Mohammad was an hour late, but finally led me through the dark maze of alleys to the landward gate, its paving stained with dung. A bribe was required to get it opened at night, and I passed through its archway with that curious exhilaration that comes from starting a new adventure. I had, after all, survived eight kinds of hell in Egypt, restored myself to temporary solvency with gambling skills, and was off on a mission that bore no resemblance to real work, despite my fantasies of becoming a ledger clerk. The Book of Thoth, which believers contended could confer anything from scientific wisdom to life everlasting, probably no longer existed . . . and yet it might just be found somewhere, giving my trip the optimism of a treasure hunt.
And despite my lustful instincts, I truly longed for Astiza. The opportunity to somehow learn her fate through Smith’s confederate in Jerusalem made me impatient.
So off we strode through the gate—and stopped.
“What are you doing?” I asked the suddenly recumbent Mohammad, wondering if he’d had a fainting spell. But no, he lay down with the deliberation of a dog circling a fireplace rug. No one can relax like an Ottoman, their very bones melting.
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“Bedouin gangs infest the road to Jerusalem and will rob any unarmed pilgrim, effendi,” my guide said blithely in the dark. “It’s not just risky to proceed alone, it is insane. My cousin Abdul is leading a camel caravan there later today, and we will join him for safety. Thus do I and Allah look after our American guest.”
“But what about our early start?”
“You have paid, and we have started.” And with that he went back to sleep.
Well, tarnation. It was the middle of the night, we were fifty yards outside the walls, I had little notion which way to go, and it was entirely possible he was right. Palestine was notorious for being overrun by brigands, feuding warlords, desert raiders, and thieving Bedouins. So I stewed and steamed for three hours, worried the marines might somehow wander this way, until at last Abdul and his snorting camels did indeed congregate at the gate, well before the sun rose.
Introductions were made, I was loaned a Turkish pistol, charged five more English shillings both for it and my added escort, and then another shilling for feed for my donkey. I’d been in Palestine less than twenty-four hours and already my purse was growing thin.
Next we brewed some tea.
At last there was a glimmer of light as the stars faded, and we were off through the orange groves. After a mile we passed into fields of cotton and wheat, the road lined with date palms. The thatched farmhouses were dark in early morning, barking dogs signaling their location. Camel bells and creaking saddles marked our own passage.
The sky lightened, bird call and rooster crow started up, and as the dawn pinked I could see the rugged hills ahead where so much biblical history had taken place. Israel’s trees had been depleted for charcoal and ashes to make soap, yet after the waterless Egyptian desert this coastal plain seemed as fat and pleasant as Pennsylvania Dutch country. Promised Land, indeed.
The Holy Land, I learned from my guide, was nominally a part of Syria, a province of the Ottoman Empire, and its provincial capital of Damascus was under the control of the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. But just as Egypt had really been under the control of t h e
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the independent Mamelukes until Bonaparte threw them out, Palestine was really under the control of the Bosnian-born Djezzar, an ex-Mameluke himself who’d ruled from Acre with notorious cruelty for a quarter century, ever since putting down a revolt of his own merce-nary troops. Djezzar had strangled several of his wives rather than put up with rumors of infidelity, maimed his closest advisers to remind them who was boss, and drowned generals or captains who displeased him. This ruthlessness, Mohammad opined, was necessary. The province was splintered among too many religious and ethnic groups, each about as comfortable with the other as a Calvinist at a Vatican picnic.
The invasion of Egypt had hurled even more refugees into the Holy Land, with Ibrahim Bey’s fugitive Mamelukes seeking a toehold.
Fresh Ottoman levies were pouring in to anticipate a French invasion, while British gold and promises of naval aid were stirring the pot even thicker. Half the population was spying on the other half, and every clan, sect, and cult was weighing its best chances between Djezzar and the so-far-invincible French. Word of the astonishing Napoleonic victories in Egypt, the latest of which had been suppres-sion of a revolt in Cairo, had shaken the Ottoman Empire.
I knew, too, that Napoleon still hoped to eventually link up with Tippoo Sahib, the Francophile sultan fighting Wellesley and the British in India. The fervently ambitious Bonaparte was organizing a camel corps he hoped could eventually cross the eastern deserts more efficiently than Alexander had done. The thirty-year-old Corsican wanted to do the Greek one better by galloping all the way to southern India to link with Citizen Tippoo and deprive Britain of its richest colony.
According to Smith, I was to make sense of this porridge.
“Palestine sounds like a regular rat’s nest of righteousness,” I remarked to Mohammad as we rode along, me three sizes too big for my donkey, which had a spine like a hickory rail. “As many factions here as a New Hampshire town council.”
“All men are holy here,” Mohammad said, “and there is nothing more irritating than a neighbor, equally holy, of a different faith.” Amen to that. For another man to be convinced he is right is to sug-2 4
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gest you may be wrong, and there is the root of half the world’s bloodshed. The French and British are perfect examples, firing broadsides at each other over who is the most democratic, the French republicans with their bloody guillotine, or the British parliamentarians with their debtor prisons. Back in my Paris days, when all I had to care about was cards, women, and the occasional shipping contract, I can’t recall being very upset with anybody, or they with me. Then along came the medallion, the Egyptian campaign, Astiza, Napoleon, Sidney Smith, and here I was, urging my diminutive steed toward the world capital of obstinate disagreement. I wondered for the thousandth time how I’d gotten to such a point.
Because of our delay and the caravan’s stately pace, we were three long days getting to Jerusalem, arriving at dusk on the third. It’s a tiresome, winding route on roads that would be snubbed by any self-respecting goat—there obviously hadn’t been a repair since Pontius Pilate—and in little time the brown, scrub-cloaked hills had acquired the steepness of the Appalachians. We climbed up the valley of the Bab al-Wad into pine and juniper, the grass brown this fall season.
The air got noticeably cooler and drier. Up and down and round-about we went, past braying donkeys, farting, foam-flecked camels, and cart drovers whose oxen butted head-to-head while the two drivers argued. We passed brown-robed friars, cassocked Armenian mis-sionaries, Orthodox Jews with beards and long sidelocks, Syrian merchants, one or two French expatriate cotton traders, and Muslim sects beyond number, turbaned and carrying staffs. Bedouin drove flocks of sheep and goats down hillsides like a spill of water, and village girls swayed interestingly by on the road’s fringe, clay jars balanced carefully on their heads. Bright sashes swung to the rock of their hips, and their dark eyes were bright as black stones on the bottom of a river.