Holmes nodded as if he were not really satisfied, and then he turned the conversation and allowed it to meander through harmless matters. Much later, we took ourselves back to our inn through a city that was dark and lifeless and eerily silent. The inn was shut up and dark as well, and we had to hammer on the gates before a boy came to let us in. The door to the room Ali and Mahmoud shared was closed. To my relief, Holmes surrendered to the trend, and we went to our respective rooms and our hard beds.
The income of the Bedu is not large, because they live where there is little need for hired work, and such is the basis of profit.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
he morning began early, when a fist pounded on the door with a rhythm I knew well.
“Up, Russell! You have work.”
I tucked my hair into my turban and opened the door, to see a familiar sight: Holmes, not rising from his bed, but rather coming home after a long night. I wondered if he had slept at all. I yawned; he looked at me with that dreadfully cheerful, superior attitude of the earliest bird around.
“Are you going to give me breakfast while you tell me about it, Holmes?”
“No time for either.”
“Holmes!” I objected.
“Can you find your way to the Souk el-Qattanin?”
“The Cotton Bazaar? Er—”
“Straight down David Street past the jog where it becomes es-Silsileh, two hundred yards towards the Haram, then north on el-Wad, and the Souk el-Qattanin comes in on your right. Just follow the sound of looms.”
“Why?”
“Because the army and the Red Cross have begun to renovate the souk and restore it to its original purpose, thus creating jobs for—”
“No, Holmes: Why do I need to go into the souk?”
“The innkeeper has arranged work for you on the renovation project there.”
“Work? What kind of work? I don’t know how to run a loom. And isn’t today Friday? I thought everything stopped on Friday.”
“You won’t be weaving. And it’s mostly Christians today, of course. Ideal for your purposes; the other days it’s mostly Arab women, and you wouldn’t fit in.”
“But doing what?”
“Carrying rocks and dumping the baskets where you’re told, I should think.”
“That’s it? What, are we out of money? I think I’d rather beg. Surely you can make me up to look like a leper or a multiple amputee or something.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Russell. You will watch. For anything unusual.”
“Everything’s unusual, Holmes,” I pointed out.
He ignored my sarcasm. “You’d better leave your spectacles here, too.”
“Then how am I to watch?”
“Listen. Perceive. For heaven’s sake, Russell, use your brain. Now, you are already late. Take a cup of coffee down in the courtyard, and I’ll see you in the afternoon.”
“What will you do?” I cried desperately.
He paused in the doorway to his cubicle, looking back at me sternly. “I will sleep, of course, Russell. I am, you will be so good as to remember, an old man who is recovering from a serious injury. I must have my rest.”
His door closed softly in my face. I stood with the ancient wood in front of my nose for some time before I decided that I might as well follow his instructions and learn something as go back to bed and lie there scratching and wondering. Folding my spectacles into a pocket, I went down the shaky stairs and out into the bazaar.
The project in the Cotton Bazaar was, inevitably, under the auspices of the army. A bored sergeant leant against a wall, smoking an Egyptian cigarette and looking at the women and a few men who were clearing rubble from the derelict street.
The Cotton Bazaar was one of the covered markets, a filthy Mediaeval near-tunnel of crumbling stone and rotting timbers that had, understandably, been abandoned for some years. I could hear the rhythmic sound of a number of looms, coming from no place in particular but seeming a part of the air. In the section of the bazaar still awaiting renovation, two privates with spades formed one end of the line, a group of donkeys with panniers the other, and in between we, the workers, balanced the heavy baskets on our heads to transport the rubble across the uneven and narrow places where the donkeys would not go.
I had carefully constructed an explanation for my presence, as good a speech as I could manage considering that I had no idea why I was actually here, but I rapidly put together another explanation in broken Arab English for the sergeant. He was not interested. He just waved me to the waiting baskets without looking at me and spat onto the paving stones. I took a basket and joined the line of dispirited workers.
Two hours later I was very aware that my skull was not fully healed: It did not take kindly to the weight of a wide basket laden with damp soil and stones resting on it. My stomach cried out for food, even some of Ali’s half-burnt, half-raw bread, and my hands, arms, shoulders, and back were on fire. I had done no serious physical labour since the previous summer’s harvest: I was, after all, by profession a student.
Now, however, one of Oxford’s finest was hauling rock with the illiterate workers of Jerusalem. How should I explain the state of my hands to my tutors, if ever I returned to those green and pleasant shores? Even the thing from which we had fled here as respite, some unknown, invisible, and apparently omnipotent foe in England after our blood, began to look attractive compared to this.…
Later in the morning several of the workers broke off for a smoke and a gossip. Trying to look inconspicuous (that is, not as utterly exhausted as I felt), I collapsed slowly onto a heap of displaced paving stones and tried not to tremble. My companions, half a dozen women and three men, had accepted me as a decidedly stupid young man with speech problems, and talked over and through me. A man with an elaborate gleaming copper contraption mounted on his back came down the street, selling glasses of tea. He passed slowly down the line of resting workers, taking each customer’s coin and waiting while he or she drank before passing on to the next, when he refilled the glass and waited again. I bought two glasses, and was thinking about a third when an angel appeared.
My friend from the inn, the young cook’s helper, came skipping down the slippery cobblestones, placed a hamper in my lap, and turned and trotted away. My life was saved.
I bolted half the food in the basket without tasting it, by which time my co-workers were heading back to their very different kinds of baskets. Reluctantly, I placed it to one side, but its rejuvenating effects were already taking hold. I smiled at the old woman in front of me. The dim souk seemed brighter. The language around me became comprehensible again.
It always astonishes me, what women will freely talk about, even in front of men. By the time we stopped for lunch, I knew more about some of these good ladies than I knew about my neighbours in the Oxford lodging-house where I lived, and I had thought that intimacy considerable. I learnt a number of new words that morning, although truth to tell I had to guess at some of the English equivalents. It became quickly apparent that neither the sergeant nor the two privates (who had been put to dig as a punishment) spoke a word of Arabic. They may have suspected the nature of the comments and raucous laughter, but could do nothing but practise being phlegmatic and British. I began to enjoy myself, and ventured the occasional brief remark which, as they were Christians, they were able to accept slightly more readily from me, a male, than had they been Moslems.
Halfway through the next work period, a statement was made which interested me greatly. We had finished clearing the first patch, and our sergeant had shifted us around the corner to a side alley, when one of the women, looking with interest at the heap of fresh mud there, said plainly, “We moved this same soil yesterday,” to which another responded, “And the day before.”
They both laughed, but I looked closely at this pile as it went into my basket and into the pannier. It did seem different from the heap we had finished with, wetter and somehow less organic, but only when I saw how the othe
rs deposited the soil on the donkeys did it occur to me just how it was different. They too were paying attention to the contents of their baskets, and instead of simply upending them into the panniers, they were taking the time to tilt and shake them attentively, watching the soil pour down. Even without my spectacles I could easily see the change in their attitudes; then, near the donkey, the woman ahead of me snatched something from her emptying load and hastily thrust it inside her robe. Something flat the size of a thumbnail; I thought it was a coin, and then I knew how this soil was different: It was old, and these canny diggers knew it.
I nearly missed the bit of treasure buried in my own load, would have missed it had my colleagues not decided I was little better than a half-wit. One woman, a thin, hard-faced little grandmother, paused after emptying her basket to watch me tip mine into the donkey’s containers. Her hand moved, but mine was there before hers, and I had the object stashed away before she could even curse. Later I paused in a doorway to examine it more closely. Scraping the caked soil of the ages from it with a thumbnail, I found a tiny glass phial, no more than two inches tall. I felt eyes on me, slipped it away into my pocket handkerchief, and took up my basket again.
When we broke for lunch I rapidly shovelled the remainder of the picnic down my throat, then sat with the basket on my knees, dabbing up the crumbs with a damp finger while I racked my brain to think of a way to return the conversation to the subject of the woman’s comment about the reappearing soil. Unfortunately, the women were at one end of the alley, while I was with the men twenty feet away at the other. The men’s conversation was infinitely less interesting than the chatter I could hear coming from the other end, being all about injustices done and relatives wronged by the new government, until one old man began dramatically to recite a positive epic: One of his goats had gone missing the week before! The very next day, his neighbours threw a feast! Roast goat figured prominently on the menu! The old man’s grandsons attempted a course of rough justice! The military police arrived! They put a halt to the fracas!
His long and emphatic recitation finally came to an end, and before any of the others could draw a breath I made a loud remark, putting my tongue in the front of my mouth to supply a ready mechanical explanation for any linguistic failures.
“My mother lost a chicken the other week, but whoever took it left a silver bangle in its place.” The smattering of tales sparked by this pale story were neither enthusiastic nor particularly apt, and when they started to drift off on another track I made another loud comment. “We think it is an afreet.” As I had hoped, the entire alley fell silent at my reference to a troublesome imp.
“Why would an afreet leave a silver bangle?” the man next to me demanded.
“Why would an afreet take a chicken?” I retorted, my logic equal to his. “Afreets cause trouble. My mother’s chicken gave us many eggs, but the silver bangle, when she tried to sell it, brought only problems, for a woman down the road said we had stolen it.”
This was much more satisfying. For ten minutes we swopped stories of false accusations and genuine theft, and then I gave a final nudge.
“Why do you think the piles of soil keep coming into the Souk el-Qattanin? The new piles with old coins?”
After a moment of silence a great babble of voices burst out, which only eventually was dominated by one man, who simply had a greater lung capacity than the others.
“—the coin to my brother and we cleaned it until it shone, and then we carried it to the cousin of my brother’s wife, who has a shop on the Tarik Bab Sitti Maryam, near the place where Jesus stumbled, where many foreigners used to buy things before the war and are now beginning to return, and the cousin of my brother’s wife sold that coin to a rich Amerikani just last week for two gold lira, although he only gave my brother and me twenty-five mejidis.”
The others politely waited until he had finished to contribute their “Wa!” of appreciation and their own stories, which circled around the suggestion I had planted in their minds, that the rich soil was being placed there by some peculiarly subtle variety of demon. I listened with only half an ear, though, because my question had already been answered by the last speaker: Yes, there was a rich and therefore deep vein of soil being worked somewhere beneath my feet.
“My father,” the man was saying, “blessed be his memory, found a purse of coins on the roadside, and when he was honest enough to report this, being a good Christian, the police beat him and threw him into the Old Serai for a week, saying that he had stolen some of the coins and wanted a reward for the ones he had left, although it was actually the police who stole them. Of course, they were Turks,” he added pensively.
“And my mother’s father’s second wife,” called one of the women …
The topic of archaeological discoveries was thrashed over until our sergeant reappeared and ordered us back to work, but I was well satisfied with the results of my own labours: Someone, at night, was depositing quantities of soil from deep underground onto the surface to be hauled away. Someone, perhaps, who had borrowed two baskets from the wall of a tomb/house in Silwan that he had happened to pass. Who before that had borrowed two habits, a rope, and a handful of candles, because he thought he might need them, and he was passing. Someone who—The consideration of the someone distracted my mind satisfactorily for quite some time. I queued up with the others to have my baskets filled, and followed them to dump the rubble, but was quite unaware of any of it until I felt a hand on my sleeve.
I looked down into the face of the young cook’s helper from the inn, for whom I was beginning to feel a deep affection.
“You are required back at the inn,” the boy said.
“Who requires me?”
“Your friend.”
“I have a number of friends.”
“Your long friend in the blue kuffiyah,” he said, and then for some reason he covered his mouth with his hand and let out a giggle.
“I will come.” I laid down my basket and went down the narrow street on his heels, picking my way over the rough surface and avoiding the holes (one of the privates had graduated to a pickaxe). On the Street of the Cotton Merchants the sergeant stopped me.
“Oi, where do you think you’re going?”
“Effendi, my presence is required elsewhere,” I said smoothly in English.
“You don’t say.”
“I fear that I do say.”
“There’s no pay for half days. All or nothing, that’s His Majesty’s way.” I doubted it very much, but was not inclined to argue over a pittance. I began to say something to that effect when my youthful companion nudged me to one side and began sweetly to cajole the dour sergeant. I left him to it, and threaded my way briskly through the bazaar towards the Jaffa Gate. I thought I heard the sergeant’s voice raised in shouts, but then I turned a corner and left them behind.
Only as I was passing through the vegetable market on David Street, restoring my spectacles to my nose, did it occur to me that a British soldier might find it suspicious that a native worker would leave without the better part of a day’s pay. I hesitated, and nearly turned back, but Holmes was waiting, and the cook’s boy had seemed to me quite resourceful enough to get himself out of that sticky situation. I trotted on up the steps of David Street to the inn.
With the decrease of civilisation, the land’s riches fade. In countries where springs existed in the days of civilisation, when the countries fell into ruin, the water of the springs disappeared into the ground as if they had never existed.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
n army staff car sat in the street outside the inn’s gates. This sounds like a simple matter, but when the street in question is less than eight feet wide and the car more than five, it means that a laden donkey must be unloaded and all but the narrowest carts turned and taken another way. The driver, magnificently deaf to the shouts and curses of would-be passers-by and the pleas of beggars alike, held a cigarette in one hand and a yellow-back novel in the other. I
sidled past and went through the heavy wooden gates into the inn’s yard, wondering mildly whom an army officer might be visiting in this quarter.
I did not wonder for long. My soft boots made chuffing sounds on the worn steps all the way to the top floor. I rapped on Holmes’ door, stepped inside —and immediately bowed and scraped my panic-stricken way backwards into the hallway.
“Effendi, ten thousand apologies, I fear I have the wrong room, I did not intend—” I closed the door, stood and stared at it for a long, puzzled moment, before realising that even if the sergeant had his suspicions about a hastily departing labourer, he could not have arranged for this both immediate and high-ranking a response. Besides which—I reached again for the worn iron door handle and put my head back inside. “Holmes?”
The sleek figure—shiny high boots, immaculate khaki uniform, polished belt, starched hat, perfect hair, trimmed moustache, and the swagger stick he had been slapping against his elegant leg—turned with a diabolical grin on his face.
“Good Lord, Holmes, what on earth are you doing in that get-up? You’ll be arrested!” I had seen the man in any number of disguises, from paternal gipsy to ageing roué to buxom flower-seller, but none more outlandish, given his personality, than this one.
He just stood there and laughed at me. “By God, Russell,” he finally choked out, “it was worth the untold bother of this fancy dress uniform and ten thousand accursed salutes to see you cringe like that. I didn’t know you were capable of it. You were slinking, Russell. Positively slinking.”
I didn’t think it at all amusing, and told him so. “You nearly gave me heart failure, Holmes. I thought you were here to arrest me for stealing antiquities. I ought to turn you in for impersonating an officer.”
He wiped his eyes and blew his nose, and began to divest himself of hat, stick, and military belt. “I wear this uniform with the approval of the highest authorities—although it is a decidedly temporary commission,” he added. “What antiquities have you stolen?”