Immediately they had disappeared down the track, Ali jabbed his vicious blade back into its scabbard (causing me to wonder fleetingly if Arabs ever disembowelled themselves when putting their knives away in a hurry) and then whipped out the flats of bread that he had cooked the previous evening, and we moved into the tent to break our fast around the fire. I was already very tired of this diet of damp unleavened bread, burnt in spots, which even when hot had no more taste than blotting paper. That morning, however, I was ravenous, and would have eaten the stuff gladly plain, but as recognition of the successful night’s work Ali uncorked a jug of honey and placed it on the carpet between us. He then gave us each a handful of dates and another of almonds, and poured out four tin mugs of the sour goat’s milk called laban that he had bought the day before from our neighbours. Holmes and Mahmoud, I noticed, had their food placed directly before them, whereas my portions were deposited very nearly at arm’s reach. Ali did not like eating with a woman, and although he submitted to the necessity, he did all he could to demonstrate his dislike. Even Mahmoud put my coffee down on the carpet in front of me, instead of allowing me to take it directly from his fingers as he did with any male. I sighed to myself and stretched forward to retrieve my breakfast, and sat back on my heels to enjoy it.
When we had feasted, Mahmoud reached for the coffee-making accoutrements. Wordlessly, the rest of us settled back into our carpets, Ali with his carving and Holmes taking out pipe and tobacco from the breast of his robe, tucking the ends of his kuffiyah up into the thick black loops of the agahl that held it on his head, and proceeding to fill the pipe and light it with a coal lifted from the fire with the tongs. He had, over the last days, taken to smoking the black leaf of the natives, but this morning’s pipe gave off the familiar smell of his usual blend, a small quantity of which he had brought with him off the ship. The homely smell was a jolt in this foreign and uncomfortable setting, and for the first time I was washed by a wave of homesickness.
He waited until Mahmoud had the coffee beans in the long-handled pan and the luscious burnt-toast smell was beginning to mingle with the pipe smoke before he put the tongs down next to the fire and reached again into his robe. He drew out the letters that he had taken from the villa’s safe. There were five in all, four of which he tossed onto the carpet at Mahmoud’s feet. The fifth he held out to me. Mahmoud’s face went stony and Ali sat upright abruptly, his great knife held out dangerously in his right hand, the carving forgotten in his left.
“That is not for you,” he objected angrily.
“You two may be accustomed to acting blindly under orders,” said Holmes, concentrating on his pipe, “but neither Russell nor I have accepted any such commissions. Speaking for myself, I do not care to put my hand into any crevice I have not examined first. The other papers,” he told me, “are the usual—two incautious love letters from a lady in Cairo, a landowner in Nablus referring to the purchase of illegally seized land, and a police report about—well, never mind that one. And there is this.”
I satisfied myself that Ali was not about to use the knife on us, then took the sheet of paper out of its envelope and unfolded it. Seeing that it was in German, and there was a great deal of it, I lowered my backside to the ground to stretch my legs and give my thigh muscles a rest—and immediately had all three men hissing at me.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I objected. “I can only sit for so many hours with my knees in my armpits. My muscles cramp.”
“It’s your feet,” explained Holmes. “It is extremely bad manners to point the soles of your feet at someone. Almost as bad as eating with your left hand.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, and folded my painful extremities beneath me.
With the coffee halfway to roasted, Mahmoud could not very well put it back into the pouch, but it was with ill grace that he continued the ritual. I had finished the letter and was rereading it when the tiny porcelain cup was brusquely set down in front of me. I sipped it absently.
“Interesting,” I said. Holmes did not answer. I looked at him and found that he was sitting with one knee drawn up and the other leg tucked under his robe. He was studying his cup with exaggerated concentration, one eyebrow slightly raised.
I had known Holmes for nearly four of my nineteen years, during which time he, along with his housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, and his old companion-at-arms and biographer, Dr Watson, had become my only family. I had studied with him, spent thousands of hours in his often abrasive but never dull company, and worked with him on several cases, including the intense and dangerous kidnapping the previous summer; by now I knew him better than I knew myself, and read instantly what his posture was telling me.
“Hum,” I grunted, a considering sound, and read slowly through the German document a third time with his unverbalised but clearly expressed scepticism in mind. After consideration I began to see what he objected to. “You may be right,” I admitted, and only after I said the words did I notice the consternation on the two swarthy faces across from us. With the sweet flavour of revenge on my tongue I nodded my head deliberately, then folded the letter back into its envelope and returned it to Holmes.
“I should say the flourishes on the final e’s and the angle of the dots clinch it,” I said nonchalantly, and held out my cup to Mahmoud. “Is there more coffee?”
That gentleman gave me a long, expressionless look before reaching for the brass coffee beaker, but Ali could not control himself.
“Is this a secret language?” he burst out. “The hand signs are invisible.”
“Merely the communication of true minds,” said Holmes. Turning his gaze on Mahmoud, he continued, “What Miss Russell has noticed is that one of the letters we so laboriously stole from the mullah’s safe is a fake.”
“A fake!” exclaimed Ali dramatically without looking at Mahmoud. “What do you—”
“Planted by you.” Ali made a strangling noise. “Written by you.” Ali began to protest in an increasingly theatrical manner, but Mahmoud began a very small and quiet smile deep in his eyes, and eventually Ali sputtered to a halt. Holmes’ voice went hard. “The night we landed, you had your fun, trailing us about and pushing us into heaps of rotting fish and mounds of refuse. I protested at the time, yet since we left the town you have continued to lead us a song and dance through the Judean hills. I have said nothing, and if you do not think Russell has been remarkably patient, you do not know her. I understand that you found it necessary to test our mettle; in your position, I might have done the same. However, this has gone quite far enough.” He waggled the letter, then leant forward and dropped it onto the embers. That neither of our companions rushed to snatch it to safety was all the confirmation needed. Mahmoud’s forged letter from a purported German spy in Tiberius smoked for a moment on the coals, puffed into flame, and curled blackly. Holmes looked up from the fire. “Five days of keeping us in the dark is about three days more than I should have thought necessary, particularly considering the way it began. Make your decision: Trust us, or let us go our way.”
It was Mahmoud, still giving his impression of an amused stone, who broke the gaze, flicking a glance at me before he bent forward to dash the dregs from his coffee onto the letter’s crisp, trembling curl of ash, and continued the motion into standing upright. He handed his cup to Ali.
“We will go to Joshua now,” he said, and turned towards the depths of the tent.
“Ah,” said Holmes with a nod of satisfaction. “Joshua.”
Mahmoud paused with his hand on the tent’s central post. “You know Joshua?”
“I know of him.”
Mahmoud studied Holmes for a moment, and then went on into the tent.
“Who is Joshua?” I asked. Holmes looked at Ali with an eyebrow raised, inviting an explanation, but the man merely dusted his robes free of wood shavings and moved off to begin breaking camp. “Holmes?” I persisted.
“You know your Bible, Russell. Surely you don’t need me to explain his nom de guerre.”
; “Joshua is a code name? For one of the military officers?”
“This Joshua prefers to remain in a more, shall we say, unrecognised position than at the head of his troops.”
I thought about it, then suggested, “The Book of Joshua; ‘He sent out two men to spy out the land’?”
“Precisely so,” Holmes agreed, and, knocking his pipe out on the stones of the cook fire, went to empty his possessions from our tent.
Weapons are unnecessary on the main routes … but advisable on the others, as fire-arms, conspicuously carried, add a great deal to the importance with which the “Frank” is regarded by the natives.
—BAEDEKER’S Palestine and Syria,
1912 EDITION
ow” being a relative thing when burdened by tents, water-skins, cooking pots, and mules, we did not get away until the middle of the morning. I packed up our meagre possessions and helped fold away the bell tent Holmes and I had shared since leaving Jaffa.
Once on the road, we headed slightly north of due east, in the direction of Jerusalem, although Ali admitted that we were only going as far as Beersheva. We followed the pattern that had been established our first day on the road: Ali and Mahmoud went in front, holding to a steady pace and never looking back except for Ali to shout the occasional command over his shoulder, telling us not to lag or stumble or let the mules stray. The two men led by as little as ten paces or as much as half a mile, and spent the whole time talking—or rather, Ali talked, with voice and hands, while Mahmoud listened and occasionally made response. Then came Holmes and myself, either in silence with my nose in the Koran or with him drilling me on Arabic grammar and vocabulary or lecturing me on customs and history. Behind us trailed the three mules, clattering and banging with the pots draped about them, obediently treading on our heels and breathing down our necks until we entered a village, when we had to take up their ropes lest the dogs spook them, or if we heard the rare sound of an approaching motorcar in the distance, which usually turned out to be an ancient Ford Tin Lizzie.
I had come to realise that Ali and Mahmoud were well known in this land. Mahmoud, despite his rough appearance, was a respected scribe and public reader. I found that they moved up and down the countryside in a more or less regular cycle, stopping for an hour or a week to draw up letters to distant relatives, contracts between neighbours, and pleas to the government, and to read letters received, or old newspapers, or even stories. The florid Arabic pleas to the Turkish rulers might recently have given way to more concise English documents, and the payment he accepted was now in Egyptian piastres and even the occasional English coin, but little else had changed. As we went along I began to appreciate the freedom the two brothers had, for they were familiar figures, and therefore accepted, but it was also accepted that they were different: nomads without livestock; lacking womenfolk but apparently no threat to the wives and daughters they came near; possessing a valuable skill that yet set them apart and gave them a touch of mystery and power; from no particular place, so the oddities in accent and vocabulary among us—Holmes’ proper kuffiyah and my own loosely wrapped turban, Ali’s Egyptian boots of shiny red leather and his long colourful jacket, our troop’s use of mules in a country that classified people either by the plebeian donkey-and-goat or the aristocratic camel-and-horse of the true Bedouin, our blue Berber eyes with the brown of our two Bedu companions, and even my spectacles—were not so much forgiven as expected, as if we formed a distinct and idiosyncratic tribe of our own. Ali and Mahmoud had lived this life for at least ten years, an ideal arrangement for a neighbouring (now occupying) government needing to keep watch on the activities of the countryside.
I wondered if now, with the war at an end, the brothers’ way of life was about to change. Would the government want spies in the land during a time of peace?
“Holmes, what do you make of them?” I nodded at the road ahead, where the two figures, in the Arab fashion that strikes the Western eye so strangely, were holding hands while Ali’s free arm waved in the air, illustrating a point. In Arab countries men hold hands in public; a man and a woman emphatically do not.
“You find them intriguing?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I find them. I don’t know this country, there may be an entire populace like them, as far as I know.”
“No, I believe you could assume that Ali and Mahmoud are very nearly unique here. Even T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell draw the line considerably closer to home than these two.”
It took a moment for his meaning to sink in, and when it did, I demanded, “What do you mean? Are you suggesting they aren’t Arabs?”
“Most assuredly not. Can’t you hear the London in their diphthongs?”
“I assumed that Ali had been to an English-speaking school, his English is so good, but his accent is Arabic, not Cockney. And I don’t think I’ve heard Mahmoud say more than two dozen words in English.”
“Not Cockney, more like Clapham, and the Arab accent is an accretion. You really must work on your accents, Russell.”
“What would two brothers from Clapham be doing here?” I demanded incredulously.
“Russell, Russell. They aren’t brothers, surely you can see that? Aside from the complete lack of any physical resemblance, their accents and their acquired habits—table manners (if one can refer to such when there is no table), gestures, attitudes—are quite different. At the most they might be cousins, but personally I should not care to put money even on that.”
“Friends?” I asked suspiciously; this had to be one of his peculiar jests.
“Companions, who appreciate Arab dress and culture and enjoy the freedom of their gipsy life.”
“And do some work for the British government on the side.”
“For their king, yes. They are Mycroft’s, after all.”
Ah, yes, Mycroft, the older Holmes brother, everything the younger was not: corpulent, physically indolent, a life-long cog in the machinery of government. But like the Holmes whose apprentice I had become, Mycroft was brilliant, gifted with a far-sighted ability to discern patterns, and able to grasp instantly the central issue in a tangle. Too, Mycroft, like Sherlock, was unbendingly moral, a fortunate thing for the British people and for international politics, because Mycroft’s power within the government was, as far as I could see, nearly limitless. Had he chosen to do so he could very probably have brought the government to its knees. Instead, he gently nudged, and watched, and murmured the occasional suggestion, then sat back to watch some more. If anyone was capable of shaping a pair of Englishmen into Bedouin spies, Mycroft was the man (although I was far from certain that Holmes had not been pulling my leg). I had assumed that whatever task Mycroft needed done here would be as subtle as he was; I had begun to believe that it was so subtle as to be nonexistent. However, by the sounds of things, clarification would finally be given us in Beersheva, no doubt by the mysterious spymaster Joshua.
We stopped at one o’clock to water the mules and make tea, and when I had finished my tasks and came to sit by the small fire, I eased off the fiendish sandals and tucked my bleeding feet carefully under the hem of my dusty abayya. The sweet tea was supplemented by a handful of almonds and some rather nasty dried figs, and in less than half an hour Ali was putting things away. With a sigh I reached for the sandals, but was stayed by Holmes’ hand on my arm.
“Wait,” he said. He scooped a handful of almond shells from the lap of his robe and brushed them onto the dying embers, then rose and walked swiftly over to where the mules stood. Pausing a moment to study Ali’s complicated knotwork, he laid hands on the ropes and in a minute had one lumpy canvas bag both free and open. He dug inside, pulled out a familiar pair of boots that I had thought gone forever, closed the bag, and retied the ropes. When he came back to the fire he dropped the boots in front of me, then in one brisk motion he bent to catch up the flimsy sandals and tossed them on top of the burning almond shells.
The pair of stockings that I had stuffed inside the boots five days before
were still damp with seawater and the shoe leather smelt musty, but I did not hesitate. I slid them on, did up the bootlaces, and returned the slim throwing knife that had been lodged awkwardly in my belt to its customary boot-top sheath. When I stood up in my old friends, neither Ali nor Mahmoud had said a thing, but my feet were shouting with relief, and I felt that I could walk to Damascus if necessary.
We travelled on through the desert place, seeing only the low black tents of other nomads like ourselves and a few hovels, until late in the afternoon we began to come upon debris from the battle of Beersheva fourteen months before: snarls of rusting barbed wire, the broken frame of a heavy gun, the bare and scattered skeleton of a horse, and strange tufts of rabbit wire reaching up to trip us—a mystery until Holmes explained that this was a means of laying a quick and temporary road for motorcars across stretches of soft sand. When the sun had completely left the sky, we stopped, ate a cold meal, and then pressed on in the almost complete darkness under a heavy layer of clouds.
In the daylight, thanks to my improved footgear, I had not found it difficult to keep up with our guides, but in the booby-trapped dark I fell behind again, and twice was trodden upon by the lead mule.
After about an hour of this the wind came up. An already cold night turned bitter, with the added pleasure of sand driven into our faces. I took off my spectacles, which were in danger of being sand-blasted into opacity if not actually blown off my nose, wrapped my abayya more firmly around my body, and followed the dim form ahead of me.
It then commenced to rain. Ali and Mahmoud appeared, waiting for us to catch them up so they could help control the mules. Soon the drops were pelting down; lightning and thunder moved in on us until the storm was directly over our heads as we pressed on, clinging to the halters of the skittish animals for fear our tents and pans would gallop off into the night. The track, never a road, turned slick, and then sticky, until even those of us who had four feet were having a hard time of it.