O Jerusalem (23 page)

Then to the left, the cubist tendencies of the wasps had gone mad, and a tumble of angular buildings, hard planes of stone and tile, spilled down into the wadi, beginning high above with a pair of square watch-towers planted firmly on the road that ran along the top of the western rim. Walls, windows, roofs, terraces, buttresses, and stairways, in varying states of repair, looked as out of place as an upended tub of monochromatic building blocks. The only reminders of organic shapes in the monastery’s centre were two domes and a sprinkling of trees.

“Come,” Ali said. “They will not admit us after sunset.”

We dropped down a faint pathway cut into the precipitous face of the wadi. A couple of hours later we had gained the bottom without serious mishap, hoisted our skirts to wade across a shallow place, and climbed up again to reach the gates of the monastery. The sun was low above the hills when Ali stepped forward to pound a demand on the small barred door. It took three tries, increasing in their authority, before the door edged open.

“Too late,” said the figure within.

“It was not sunset when first I knocked,” answered Ali.

“Come tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow we are gone.”

“So much the better.” The door closed, but on Ali’s boot.

“We wish to worship,” he said, and then astonished me by adding, in passable Latin, “Do not deny us the hospitality of thy gates, O holy one.”

“There is a party already in the guest rooms,” the truculent monk replied.

“We have tents, and do not wish to be greedy.”

“You must have a letter from Jerusalem. I cannot admit
you without the permission of our monastery in the city,” the monk added with a note of triumph.

“I have a letter,” Ali answered. The monk sighed, and put his hand out of the door. Ali handed over a dirty and very worn piece of paper, but as it was not dated, and it was clearly signed, the gatekeeper had no choice but to admit that there was no dislodging Ali’s foot. Besides which, the hinges might not have withstood a fourth assault. The door opened, brother porter handed the letter back to Ali, and stood back. We led the mules in, surrendered them to a servant, and followed the monk into the heart of the order.

The monk, once he had received our donation, led us on a desultory tour through the buildings, over the carefully tended terraces where they grew figs and olives, melons and vegetables. A great many birds made their homes here, and we noticed a hive of bees in a protected corner of one terrace garden. There was a domed chapel, ornate to the point of biliousness, which we were taken through and made to admire. We also saw a pile of skulls stacked behind iron grating to commemorate the disastrous Persian invasion of 614, the small patch of ground where more recent residents lay buried, and a cavern to the south of the monastery where St Sabas himself was reputed to have lived peaceably with a lion.

All the monks in that place, who numbered less than fifty, were thin and brown and leathery, and the entire time I was within the walls I remained acutely conscious that no other woman had entered these walls since the monastery had been founded in the sixth century. Unless, of course, she too had been in heavy disguise.

As the sun receded, the birds in the palms quieted; eventually, as the moon rose over the rim of the wadi, the water below could be heard, tumbling on its way to the Dead Sea. The monk left us, and then Ali and Mahmoud went away. It was utterly still, and cold, and the
desolation of the rocks in the blue light of the moon was eerie. I suppressed a shiver.

“We could be a thousand miles from anywhere,” I said quietly.

“We are three hours from Jerusalem.”

The night seemed less cold; my spirits rose. “Is that all? When will we go there?”

“Patience, Russell. We need data first.”

“But will we go there?”

“You yourself have told me that Jerusalem is regarded as the centre of the universe. I believe we will find that it lies at the centre of this mystery as well.”

“Did you find the thing you were looking for here?”

“It is not here. The candle in Mikhail’s pack did not come from these bees.”

“How can you be certain?”

“The smell of the candles in the chapel here was entirely different,” Holmes said, “and the colour and texture were wrong.” I did not question his judgement; after all, beekeeping was the avocation to which he had devoted innumerable hours in the years since his premature retirement. I merely stood up and cast a last glance at the unearthly landscape of the wadi.

“Shall we go and see what Ali intends to inflict on us for supper?”

To my surprise we were once again installed in our tents outside the monastic walls. Ali produced a dish of some unidentifiable meat that tasted like chicken but had rather too many vertebrae, and as I perched gingerly on the inadequate carpets, picking meat from bones, I reflected on the incongruity of how difficult it was proving to keep kosher in the Holy Land.

The ground was very hard, and when Mahmoud began to make coffee I gave up trying to find a decent seat and perched on my heels. I removed my boots first, examined the sprung seam on the side of the one, and asked Ali if he had a needle and tough thread I could use to repair it.

“Why didn’t we stay in the monastery tonight?” I grumbled. My threadbare stockings and the carpet beneath them were little protection against the stones, my twisted ankle hurt in the squatting position, and my backside hurt if I tried to sit. “The ground inside the walls is considerably smoother,” I added, and then cursed under my breath as the blunt end of the needle buried itself in the thick of my thumb.

“Did you discover who are the occupants of the guest-chamber?” Holmes asked Mahmoud.

“There are no occupants of the guest-chamber,” Mahmoud replied. “The servant who cares for guests is away, and the monk did not wish to be bothered with us.”

I removed my punctured thumb from my mouth. “We could insist,” I suggested hopefully.

“The divans of the guest-chamber are generally infested with fleas,” remarked Mahmoud unexpectedly in English. For some reason this set Ali off on a gale of giggles. It sounded like a quotation, and was obviously a private joke.

“Have they had many guests?” Holmes asked.

“One week ago a party of four Englishmen, and a group just before Christmas. No-one at the time of the new moon.”

“I thought not. Very well, we shall go north tomorrow.”

The rocks remained every bit as uncomfortable as they had started out, to the extent that at two in the morning, flea-infested divans began to seem attractive. It was no hardship to rise early and return to the road.

We turned back towards the sea and north, and trudged for twenty dreary miles (how far I had come since the first sparkling day out of Jaffa, a bare two weeks before!) down out of the desert hills and into the Jordan Valley, where the river emptied into the Dead Sea. When it first appeared, I welcomed the green of palm and banana and sugarcane and the rustle of birds
in the leaves, but with every step the air grew warmer, and so damp that it became a struggle to breathe. The mules plodded with their heads down, dripping sweat from their necks and flanks. Their humans did much the same.

The monastery of St Gerasimo was another disappointment, as were the following day the various small monasteries around the site of John the Baptist’s immersion in the Jordan. We pushed west through the thorns and the oppressive air towards Jericho, a squalid little settlement unworthy of its ancient and noble history. We were aiming our steps at the Greek monastery on the Mount of Temptation to the north of town, after which we would turn our faces towards the monastery in Wadi Qelt and then to those along the Jerusalem road, but no sooner had we shaken the town’s mongrel dogs from our heels than we stumbled upon an archaeological dig inhabited by an elderly Englishwoman with a passion for the subject as a whole, a positive lust for potsherds in particular, and a furious store of energy at her command. In our enervated state she had no trouble in seizing us and dragging us off to her home, where she questioned us and lectured us and put us up for the night, returning us to our path the following morning clean and fed if delayed and rather dazed by the assault.

From her peculiar encampment we travelled north towards the Mount of Temptation (it being a steep climb to the top, I planned on volunteering to stay behind and guard the mules). Before we reached it, though, about a mile outside of town where the track passed through a small plantation of young banana trees watered by the ages-old Jericho springs, a car stood waiting.

It was a heavy car, an open Rolls-Royce of the sort used only by the highest-ranking army staff officers, its chassis virtually indestructible over the roughest of roads. The driver sat on the running board, smoking a
cigarette and watching us come along the dusty track. As we approached he straightened, flicked the end of his cigarette across the road, and nodded in a familiar way to Mahmoud.

“I’ve arranged for you to leave your mules and kit with the family in the next farmhouse,” he said politely in an English straight out of Edinburgh. “General Allenby would like a word.”

Both the sword and the pen are necessary tools for a ruler; however, at the start of a dynasty, the need for the sword is greater
.

—THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN

t was strange beyond measure, compelling and exotic, to sit motionless while the land flew past at a speed faster than legs could move one. Trees were no sooner sighted than they were gone, and I felt as though I was looking at the open-mouthed children on the roadside with an identical amazed expression on my own face.

We were in Haifa in no time at all, it seemed: one hundred miles, and it was still not too late for tea. We were driven up to a grand house (the palace of a pasha, I discovered later) that had a number of incongruous army lorries and armoured vehicles scattered about what had once been formal gardens. The driver deposited us at a portico, where a lieutenant wearing thick spectacles and a uniform that had never seen battle conditions took possession of our ragged persons with such an air of infinite politeness that one would
have assumed that he ushered in similar guests every afternoon—as indeed he may have done.

The lieutenant clicked down the polished corridor, turned a corner, stopped before a door, opened it without knocking, said, “The Hazr brothers are here, sir,” stood back to let us file in, and closed the door behind us. I was dimly aware of the sound of his heels clicking away, but mostly my attention was taken by the man in the room.

The room held two men, but I do not imagine that the world has produced many individuals who would be noticed in the presence of the man whose office this was.

He was big, although not extraordinarily so. His size was more an extension of his personality: taut with power until his uniform seemed at risk of bursting. He had eyes that probed and analysed and summed up the strengths, weaknesses, and potential uses of their target in seconds, a beak of a nose, a thinning tonsure of hair, and his bullet head was tipped slightly to one side as if listening for hidden currents. Behind his back, men called him “the Bull.” This was the man of whose exploits Mahmoud had spoken in the village, the man who, in the space of sixteen months, had assembled his inherited hotchpotch of an army and moved it out of its static place in Suez in order to present the despairing British people with Jerusalem for one Christmas and the remainder of the Turkish empire for the next, the man who at that moment was the sole authority of all the occupied territory from Constantinople to the Suez Canal: the Commander in Chief, General Edmund Allenby. He seemed to take up a great deal of space in the room.