O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [101]
With growing confidence I walked on, down the shop-lined alleyways, through the merchants of grain and seed and into an area where the streets were so narrow that the wooden lattice-work boxes over the upper windows nearly met in the middle. Then the vaulting began, and the open street became a stone tunnel. When a cart or a laden donkey came along (and once a mounted police constable) pedestrians had to squeeze to one side. I paused at a book-stall and made two small purchases, and wandered on until I came to a meat market. There I held my breath and scurried through the foetid air and the flies, slowing again when I came to tables heaped high with fruit. I bargained for a couple of withered apples at one stall, a clot of dates and a handful of sweet almonds at another, and nibbled at them as I passed through a baffling variety of hats, caps, turbans, and scarfs, long black robes and dust-coloured khaki, a Scotsman in a kilt and a Moroccan in his embroidered robes, a Hasid dressed in his best silk caftan and a wild-eyed ascetic wearing almost nothing at all. I listened to the rhythm of Arabic (understanding a great deal of it) punctuated by the cries of children and a waft of Latin that smelt of incense and the occasional murmur of Hebrew, breathed the scents of freshly watered dust and old sweat and young bodies, of gunpowder and petrol, turmeric and saffron and garlic, incense and wine and coffee, and everywhere the smell of rock, ancient stones and newly crushed gravel and recently hewn building blocks.
At the far end of the souk I perched on a high doorstep and ate the second apple while watching the residents of Jerusalem go about their business. Half a dozen urchins screamed up and down the steps after a fraying golf-ball; two oblivious grandfathers in gleaming white robes sat in an inner courtyard, playing chess and rubbing their long beards in thought; a trio of adolescent girls with demurely hidden faces huddled together and giggled madly when a pair of handsome young boys went past them. A police constable strolled by me, followed by a small group of fashionably dressed tourists searching for the place (forty feet above what would at the time have been street level) where Jesus stumbled and put out his hand.
A few minutes such as this could almost make a person forget the lives that had been lost on these stones, the Nazarene Jesus two millennia before, the British Tommy bare months ago. It was a precarious peace that a handful of us were fighting to maintain, a foothold of good-will and security that future generations might use to rise above the bloody past. If we failed, if Karim Bey had his way, the fragile structure of government would collapse, anarchy would reign, and tyrants would again walk these stones. Hell lurked just outside the city gates.
I finished my apple, watching the tourists go by. They would lose their purses to a nice peaceful pickpocket if they weren’t more careful, I thought, and tossed the core of my apple into the gutter to follow them. Night was closing in fast, and the original purpose of finding Holmes had long faded from view—after an hour in the souk I had to admit that I had little hope of stumbling across him. I turned back towards the Christian Quarter, and there I took a wrong turning.
It is difficult to become seriously lost in a walled city that covers less than a square mile, and I had memorised the names of the principal streets that cut through the maze; however, with most of the streets lacking either signs or street-lamps and darkness settling over the already dim lanes, I mistook the Akabet et-Tekkiyeh for the parallel Tarik es-Serdi, and found myself in an alleyway of locked shops and few people. Wondering if it ended