O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [103]
“I believe if you examine it you will find it’s nothing so fresh as that,” he said mildly, and with that I stood up and saw the filth that was smeared the length of my robe.
“Oh, God, Holmes, it reeks! What is that?”
“Best not to ask. Come.”
“I hope we’re going back to the inn.” The other robe I possessed had seemed too dirty to bear, but now called to me as a paragon of cleanliness. I was not surprised, however, when he did not even answer, only swung his legs over the wall and dropped softly into the roof garden below. Muttering Arabic curses under my breath and searching for an unsoiled patch of my abayya on which I might scrub my palms, I followed.
We rejoined street level in the Jewish Quarter and picked our way through the alleyways until we came to an open place. Several men, Polish Jews by the sound of their accents, were walking purposefully off to our left, and I glanced towards their goal, an opening between two squalid blocks of houses. It wasn’t until we had walked a bit farther and I saw the bulk of the Temple Mount rising before us that I knew where they were going. I stopped dead, and when I listened I could make out their voices, struggling to reach the heavens out of the alleyway and past the heads of the houses that had been built up against the holiest place in Judaism. My people were praying at their Wall.
“ ‘We sit alone and weep,’ ” I recited, tomorrow’s Shabbos prayer. “ ‘Because of the palace which is deserted. Because of the Temple which is destroyed.’ ”
“Russell.” Holmes spoke sharply in my ear. A pair of men walking by us, dark shapes in their black caftans and fur hats, stopped dead to stare at the phenomenon of an Arab boy reciting a Hebrew prayer. I politely wished them in Hebrew a good evening, and they looked at each other and scuttled off.
“That was not wise,” Holmes commented.
“ ‘Let peace and joy return to Jerusalem,’ ” I told him a bit giddily. “ ‘Let the branch put forth and blossom.’ ”
“That is precisely what we are attempting to achieve,” Holmes said, and took my elbow to march me away from there.
“Where are we going, Holmes?”
“To see a Moslem woman whose baskets were returned to her, and then an Armenian priest with an interest in archaeology.”
Why was it, I wondered silently, that the only time Holmes gave me a ready answer to a simple question was when the response was cryptic to the point of being oracular?
“Will we have time to eat?” I asked hopefully.
“Probably not.”
Either cryptic or disheartening.
* * *
TWENTY
ف
Muhammad said: “Every infant is born in the natural state. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a heathen.”
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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Holmes’ mysterious Moslem woman with the reappearing baskets lived in the village of Silwan, or Siloah, across the Kidron Valley from the Old City. We went out through the Dung Gate near the southern end of the Haram es-Sherîf and walked along the outer wall of the city for a space, then dropped down onto a rutted track leading across the valley (which was usually dry, although at the moment it had a trickle at the bottom) and up the other side. There we found a village of tombs, taken over and added to by the living. The inhabitants looked as rough as their setting, and I could only hope that we appeared too poor to bother assaulting.
Holmes seemed to know more or less where we were going, and only at the far end of the village did he stop to ask a child for the house of “the widow of Abdul the Ugly.”
The widow lived in one of the tombs, it seemed. A boy answered our salutation, a child of