O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [109]
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 others 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