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evidence that the following tale is true. Granted, many of the people mentioned in it did exist, and most of the physical landmarks described by Ms. Russell—the Cotton Grotto and the Haram es-Sherîf, the cisterns, streets and public baths, the monasteries in the desert—are there to this day. Even the Western Wall was then as she describes it, a dank stone courtyard measuring some fifty yards long and ten deep, crowded round by the high dwellings of impoverished North African Muslims. Still, there is no proof that this heretofore unknown chapter of Israel’s history actually took place.

Then again, there is no proof it did not.

—Laurie R. King

* * *

AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE

The education of a scholar is greatly benefited by travelling in the pursuit of knowledge and to meet the authorities of his age.

—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN

« ^ »

During the final week of December 1918, shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I vanished into British-occupied Palestine in the company of my friend and mentor Sherlock Holmes. The reasons for our temporary exile I have given elsewhere,* but as that adventure had almost no bearing on what we did while we were in the Middle East, I need not go into it in any detail here. Suffice it to say that our Holy Land sojourn was by way of being a retreat, distressingly near ignominious, a means of distancing ourselves from a disastrous field of battle—England—while we patched the wounds that our bodies and our self-respect had sustained and assembled plans for the next stages of that campaign.

We entered the country, a British protectorate since the autumn’s triumphs over the Turks, under the auspices of Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, an enigmatic and occasionally alarming figure whose authority within His Majesty’s government was as immense as it was undefined. Given the necessity of our temporary absence from the United Kingdom, Mycroft had presented us with a choice of five venues, in each of which he (and hence His Majesty) had tasks with which he needed help. Holmes, in a spontaneous and utterly unexpected recognition of my increasingly adult status in our partnership, had ceded the choice to me. I chose Palestine.

A note about Arabic:

Arabic has more grammatical forms than English. For example, “he” and “she” take separate verb endings, and “you” can be masculine, feminine, or plural. English translators often resort to “thou” and “thy” under the mistaken impression that the pronouns impart an Arabic flavour to the translation. To my mind, the only impression given is a stilted and thus inaccurate one, but then a literal translation is quite often not the best. I have therefore rendered Arab and Hebrew speech into their most natural English equivalent, and if the reader is disappointed not to find a story peppered with “Thou son of a dog!” and “By the beard of the Prophet!” so be it. Personally, I have always thought pepper an overused spice.

Similarly I have rendered the names of people and towns in the orthography of English usage: Jerusalem rather than the more exact Yerushalayim, Jericho instead of Yeriho, etc.

—M. R. H.

*See The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

* * *

ONE

ا

I began to learn another alphabet, and meditate on words that hissed and words that gasped.

—JEROME, Vita S. Paulii,

TRANS. HELEN WADDELL

(The Desert Fathers)

« ^ »

The skiff was black, its gunwales scant inches above the waves. Like my two companions, I was dressed in dark clothing, my face smeared with lamp-black. The rowlocks were wrapped and muffled; the loudest sounds in all the night were the light slap of water on wood and the rhythmic rustle of Steven’s clothing as he pulled at the oars. Holmes stiffened first, then Steven’s oars went still, and finally I too heard it: a distant deep thrum of engines off the starboard side. It was not the boat we had come on, but it was approaching fast, much too fast to outrun. Steven shipped the oars without a sound, and the three of us folded up into the bottom of the skiff.

The engines grew, and grew, until they filled