O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [31]
Holmes and I looked at each other, wrapped ourselves in our abayyas, and went to sleep on top of the baggage.
Ali woke us late in the afternoon, complaining mightily of a sore head and grousing at the cold food he had to eat. (I shuddered at the little footprints on the platter and averted my eyes.) Before long Mahmoud swept in.
“One hour,” he pronounced. Ali immediately stood up, deposited the platter and empty bowls outside the doorway, and he and Mahmoud began to turn out and reorganise our possessions. Two cups, a bowl, and the smallest brass coffee-pot, its handle snapped off under Charlie’s boots, were set to one side, and everything else was bundled neatly into a surprisingly small pile. When the tent was carried in a short time later, smelling of sunshine, it too was reduced to a snug roll in the corner.
Holmes and I sat on our heels out of the way and watched.
Our house restored to order, Mahmoud reached for his sheepskin coat. We made haste to do the same, and followed him out of the door.
The early evening air was sharp with the smoke of cook fires and the day’s warmth was fast departing, as it always does in the desert. We walked in a leisurely fashion through the mud-brick town, past two wells busy with women and a mosque in a park, through a whirl of children playing what appeared to be an Arabic variation on cricket, and ignored by soldiers and glanced at by the native residents. Finally we entered a large and very new-looking cemetery—a military cemetery, full of the dead from Britain and Australia and New Zealand, men who had died ensuring that this, the southernmost town of the ancient Israelites, should be the first town prised from Turkish hands.
In the smoky gloom of dusk, we strolled to the end of the sad, neat little park, and then turned to retrace our steps. On our way into the cemetery we had avoided a canvas-sided army lorry that stood near the entrance—hardly surprising that Ali gave it a wide berth, as its driver was behind the wheel with a glowing cigarette. The only surprising thing was that we had not been intercepted and thrown out on our ears the instant we appeared, four untidy Arab natives daring to defile a British military cemetery. Indeed, as we approached the lorry a second time, coming closer to it in the near darkness, the driver’s door opened. I braced myself for a quick fade into the twilight, but to my relief, instead of abuse, the head that came out merely said, “You’re alone,” and withdrew.
The motor spluttered and roared into life, the driver’s door slammed shut, and we had barely time to tumble after Mahmoud up and into the back of the lorry before it was in gear and moving.
We stayed behind the canvas, though the back flap revealed the town fading behind us. The check-point on the Gaza road slowed us briefly, but the sentries did not bother to look in the back. Soon we were bouncing down the pitted road, clinging to the sides in an attempt to take the edge off the worst of the jolts. The night became colder and the road got no better, for what seemed a long time, after which we turned abruptly to the right, and the road grew worse.
Ten minutes of this, and the lorry dived into a pothole, gave an alarming crack from somewhere in front, and the engine died.
Convinced that we had broken some vital part of the machinery, I just sat. Ali and Mahmoud, however, struggled to their feet and dropped over the back. Holmes and I followed, straightening up slowly to allow our vertebrae to ease back into line.
“As the Irishman said when he was run out of town on a rail,” Holmes commented, sotto voce, “ ‘Were it not for the honour, I’d rather have walked.’ ”
“Are we there, then?” I asked.
“So it would seem.”
The headlamps of the lorry illuminated a heap of mud bricks topped with rusted sheets of corrugated iron that I should have taken for derelict but for the well-fitting door that opened on noiseless hinges at Ali’s touch. The moment we stepped inside, the lorry lamps went out. Mahmoud shut the door behind us, I heard Ali in front of me move, and then