O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [43]
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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North of Beersheva lies a strip of true agricultural land where the soil is more than a thin scum of dust on the surface of rock and there is water enough to encourage the crops. The small fields of green wheat and barley looked strange at first to eyes accustomed to the stony places, but when we entered a brief hollow where the green stretched out on either side and the trees along the edges of the track had miraculously escaped the Turkish axe, I was hit again by a flash of déjà vu, back to the previous summer as gipsies. Here we had mules clanking behind us instead of the creak and tinkle of a gaudy horse-drawn caravan, and the sky over our heads was brilliant and clear instead of grey, but the feel of being on the road incognito was very similar.
“This reminds me of Wales,” I said to Holmes.
“In Arabic!” he growled, in that language. This also was like our time in Wales, when I was required to maintain the disguise even when unobserved. Obediently, I re-worded the sentence into something resembling Arabic.
Holmes corrected my vocabulary and pronunciation, and waited until I had repeated it, before he answered that yes, he remembered Wales, and then launched off on a completely unrelated tale of a Bedouin raid he had participated in while a guest of the Howeitat tribe, of which I understood every second word. My Arabic was improving, but it was a strain to have to think in a foreign tongue.
We lapsed into silence. A mile or so passed, the only sounds our laden mules, the occasional lorry, the tinkling of various goat bells, and from time to time the drift of conversation from the two men ahead of us. Ali seemed in high spirits; I wondered idly what he had come upon during his trip to retrieve the guns that cheered him so.
Mostly, however, my thoughts were on the previous night’s curious encounter with the spymaster Joshua. His stubborn determination to present an unruffled, unworried façade in the face of what to me seemed some fairly serious problems had struck me as odd then, and seemed even more peculiar at a distance. And he certainly was no judge of men, if he thought Holmes would be deflected by pretty words and stern instructions. Indeed, had he wanted Holmes’ interest to be piqued, he could not have chosen a better approach.
I stirred myself and trotted forward to join Holmes, who had drawn ahead of me while I was deep in thought.
“Tell me, Holmes,” I began, only to have him hiss at me in disapproval. I laboriously constructed a sentence in Arabic, which came out something like “Consider Joshua want help you—your, or no?”
Holmes put the sentence right for me, waited until I repeated it with the correct inflection, and then said merely, “I think you’d find that our friend Joshua is a very clever man indeed.”
Which was all well and good, but I personally would not trust the little man one inch further than was absolutely necessary.
By the time we made camp that night, having walked eighteen or twenty very uneven miles and heard nothing but Arabic since leaving Beersheva, I was exhausted. I did my chores and ate Ali’s tasteless food mechanically, and sat slumped against a bundle in front of the fire in the black tent, dimly aware of Mahmoud pounding the coffee mortar and Holmes talking again, telling another story. Without making an effort of concentration, it was just a flow of Arabic, sweetly guttural noises that ebbed and flowed against my eardrums, until my attention was snagged by the sound of my own name. I bent my ears to his words and decided after a minute that he was telling Ali and Mahmoud the tale of our Welsh adventure; as I listened, an odd thing happened. Despite, or perhaps because of, my combined lack of sleep, physical tiredness, and psychic revulsion for the ubiquitous foreign language, I suddenly realised that I was able to understand virtually everything that was being said. It was as if some internal mechanism had clicked on and the strange and laborious patterns fell neatly into place, so that even