O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [67]
From her peculiar encampment we travelled north towards the Mount of Temptation (it being a steep climb to the top, I planned on volunteering to stay behind and guard the mules). Before we reached it, though, about a mile outside of town where the track passed through a small plantation of young banana trees watered by the ages-old Jericho springs, a car stood waiting.
It was a heavy car, an open Rolls-Royce of the sort used only by the highest-ranking army staff officers, its chassis virtually indestructible over the roughest of roads. The driver sat on the running board, smoking a cigarette and watching us come along the dusty track. As we approached he straightened, flicked the end of his cigarette across the road, and nodded in a familiar way to Mahmoud.
“I’ve arranged for you to leave your mules and kit with the family in the next farmhouse,” he said politely in an English straight out of Edinburgh. “General Allenby would like a word.”
* * *
TWELVE
س
Both the sword and the pen are necessary tools for a ruler; however, at the start of a dynasty, the need for the sword is greater.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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It was strange beyond measure, compelling and exotic, to sit motionless while the land flew past at a speed faster than legs could move one. Trees were no sooner sighted than they were gone, and I felt as though I was looking at the open-mouthed children on the roadside with an identical amazed expression on my own face.
We were in Haifa in no time at all, it seemed: one hundred miles, and it was still not too late for tea. We were driven up to a grand house (the palace of a pasha, I discovered later) that had a number of incongruous army lorries and armoured vehicles scattered about what had once been formal gardens. The driver deposited us at a portico, where a lieutenant wearing thick spectacles and a uniform that had never seen battle conditions took possession of our ragged persons with such an air of infinite politeness that one would have assumed that he ushered in similar guests every afternoon—as indeed he may have done.
The lieutenant clicked down the polished corridor, turned a corner, stopped before a door, opened it without knocking, said, “The Hazr brothers are here, sir,” stood back to let us file in, and closed the door behind us. I was dimly aware of the sound of his heels clicking away, but mostly my attention was taken by the man in the room.
The room held two men, but I do not imagine that the world has produced many individuals who would be noticed in the presence of the man whose office this was.
He was big, although not extraordinarily so. His size was more an extension of his personality: taut with power until his uniform seemed at risk of bursting. He had eyes that probed and analysed and summed up the strengths, weaknesses, and potential uses of their target in seconds, a beak of a nose, a thinning tonsure of hair, and his bullet head was tipped slightly to one side as if listening for hidden currents. Behind his back, men called him “the Bull.” This was the man of whose exploits Mahmoud had spoken in the village, the man who, in the space of sixteen months, had assembled his inherited hotchpotch of an army and moved it out of its static place in Suez in order to present the despairing British people with Jerusalem for one Christmas and the remainder of the Turkish empire for the next, the man who at that moment was the sole authority of all the occupied territory from Constantinople to the Suez Canal: the Commander in Chief, General Edmund Allenby. He seemed to take up a great deal of space in the room.
We had paused just inside the door while Allenby swept us with those search-light eyes of his. After a long five seconds he let us loose and turned to the man seated