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By Root 345 0

a point where speech was acceptable. Eventually, the silent Mahmoud looked at Ali, who seemed to feel the glance and take it as a signal because he immediately reached into the front of his robe with his left hand and took out a thumb-sized knob of soft wood. His right hand went to his chest and drew the heavy, razor-honed knife from its decorated scabbard, and to my surprise he proceeded to use the unlikely blade to whittle delicately at the bit of wood. After a few moments, his cigarette bobbing dangerously close to his black beard, he paused in his carving and raised his eyes to Holmes.

“So,” he said. “Do you mind telling us what you are doing here?”

* * *

TWO

ب

Geometry enlightens the mind and sets one’s mind straight … The mind that turns regularly to geometry is unlikely to fall into error.

—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN

« ^ »

I was beginning to wonder the same thing myself, and in fact, the question was to run like a refrain through all the activities of the next few days. What was I doing here?

“My brother, Mycroft, suggested that you had a problem we might help you with,” Holmes replied. “That is all I know.”

“A ‘problem’,” Ali repeated.

“His word.”

“So you come all the way from England to help us with a problem you know nothing about.”

“I am regarded as something by way of an expert on problems,” Holmes said modestly.

“Or is it that your brother, Mycroft, wants you to check up on us?”

“I should think if that’s what he wanted, he would have indicated we might not trust you, but it’s difficult to say. Mycroft is something by way of an expert on keeping things to himself.”

Ali made a growling noise in the back of his throat and fingered his knife impatiently. “Why did you come? What brings you here?”

Holmes made no further effort to dodge the question, although the answer was a thing of unvarnished humiliation. “We were in danger of losing our lives in London, and needed to get away for some weeks in order to gain the upper hand on our return. Mycroft thought we could as well make ourselves useful as hide in a cave somewhere.”

“So we are to be your nursemaids?” Ali said with incredulity.

“Absolutely not,” Holmes snapped, his voice suddenly cold.

“You are an old man and she is a girl,” Ali retorted. “You may have dyed your faces, but you can’t even speak Arabic.”

“I speak the tongue as one who was born to the black tents of the Howeitat Bedu,” said Holmes in an Arabic that was apparently as flawless as he imagined it, for Ali looked at him in surprise and even Mahmoud cocked an eyebrow. “Russell speaks Hebrew, as well as French, German, and a number of fairly useless dead languages; her Arabic is progressing rapidly.”

It was an exaggeration, but I promptly dragged up a sentence I had laboriously constructed during our boat trip here (ten days spent primarily on intensive lessons in Arabic and intense games of chess) and I parroted it to the room. “My Arabic lacks beauty, but the bones are strong and it grows in the manner of a young horse.”

I was afraid they would ask me a question, at which my ignorance would be laid bare, but Ali picked up where he had left off.

“Very well,” he said, still in English. “You speak with a beautiful accent, but there is more to life here than language. We do not have time to set our steps by yours.”

“If we lag behind, leave us. An hour in the bazaar to supply the portions of our costume the boat could not provide, and we are ready.”

“Dressed as you are, everyone in the market would know your business.”

“Then you will have to spend the hour for us,” Holmes said, as if in agreement to a proposal. Mahmoud made some slight noise, but when I glanced at him, his face was without expression.

“But you look wrong,” Ali objected. “You have strange eyes. The girl even wears spectacles.”

“The spectacles are an oddity, but not an insurmountable one. As for the eyes, Circassians often have blue eyes. So do Berbers, who often have yellow hair as well. Berbers are also known for being strong-headed, which is even more appropriate.”

“We have no beds,” Ali