The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [113]
As I said, I found this combination of unreality and hazard im-mensely appealing, and indeed it gave me a lasting taste for what is called Intelligence (which is not to be confused with Wisdom, being, in fact, often completely devoid of sense). At the time all I thought about was that we were safe from our shadowy pursuer, and that My-croft was proving a powerful if enigmatic ally.
This is not the place to burden the reader with a detailed (that is, book-length) account of our expedition to Palestine, for, although it had its own distinct points of interest, it had almost no bearing on the case that had sent us there. It was an excursus, the chief benefit of which was that it enabled us to reconsider the balance in our relation-ship, and to come to a decision about how our case at home was to be handled, while Mycroft and Lestrade were assembling data for us. That our time of exile changed my life personally, that it endowed me with a sense of the texture of history that has stayed with me to this day, that it moved me to profound wonder and joy and fury, that the sense of Palestine as a refuge made me a Jew more than any one thing apart from the accident of my birth—all these have proven to be of lasting interest to me personally, but of peripheral interest to this par-ticular narrative.
Nor shall I subject the reader to a travelogue of that most remark-able of lands. We stayed for a few days in a mud hut near Jaffa, getting our bearings and perfecting our disguises (which Holmes had used be-fore, in Mecca) before setting off south. We moved into the empty des-olation of nomadic peoples and ruined monasteries, where the desert shimmered even in January. We walked and rode across the wilderness to the Salt Sea, and in the dark before the moon rose we floated in its remarkable buoyant waters, and I felt the light of the stars on my naked body. We went north and touched the crumbling remains of mosaic pavements, the delicate stone fishes and twining grape clusters, and walked among the massive remains of temple walls and the more re-cent remains from Allenby’s victories. We slept under Bedouin tents that stank of goat, in caves cut into the hillsides, on warm, flat roofs under the stars, in feather beds in a pasha’s palace, under an Army lorry, under a fisherman’s skiff, and under nothing but the sky. We drank cold, sour lemonade with Jews in a Zionist settlement, hot, syrupy mint tea with a Bedouin sheikh, and Earl Grey with tinned milk in the house of a high-ranking Army officer in Haifa. We bathed (far too sel-dom for my taste—there are drawbacks in being disguised as a male, and one of them is public bathing) in a bubbling spring above Cana of Galilee, in a smooth stretch of the Jordan surrounded by barbed wire (under the disapproving gaze of a kingfisher), and in the tin hip bath of an English archaeologist in Jericho, whose passion for preserving her site was matched only by her extreme Zionism.
(She was, incidentally, the only person I have ever met who, seeing me in disguise, knew me immediately and matter-of-factly for what I was. She greeted us with a furious barrage of words from the bottom of her trench, established that we were not about to carry off her beloved potsherds, marched us off to her remarkable home, which resembled a low Bedouin tent made of scrap wood and corrugated iron, and clos-eted me in a windowless room with concrete walls and an endless sup-ply of gloriously hot water. Holmes she allowed to sluice off under a bucket of cold water in the courtyard.)
We—I—left Jerusalem until nearly the end, circling around it on our way north, coming tantalisingly close twice and shying away, until finally we walked the long dry hills up to the city in the company of a group of Bedouins and their emaciated goats and stood, burnt black and footsore and absolutely filthy (even the normally catlike Holmes) on the crest of Mount Olivet at sundown. There before us she rose up, the city of cities, the umbilicus mundi, centre of the Universe, growing from the very foundations of the earth, surprisingly