The Haj - Leon Uris [6]
‘Dog!’ he hissed.
‘Kamal!’
He turned as our mother entered. ‘Do not touch Ishmael!’
‘What do you know, crazy old woman! You sow! Ibrahim does not even sleep with you!’
‘He has called me to his bed tonight,’ she said calmly. ‘I will have some interesting things to tell him.’
Kamal had never been known as much of a fighter among those of his own age and size. He had been able to defend himself only because he was the muktar’s son and could read and write. He thought it over for only an instant, then dropped the pitchfork.
‘You will never touch Ishmael again,’ my mother repeated. She took the pitchfork from my hands, looked at us, one to the other. ‘Never again,’ she repeated, then left.
‘A day will come,’ Kamal said.
‘We do not have to be enemies,’ I said. ‘There are still thirty parcels I have not told Father about. If we go in on this together, I will want half.’
‘It is very early for you to be playing such games, Ishmael,’ he said.
‘I want half. You will give my half to Mother.’
‘What about Uncle Farouk?’
‘It must come from your, half. Uncle Farouk had better be careful because Father is ready to throw him out of the village. Well, do you agree or not?’ Fuming, he shook his head in agreement and left.
When my mother and I slept together again in a few nights she stroked my head and kissed my face a hundred times over and cried of how proud she was of me. So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.
3
‘SUN, STAND THOU STILL at Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ayalon.’ Thus, Joshua requested the light by which to smite his enemies.
The Village of Tabah occupies a small but strategic knoll in Ayalon, which has been described as both a valley and a plain. A German archaeological dig before the First World War determined that remnants of civilized man on this hillock dated back over four thousand years. If one were to come from the sea from Jaffa moving south and east toward Jerusalem, one would enter the plain through the twin guardian cities of Ramle and Lydda, where St. George the dragon slayer allegedly held court.
Ten miles into the plain one would come upon the knoll where the Village of Tabah stands sentinel as the gateway to Jerusalem. Beyond Tabah the road takes on a tortuous uphill route, snaking along the bed of a steep ravine known as the Bab el Wad. The Bab el Wad squirms a dozen miles to the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Before Joshua’s battle, this was ancient Canaan, a land bridge between the powers of the Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia and Egypt. Then, as today, the land of Canaan lay like a morsel between the jaws of a crocodile, a passageway for invading armies. Waves of Semitic tribes drifted or swarmed into Canaan and settled to create a prebiblical civilization of city-states that were eventually conquered and absorbed by the nomadic Hebrew tribes.
After Joshua, the knoll of Tabah bore witness to the scourging armies of Assyria and Babylon, of Egypt and Persia, of Greece and Rome. It was the pale of the ill-fated Hebrew Tribe of Dan and the home of the errant Jewish judge, Samson. It knew the wheels of the Philistine chariot all too well.
It saw the great Jewish revolt against the Greeks, and here Judah, ‘the Hammerer,’ assembled his Maccabees for the assault to liberate Jerusalem.
It is said that Mohammed stopped at the knoll on his legendary overnight journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and back, riding his mythical horse, el-Buraq, which had the face of a woman, the tail of a peacock, and could gallop in a single stride as far as the eye could see. Mohammed, any villager will tell you, leaped from the knoll at Tabah and landed in Jerusalem.
Mohammed