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By Root 1001 0

of Nazareth and south for many miles down the Great Rift Valley where the river fell from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. The strings of Jewish settlements along the lake appeared so tiny and helpless from here. Syrian artillery could sit on this mountain and simply rain down their fire. The Jews had no guns that could reach this far. Certainly the Jews would never be able to scale the clifflike sheerness and capture the place. Even his fellahin in Tabah could hold such high ground against a brigade of the elite Palmach. It took no Saladin to figure out that the Jews would be driven underground by the barrage, after which Syrian tanks and infantry would merely have to sweep down and eradicate them. Of all the military positions in Palestine, Haj Ibrahim could not envision one that gave the Arabs a greater advantage.

The Syrian officer at the border town of Quinetra groveled before the imposing automobile and, after a brief word with Dandash, snapped off a smart salute, shouted a command to open the gate, and watched the car as it bolted into the town.

Quinetra had been built up as a military staging town because of its impeccable strategic credentials and because it straddled an oil pipeline that originated in the Persian Gulf almost a thousand miles away. The flurry of military vehicles, a field of neatly parked tanks and mobile artillery pieces, and hundreds of Syrian soldiers on the street all bespoke coming war.

Once through the town they skirted the bottom of a snowcapped Mount Hermon, a great lonely peak whose broad base touched down into Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. The mountain’s lower slopes held a collection of villages of the mystical quasi-Islamic Druze sect, impoverished Shi’ite Moslems, and a smattering of Christian Arabs.

Now out on a flat ugly gray volcanic desert plain of the Golan, they linked up to the Amman highway, and before Haj Ibrahim could prepare for it, there suddenly rose before him the spires of the glorious Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, next in sacred rank to the Dome of the Rock. Damascus, the city of Abel and Cain and the Apostle Paul and the birth of Christianity, was claimed as the oldest on earth. It rose from the surrounding desolation as a gigantic oasis. Damascus, which had once ruled an empire larger than Rome’s, continued to live on glory a thousand years departed.

Haj Ibrahim’s calm fled him; his prayer beads were fingered at a feverish pace as they reached the outskirts of the city. Next to his arrival in Mecca, he had never experienced anything like this. His awe was counterpointed by Dandash’s sullenness and the chauffeur’s bullying his way by horn. An Arabic hodgepodge of minarets and domes, of the old walled town with its crumbling casbah packed with humanity, was breached by modern glass skyscrapers and wide boulevards telling of recent French influence. Everything was hazed by an eternal pall of ash and sand that constantly blew in from the desert.

Damascus was made possible by the River Barada, which gushed down from the mountains of Lebanon, then broke into hundreds of streamlets that had been converted into a patchwork of canals. The waters had enriched a greenbelt called El Ghouta. This district had been likened in Arabian fantasy to the Garden of Eden. El Ghouta held an unlikely mixture of gardens and grand villas, of casinos and farms and orchards that fed the city, of parks and recreation areas.

It was in El Ghouta that the Effendi Kabir dwelled in a square villa of demicastle proportions. A quarter of a mile down the gated and guarded entrance they drove through a small blizzard of fruit orchards and into a garden of thousands of Damascus rose bushes, then burst on the villa with its facade of orange-peach colored Algerian marble framed in Persian tiles.

Haj Ibrahim’s head became light and fuzzy as Fawzi Kabir greeted him with no less exuberance than if he had been welcoming a Saudi prince. The enormity of the welcome snapped Ibrahim into alertness and made him doubly suspicious. He knew full well that he had been summoned for something of great importance.