Jimgrim and Allah's Peace Part 6

The arrangement finally agreed to was Anazeh's suggestion, but showed diplomatic genius on both sides. The old man divided up his party into sets of three, and a.s.serted that every set of three was independent. There were twenty-two of us all told, including Ahmed, but he described Ahmed as a prisoner, and offered to have him shot if that would simplify matters.

There was a great deal of windy discussion about Ahmed's fate, during which his face grew the color of raw liver and he joined in several times tearfully. Once he was actually seized and half-a-dozen of the castle guards aimed at him; but they compromised finally by letting him go in with hands tied. n.o.body really wanted the responsibility of shooting a man who had smuggled stolen cartridges across the Dead Sea, and might do it again if allowed to live.

We rode for eighty or a hundred paces through an echoing tunnel into a city of shacks and ruined houses that swarmed with armed men, and it was evident that we were not the only ones who had ignored the rule about numbers. Anazeh explained in an aside to me that only those would obey that rule who did not dare break it.

"Whoever makes laws should be strong enough to enforce them," he said sagely. "And whoever obeys such a law is at the mercy of those who break it," he added presently, by way of afterthought. To make sure that I understood him he repeated that remark three times.

Every house had its quota of visitors, who lounged in the doorways and eyed us with mixed insolence and curiosity. There were coffee-booths all over the place that seemed to have been erected for the occasion, where, under awnings made of stick and straw, men sat with rifles on their knees. Those who had provender to sell for horses were doing a roaring trade-short measure and high price; and the noise of grinding was incessant. The women in the back streets were toiling to produce enough to eat for all that host of notables.

To have had to hunt for quarters in that town just then would have been no joke. There was the mosque, of course, where any Moslem who finds himself stranded may theoretically go and sleep on a mat on the floor. But we rode past the mosque. It was full. I would not have liked a contract to crowd one more in there. Perhaps a New York Subway guard could have managed it. The babel coming through the open door was like the buzzing of flies on a garbage heap.

I was trying to sit upright in that abominable saddle and look dignified, as became the honoured guest with a twenty-man escort, when a courteous-looking cut-throat wearing an amber necklace worth a wheat-field, forced his way through a crowd and greeted Anazeh like a long lost brother. I examined him narrowly to make sure he was not Grim in disguise, but he had two fingers missing, and holes in his ears, which decided that question.

After he had welcomed me effusively he led us through a rat-run maze of streets to a good-sized house with snub-nosed lions carved on the stone doorposts and a lot of other marks of both Roman and crusader. No part of the walls was less than three feet thick, although the upper story had been rebuilt rather recently on a more economical and much less dignified scale. Nevertheless, there was a sort of semi-European air about the place, helped out by two cas.e.m.e.nted projections overhanging the narrow street.

There was no need to announce ourselves. The clatter of hoofs and shouts to ordinary folk on foot to get out of the way had done that already. Sheikh ben n.a.z.ir opened the door in person. His welcome to me was the sort that comes to mind when you read the Bible story of the prodigal son returning from a far-off country. I might have been his blood-relation. But perhaps I am wrong about that; bloodfeuds among blood-relations are notoriously savage. He was the host, and I the guest. Among genuine Arabs that is the most binding relation there is.

He was no longer in blue serge and patent-leather boots, but magnificent in Arab finery, and he was tricked out in a puzzling snowy-white head-dress that suggested politics without your knowing why. He had told me, when I met him at the American Colony, that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca more than once; but that white linen thing had nothing to do with his being a haji, any more than the expensive rings on the fingers of both hands had anything to do with his Arab nationality.

After he had flattered and questioned me sufficiently about the journey to comply with etiquette I asked him whether Ahmed might not be untied. The thong cutting the man's wrists. Sheikh hen n.a.z.ir gave the necessary order and it was obeyed at once. The liquid-eyed rascal with the priceless amber necklace then led away the escort, Ahmed included, to some place where they could stall the horses, and-side-by-side, lest any question of precedence should be involved, Anazeh and I followed ben n.a.z.ir into the house.

We were not the only guests there. He ushered us into a square room, in which outrageous imported furniture, with gilt and ta.s.sels on it, stood out like loathsome sores against rugs and cus.h.i.+ons fit for the great Haroun-al-Raschid's throne room. Any good museum in the world would have competed to possess the rugs, but the furniture was the sort that France sends eastward in the name of "culture"-stuff for "savages" to sit on and be civilized while the white man bears the burden and collects the money.

There were half-a-dozen Arabs reclining on two b.a.s.t.a.r.d Louis- something-or-other settees, who rose to their feet as we entered. There was another man, sitting on a cus.h.i.+on in a corner by himself, who did not get up. He wore a white head-dress exactly like our host's, and seemed to consider himself somebody very important indeed. After one swift searching glance at us he went into a brown study, as if a mere sheikh and a Christian alien were beneath his notice.

We were introduced first of all to the men who had stood up to greet us, and that ceremony took about five minutes. The Arab believes he ought to know all about how you feel physically, and expects you to reciprocate. When that was over ben n.a.z.ir took us to the corner and presented, first me, then Anazeh to the solitary man in the white head-dress, who seemed to think himself too important to trouble about manners.

Anazeh did not quite like my receiving attention first, and he liked still less the off-handed way in which the solitary man received us. We were told his name was Suliman ben Saoud. He acknowledged my greeting. He and old Anazeh glared at each other, barely moving their heads in what might have been an unspoken threat and retort or a nod of natural recognition. Anazeh turned on his heel and joined the other guests.

In some vague way I knew that Saoud was a name to conjure with, although memory refused to place it. The man's air of indifference and apparently unstudied insolence suggested he was some one well used to authority. Presuming on the one thing that I felt quite sure of by that time-my privileged position as a guest-I stayed, to try to draw him out. I tried to open up conversation with him with English, French, and finally lame Arabic. He took no apparent notice of the French and English, but he smiled sarcastically at my efforts with his own tongue. Except that he moved his lips he made no answer but went on clicking the beads of a splendid amber rosary.

Ben n.a.z.ir, seeming to think that Anazeh's ruffled feelings called for smoothing, crossed the room to engage him in conversation, so I was left practically alone with the strange individual. More or less in a spirit of defiance of his claim to such distinction, I sat down on a cus.h.i.+on beside him.

He was a peculiar-looking man. The lower part of his cheek-that side on which I sat-was sunk in, as if he had no teeth there. The effect was to give his whole face a twisted appearance. The greater part of his head, of course, was concealed by the flowing white kaffiyi, but his skin was considerably darker than that of the Palestine Arab. He had no eyebrows at all, having shaved them off-for a vow I supposed. Instead of making him look comical, as you might expect, it gave him a very sinister appearance, which was increased by his generally surly att.i.tude.

Once again, as when I had entered the room, he turned his head to give me one swift, minutely searching glance, and then turned his eyes away as if he had no further interest. They were quite extraordinary eyes, brimful of alert intelligence; and whereas from his general appearance I should have set him down at somewhere between forty and fifty, his eyes suggested youth, or else that keen, unpeaceful spirit that never ages.

I tried him again in Arabic, but he answered without looking at me, in a dialect I had never heard before. So I offered him a gold-tipped cigarette, that being a universal language. He waived the offer aside with something between astonishment and disdain. He had lean, long-fingered hands, entirely unlike those of the desert fraternity, who live too hard and fight too frequently to have soft, uncalloused skin and unbroken finger-nails.

He did not exactly fascinate me. His self-containment was annoying. It seemed intended to convey an intellectual and moral importance that I was not disposed to concede without knowing more about him. I suppose an Arab feels the same sensation when a Westerner lords it over him on highly moral grounds. At any rate, something or other in the way of pique urged me to stir him out of his self-complacency, just as one feels urged to prod a bull-frog to watch him jump.

He seemed to understand my remarks, for he took no trouble to hide his amus.e.m.e.nt at my efforts with the language. But he only answered in monosyllables, and I could not understand those. So after about five minutes I gave it up, and crossed the room to ben n.a.z.ir, who seized the opportunity to show me my sleeping-quarters.

It proved to be a room like a monastery cell, up one flight of stone steps, with two other rooms of about the same size on either side of it. At the end of the pa.s.sage was a very heavy wooden door, with an iron lock and an enormous keyhole, which I suppose shut off the harem from the rest of the house; but as I never trespa.s.sed beyond it I don't know. I only do know that a woman's eye was watching me through that key-hole, and ben n.a.z.ir frowned impatiently at the sound of female giggling.

"The Sheikh Anazeh will have the room on this side of you," he said, "and the Sheikh Suliman ben Saoud the room on the other. So you will be between friends."

"Suliman ben Saoud seems a difficult person to make friends with," I answered.

Ben n.a.z.ir smiled like a prince out of a picture-book-beautiful white teeth and exquisite benignance.

"Oh, you mustn't mind him. These celebrities from the centre of Arabia give themselves great airs. To do that is considered evidence of piety and wisdom."

I sat on the bed-quite a civilized affair, spotlessly clean. Ben n.a.z.ir took the chair, I suppose, like the considerate host he was, to give me the sensation of receiving in my own room.

"He wears the same sort of head-dress you do. What does it mean?" I asked.

"I wear mine out of compliment to him-not that I have not always the right to wear it. It is the Ichwan head-dress. It is highly significant."

"Of what?"

He hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to make up his mind that it did not much matter what he might divulge to an ignorant stranger soon to return to the United States.

"It is difficult to explain. You Americans know so little of our politics. It is significant, I might say, of the New Arabia- Arabia for the Arabs. The great ben Saoud, who is a relative of this man, is an Arabian chieftain who has welded most of Arabia into one, and now challenges King Hussein of Mecca for the caliphate. Hussein is only kept on his throne by British gold, paid to him from India. Ben Saoud also receives a subsidy from the British, who must continue to pay it, because otherwise ben Saoud will attack Hussein and overwhelm him. That, it is believed, would mean a rising of all the Moslem world against their rulers-in Africa-Asia-India-Java-everywhere. It began as a religious movement. It is now political-although it is held together by religious zeal. You might say that the Ichwans are the modern Protestants of Islam. They are fanatical. The world has never seen such fanaticism, and the movement spreads day by day."

"You don't look like a fanatic," I said, and he laughed again.

"I? G.o.d forbid! But I am a politician; and to succeed a politician must have friends among all parties. My one ambition is to see all Arabs united in an independent state reaching from this coast to the Persian Gulf. To that end I devote my energy. I use all means available-including money paid me by the French, who have no intention of permitting any such development if they can help it."

"And the British?"

"For the present we must make use of them also. But their yoke must go, eventually."

"Then if America had accepted the Near East mandate, you would have used us in the same way?"

"Certainly. That would have been the easiest way, because America understands little or nothing of our politics. America's money-America's schools and hospitals-America's war munitions- and then good-bye. I am willing to use all means-all methods to the one end-Arabia for the Arabs. After that I am willing to retire into oblivion."

Nevertheless, ben n.a.z.ir did not convince me that he was an altruist who had no private ends to serve. There was an avaricious gleam in ben n.a.z.ir's eyes.

Chapter Five

"D'you mind if I use You?"

For all his care to seem hospitable before any other consideration, ben n.a.z.ir looked ill at ease. He led me down again to a dining-room hung with spears, s.h.i.+elds, scimitars and ancient pistols, but furnished otherwise like an instalment-plan apartment. He watched while a man set food before me. It seemed that Anazeh had gone away somewhere to eat with his men.

Ben n.a.z.ir's restlessness became so obvious that I asked at last whether I was not detaining him. He jumped at the opening. With profound apologies he asked me to excuse him for the remainder of the afternoon.

"You see," he explained, "I came from Damascus to Jerusalem, so I was rather out of touch with what was going on here. This conference of notables was rather a surprise to me. It will not really take place until tomorrow, but there are important details to attend to in advance. If you could amuse yourself-"

The man who could not do that in a crusader city, crammed with sons of Ishmael who looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament, would be difficult to please. I asked for Ahmed, to act as interpreter. Ben n.a.z.ir volunteered to provide me with two men in addition as a sort of bodyguard.

"Because Ahmed is a person who is not respected."

It did not take ten minutes to produce Ahmed and the two men.

The latter were six-foot, solemn veterans armed with rifles and long knives. With them at my heels I set out to explore El-Kerak.

"There is nothing to see," said Ahmed, who did not want to come. But Ahmed was a liar. There was everything to see. The only definite purpose I had in mind was to find Grim. It was possible I might recognize him even through his disguise. Failing that, he could not help but notice me if I walked about enough; if so, he would find his own means of establis.h.i.+ng communication.

But you might as well have hunted for one particular pebble on a beach as for a single individual in all that throng. Remembering Grim's disguise when I first saw him, I naturally had that picture of him in mind. But all the Bedouins looked about as much alike as peas in a pod. They stared at me as if I were a curio on exhibition, but they did not like being stared back at.