“You don’t look like a fanatic,” I said, and he laughed again.
“I? God 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 Nazir did not convince me that he was an altruist who had no private ends to serve. There was an avaricious gleam in ben Nazir’s eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE.
“D’YOU MIND IF I USE YOU?”
For all his care to seem hospitable before any other consideration, ben Nazir looked ill at ease. He led me down again to a dining-room hung with spears, shields, 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 Nazir’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 Nazir 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 establishing 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.
There was no hint of violence or interference, and no apparent resentment of an alien’s presence in their midst. The loud-lunged bodyguard shouted out to all and sundry to make way for the “Amerikani,” and way was made forthwith, although several times the bodyguard was stopped and questioned after I had passed, to make sure I was really American and not English. Ahmed assured me that if I had been English they would have “massacred” me. In view of what transpired he may have been right, though I doubt it. They might have held me as hostage.
Not that they were in any kind of over-tolerant mood. There was a man’s dead body hanging by one foot from a great hook on a high wall, and the wall was splattered with blood and chipped by bullets. I asked Ahmed what kind of criminal he might be.
“He did not agree with them. They are for war. He was in favor of peace, and he made a speech two hours ago. So they accused him of being a traitor, and he was tried and condemned.”
“Who tried him?”
“Everybody did.”
“War with whom?” I asked.
“The British.”
“Why?”
“Because they favor the Zionists.”
“And that is what the conference is all about?”
“Yes. There is a man here from Damascus, who urges them to raid across the Jordan into Palestine. He says that the Palestinian Arabs will rise then, and cut the throats of all the Zionists. He says that Emir Feisul is going to attack the French in Syria, and that the British will have to go and help the French, so now is the time for a raid.”
“Is my host, ben Nazir, the man who is talking that way? He has been to Damascus.”
“No. Another, named Abdul Ali—a very rich sheikh, who comes here often with caravans of merchandise, and gives rich presents to notables.”
“Has ben Nazir anything to do with it?”
“Who knows? Mashallah! The world is full of mysteries. That Nazir is a knowing one. They say of him: whichever option is uppermost, that is always his opinion. He is a safe man to follow for that reason. Yet it is easier to follow water through a channel underground.”
We made our way toward the castle at the south side of the town, but were prevented from entering by a guard of feudal retainers, who looked as if they had been well drilled. They were as solemn as the vultures that sat perched along the rampart overlooking a great artificial moat dividing the town from the high hill just beyond it.
Nobody interfered when I climbed on the broken town wall and looked over. The castle wall sloped down steeply into the moat, suggesting ample space within for dungeons and underground passages; but there was nothing else there of much interest to see, only dead donkeys, a dying camel with the vultures already beginning on him, some dead dogs, heaps of refuse, and a lot more vultures too gorged to fly—the usual Arab scheme of sanitation. I asked one of my bodyguard to shoot the camel and he obliged me, with the air of a keeper making concessions to a lunatic. Nobody took any notice of the rifle going off.
It was when we turned back into the town again that the first inkling of Grim’s presence in the place turned up. A bulky-looking Arab in a sheepskin coat that stank of sweat so vilely that you could hardly bear the man near you, came up and stood in my way. Barring the smell, he was a winning-looking rascal— truculent, swaggering, but possessed of a good-natured smile that seemed to say: “Sure, I’m a rogue and a liar, but what else did you expect!”
He spoke perfectly good English. He said he wished to speak to me alone. That was easy enough; Ahmed and the bodyguard withdrew about ten paces, and he and I stepped into a doorway.
“I am Mahommed ben Hamza,” he said, with his head on one side, as if that explanation ought to make everything