“Why not do it?”
“Rubbama.” (Perhaps.)
“True-believers! Followers of the Prophet! Sons of warrior kings!” thundered Abdul Ali. “Will you do nothing to help Feisul, a lineal descendant of the Prophet? You have helped him to a throne. Now strike to hold him there!”
“Jimgrim says, I may go away and leave you here,” growled Anazeh. “What say you?”
“Ala khatrak. (Please yourself.) Jimgrim is wise.”
“He is the father of wisdom. Mashallah! I will consider it. There will be a banquet presently!”
“And loot! You can help yourselves!” shouted Abdul Ali of Damascus. Then he sat down amid a storm of applause. Suliman ben Saoud—Jimgrim—was on his feet before the tumult died away, and again they grew perfectly still to listen to him. If an Arab loves anything under heaven more than his own style of fighting, it is the action and reaction of debate. I could not understand a word of the mid-Arabian dialect, but Abdul Ali’s retorts were plain enough; and from the way that Grim pointed at me and Mahommed ben Hamza it was fairly easy to follow what was happening.
He denounced me as possibly dangerous, and wondered why they permitted me to have an interpreter, who could whisper to me everything that was being said.
“Put out the interpreter!” sneered Abdul Ali, and there was a chorus of approval. Mahommed ben Hamza got up and hurried for the door while the hurrying was good and painless to himself, though it was hardly that to other people; forcing his way between the close-packed notables he kicked more than one of them pretty badly and grinned when they cursed him. I saw Abdul Ali of Damascus whisper to one of his rose-coloured parasites, who got up at once and made his way toward the door, too.
“The fellow is from Hebron,” Abdul Ali sneered in a voice loud enough for all to hear. “It is best that he should not go back to Hebron to tell tales! I have attended to it.”
My blood ran cold. I tried to catch Grim’s eye, but he would not look in my direction. I wondered whether he had heard Abdul Ali’s threat. It seemed to me that if Mahommed ben Hamza were either murdered or imprisoned Grim’s whole chance of success was gone. The danger would be multiplied tenfold. Anazeh seemed the only remaining hope. The old-rose individual who followed ben Hamza had not reached the door yet.
“How about your men?” I asked.
“They are all right.” Anazeh’s eyes pursued the liquor bottle.
“Why not go and see?” I suggested.
“Ilhamdul’illah, they are good men. I know them. If there is trouble they will come and tell me.”
The door opened softly. The gorgeous old-rose parasite slipped through. I had a mental vision of Mahommed ben Hamza lying face-downward with his new coat stained with blood. There was nothing for it, it seemed, but the magic formula to move Anazeh.
“Jimgrim says, ‘See that ben Hamza gets safely away!"’
“Dog of a Hebron tanner’s son—let him die! What is that to me?”
“It is Jimgrim’s command.”
“Wallahi haida fasl! (By God, this is a strange affair!) Wait here!”
Old Anazeh, with the name of the Prophet of God on his lips, cast an envious glare at the bottle of liquor and seized action by the forelock. There was nothing to excite comment in his getting up to leave the room. A dozen men had done that and come in again. He strode out, straight down the middle of the carpet. Suliman ben Saoud—Jimgrim—went on talking, and to judge by Abdul Ali of Damascus’ increasingly restless retorts he was getting that gentleman’s goat as promised. Finally Abdul Ali got to his feet and said that if the Ichwan would see him alone he would show him certain documents that would satisfy him, but that it would not be policy to produce them in public. He offered to send for the documents, and to show them during or after the banquet.
So Jimgrim sat down, and there was a good deal of quiet nudging and nodding. Every one seemed to understand that the Ichwan was going to be bribed; they seemed to admire his ability to get for himself a share of the funds that most of them had tapped.
A man nearly opposite me leaned over and said in fairly good French, with the manner of a doctor assuring his patient that the worst is yet to come:
“It has been decided that you are to be detained here in the castle until there is no danger of your carrying away important news.”
While I was turning that over in my mind Anazeh came back, grinning. Something outside had tickled him immensely, but he would not say anything. He sat down beside me and chuckled into his beard; and when his neighbour on the right asked what had amused him he turned the question into a bawdy joke.
“Did ben Hamza get away?” I whispered.
He only nodded. He continued chuckling until the man on duty by the door announced to the “assembled lords and princes” that the muezzin summoned them to prayer. All except three Christian sheikhs trooped up the narrow stairway in Ali Shah al Khassib’s wake, Anazeh going last with a half-serious joke about not caring to be stabbed in the back.
I expected the three non-Moslems would take advantage of the opportunity to ask me a string of questions. But they took exactly the opposite view of the situation. They avoided me, withdrawing into a corner by themselves. I suppose they thought that to be seen talking to me was more risky than the amusement merited.
So I went up to the ramparts, too, to watch the folk at prayer, minded to keep out of sight, for they don’t like being regarded as a curious spectacle; and on the way up I did something that may have had a lot to do with our getting away alive, although I did not give much thought to it and could hardly have explained my motive at the time.
The door at the foot of the stairs opened inward. It was almost exactly the same width as the stairway, so that when it stood wide open you could not have put your hand between its edge and the stairway wall. Lying on the floor of the hall within a few feet of the nearest corner was a length of good sound olive-wood, about three inches in thickness, roughly squared and not particularly squared. Having stepped on it accidentally, I picked it up, and discovered more by accident than intention that it was longer than the width of the stairway. Then I noticed a notch in the stairway wall. Behind the opened door there was a deeper notch in the opposite wall. There was no lock on the door, no bolt. That length of wood had been cut to fit horizontally from notch to notch across the passage. Once that beam was fitted in its place, whoever wished to reach the roof would have to burn or batter down the door. I moved the door and placed the length of olive-wood on end behind it.
I found the view from the ramparts much more interesting than the soul-saving formalities of eighty or so potential cut-throats. While they prayed I stood watching the shadows deepen in the Jordan Valley, as no doubt Joshua once watched them from somewhere near that same spot before he marshalled his invading host. You could understand why people who had wandered forty years in a stark and howling wilderness should yearn for those coloured, fertile acres between the Jordan and the sea: why they should be willing to fight for them, die for them, do anything rather than turn back.
By the time we had filed down—Anazeh last again—the servants had nearly finished spreading a banquet. What looked like bed-sheets had been laid along the strip of carpet, and, the whole length of them was piled with all imaginable things to eat, from cakes and fruit to whole sheep roasted and seethed in camel’s milk and honey. There were no less than six sheep placed at intervals along the “table,” with mountains of rice, scow-loads of apricots cooked in various ways, and a good sized flock of chickens spitted and smeared with peppery sauce. At a guess, I should say there were several pounds of meat, about two chickens, and a peck of rice per man, with apricots and raisins added; but they faced the prospect like heroes.
Perhaps what helped them face it was the sight of sundry bottles bearing labels more familiar in the West. Abdul Ali of Damascus, licking his lips like a cat that smells canary, took his place