Beledi (1918)
He would be off soon. He talked excitedly of getting the train back to the Hejaz, eager to ride the railway he had helped blow up so many times. Not for him the settled life of a peasant villager. Not while there was desert to explore and battles to be fought. Abdul-Malik wondered sadly if he would ever see him again.
The car blew a gasket as soon as it pulled up in the dusty open space where Deir al-Hamra’s only well stood, much to the delight of the fellaheen who had emerged from the houses and fields to stare. Najid laughed delightedly and opened up the machine’s bonnet. Breezily he assured Abdul-Malik that he would have it working again in no time, before beginning to pull out and rearrange components with the entirely pretended experience of a life-long engineer. Abdul-Malik left him to it. He hauled his bag of belongings from the back seat of the vehicle and set off to find the little mud-brick house that was to be his home.
It stood on the uppermost terrace of the village, set a little way apart from the rest of the houses with its back to the hillside. A row of cypresses stood along one wall. A few chickens and a couple of scrawny-looking goats wandered listlessly in its small yard. Abdul-Malik stood in the shade and contemplated it a while.
‘Not much of anything, is it?’ asked Najid, appearing at his side. ‘The houses in al-Quds are better, I think. And there one has the city to keep one entertained. Now that the Turks are gone, the place will be almost civilised.’ He said this as if he were a jaded society man from London or Paris, whose very existence depended on being able to eat at a different haute cuisine restaurant and attend a different opera every night of the week. He laughed heartily. ‘If not that, then why not come with me back to the desert? It’s harsh and spare but it makes a man. Never imagined you as a fellah, boy.’
‘I’m done with sand. If the war didn’t make a man of me, then I’m probably beyond hope.’ He nodded at the oil-grimed metal gewgaw in Najid’s hand. ‘Shouldn’t that be in the car?’
‘These Europeans,’ the older man replied. ‘Forever loading themselves up with things they do not need.’ He tossed the left-over component away into a thicket of dry brush. One of the goats sniffed at it before wandering away indifferently.
Abdul-Malik took a step towards the house. ‘Come in?’
Najid shook his head. ‘I’ll be wanted back at the city.’
Of course. The very highest echelons of the British mandate must already be drafting frantic telegrams back to London as the ancient city crumbled around them.
‘Will you be all right here, under the British? It might seem all right now, but when the Jews start to arrive....’
The Jews.
Always now, discussion among the Arabs turned back to the Jews, to the Zionist ambition to build a homeland for themselves here in Arab Palestine. Nothing had been the same since they had opened that letter. Najid had always been suspicious, of course, but the extent of British double-dealing had come as a shock to Abdul-Malik. There’d been outrage when it all became public knowledge.
But could it really be as bad as all that?
‘King Hussein says the Jews are our brothers and countrymen. We should welcome them.’
‘He says that,’ agreed Najid. ‘What do you think would happen to him if he didn’t? Just be careful, my lad. This treachery runs deep. We haven’t yet seen the sum of it.’
Abdul-Malik laughed, turning away. Leave Najid to his xenophobia and suspicion. He’d spied a local girl among the trees. A slender and lovely thing. Was it his imagination or was she watching him? There! He hadn’t dreamed that! A definite half-smile as their eyes briefly met.
‘You worry too much,’ Abdul-Malik told his friend. ‘I’m going to be all right here, I know it.’
He patted Najid on the shoulder and wandered away to introduce himself to Yael.
‘Insha’Allah, my friend,’ Najid murmured to himself. ‘Insha’Allah.’
Mada’in Saleh (1917)
It was a place of the dead. Colossal rock-formations jagged up out of the desert into the dawn sky. Hesitant light raked across their elaborately carved façades. They resembled nothing so much as tombstones, and tombs they were. Nabataeans had hewn them from the cliff-faces two thousand years earlier, when this godforsaken desert backwater had been a city to rival their capital at Petra.
Captain Alec Quinn sprinted across the sand towards the camel paddock, the history of Mada’in Saleh the last thing on his mind. His pursuers’ hounds seemed to be at his very heels. Torch-beams scythed the twilight.
His mind’s eye fixated on the weary, almost apologetic expression on the Ottoman bey’s face as he’d supervised the torture. Something about the base coldness in those dark eyes frightened him far more than soldiers with guns and dogs. The way he pretended not to enjoy it, to be a civilised man above such base sadism. Sorry, old man, his expression seemed to say. This is all frightfully distasteful. Not for one moment had he looked away, though. There was no mistaking the understated thrill with which he’d savoured Quinn’s pain.
Let him savour. Quinn had given him nothing more. The boy’s questions had got him nowhere.
Questions? What questions? What exactly had he been asked?
Johnny Turk had learned his lesson! Wouldn’t be so cocky next time. He’d know now that Englishmen were made of sterner stuff. Quinn had not betrayed his mission or his country. He’d gritted his teeth, taken the pain. Just like being at school, he’d told himself. Never flinched from the willow there. Pain makes you stronger. Builds character, boy!
He’d taken it. Savoured it, as much as the Turk had. He’d bided his time.
And when the moment came, he’d escaped.
Just like that.
A ruse, a ploy, a swift knee to his guard’s solar plexus! Bang! Bang! Bang! with his stolen revolver. Startled Turk lads dropping. And he was out into the night, outrunning the enemy as he made good his escape.
He’d made for the locomotive sheds first, taking it in mind to commandeer one: he would burst from his captors’ clutches under a great head of steam! But the patrols around the railway depot were too heavy. He had no option but to detour. Quinn allowed himself a rueful smile. Didn’t know how to drive a train anyway.
Running in the opposite direction, he’d found himself out in the necropolis, stumbling over the sands between the great, ancient edifices. The Mohammedans were leery of the ruins. A superstitious race. They believed Mada’in Saleh cursed. He’d hoped they wouldn’t follow him in.
No such luck, but he did at least get a sense that his hunters were somewhat less enthusiastic – and perhaps fewer in number – than they had been. He’d spied a paddock of camels over by a well in the shadow of one of the rock outcrops. Quinn thought back to his briefing. Surely it couldn’t be more than a few dozen miles to the Arab rebel army. That chap Lawrence would be with them. A strange fish, by all accounts, but Quinn wasn’t about to be fussy.
A bullet whizzed above his head and ricocheted off the rock face.
Quinn cursed floridly. Two guards, over by the paddock. Hadn’t seen them in the paltry light. One of them shouted something. Both fired again. More bullets kicked up the sand around him.
Quinn dived for cover, flinging himself against the cool rock façade of one of the tombs. His heart was pounding. Days without food and only a miserly ration of water. Couldn’t keep this up much longer. Dog-tired. His every aching muscle and sinew begged him to just slump against the rock and let exhaustion take him.
Certain death. Obviously.
The pursuing soldiers were almost upon him. He risked trying to break out of his cover; jerked hurriedly back as a volley of shots filled the air around him. Out of options, old boy.
Except one.
The opening into the tomb was dark and utterly forbidding. When Quinn had been a boy, he and Cecil Jenkins had used to explore the crypts in the old tumbledown chapel that lay forgotten in one of the far corners of his father’s estate. All good larks for a summer. Till one morning, after a night of heavy rain, the whole lot came down around them. Quinn had been lucky to emerge unhurt. Jenkins less fortunate. The sight of his shattered legs had been seared on the young Quinn’s memory. Jenkins wouldn’t walk again. Seemed a tragedy at the time. He wondered if Jenkins still thought so. His brothers had bought it at Gallipoli.
No rain here, at any rate. Another bullet blasted chips out of the rock. Even if the tomb turned out to be unstable, his demise within was no more likely than if he remained out in the open. Gritting his teeth and cocking his pistol, Quinn plunged inside.
Stone steps led down into a large chamber, the straight, geometric lines of its classical architecture cut with startling precision from the red stone. A crack in the rock far above let in a thin sliver of wan light, the only illumination. Its feeble glow picked out an object of startling incongruity.
POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX
Quinn stopped. Stared, open-mouthed. English lettering. Right-angles and even measurements (or near as damn it). The reassuring police blue of its paintwork. Whatever this was, it had no business being in Arabia.
‘A funny old thing, isn’t it?’
The Turkish bey stepped out of the shadows, a wry smile playing at his lips. He spoke English in rich, almost honeyed tones. Not a hint of an accent, though his saturnine features were redolent of the Orient. His attention was fixed on the strange box, black-gloved fingertips brushing its slightly-wonky detailing like a collector admiring the jewel of his sculpture gallery.
Quinn raised his revolver.
‘I wouldn’t,’ the bey warned. Still didn’t take his eyes off the police box. The faintest tilt of his head, indicating behind Quinn.
The old Arab was standing there with a Luger leveled at him. Expression as dead and emotionless as it had been throughout his torture. A faint commotion at the doorway attested to the arrival of the rest of the Turks.
The bey turned and regarded Quinn sympathetically. ‘Never mind, old chap,’ he said, mimicking Quinn’s own upper-class English tones. ‘Better luck next time.’