Edith hurried at once to Habib. “Listen to me!” she commanded. “What kind of snake was it? Tell us at once.”
“A viper! A viper!” Habib wailed, and began to moan that he was dying.
Edith dashed off and returned a moment later with a knife. “Get someone to help you hold him down,” she told Abdullah. “I must cut his wound and suck out the poison.”
“Never! I will not be sliced with a sikkîn! I would rather die!” Habib cried.
Abdullah called Mastur to help him, but Mastur shook his head. “Insulata,” he said. “It is willed that he die. There is no need to send him to Allah in pieces.”
In the midst of this Monsieur Louvois appeared, got up in a silk paisley dressing gown complete with ascot. He walked nonchalantly into the circle of light as though he were entering a drawing room. Father shoved the lantern into Monsieur Louvois’s unwilling hand and knelt down to grip Habib. Edith was leaning over the terrified man with her knife.
“Do you know what you are doing?” Father demanded.
“Certainly,” she said shortly. She made two deep cuts in Habib’s leg in the shape of a cross, and when the blood began oozing out, she leaned over and sucked at the leg, spitting out the blood and venom. I was at once sickened and fascinated, wanting and not wanting to look. In the light of the lantern, the scene of the terrified man, now submissive with fright, and Edith leaning over him to clean out his wound, made me long for pencil and paper.
Father handed Edith a flask of brandy and told her to rinse her mouth with it. “You were rather efficient at that operation,” he said.
Edith spat out the first gulp of brandy and swallowed the second. “I sincerely hope this doesn’t mean you will all consider me some sort of nurse and come to me about your sick tummies and constipation.”
Mastur helped Abdullah carry a trembling Habib away. There was a complicit smile on Mastur’s face as he murmured to Edith, “Now at last you have an Arab blood brother.”
XI
PALMYRA
Miss Julia Hamilton
Palmyra, Syria
April 10, 1907
Mrs. Edgar Hamilton
77 South Audley Street
London, England
Dear Aunt Harriet,
I have no idea when this letter will be mailed, but I must get down my impressions of Palmyra while they are still fresh, for it’s a magical city, worth the arduous trip and the lice. Yes, your dear Julia has lice! Never fear, I shall leave them all here in the desert.
King Solomon built Palmyra in the wilderness, and Mark Antony loved the city. Queen Zenobia, who once ruled the city, was carried back to Rome in chains of gold. Chains of gold! It takes my breath away. That is just how I feel when I see the city—breathless, not so much with what is here as what was once here.
The Temple of the Sun is visible from a long distance, for it is raised on a hill, but few of the rooms have more than one wall, and all one sees between the columns is blue sky. All these glories were built with a limestone that is the rosy color of the inside of a seashell, so for all the cold message of destruction, the ruins still glow warmly in the sun.
Sometimes I feel the Julia who lived in Durham Place is still back there in England, wandering alone and bored through that great empty house, while a new Julia wanders on horseback through a desert with fascinating companions and has one amazing adventure after another. How sorry I feel for that first girl.
Your loving niece,
Julia
It was true that I was having adventures and seeing a magical city, but I was also feeling a little useless. Father was carrying out some secret business for the Foreign Office; Edith was searching out rare plants, and Monsieur Louvois rare antiques; and Graham was involved in some grand plot; while I was only an onlooker. “Perhaps,” I thought, “I’ll find some purpose in Palmyra.”
We rode into Palmyra on the Muslim Day of the Dead. After hours of barren stretches and miles of stone and sand, Palmyra with its ruined temples appeared more illusion than reality. As we entered the city, the first thing we saw was the burial ground, where Arab women were garnishing the graves with wilting nosegays of wild irises and hyacinths laced with branches of almond. It would have been a mournful scene except for the small children who frolicked among the graves like puppy dogs. “I don’t know why the dead are always left to the care of women,” Edith said. “I suppose it is the logical progression from birth.” She left me for a moment to talk with the women and examine their flowers for some blossom or bud not in her collection.
In Palmyra we all found something. The sheikh from Karyatein had sent a message to the local sheikh in Palmyra introducing our party. Father took advantage of this to request an invitation to the sheikh’s home.
“I am eager to meet the man,” he said, but a moment later I saw him sink into a chair as if he had been overtaken by a wave of dizziness. I was concerned, for I had noticed in the last few days that he tired easily and was eating very little. I begged him to rest, but he soon recovered and insisted on the visit.
“Julia,” he said to me, “while I have you alone, I must ask you to spend less time with Geddes. I am growing more and more wary of the man. I consider his politics bizarre. What possible reason can an Englishman find for enlisting in the cause of the Young Turks’ revolution?”
“I don’t have anything to do with his politics,” I said, and felt guilty, for that was not strictly true.
“Nevertheless, I foresee in him nothing but trouble.” After a half hour’s rest Father made his way to the sheikh’s home. I supposed he meant to court him for England with a message of friendship and vague promises.
I ignored Father’s request and allowed Graham to take me away to wander among the ruined temples. “Everyone on the tour seems to know exactly what they want,” I said. “I wish I had some sort of purpose instead of just following everyone about.”
“You might start by tying up that father of yours. He’ll promise the sheikh that England will be a friend to the Arab, when all he wants is for England to get a foothold here.” Graham saw that I was offended, and apologized. “It’s foolish to discuss politics on an afternoon like this. What I want is to be alone with you.”
We wandered hand in hand through what had been the marketplace. “I read that tigers and slave girls were sold here,” I said.
“And gold and spices.”
“Elephants and peacocks.”
From the marketplace we entered one of the funerary towers where the ancient Palmyrans were buried. It was an eerie place; we came upon ghostly bits of bone and tatters of winding sheets and in one tomb a fragment of a mummy.
I was anxious to hurry away. Returning to the camp, we passed through the village, where the few inhabitants lived. There could not have been more than forty or fifty huts. At first glance the huts seemed small and mean. I looked more closely.
“Graham, that hut has a marble frieze for one of its walls,” I said. The frieze was made from the same rosy limestone as the temple. The carving on the frieze was of an eagle, its wings outspread, its claws curved to grasp some unseen prey.
“Over there.” Graham pointed to where a gracefully grooved column supported the disintegrating tin roof of a shed.
The huts, which had appeared merely ramshackle at first, were put together with magnificent architectural fragments reclaimed from the ancient city. The hovels were like beggars whose clothes had been patched with the castoffs of kings.
I asked, “How can you risk your life for a cause when you see how nations fall apart? Do you really believe people are wiser now than they were a thousand years ago?”
“Of course not. I’m not a Utopian. My goals are much more modest: I merely believe things could be a little better—or perhaps it’s the risk itself that attracts me.” He laughed. “It may be that I am a born meddler.”
I wasn’t interested in choosing sides. I only wanted to spend time with Graham. I did not want the trip to end. I did not want to go back to a
world without Graham. I clung more tightly to his hand, as if I could keep him by my side by sheer force. He must have guessed my feelings, for he choose a path that concealed us from curious eyes. The path wandered through an old orchard of ancient apricot and pomegranate trees. The apricot trees were in bloom, and as Graham took me in his arms, the blossoms in the lightest of breezes detached themselves from the branches and fell over us like fragrant snow.
That afternoon Graham rode off with Mohammed. The two of them were gone for hours, returning hot and dusty from a direction that suggested nothing but emptiness, leaving me to wonder what mystery they had been up to.
During Graham’s absence Monsieur Louvois had called to me, “For your eyes only. You are an artiste and will appreciate it.” Word of his gold must have traveled from Jerud to the Bedouin tribes near Palmyra, for a steady flow of Bedouin came and went with ancient bits and pieces to sell to him. The object he held out, enfolded in a square of worn blue cotton, made me catch my breath. It was a winged ibex, a magical antelope, no larger than my little finger and made of silver with gold splashed on its face and wings. I couldn’t guess at the value of the piece, but the graceful curve of the horns, the supple grace of the body, the frightened look on its face, and the impression that it was about to leap to freedom gave it a haunting beauty.
“It’s magnificent,” I whispered.
“Achaemenian, perhaps twenty-five hundred years old. You can have your grand Greek sculptures; I prefer something the hand can close over. This could hold its own against a Michelangelo.”
“Where do the Bedouin find such things?”
“They have learned from the professional archaeologists who hire their people to work in the digs. The archaeologists excavate one site while the Bedouin find a site for themselves nearby. Unhappily, they are not as careful as the archaeologists.”
“If there is damage done, don’t you feel responsible when the loot is being sold to you?”
Monsieur Louvois looked offended and plucked the ibex from my hand. “Loot? Le butin, not a pretty word. These men mean to sell, and if I do not buy, someone else will, and the someone else may have no idea of beauty and value. At least I will see that this finds a proper home and is preserved.”
“How will you bear to part with it?” I asked, already missing its small weight in my hand.
“As for that, we shall see.”
“Won’t you risk imprisonment by taking it out of the country?” He merely smiled, but I knew he would take the risk gladly.
Edith’s specimen cases were rapidly filling. I sometimes tagged along with her, making sketches and watercolors of her finds. I had developed a trick of setting white flowers against their green leaves rather than against the white paper, where they had to be strongly outlined to set them off.
“An ingenious idea,” Edith said. “Look at how it shows off the veining in this tulip.” Edith knelt by the flower I had painted. She regarded it with the same tenderness that Monsieur Louvois had shown his ibex, but a moment later she had clipped off the bloom to squash in her press and was digging for its bulb.
“How can you say it is so beautiful and then let it die like that?”
“Don’t think of its death but of its resurrection,” Edith said. “The flower dies, but the bulb lives to produce more flowers and more bulbs in a place where many people will enjoy it. If you and I had not been here, this flower would have been seen by no more than a handful of desert wanderers.”
I thought it was Monsieur Louvois’s argument all over again. Later she found a scarlet anemone. “You know the story, don’t you?” Edith asked. “Aphrodite loved Adonis, but because he was a mortal, she could not prevent a wild boar from killing him. She caused a red anemone to grow wherever a drop of his blood fell.”
“Do you travel to look for flowers or do you look for flowers so that you can travel?” I asked her.
Edith made a dismissive gesture. “I am here merely to do a job for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. I have no designs on the country.” She gave me a long look. “Because I am fond of you and trust you, I will tell you a story I have told to very few.” Though no one was near, she lowered her voice. “When I was eleven, a terrifying thing happened to me. I was living in northern India in the town of Meerut. My father was in the British civil service. My childhood was a free one. Except in church, I ran about barefoot. We lived a little outside the English settlement, which was remarked upon by the English residents, but my mother loved the countryside and avoided the English teas and dinner parties of the Raj, the English rulers of India. The house for me was only for meals and sleep. My ayah, my nursemaid, was a young girl who was content to sit on the riverbank with me, our toes cooling in the water, watching kingfishers arrow down from a tree branch to snatch a silver fish.
“England was busy in those days sweeping up one Hindu state after another. They concocted a clever scheme. If a ruler died without an heir, England got his state as a prize. The English tidied up and organized India, bringing their customs, their religion, their air of superiority. All the while the Indians were growing more and more resentful. When their resentment boiled over, my parents were dead, killed with the other English by an uprising of the sepoys, the very soldiers the English had trained to protect them.
“I was shipped back to England, the country whose greed had taken away my parents. I was cared for by a joyless aunt who kept me in tightly laced kid boots and starched blouses that scratched. The moment I had the chance, I chose sun and distance, and I never looked back. My return trips to England, and Kew in particular, are rare and brief. I feel as strange in London as I feel at home in the desert.”
“Edith, how terrible that must have been for you. I am so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago, Julia, but I recall it as if it were yesterday.”
“Yet in spite of the horrible way your parents died, you seem more on the side of the Indians than the British.”
“I learned early in life what evil can come from the sins of empire. I am not here as your father is or as Geddes is or even Louvois. They are like guests in a house they mean to rob. Someday this country will be freed of the Turks and returned to the Arabs, and I say it can’t be soon enough.” Watching her stab her trowel furiously into the earth to pry out another flower, I shuddered at Edith’s anger.
Later that day, as Monsieur Louvois, Graham, and I were having tea, Father, dressed carefully in a clean field jacket and trousers and a slouch hat, left for a second visit with the sheikh. Abdullah, who accompanied him, was also dressed for the occasion and wore a black-striped robe with a black kaffiyeh wrapped with a gold cord. They disappeared into the afternoon haze, from which the columns of the ancient city seemed to grow like stone trees.
Monsieur Louvois regarded Father’s departure with a rising irritation. “I tried to see the sheikh all day yesterday,” he said. “He must be insensé if he believes the British will do something for him. It is we, the French, who understand the Arabs.”
“I didn’t know you took an interest in politics,” Graham said.
Flustered, Monsieur Louvois responded, “My visit was not intended as politics; only as a polite gesture.”
“Actually, I’m rather pleased Hamilton is seeing the sheikh,” Graham said. “Perhaps he’ll learn what’s going on in this village. Something unpleasant, I’m sure. The villagers won’t look us in the eye and disappear around corners. Doors and tent flaps close when we approach. We seem to have come at an inconvenient time.”
But when he returned, Father had little to say. He spoke pleasantly of his visit with the sheikh. “The sheikh is an educated man. He not only speaks English but also knows his Latin.” He turned to me. “I asked if I might bring you along on my next visit, Julia. He said the women would be honored.”
The home of the sheikh was set apart from the rest of the village, and the next day Father and I made our way up a steep rise to a hilltop on which was balanced a tumble of sun-blanched boxlike structures. I noti
ced that Father had to stop several times to catch his breath, and on the steepest part of the path he had even taken my arm. His needing my support gave me a strange feeling, as if the world were upside down, but when I asked if he was well, he brushed aside my question. “Perfectly well, just a bit of tummy trouble.”
There was nothing green to soften the sharp edges of the houses, only a few dying almond trees. Hangers-on lounged outside the entrance of the largest structure, watching our arrival, suspicious looks on their faces.
“They don’t like us, do they?” I asked Father.
“It isn’t a matter of ‘liking.’ They find me suspect, for I ask questions. Unlike Geddes, however, I do not tell them what they ought to do, and for that they give me credit.”
“What questions do you ask?”
“I suppose you may as well know what I’m up to. Graham knows, I’m sure, and it isn’t all that dramatic. I am merely trying to get some idea of how friendly the Arab sheikhs in these remote villages are to Britain, but none of that involves you, so you must put it out of your mind. This afternoon we are merely making a social visit, and everything will be most friendly even though you will appear to them as very strange indeed.”
“What do you mean?”
“A woman wearing clothes like yours, walking about wherever you please—that is not understood.”
“But what about Edith? She often travels alone through Arab country more remote than this, and the Arabs seem to accept her.”
“The Arabs see Edith not as a woman but as a phenomenon. Should she be making the visit you and I are making, she would be expected to spend her time with the sheikh, not with his harem. Still, you needn’t worry; the more outlandish they find you, the more courteous they will be.”
I looked forward to the visit and to seeing what life was like for the women, and wondered how it would compare with my own protected and limited life. I suspected the Julia Hamilton of Durham Place might have much in common with the women shut up in the harem.