In the middle of the day we stopped for lunch and a rest in the small village of Tokat. I settled myself next to Graham, with the others close by, all of us grateful for the pool of shade provided by an orchard of fig trees. The animals and gear were given over to the mukaris to care for, but Khidr insisted on seeing to them himself, sending Daud and Mustafa to prepare lunch. “The horses are overly tired with the heat, effendi,” Khidr said to Hakki. “I will take care of them so they are rested and fresh for the afternoon.” Unlike me, Hakki did not see the expression of helpfulness on the dragoman’s face turn to hate the moment Hakki turned his back.
The mukaris poured water into basins for us so that we could wash away the red dust, then gave us a lunch of cheese and flatbread followed by dates and oranges and hot tea, which was refreshing now that we had cooled off. The setting for our meal could not have been prettier. Butterflies progressed in an orderly fashion among a sprinkling of wild crocuses that Edith was already sampling. After our lunch we lay under the trees and chatted in a lazy way, except for Edith, who covered her face with her straw hat and went immediately to sleep, her soft wheezing snores as soothing as the sound of a gentle surf. If it hadn’t been for the mukaris hunched nearby, we might have been picnicking in the English countryside.
When we returned to the horses, Khidr, full of unconvincing smiles, greeted us with a new sprightliness that, for no reason I knew, alarmed me.
We descended into the wadi and had an easy ride of only a few hours to Ain el Beida. Graham explained to me that in many small villages, where no stopping places existed for travelers, it was usual for a party to stay in the home of the local sheikh. The custom had existed for thousands of years: In a world of desert and empty distances, hospitality is a matter of life and death.
We were welcomed by Sheikh Abd el Rehman, a tall, upright man with a tangled beard, kindly eyes, fat cheeks, and a rifle slung so comfortably over his shoulder that he might have been born with it. The sheikh greeted us gracefully and, after assigning a servant, a young black man, to care for our horses, ushered us into a small house made with the sun-dried brick of the countryside. The sheikh left us for a moment to see to some detail of our accommodations and Monsieur Louvois said to no one in particular, “That black man is a slave. Quel disgrâce.”
“To give them their due, the Turks have outlawed slavery in most of the Ottoman Empire,” Father said. “They were bullied into allowing the Arabs to keep on with it.” He turned to Graham. “What will your idealistic Young Turks do about that?” he asked.
Graham said, “Don’t preach to me. My father fought against the Boers at Ladysmith and Mafeking. He said the British were fighting the war for all the Africans. When the peace was made, England went back on its promise of a vote for the native Africans.”
“We have forbidden slavery in South Africa,” Father countered.
Graham said, “Without the black man’s right to vote, slavery is merely a technical term.”
We were shown to our quarters by one of the sheikh’s servants. The room to which Edith and I were assigned was small but freshly whitewashed, with a shuttered window that looked out onto a courtyard where the veiled women of the household went back and forth like black shadows. I liked this intimacy with another kind of life and wondered if we would have the opportunity of visiting the harem to meet the women of the house; and then, remembering my last visit to a harem, I shuddered.
In the late afternoon Edith pulled on her boots and shouldered her knapsack to go off in search of plants, while Father and Graham, each reluctant to leave the other alone with the sheikh, stayed behind. Monsieur Louvois and I walked the short distance into the village with Hakki, who promised us ancient tombs. Once in the village, Paul Louvois thought of an unconvincing errand he had to attend to, leaving Hakki and me to go on alone to the tombs, which were hardly more than crevices among the rocks with a few carvings and an unroofed stone stairway open to the heavens.
Hakki was in a quiet and joyless mood. He spoke not so much to me as to some gods who had disappointed him. “Nothing good will come from this trip,” he said. “It was to be a pleasant journey, and I was to show all the things to be seen. I looked into many books in preparation for the trip. I went to much trouble in the arrangements. But it is not knowledge and pleasure that everyone desires, but an opportunity to make trouble for my country and for me.”
I tried to cheer him. “I’ve enjoyed myself immensely, Hakki, and so have the others. We’ll all write to Watson and Sons to tell them so. And it isn’t your country the others are criticizing, only the sultan.”
Hakki drew himself up. “Miss Hamilton, the sultan is the country.” After that we walked among the dull tombs, slapping at flies and keeping silent.
In the evening the sheikh, his tangled beard wagging amiably as he spoke, extended a gracious invitation for us to dine with him. We ate in the Arab fashion, sitting in a companionable circle on rather shabby and stained rugs, reaching with our right hands into a large communal brass dish of mutton and rice. We were joined by members of the sheikh’s family—brothers, cousins, in-laws; all men of course—who had no English or no wish to speak it, but sat silently staring at us, giving the impression that here indeed was something novel. After a few awkward confrontations I learned there was a nice etiquette as to when one’s turn came, so that a bowl full of greedy hands was avoided.
The sheikh was full of questions as to where we were going and where we had been. He dismissed Aleppo and Antioch. “Cities do not interest me,” he said. “In the city the small courtesies are the first thing lost. The next thing is your money. And the thing after that is your freedom. I remain in my own village, where I can read in each man’s face a familiar story.”
Edith, in a flirtatious mood we had not seen before, set out to woo the sheikh, praising everything in sight—rugs, servants, food—and lapsing frequently into Arabic. I was startled by her coquetry and would not have been surprised had she reached over and pinched the man’s fat cheeks or chucked him under his double chin. For his part the sheikh appeared entranced by the stout, middle-aged woman with the mannish haircut and rumpled, baggy clothes, treating her as though she were some perfumed, dark-eyed dancing girl wrapped in silk scarfs and veiled in gauze. He picked out the best nuggets of mutton for her and filled her coffee cup himself. His relatives, observing his behavior out of the corners of their eyes, appeared to regard it as an amusing game.
“She’s as good as bewitched him,” Graham muttered to me. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see her moving into his harem.”
After dinner the relatives viewed the empty bowls with regret and withdrew. The sheikh invited Edith to examine a rose of unusual color in his courtyard, and Hakki went off in search of Khidr, who seemed to have disappeared.
Monsieur Louvois said, “While he’s gone, I must show the three of you a most élégant find. It was brought to me by a man I contacted this afternoon in the village. He said they discover these things just south of here, and more things are available. It is possible I may stay another day at the sheikh’s house and rejoin you in Antioch.” As Monsieur Louvois spoke, he was unwrapping a small stone statue, which he then thrust at us with the air of a magician exceeding his usual tricks. “Have you ever seen anything with more majesty? It is four, perhaps five thousand years old.”
The statue, about seven inches high, was of a man, haughty and magisterial, a king or priest whose almond-shaped eyes stared straight out with the expression of a sovereign weighed down with boredom. His chest was bare, but he wore a skirt made of carved petallike tiers. The long beard was curled into an intricate pattern suggesting unlimited vanity.
The three of us were dumb with admiration. Finally Graham said, “It’s very fine, but you’ve no right to take it away from this place. It belongs here.”
“Absurde. It will be sold to the next person who comes along.”
“Apart from the ethics of the thing,” Father said, “you can get into a great deal of trouble
, and so could we for being associated with you.”
Graham agreed. “I second Hamilton. You are putting all of us at risk.”
Monsieur Louvois’s look went from stubborn to nasty. “You are hardly the one to speak of getting us in trouble, Geddes. I talked with Abdullah in Homs and found out what happened to Mohammed.”
“What I do, I do for a principle; what you do, you do for greed,” Graham snapped.
“You are very clever if you believe you can separate the one from the other,” Louvois told him.
I was growing to dread these squabbles among the three men, for the anger never seemed to be about the thing they were arguing over, but about some hidden disagreement that was never resolved because it was never spoken of.
Edith, flushed and grinning, returned from her tête-àtête with the sheikh and scolded, “You are as quarrelsome as schoolboys. You never tire of your scraps. Perhaps we will have something less theoretical to deal with, for there is Hakki returning without Khidr.”
Hakki, usually so neat even in the middle of the desert, appeared with his hair rumpled and his jacket unbuttoned. He had the panicky look of a man who realizes he has lost control. “This is unfortunate,” he said. “Our dragoman, Khidr, is nowhere to be found. If he doesn’t return by the morning, we will have to trust ourselves to the mukaris. I don’t like it, but what else can we do?”
Later, as we were getting ready for bed, Edith said to me, “Nothing seems to be going well: the plot against Mohammed, Hakki’s fall from grace, your father’s illness, and now Khidr sneaking away—not at all like him.” With a sigh she reached for the Koran.
“Graham once told me unbelievers were forbidden to touch the Koran.”
“‘Let none touch it but the purified’; but I am of the opinion that if one lives long enough in the desert, one is indeed purified.”
In the morning the mukaris sulked and drew circles in the dust with their sandals. “No, effendi,” Daud told Hakki, “we cannot leave without Khidr. He is sure to return soon.”
Mustafa supported Daud. “Khidr told us under no condition were we to leave without him.”
Hakki became even more indignant, seeing the delay as one more mark against him with Watson & Sons. “Why should he have given you those instructions and said nothing to me about his leaving or returning? We are already an hour late in our start.” He appealed to the sheikh. “We must reach Antioch tomorrow.”
Sheikh Abd el Rehman was looking out over the plain. “I would gladly send one of my men with you, but I believe your Khidr returns.” There was a note of warning in his voice.
By now we could make out on the horizon three figures riding toward us. The figures became Khidr in the company of the khayyál, the Turkish mounted police, smart in khaki uniforms with red tarbooshes on their heads. At first it appeared that Khidr was in some sort of trouble and under the custody of the officers. Graham must have realized this was not the case—that the police were there for some other purpose—for I was standing close to him and felt his body tense.
The police rode up to us, but Khidr, looking rather smug, hung back. The younger officer appeared puzzled, as though he had expected dangerous brigands instead of the motley and harmless-appearing group before him, but the older of the two, a lieutenant, was prepared to do his duty and, drawing himself up, asked in heavily accented English, “Which of you is Louvois?”
Hakki bravely stepped forward. “I am the leader of this tour, and it is I who am responsible for its members. If you have anything to say, it must be said to me.”
The lieutenant, while not intimidated, recognized Hakki’s courage, for his tone became less belligerent. “Very well,” he answered. “I have information that this Louvois has purchased valuable pieces of ancient art that he plans to remove from our country. Such behavior is illegal, and he must come with us to Antioch and face the authorities.”
Hardly breathing, poor Monsieur Louvois stood quite still in the hope that he would somehow go unobserved, but a word or two from Khidr directed the soldier’s attention to the proper target. The lieutenant snatched Monsieur Louvois’s case from him and, forcing it open, clumsily began to unwrap the pieces inside. For a moment I believed Monsieur Louvois would choke the man. He must have thought again, for he remained where he was until the lieutenant discovered the ibex and began to handle it roughly.
Monsieur Louvois grabbed the officer’s arm. “Barbares!” he shouted. “You know nothing of such things. Let them go where they are honored.”
The lieutenant began to hustle the Frenchman off. “You will come with us to Antioch.”
Sheikh Abd el Rehman thrust himself between the officer and Monsieur Louvois. “This man has been a guest at my house. He has eaten my food. By custom he remains under my protection for three days.” Monsieur Louvois, like a dog who knows his master, moved closer to the sheikh.
The lieutenant swung his rifle into position. The younger soldier looked like an innocent pedestrian who had wandered by mistake into a street brawl. The sheikh, ignoring the rifle, unsheathed his dagger. Hakki bravely stepped between them. “We must have no bloodshed,” he pleaded in an unsteady voice. “There must be no violence, for that would be fatal to our party. We appreciate your kindness, sheikh, but Monsieur Louvois is under my protection and it is I who must decide what is to be done.”
Hakki appeared to consider matters and then said, “Clearly Monsieur Louvois has broken the law.” Paul Louvois shot him a furious look. Hakki went on. “I don’t believe it is a serious offense; however, he must not remain here but be transfered to Antioch at once. That way we will not be separated from him by any distance. As soon as we reach Antioch, I will get in touch with the French consul, who will make everything right. But let the police know I hold them responsible for his treatment.”
Hakki was now clearly in command of things. Watching him, I could not help wondering if he had more influence with the Turkish officers than we had guessed.
As the soldiers approached Monsieur Louvois, he shrank from them. Desperately he pulled a handful of money from his pocket and held it out to them, saying, “I’ll pay a fine. You have only to tell me the amount; but you must leave the case with me.” While the younger soldier looked hungrily at the money, the lieutenant hustled Monsieur Louvois away.
When they were gone, Father said, “Louvois was a fool not to have waited until he was alone with the officers. He offended them by offering a bribe in plain sight of everyone. Under those circumstances they could not possibly have accepted it. He was mistaken to think he could get out of this without giving up his treasures. The police will keep them to resell, and take the profit for themselves.”
Hakki was upbraiding Khidr, who listened impassively until Hakki paused for breath, leaving him the opportunity to reply in a spiteful voice, “You expect us dragomen and mukaris to be honest, but these infidels you try to protect come here to break our laws. That man did what he should not do. Does he not deserve to be punished?” He turned on his heel and, mounting his horse, rode off after the policemen and their prisoner.
Edith apologized to Hakki, “You hired that rogue, Khidr, on my say-so; I’m most awfully sorry. He must have looked into Louvois’s saddlebag while we were in the orchard and seen the chance of a rich reward. I promise you there was no trouble when I traveled with him before, but of course he knew my things were not worth the having: dead plants and handfuls of seeds. We’ll all march over to the French consul when we get to Antioch and straighten things out.”
Father said, “I don’t suppose he’ll get into too much trouble, since he hasn’t as yet actually taken the things out of Syria. But he won’t be happy to leave his knickknacks behind.” Father could not hide his satisfaction. “At least he will be too much in the eye of the authorities to do any business for the French.”
Edith appeared shocked. “You mean it isn’t just dirty old toys he’s after?”
“Does anyone come to this country without some purpose?” I asked.
/> Graham said unkindly, “Are you suggesting the ideal state is to have no purpose?”
I gave Graham a hurt look.
“As there is no hotel in Antioch,” Hakki said, “Watson and Sons has engaged rooms for us at the house of the British consul. He will surely know how to approach the French consul.”
Father was doubtful. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic about the abilities of the British consul in Antioch. I don’t suppose the Foreign Office has been able to find an Englishman of any great ability who would be willing to settle in that godforsaken place.”
Graham pointed out, “Having traveled in Louvois’s company, we will all be under a cloud.”
I said, “Now that Monsieur Louvois has been arrested, I suppose we will all be closely watched. What will our reception be in Antioch?” I was afraid for Graham.
Graham said, “I suppose it won’t be quite as nasty as the punishment meted out by Baybars during the Crusades, when sixteen thousand crusaders were butchered in Antioch.”
“If you are counting bodies,” Edith said with a sniff, “don’t forget what the crusaders did to the Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem. There was quite a pile of arms and legs scattered about.”
I winced, determined to ask no more questions.
XVI
ANTIOCH
IN MY CONCERN FOR Monsieur Louvois and worry about Graham, I hardly noticed the dusty roads and the countryside through which we rode. On one side the city was sheltered by Mount Silpius; on the other side the Orontes River, like a fat snake, coiled and looped about the city.