The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (35 page)

As there was no choice in the matter, I was quite content to let Salah drive until he found a ragged outcropping of tents along a ridge. I had noticed the irregularity of shape in the shadows, but would not have immediately recognized this as a Bedouin encampment. The fires were all well hidden by the deep sand pits, around which men sat on fine carpets and smoked a water pipe.

Salah approached one of the elders, a gentleman with skin as dark and lined as the waterskin that lay empty under the driver's seat. Under his keffiyah his hair was no doubt as white as his long desert robe, and his nose was a monument to both the size and sharpness of the organ. Indeed, it looked more like a beak than anything human.

The old man rose with grace that belied his years and welcomed us among the Murrah tribe of the Bedouin. “We are happy to fulfill the obligation of hospitality that is the law of the desert, and in so doing to give of charity as we are commanded as believers. For did not the Prophet say that to remove the obstructions in the way of true belief is itself a form of charity? That to smile at someone is charity, to give greeting is charity. And so we are honoured to welcome you to our fire and conversation.”

Salah bowed and introduced us. “This gentleman is a European who has need to travel. His name is Sherlock Holmes, and he serves his ruler, the Queen of England.”

The old man jutted his chin with approval and pointed his nose to a place that had been made on the carpet next to him. “I am Bader ibn Abdullah of the Murrah Bedouin. We await the arrival
of a young man of Riyadh who wishes our escort to cross the Empty Quarter.”

Immediately my interest was aroused. “You cross the Empty Quarter? I had heard that even the Bedouin prefer to go around that place.” For it is surely the most desolate spot on the earth, I added mentally, with perhaps the exception of the South Pole. There is no water there, nothing at all grows in the shifting dunes, and it is full of treacherous quicksand and springs where the water is tainted with toxic chemicals leached from the sands.

Ibn Abdullah smiled as if what I said had pleased him greatly. “This is so indeed, Mr. Sherlock. Of all the Bedouin, only the Murrah will make the crossing more than once. We know the ways of the Empty Quarter, and we can take anyone across it for a price.”

The young man who was serving Salah coffee made a face. Then he offered me a thimble-sized glass edged with gold on an ornate brass tray. I sniffed at it slightly; the beverage was heavily laced with cardamum but from the way the men regarded me it was obvious that I was required to drink. Not to do so would be an insult to my hosts. I quaffed the whole in a single mouthful, and while the strangely spiced coffee was odd it was also decidedly appealing and refreshing.

“Delicious,” I said quite honestly to my host, and added a smile to the young man serving. He smiled back brilliantly and immediately poured me another cup. This one I savoured slowly.

“When do you think you shall leave across the Quarter?” Salah asked.

Ibn Abdullah shrugged. “In a day and a night, maybe two nights, God willing. But we cannot wait much longer. In two weeks it will be too late to attempt to cross before the windstorms become too dangerous. Then we shall have to wait until the end of the windstorm season, which will not suit our customer in Riyadh.” Then the old man's face broke into a deep smile. “But there will be good hunting along the way for the falcons, and I am sure that this fat, Western-taught Rasheedi will not be up to the hunt. I do not
think he can handle birds at all.”

A few deep laughs joined the old man's. I was curious and hoped he would speak more. Certainly I already knew that the traditional ruling family of Riyadh had been driven from the city and the Rasheedi were considered upstarts and pretenders by everyone in the region. But the two families had been feuding for a very long time and one of them ascendant over the other meant nothing, or so I understood.

“So one of the new royalty has hired you as guides?” I prompted just a bit more discussion of the matter. “Surely he has other matters more important to attend.”

Ibn Abdullah smiled slowly, and this time there was a hint of slyness under the white teeth. “Ah, perhaps the rest of the family does,” my host agreed with me. “But young Mahmud has just returned from studies at Oxford and also in Switzerland and thinks himself rather above us here. Tell me, sir, have you ever been to Switzerland? Is there some reason that he would learn to deny his people, his heritage, his duty to God there? Those who go to the West all carry the taint of irreligious thought and no longer think that the ways of the Murrah are good enough any longer. ‘This is a new age,' they say. ‘We should be settled and have automobiles.' Tell me, sir, what is your thought on automobiles?”

“That they would be quite absurd in the desert,” I answered truthfully. “They are made for carefully paved roads. Here the sand would get into the engine and then it would break down.”

The old man slapped his palm against his knee. “Just so! And when it has broken, you cannot eat it or drink from its stomach or its blood, you cannot use it to warm you. And it has no sense, it cannot smell water under the ground, it cannot tell which wells are tainted and which are sweet and pure. No, I do not think that a camel is of the past and that this automobile is the way we shall overcome the desert. Though I do not hate all things Western,” he said expansively, trying to be more generous towards me. “Look.” He pulled back the white sleeve of his beautifully laundered and pressed
thobe
to display a Swiss timepiece as fine as any I have ever seen on a gentleman's arm, and I lost no time in telling him so.

“Then I must give it to you,” he said immediately, taking the watch from his wrist.

“No, not at all, sir,” I protested. “It would be unseemly and ungentlemanly for me to accept such a gift on so short an acquaintance.”

“Not at all,” the old man insisted, tossing the watch into my lap. “I would be honoured if you would wear it always and remember our friendship. Besides, it is not so good to have it. Our young people must learn to read the shadows and the sun to know when it is time to pray, and not become the slaves of some foreign timepiece that could break. Only Allah's own clock can keep time precisely enough so that we will never miss the correct time for worship. Everything else is false.”

Try as I might I could not refuse. Arabians, especially the Bedouin, judge themselves not by education and achievement as we do in England, but by piety, generosity and courage. It gave Ibn Abdullah great esteem among his people to be so conspicuous in his gift-giving. Even knowing that did not erase the last shadow of guilt, however. I should have realized that this was the proper time to have admired the watch on his wrist, to say how finely it suited him, instead of simply stating the obvious fact of its fine precision and manufacture. But the Bedouin are more sensitive to such things and while I was quite comfortable with the language and customs of the city-dwellers in places like Egypt and Syria, there were subtle differences with these desert dwellers that promised at least some diversion on the long journey ahead.

I thanked him deeply and then put the watch on my wrist. It has resided noplace else since, not only to honour Ibn Abdullah but to honour all those people of the Peninsula that I came to know and find quite admirable and respectable in a way that is not generally commonly assumed in England. There the Arabs are seen as innocent natives, all quite noble and primitive when they are not being sneaky and underhanded.

The moon rose high above the camp in a midnight blue sky. It was a thin crescent sliver shimmering among the stars, and in this clear dry air it was easy to distinguish hundreds of the lesser stars. They spilled across the sky so richly that it seemed that all heaven was ablaze with hundreds and hundreds of tiny lights. Indeed, there were even stars I could not recognize or name, and briefly wondered whether they all had names in English.

The boy who had poured my coffee showed me quickly to a sleeping place, a pile of elaborately woven rugs in the men's area of a tent. Two others were already asleep and snoring, one of them being my driver Salah.

“Please to let me show, if you need. I happy to serve, honour the Murrah,” the boy said in heavily accented English. I was quite surprised that he attempted the language at all. I wondered idly if he were literate.

“Indeed, I can read the Koran and the Hadith and can write well enough, though my tutor said that my letters are harder to read than a camel track in the sand,” he replied in elegant Arabic. There was no question at all that he had been well schooled. “Will you be travelling with us? I would like to improve my English and my French, too, if that is possible.”

Indeed, the fact that this band was crossing the Empty Quarter and leaving immediately was an advantage. My errand in Riyadh should take no more than the morning, and it appeared that the group would not leave until the next day in any case. Besides, that would mean that no one could easily track where I was headed; Mycroft did impress me with the need for discretion in this task. There would be no record of my asking for guides, buying supplies, and making a fair show in town.

“If that is amenable to your leaders, I should find it very convenient,” I replied. “But surely you can practice English and French with this Rasheedi. He was educated at Oxford, so I understand, and studied in Switzerland. I should think that he would be most accomplished in those languages.”

The boy sneered. “I will not speak with him at all. He is the
enemy of my family and some day I shall bury him in the desert and pray for his soul.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You are of the House of Saud, then?” I asked, though I hardly needed the question. The Rasheed family had unseated the ibn Saud from their royal position in Riyadh, though if it weren't for the education he had received I could easily believe that this boy was Bedouin and felt that the Rasheeds had been responsible for some personal misfortune. However, he was far too well educated for a Bedouin, and too commanding in the company of his elders. The mark of Royal bearing was unmistakeable.

“I am Abdul Aziz ibn Saud,” he said proudly.

Not simply a member of the Royal family then, but the deposed young prince himself. Mycroft had spoken highly of him and his father in years past, and praised the boy's keen intelligence and political bent of mind. “He will be a fine king one day, and if we do well by him he will be a good friend of England for life,” I remembered Mycroft saying from the recess of a great leather wing-back, veiled in cigar smoke.

But the ibn Saud had been displaced by their old rivals the Rasheeds, and the boy had been driven into the desert with his sister Noura. The whereabouts of his parents and other family members were still unknown, and very likely they were dead.

“Your Highness,” I said, rising and nodding sharply to him as I would to a European aristocrat of high rank. “I am honoured to make your acquaintance. My name is Sherlock Holmes and I am in Arabia on a mission from my Queen.”

“Sherlock Holmes?” the boy asked quickly. “I have read about the way you have solved many difficult crimes. Always those were the best things in the English papers that I studied. It is I who am honoured to meet you.”

He said the last in very creditable English.

That was when I decided that I would indeed accompany this band of Bedouin across the Empty Quarter. I wanted to know more about this Saudi princeling who seemed so much at home as a
Murrah youth. And I wanted to meet the Rasheed who would be traveling with us as well. The information might never become important, but at least it would provide some intellectual stimulation while on the way.

T
he next day I accomplished my business in Riyadh by noon. Salah had driven me to both of the houses where I was to call, and threw in the ride back to the Murrah Bedouin camp for free. “It is too late to get a good fare now, anyway, and I enjoyed meeting ibn Abdullah,” the carter said with a pleasant smile. “And I will be home before the gates close for the sunset prayers.”

I gave him a generous tip before I approached the aged Bedouin leader to ask for a place on the journey. Ibn Abdullah might have lived all his life in tents on the sands, but he was as fierce bargaining over fees as he was flying his hawks. Finally we agreed upon a price that was rather higher than I would have liked and well below the budget Mycroft had set. I would have my own small tent furnished with several rugs and blankets and take my meals with the Rasheed party, which would be served by the teenage boys in the band.

I requested that Abdul Aziz be assigned to me, to pack and set my tent, to care for the camel I would ride and to make sure I was properly mounted every night. The old man insisted that there was no Abdul Aziz among the boys and that he had never heard of the House of Saud. I shrugged and said there was a boy who wanted to practice some English and French with me, and that was the one, no matter which name I had “misunderstood.” Ibn Abdullah nodded sagely and agreed that I would have such an assistant.

The Rasheed party did not arrive until the next day near sunset. They rode fine horses that ibn Abdullah insisted be sent back to Riyadh. “They will never survive the Empty Quarter,” he said, but as he surveyed his guests it appeared that he thought they would not survive it either.

There were four men in the group. Ahmed al-Rasheed was precisely the kind of Arab noble one found with such ease in Western universities. He was handsome enough, and would have cut quite a figure had he not already begun to indulge in the excesses for which his people are known. He was perhaps twenty-five years old, but already his body was thickening and his face had heavy jowls. His skin was red and blotchy, attesting to far too much fondness for drink. He would find the long road ahead difficult indeed, then, since ibn Abdullah was not about to tolerate any alcohol in his camp.