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for only a small consideration, should we so wish. After he had finished I congratulated him on his English.
    'Where did you learn it?' I asked. 'In jail,' he replied.
    He led us up a flight of stairs, under a line of drying nappies, into one of the filthiest houses I have ever seen. From down the end of the corridor came the wail of a screaming baby. In another room, whose door was open, we saw what I took to be his father, an enormously fat Arab gentleman who was sprawled toad-like on a bed. He had button-black eyes, wore a dirty shift and in his mouth was lodged the brass filter of an out-sized hubble-bubble. In the following twelve hours we passed the door of that room several times, yet Hamoudi's father never seemed to move. He never blinked, never scratched himself, never left his station to eat or to wash. He certainly never spoke. The only indication that the man was alive were the aquarium-like sucking noises that emerged from his nargile.
    Hamoudi led us into an empty room at the end of the corridor. The paint was peeling, a naked light bulb dangled from the ceiling and the whole place smelt strongly of livestock. Hamoudi went out into the corridor and pulled two stained mattresses into the room. While Laura washed, Hamoudi fetched two cups of Turkish coffee and, as a present for me, a pile of Arab soft porn. 'Gearls,' he explained, displaying a set of black jagged teeth. He sat on the bed, flicked through his magazines and treated me to an anecdotal history of his sex life. Hamoudi's existence seemed a fairly comprehensive passage through the different vices. There was little he had not bought, sold, smoked, sniffed or made love to. In particular he had had many gearls, he told me: Swedish, French, Italian, Israeli - but, he confided, the Bulgarians were undoubtedly the best. I should try one sometime. Hamoudi rambled on until Laura returned from her shower and evicted him.
    When we emerged it was late evening, and the light was beginning to fade. We wandered through the bazaars as the fishmongers were beginning to shut up shop, and the old Arabs who had been sitting outside, leaning on their sticks began to hobble off home. We visited the Palace of the Hospitallers, buried since the fall of Acre in 1291 and recently excavated by Israeli archaeologists. The refectory is one of the finest crusader buildings to survive anywhere. It has magnificent vaulting held up with three monolithic round pillars, as huge and heavy as those in Durham Cathedral, only simpler, with no chevron work or decorated capitals. The Hospitallers' refectory at Krak, built in happier times, is as elaborate and refined as anything to survive from the Middle Ages in Europe. This was very different: dating from the very end of the crusader period, it is sombre, defensive architecture, utilitarian and practical with no unnecessary details or distractions. It is the architecture of a people with their back against a wall.
    From the Hospitallers' Palace we passed through the old Genoese quarter and arrived in what had once been the quarter of the Venetians. The Italian communes had claimed these areas in the early twelfth century as a condition for helping with their original conquest and had since zealously guarded their privileges and rights within the walls. Here they mixed with their own people, spoke their own language, and were disciplined by their own laws. There was a commune bath and a commune bakery to cater for particular tastes and habits, a commune church to bless and bury in a familiar tongue, among compatriots. To these quarters the Italians carried the feuds and rivalries that proliferated in mediaeval Italy. The vendettas of the family, the factions of Guelph and Ghibelline, the rivalries of Genoa and Venice, all these were brought to the Holy Land to add to the divisions that already complicated expatriate life there. Yet while the Italians dominated the commerce of the Crusader Kingdom they tried wherever possible to keep to