Leon Uris Read Online Free PDF

three of their members serving a sentence, generally for stealing, smuggling, or a knifing. As often as not, they left a wife a few months pregnant. There were others, widows and poor souls unable to bear children. These were safe.
    Every village had a nearby cave or hiding place where Gideon would go out to rest and soon be ‘found,’ frequently a half a dozen times a day. He had the strength of youth. They were very natural with him and for the moment seemed released from the eternal shadow of shame. He seldom failed to ride off content and they seldom failed to giggle and to smile inwardly as they watched out of the corner of an eye as Gideon galloped away.
    By the onset of the First World War, Britain and France were casting an envious eye on Turkish-held territories in the Middle East. The two emerging international imperial powers saw the region as a crossroads. Key to that power was the securing of the Suez Canal. British control stopped at Egypt and at the Canal itself. Turkish control began on the opposite bank in the Sinai and Palestine. That the Sinai was to become a battlefield was predestined.
    In Turkish-held Palestine, Jewish aspirations for a national homeland had been growing rapidly and had gained the support of world Jewry and the attention of the world’s capitals. Although it was perilous for the Jews of Palestine to stand against the Turks, they did so en masse, by enlisting in the British Army. In order to lock world Jewry into the Allied cause, the British foreign secretary issued the Balfour Declaration, favoring the establishment of the homeland in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was later canonized into international law and recognized by the entire world, save the Arabs. By the eve of the First World War, the Arabs had formulated a nationalism of their own, to commence when the yoke of the Ottomans could be shaken.
    British Intelligence agents slipped into Palestine to set up espionage networks in advance of their armies and to find men to engage in highly specialized work.
    Gideon Asch was secretly commissioned as a lieutenant in the British Army; his mission was to go into the Negev and Sinai deserts to chart the wadis, the water holes, the sparse patches of shade, the sheer passes—all for the coming battle against the Turks. Asch was born a desert rat, able to disappear among the Bedouin and sink deeply into the vast brooding reaches of the wilderness of Zin and Paran, where Moses and the Hebrew Tribes had wandered for forty biblical years. He followed those routes of the Bible through the parched dry beds, piecing bits and clues together of how one can survive and travel in such a landscape. His blue eyes would turn to slits under the blinding glare and his fair skin would become sand-pocked and leathery.
    He became a friend of the Wahhabi tribe and its sheik, Walid Azziz, and he roamed for weeks with their legendary tracker, Nabil.
    One day, toward evening, Nabil and Gideon came upon a small clump of scrub oak in an otherwise bleak desert terrain. A lone Bedouin sat by the scrub, making a covering tent over his head with his robes. Alongside the Bedouin was a clay pitcher of water and some stale bread.
    Nabil called to him, then approached the Bedouin, who was in a semitrance from the glaring heat. They spoke, and he returned to Gideon.
    ‘Who is he, Nabil?’ Gideon asked.
    ‘His name is Mustafa. He is of the Sulikan tribe.’
    ‘Why does he just sit there?’
    ‘He says he is waiting for a friend. He said his friend told him he would be coming through this way.’
    ‘How long has he been sitting?’
    ‘Several times around the sun.’
    ‘Doesn’t he know when his friend will come?’
    ‘He said sooner or later.’
    ‘Do you mean he just sits, day after day, not knowing?’
    ‘He knows his friend will come. When his friend comes is not important. He has nothing else to do.’
    Just before eventide, Nabil sniffed out a camel caravan. He rode his mount in circles with seeming