Leon Uris Read Online Free PDF Page B

aimlessness until he picked up tracks. Nabil dismounted and placed his nose and his lips on the ground in the tracks.
    They passed here not too long a time ago,’ Nabil said.
    ‘How long?’
    ‘Not long.’
    ‘A few hours?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Many hours?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Three, four, five hours?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Enough time for the sun to come up and down?’
    ‘No, not that long a time.’
    ‘How many camels do you make out?’
    ‘Several.’
    ‘Five?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Fifty?’
    ‘Perhaps. The tracks are deep. They are heavily loaded.’
    ‘Where will they be going?’
    Nabil squinted around the horizon. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘A water hole belonging to the Sulikans. They must be Sulikans or allies of the Sulikans.’
    Gideon studied his map for a nearby water hole. It showed none.
    ‘How far away is the water?’
    ‘Not far.’
    ‘One day? Two days?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘How many miles?’
    ‘Miles? Oh miles.’ Nabil tugged at his ear. ‘Four hundred miles.’
    ‘No, dammit. It can’t be. How many times for the sun to come up and down before we reach it?’
    ‘When the sun rises here until it crosses to there,’ Nabil said, sweeping his hand in a heavenward arc.
    As the fire died, Nabil recited poetry while Gideon lay concentrating on the sky and the darting specks of comets. It was this kind of moment that made the desert real. Gideon was all of them from the beginning of time. He was Moses and Abraham looking up to the same sky, pondering man’s earliest mysteries and begging for answers to the puzzlement of the universe.
    ‘I was the jackal who could prey at the edge of the camp.
    I was a great horse who raced Mohammed’s mighty mount.
    I was a camel, the first in a line of many.
    1 was all who looked at the stupid two-legged beast called man and saw him as stupid.
    I lived like a king in my own wild ways, and they struggled.’
    Nabil stopped short and cocked his head. ‘Listen,’ he said.
    ‘I hear nothing.’
    It took several moments for the breeze to carry the sounds to him. ‘How far are they,’ Gideon asked, ‘and how many?’
    ‘Why must you always ask things for which there are no answers, Gideon?’
    ‘Well, suppose they were an enemy. If I knew how many of them there were and how far away they were, I would know how to get ready.’
    ‘What difference how far?’ the Bedouin said. ‘In the desert you must always be ready and how many will be, will be. You can’t change their numbers.’ He listened and reckoned there were many camels and that they had reached the water hole.
    ‘When the sun comes up we will reach the water hole,’ Nabil said. ‘Do not go and drink from it. We move toward it slowly. Then we sit on the edge and hold the horses so they do not drink. They will be watching us from afar, and if we drink without permission they will shoot. After a time they will appear. They will tolerate me as a Wahhabi, but they will like you very much because of the strange color of your hair and eyes. Then, they will invite us to drink.’
    Three days later they retraced their tracks and the Bedouin named Mustafa was still sitting under the shade of his robe waiting for his friend.
    After four hundred years of Ottoman misrule the feeling of the Arabs toward the Turks was one of oppressed to oppressor despite the fact that they were fellow Moslems. Clandestine Arab movements were afoot against the Turks as the war entered the region.
    The key personality among Arab dissidents was Sharif Husain, head of the Hashemite clan from the Hejaz sector of the Arabian Peninsula. The Hejaz held a coastline of nearly a thousand miles along the Red Sea that connected to the vital British lifeline of the Suez Canal. The Hashemites, who were direct descendants of Mohammed, had been accorded the honorary position of ‘keeper of the holy places’ of Medina and of Mecca, with Islam’s most sacred shrine, the Ka’aba.
    The British game was to try to lure the Hashemites