Chapter 1

Seeking refuge among the savage tribes of itinerant shepherds and camel-breeders in the southern mountains, Ishmael quickly became their acknowledged leader, fighting his way to power with an audacity and ruthlessness that commanded their admiration and obedience. It was no small matter to bind so many discordant elements into something resembling a nation, but before Hagar’s forceful and fearless son was thirty the hard-riding, fierce-fighting savages of the desert were boasting that they were ‘Ishmaelites.’ The name was respected and feared, by rulers and robbers alike, all the way from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, all the way from Damascus to Gaza. As time went on, the wild new nation became known as ‘Arabia,’ meaning ‘Men in Ambush.’

The descendants of Isaac, and his more resourceful but less scrupulous son Jacob, after many misfortunes and migrations—including a long, humiliating period of enslavement in Egypt—fought their way back into their ‘Promised Land,’ their western boundary on the world’s busiest sea, their eastern rim within a sling-shot of the domain controlled by the Men in Ambush. If some stupid stranger inquired, ‘Why do the Jews and Arabs hate each other so bitterly?’ he was told, ‘It is written in the sacred prophecies of both nations that they are destined to be at enmity for ever.’

It was commonly understood, therefore, that when the posterity of Father Abraham’s two families met they neither smiled nor saluted. They never broke bread together; never gave aid, no matter how serious the emergency. They conducted their necessary business briefly and gruffly; and, having brought it to a conclusion, turned away and spat noisily on the ground. It was not often that they fought, but it was said that on such rare occasions the catamounts crept out into the open to learn new techniques of tooth and claw. Often the contentious children of Abraham quarrelled; screaming, gesticulating, and reviling; for both of their languages, stemming from a common origin, were rich with invective and ingenious in the contrivance of exquisite insults. Neither nation had ever sent an ambassador to the other’s court. Officially, neither had ever acknowledged the other’s existence.

Not meaning, however, that there was no commerce at all between these mutually contemptuous men. Racial antipathies had not deterred the ardent traders of both nations from venturing across the Jordan to engage in an undercover barter that would have amazed and enraged the ordinary rank-and-file of their respective kinsmen. Jewish merchants, far travellers by nature, quietly forded the river with pack-trains bearing imports from many distant lands, and did not lack for wealthy Arabian customers when they appeared with foreign fabrics of silk and velvet, fine linens, gold ornaments, precious stones, medicinal herbs, spices, and other exotics. It was customary, on these occasions, for the negotiations to be conducted with all the sullen impoliteness that the everlasting feud demanded; but the expensive goods did change ownership, and the pack-asses skipped home, under a young moon, freed of their burdens. Had either the Jews or the Arabians been gifted with a sense of humour, all this might have seemed funny.

During the last score of years something resembling a commercial truce had permitted a group of Arabian camel-breeders to bring their incomparably beautiful and expensive animals to the celebrated stock-show and auction held annually on the disused drill-ground near Jerusalem during the Jewish Feast of Pentecost.

Indeed, it was the lure of the Arabians’ superb camels that had lately made this Pentecostal stock-show notable throughout the East. Rich Romans, ever competing with one another in the lavishness of their gaudy turn-outs in the proud processions of the Imperial City, would send their stewards to purchase the finest of these majestic creatures, regardless of cost. The Jews, well aware that this uniquely attractive camel-market was responsible for bringing desirable patrons from afar, tried to forget—for this one day of the year—that the coveted camels were Arabian. And the Arabs who owned the camels pretended they didn’t realize—on this one day of the year—that they were doing business in the land of Israel. They growled and scowled and spat—but they bought the camels.