Chapter 4

A few facts were in Fara’s favour. Her natural speaking voice was low-pitched and throaty; it might easily be mistaken by a stranger for the voice of a boy in his mid-teens. Too, the loose-fitting burnous ignored the curves of her girlish figure. But, even so, it would require much courage and self-confidence to maintain her role if suddenly projected into the company of men. It had not yet occurred to her that it would be quite as difficult to deceive another woman.

This dilemma had cost Fara many an anxious hour. She had privately practised being a bold and bumptious youth, accustomed to rough talk and capable of serving a large helping of convincing profanity. She had stalked up and down her bed-chamber with long, stiff-legged strides, jerking her head arrogantly from side to side as she scowled crossly into her mirrors, and growling gutturally. Once the absurdity of it had momentarily overcome her, and she had laughed at her reflection in the highly polished metal plate that hung by her door; but had instantly sobered at the sight of a pair of girlish dimples in this young man’s cheeks, and resolved that she would do no more smiling.

At the first signs of dawn Fara crossed the southern extremity of the fertile Valley of Aisne and moved on into the arid Valley of Zered, which skirted the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. It was a desolate expanse of parched and blistered land, utterly without vegetation, birds, rodents, or reptiles. There were even no insects, with which most deserts abound. The Dead Sea had been aptly named. Saidi clearly shared her rider’s hope that they might soon be out of this forsaken country, and quickened her pace, Fara straining her eyes for a glimpse of the ancient village of Akra, which, she knew, maintained a precarious existence on a bit of oasis at the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea.

The sun was already hot when she sighted it, a clump of palms and cypress, a straggling group of shabby cottages surrounding a large brown tent. This would be the khan where travellers and their pack-trains were accommodated. At the door of the tent, Fara dismounted from the perspiring filly, handed the reins to a taciturn old Arabian, and with long steps and an experimental swagger followed along to the corral, where she gruffly gave instructions how her mount was to be rubbed down and properly watered. And when the testy hostler growled that he knew how to take care of a horse, Fara shouted untruthfully that if he did he was the first old man she had ever seen who knew or cared whether a hot horse was safely watered, and that she proposed to stand by him until he had done it.

A wizened old woman glumly prepared a bad breakfast of stale eggs and staler bread. Feeling that she had need of practice in maleness in the presence of women, Fara complained bitterly about the food and reviled the old woman in what she felt might be the customary terms for a man to use on such occasions. Then she demanded a bed, and denounced the old woman as a foul and dirty slattern when she saw the untidy cubicle provided for her. This execration she attempted in Greek, aware that her vocabulary of vituperation in that language—learned of the gentle Ione—would need some polishing.

After two hours of deep sleep Fara was on her way again, after paying her hosts twice what they asked and swearing manfully that the place wasn’t fit for a goat to live in; to which contemptuous accusation the old man and his slovenly wife—grateful for their unexpected windfall—respectfully agreed. Fara smiled complacently as Saidi bounded away over the north-bound trail, her fears about her ability to be a man having been somewhat alleviated.