The Brides of Solomon Read Free Page A

to the making of money. At Damascus there were revolutions. Over here, in the lost corner of the country, there was
discontent. And with us when one is discontented, one distracts oneself by taking action. The gendarmerie is weak and scattered, and there is little to prevent a criminal from escaping into Turkey
or Iraq. For my part I prefer Turkey.
    Day and night Ferjeyn began to talk of danger. I have never understood how the Arabs can be called fatalists. In a crisis they are hysterical as women. One must admit that there was a little
danger, but only of stones thrown, of rifles fired too high to do much damage, of a house burned and cattle stolen and a woman raped—an excitement of spirit which two of my old
Arabic-speaking corporals could have extinguished by mere calm and authority!
    We, the notables, met at night conspiratorially, behind closed shutters in my house or the house of John Douaihy or the priest’s. That made a good impression on the village. But my
venerable colleagues had no more sense than children. They wanted me to make a fortress of the mountain.
    ‘Willingly,’ I answered. ‘If I have twenty men who shoot to kill, I will hold Ferjeyn from one harvest to the next.’
    Ah, yes, I could have them. What did I think? That they were no soldiers? Of course I could have them, and the boys and greybeards too—
    But they knew and I knew that this was all talk. The truth was that they dreamed of constructing an impassable Maginot Line, for they wished to hold Ferjeyn with the least possible bloodshed.
And they were right. We were sixteen hundred men, women and children, surrounded by two hundred thousand Moslems. The only tactics by which I could hold Ferjeyn—cunning and ambush and
ruthless slaughter—would have meant blood feuds with the Christians that might endure a hundred years.
    When I had pointed out that even a Chinese wall would not stop Moslems unless we had men on top of it trained to kill, the priest begged me to go to Palestine and buy a tank. For him a tank was
a piece of magic that would make Ferjeyn invincible. He might have been talking of a sort of beetle that could move itself and fight.
    I soon had enough of these councils of war which were only exclamations. I refused to take command. I wasn’t having any. I was content to eat and drink and till my land. That was my
life.
    They did their best to persuade me. The priest waggled his fingers at me as if I had been a child he were about to baptise, and told me to fight for my religion. I was polite, for I had to
appear impressed. But I could not share his opinion that it was a service to God to murder Moslems. All my life I have been unwilling to anticipate the intentions of the high command.
    Another night John Douaihy warned me that he and I might lose our property. He was at his most dignified; he spoke like a governor of the Bank of France. I shrugged my shoulders. What could we
lose? We were not rich. And a crazy band of Moslems is not an army of occupation. They do enough damage to boast about, and then go home. They cannot take away the soil in wheelbarrows.
    Then the women and children. I must defend them. That was the excitement of the saddler, who, in his old age, had married a wife nearly as pretty as Helena. Well, the appetites of raiders are
not a matter upon which one should let imagination rest—unless one is the wife of an old man—but someone has to be sacrificed, and memory is short.
    ‘Brothers,’ I would say to them, ‘let us endure the chastisement that God sends us in the firm faith that it will quickly pass—so long as we have bribed the civil
administration, given feasts to Moslem notables and assured the interest of the gendarmes.’
    All that we had done. We knew how to look after ourselves. Without any government at all, Ferjeyn would have got on very well with its neighbours. No need of proof. We Christians had been on our
mountain since the Arab conquest. The flagstones of our little