Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2) by Edward Whittemore

Author:Edward Whittemore [Whittemore, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781480434103
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2013-07-23T05:00:00+00:00

13. O’Sullivan Beare

Signal night, he thought, quiet place for sure. Demanding night up here beneath the murmurs of heaven.

AND THERE WERE OTHER, quieter moments during the twelve-year poker game when one of the three friends would disappear for days or weeks to pursue his dream. Munk Szondi building a future Jewish homeland, Cairo Martyr on his quest for the black meteorite of Islam, O’Sullivan Beare pondering the enigmas of the lost Sinai Bible and his lost love as well, Maud, the woman who had abandoned him in Jericho in 1921, taking with her their infant son.

When those moods came over him Joe left Jerusalem and traveled down to Galilee where he kept his tiny seaplane, a Sopwith Camel.

Joe had won the Camel in a poker game during the great blizzard of ’29. That spring he learned to fly the Camel and had a hangar built for it on the shores of the lake, and his first flight that spring became the pattern for all the subsequent ones.

Late in the evening he taxied out onto the still water. He pushed the engine to full power and the Camel broke free to rise above what had once been Beth Jarah or the Temple of the Moon, sped south above the Jordan down the sinking valley past Naharaim and Bethshean and Jabesh-gilead, past Jabbok and Adam and the Jungle of the Jordan where lions had once roared, above the little flowered house somewhere below that he and Maud had once known near Jericho, whose ancient name also spoke of a lunar god, between the Moabite hills and the Dead Sea along the slopes of Mt Nebo where Moses had seen the promised land that he would never enter, rising to speed above the wastes and reaching Aqaba, tracing the west coast of the gulf until the configuration of a promontory and a mountain told him the Sinai oasis was coming up beneath him.

There Joe landed the Camel and pulled it partway up on the sand. He took ashore a small wicker basket and a bottle marked with the cross of St John, dated A.D. 1122, and sat crosslegged under a palm tree eating fresh figs and drinking raw poteen, waiting for the last hours of night to pass and the sun’s first rays to rise above the mountains of Arabia, to warm the sands and glitter upon the waters where he had long ago spent a month with Maud.

Once he had a strange visitor in that remote spot, and the episode was so curious he wondered later if it might not have been a dream, a vision brought on by poteen and the dark loneliness of his mood.

In the very first light he had seen the figure, small and indistinct, coming out of the Sinai and moving in his direction. The minutes passed and the figure became an Arab, still striding directly toward him. He remembered being puzzled that the Arab had known he was there in the darkness, so complete in that

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