Declare

meant: How have you been?
    Hale now put down his tea glass with a soft knock, absurdly wishing it were a cup of the coffee they had made at camp in the old days, harsh with the foul water of the desert wells.
    “I’ve retired,” he said in Arabic. “I felt like a change of water and air. Tommo Burks will, I think, begin a new life in the Arab states. And I thought you might be able to help me.”
    Bin Jalawi nodded, still grinning. “Allah is all-beneficent!” he said. It was one of the standard lines Arabs gave to importunate beggars, meaning Look to God, not to me —the equivalent of the British Tell your troubles to Jesus, mate —and Hale couldn’t tell if the man meant it coldly or jokingly. “Many Arabs trusted Creepo,” bin Jalawi went on in a jovial tone, “until they learned that the Israelis invaded Nasser’s Suez with Creepo help, based on betrayed Arab confidences.”
    Nasser’s Suez , thought Hale bitterly. As if the Arabs could have built the canal, or could even keep it dredged!
    “I’m a landless man now,” said Hale; “but you know that the British declared Kuwait to be a sovereign nation, more than a year ago.” The remark was in character—to be too anti-British here would be to overplay his hand.
    “Kuwait was never a long-term commitment, to En gland,” said bin Jalawi. “Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.”
    Hale supposed that was true. But he let his face stiffen as he said, “My policy?”
    Bin Jalawi plucked several times lightly at the neck of his robe, then lowered his hands, palm down—an Arab gesture conveying something like, You and I have nothing to do with these villains .“I apologize, bin Sikkah,” he said quietly, using Hale’s Bedu nick-name. “You were always a generous friend to the Bedu. ‘Honor him who has been great and is fallen, and him who has been rich and now is poor.’ ”
    The radio cabinet had been producing muted conversation for these twenty minutes, but now music started, some Islamic-style single-line melody, and the Arab got up from his couch, crossed to the radio and turned up the volume. The stylized, quavering singing of an Arab woman rang out of the speakers.
    “Do you know her?” he asked.
    Hale blinked. “Who, the singer? No. I suppose I might have heard her before.”
    “She is Um Kalthum,” said bin Jalawi in a tone of reproof. “Every Thursday evening she is on Radio Cairo. In Cairo you don’t even need a radio to hear her, because every set in the city is tuned to her, and her voice seems to emanate from the stones and the sky.”
    “Do you visit Cairo often?” Hale asked.
    “Dogs can hear things that people cannot,” said bin Jalawi, staring down at the radio console, “and so they know when to be vigilant, and which way to look, which way to run to safety. So can the Bedu perhaps hear things that Westerners cannot, singing out of the sky.” He turned to give Hale a blank look. “You are maybe Bedu enough to hear also, if you clean out your ears. ‘When thine enemy extends his hand to thee, cut it off if thou canst, else kiss it.’ You in the old days cut off some metaphorical hands; now, my friend, is time to kiss the hand.”
    Hale smiled cautiously. He had often had to use the word metaphorical in dealing with bin Jalawi and the tribes, and the Arab had here pronounced the word in English, in imitation of him.
    “I visit Cairo often,” bin Jalawi went on. “You will be able to as well, I think, if you have invested the money you were paid by the American Standard Oil. Of what tribe were the Bedu guides you killed?”
    Hale raised his eyebrows at the other man. “Saar,” he answered. The Saar roved far to the south, above the Hadhramaut, and were feared by most of the other tribes. “It was self-defense.”
    This was of course his cover story, which hadn’t been activated by Whitehall until late yesterday, according to Theodora. Perhaps to his credit, Salim bin Jalawi was not bothering with pretense, but Hale wondered sourly if the man had been taking Soviet pay in the ’40s too; perhaps Hale would have been told, in the aborted briefing. Certainly the Soviet forces at Ararat had been able to prevent Hale from using the meteorite that he and bin Jalawi had found at the Wabar ruins in the Rub’ al-Khali desert…
    But… Hale’s math had