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Lady Harriet?’
    ‘Why, yes, I – I suppose I do,’ I said, feeling rather foolish. ‘I – I’d forgotten … yes, of course, the Lady Harriet.’
    ‘As far as I know she’s fine,’ said the voice, ‘but she’s certainly not my patient. In the normal way I would have attended her after Grafton left, but she wrote to tell me she had made other arrangements.’ Some undercurrent, perhaps of amusement, in the smooth voice made me want to ask what these were, but this was hardly possible. Probably (I thought) a letterrenouncing the world, the English, and the medical profession, or at least another Last Will and Testament. ‘May I know who is calling?’ asked the voice.
    ‘Lady Harriet’s great-niece. My name is Christabel Mansel. I’m here in the Lebanon on holiday, and I – none of us has heard from my great-aunt for some time; in fact, I’d got the idea she was dead. But then I heard she was still alive, and someone at the hotel here – I’m staying at the Phoenicia – told me Dr Grafton had attended her, so I thought I’d ring him up to find out anything I could. You say he’s left Beirut. Is he still in the Lebanon? Would it be possible to get in touch with him?’
    ‘I’m afraid not. He went back to London.’
    ‘I see. Well, thanks very much, I might try to look her up myself.’
    There was a slight pause at the other end. Then the voice said, carefully expressionless: ‘One gathers she lives very much retired.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I understood so. But anyway, thank you for your help. Goodbye.’
    ‘Goodbye,’ said the voice.
    I found myself grinning as I put the receiver down. What was implicit in the pleasant voice was, unmistakably, the Arabic equivalent for ‘and the best of British luck’.
    Charles rang up that evening to say that Ben’s father had been delayed, so he himself couldn’t get up before Sunday evening at the earliest, and might not even manage that. ‘But in the name of all the gods at once,’ he finished impressively, ‘I’ll be with you on Monday, or perish in the attempt.’
    ‘Don’t ask for it,’ I said, ‘at least not till you’ve bought your blue bead. You told me this was a country where anything could happen.’
    I didn’t mention my own enquiries about Great-Aunt Harriet, or that I was beginning to develop quite a lively sense of curiosity about the eccentric recluse of Dar Ibrahim.
    The desk clerk had certainly done his best to get me a nice expensive trip. The car was a vast American affair with fins, air-conditioning, blue beads to ward off the Evil Eye, and hanging in the window a text from the Koran which said: ‘Place your reliance on God.’
    It also had an altimeter. This I didn’t quite believe in until the driver, a lively sharp-faced young man called Hamid, told me we would be going from sea level to about eight thousand feet in one fell swoop, since the Adonis Source was right up in the High Lebanon. I settled down beside him in the front of the car, and watched the altimeter with fascinated amusement as we turned away from the coast at Byblos, and began to climb.
    Hamid had underestimated the number of fell swoops that were required. At first the road was reasonable, and bored its way upwards through villages and terraced fields, where the carefully spaced apple trees stood knee-deep in growing crops, and dark-eyed children played among the hens in the dust. But after a while the road shook itself clear of the little green settlements to climb more steeply through the last belt of cultivation before the flocks claimed thestony earth. Here still in every sheltered corner a neat terraced wall dammed in some carefully banked soil, and fruit trees were in meagre bloom. On the more exposed terraces the thin green blades of some grain were growing, almost smothered by the sheets of spring flowers that grew everywhere, at the roadside, in the terraced walls, in the very seams of the rocks. Hamid stopped the car with smiling good nature and