The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online

of the hills, but there were wild irises at the foot of the wall, and a blue flower like a small lily, and like shining drops of blood among the sunflower roots I could see the red anemones.
    I climbed down. The children climbed down, too. I helped them, bodily lifting down the last one a half-naked atom of perhaps three, probably with scabies. I dusted my hands off on my slacks, and hunted for flowers.
    The children helped. A big-eyed boy in a grubby vest and nothing else yanked out a handful of pinks for me, and little Scabies came up with a dandelion or two. There was a great deal of conversation. Arabic and English and (from Scabies) stone-age grunts, and we all understood one another very well. The clearest thing about the business was that I was expected to hand over something substantial in return for the company and the flowers.
    ‘A shilling,’ said Hamid from above me, sounding amused.
    I looked up. He was standing at the edge of the road.
    ‘Are you sure? It seems very little. There’s six of them.’
    ‘It’s quite enough.’
    It seemed he was right. The children grabbed the coins, and melted up and over the wall faster than they had come down and with no assistance whatever, except for Scabies, who was heaved over the last lap by Hamid, dusted off, and sent on his way with a clap over the bare buttocks. Hamid turned back to me.
    ‘Can you manage it? Some of the stones aren’t too steady.’
    ‘I won’t bother. I’ll just walk down and meet you on the road as you drive down. Did you get the oranges?’
    ‘Yes. All right, then, don’t hurry, I’ll wait for you below.’
    The path where I had seen the rider was a dry and well-worn right of way some eighteen inches wide, going down at a slant through the sunflowers and descending by three or four stony gaps in the terracing. The huge flowers, heavy-headed, were turned away from me, facing south, and the path was a narrow chasm between head-high plants. I saw now that they were planted a yard or so apart, and between them some other plant with glaucous green leaves and plumes of brownish flowers fought its way up with mallow and cornflowers and a dozen other things towards the light. Where the horse had brushed through, the leaves hung bruised and crumpled, and above the honey-smell of the sunflowers there was the clean, musky smell of dead nettle.
    I made my way down towards the road. At the gap in the wall leading down to the last terrace the sunflowers gave way to a more familiar crop of corn, and standing sentinel where the crops divided was a fig tree, its buds just bursting into young green. Its silver boughs held the buds up against the bright sky with an enchanting grace, and against the rough-cast of its stem some wild vine-like plant clung, with flowers as red as the anemones. I stopped to pick one. The vine was tough, and a hank of it pulled away from the trunk, uncovering something that lay below. On the bleached silver of the exposed stem, scrawled in red, was the sketch of a running dog. The drawing was crude but lively; the thing was unmistakably a long-haired greyhound with a plumed tail. A saluki.
    It is surely common experience that when something has been brought to your attention it crops up again and again, often with an alarming appearance of coincidence or even fate. It certainly seemed as if, once Charles had mentioned them, the creatures were going to haunt me through the Lebanon, but there was after all nothing so very odd about it; one might say that in England it is possible to be haunted by poodles, I went down to the road.
    Hamid was sitting on a low wall at the edge of the road beside the car, smoking. He got up quickly, but I waved him down.
    ‘Don’t bother. Finish your cigarette, do.’
    ‘Would you like an orange?’
    ‘I’d love one. Thanks. Oh, aren’t they gorgeous? You’re quite right, we don’t get them like this at home … Hamid, why do they grow sunflowers?’
    ‘For oil. They make very good cooking oil,