The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

almost as good as olive oil, and now the Government has built a factory to make margarine with it also, and it offers a good price for the crop. It’s part of an official campaign to stop the growing of hemp.’
    ‘Hemp? That’s hashish, isn’t it? – marihuana? Good heavens! Does it grow up here?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Have you never seen it? I believe you grow the same plant in England, to make rope, but only in hot countries does it bear the drug. In past time there has always been a lot of it grown up in the hills – it’s the right climate for it, and there are still places where the inspectors don’t go.’
    ‘Inspectors?’
    He nodded. ‘Government officials. They’re very anxious now to get the growing of these drugs under control. A certain amount is grown legally, you understand, for medical use, and for every stage of its growth and handling you must have a licence and be subjected to strict controls, but it’s always been easy enough for the peasants in these wild parts to grow more than they declare, or to harvest the crop before the inspectors come. Now the penalties have been made stricter than ever, but there are still some who try to get past the law.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘What would you? It pays, and there are always men who will take the big risks for the big money.’ He dropped his cigarette into the road and trod the butt into the dust. ‘You saw the old man up there, the one I spoke to?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘He was smoking it.’
    ‘But can he …? I mean—’
    ‘How can they stop him?’
    I stared. ‘Do you mean it’s grown here?’
    He smiled. ‘There was some growing beside his house among the potatoes.’
    ‘I wouldn’t know it if I saw it,’ I said. ‘What’s it look like?’
    ‘A tall plant, greyish colour, not very pretty. The drug comes from the flowers. These are brownish, a spike like soft feathers.’
    I had been carefully depositing my orange peel out of sight behind the wall where we sat. Now I sat bolt-upright. ‘There was something like that growing under the sunflowers!’
    ‘So?’ he said indifferently. ‘It will be gone before the inspectors get here. Shall we go?’ He opened the car door for me.
    All in all it had been a strange and heady sort of day. And things seemed to be going my way. It seemed the inevitable climax to it that as I got into the car I should say with decision:
    ‘You said you’d show me Dar Ibrahim on the way home. If there’s time, I think I’d like to call there today. Would you mind?’
    At about four o’clock we slid round a steep bend and into the village of Sal’q. Hamid stopped the car beside a low wall beyond which the land dropped clear away to give another of those staggering views of the Adonis Valley.
    ‘There,’ he said.
    I looked where he pointed. Here the valley was wide, with the river, magnificent and flowing swiftly, cutting a way down for itself between dense banks of trees. From somewhere to our left, beyond the little village mosque, fell the tributary river to meet the Adonis in the valley at the bottom. Between the two streams a highish, wedge-shaped tongue of land thrust out like a high-prowed ship down the valley’s centre, and on its tip, like a crown on the crag above the meeting waters, sprawled the palace, a seemingly vast collection of buildings running back from the edge of the promontory to spread over a fair area of the plateau. Towards the rear of the buildings the ground fell away sharply in a small escarpment shelving down to the level of the plateau, and here the palace wall rose straight out of the rock. Near the top I could see windows, a row of ornate arches looking out towards the village, but apart from these, except for a few small, square openings that seemed to be little more than ventilators, the walls were windowless, blank and white in the sun. Towards the back of the palace the green of sizable trees showed inside the walls. Outside, stretching back towards the roots of the