184
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
in the back and watch the drums. Moustafa and Faris sat in
front with the driver, guns poised against snipers and hold-up
men. Gasoline was scarce and the cargo valuable. We were
particularly jittery as we approached the Jewish settlement
near Rachel's tomb, Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. Our truck
stopped, and Moustafa, to guard against attack from Jewish
snipers, climbed with his machine-gun into the back with me.
Then our truck made a frenzied dash, madly careening and
zigzagging from one side of the road to the other to spoil the
aim of sharpshooters. The drums slammed and bounced together with a frightful racket, causing them to leak all the
more. One of them nearly pinned me to the side and another
almost smashed my hand as I tried to keep them together. I
gave up finally and held on to the sidings, never sure whether
I'd be ripped off with them at the next turn. I could see it was
going to be an exciting ride back to Cairo.
We roared by the kibbutz in a cloud of dust. No snipers
shot at us.
"You are brave, like a soldier," Moustafa said, as we slowed
down at a safe distance and he climbed back into the front
seat.
We stopped to pick up hitch-hikers. Later on, we picked
up more, ragged ruffians all. Now I had the added responsibility of keeping Arabs from pilfering oranges. It was not an
easy task to instruct loot-mad cutthroats on the proprieties of
ownership. Suddenly I caught one of them smoking a cigarette, seated atop the leaking gasoline drums. He had smoked
it more than halfway before I saw what he was doing. If I
were an Arab I'd have struck him.
I grabbed the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it into
the road.
"Ahbal! Ahbal! Fool!" I yelled over and over. The moron
shrugged his shoulders.
We passed Bethlehem and neared Kibbutz Kfar Etzion
with about twenty gas-splattered hitch-hikers perched like