"Excuse me," Ghosn said to the imam, "can I help with translation?" He absorbed the rapid-fire string of his native language and turned to the soldier.

"The imam is from Saudi Arabia. This is his first time in Jerusalem since he was a boy and he requires directions to the Troika's office."

On recognizing the seniority of the cleric, the sergeant removed his helmet and inclined his head respectfully.

"Please tell him that we would be honored to escort him there."

"Ah, there you are!" another voice called. It was obviously an Israeli. His Arabic was accented, but literate. "Good day, Sergeant," the man added in English.

"Greetings, Rabbi Ravenstein. You know this man?" the soldier asked.

"This is Imam Mohammed Al Faisal, a distinguished scholar and historian from Medina."

"Is it all I have been told?" Al Faisal asked Ravenstein directly.

"All that and more!" the rabbi replied.

"Excuse me?" Ghosn had to say.

"You are?" Ravenstein asked.

"A student. I was attempting to assist with the language problem."

"Ah, I see," Ravenstein said. "Very kind of you. Mohammed is here to look at a manuscript we uncovered at a dig. It's a scholarly Muslim commentary on a very old Torah, 10th Century, a fantastic find. Sergeant, I can manage things from here, and thank you also, young man."

"Do you require escort, sir?" the sergeant asked. "We are heading that way."

"No, thank you, we are both too old to keep up with you."

"Very well." The sergeant saluted. "Good day."

The Swiss moved off. The few people who'd taken note of the brief encounter pointed and smiled.

"The commentary is by Al Qalda himself, and it seems to cite the work of Nuchem of Acre," Ravenstein said. "The state of preservation is incredible."

"Then I must see it!" The two scholars began walking down the street as rapidly as their aged legs would carry them, oblivious to everything around them.

Ghosn's face didn't change. He'd shown wonder and amusement for the benefit of the Swiss infantrymen now halfway down the block, themselves with a trailing escort of small children. His discipline allowed him to sidle off to the side, take another turn, and vanish down a narrow alley, but what he had just seen was far more depressing.

Mohammed Al Faisal was one of the five greatest Islamic scholars, a highly-respected historian, and a distant member of the Saudi royal family, despite his unpretentious nature. Except for his age - the man was nearing eighty - he might have been one of the members of the troika running Jerusalem - that and the fact that they'd wanted a scholar of Palestinian ancestry for political reasons. No friend of Israel, and one of the most conservative of the Saudi religious leaders, had he become enamored of the treaty also?

Worse still, the Swiss had treated the man with the utmost respect. Worst of all, the Israeli rabbi had done the same. The people in the streets, nearly all of them Palestinians, had watched it all with amusement and what? Tolerance? Acceptance, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The Israelis had long ago given lip-service to respect for their Arab neighbors, but that promise had not even been written on sand for all the permanence it had carried.