Abu Yusef

Role Keeper of the Wadi al-Tih caravanserai Nationality Egyptian Status alive Age Sixties

Description

Egyptian, sixties, and twenty years in this building. He has watched several thousand Europeans arrive at his gate certain they were having an adventure, and he has given every one of them water and a room and no opinion whatsoever.

He is unhurried in the way of a man who has never once been anywhere else and does not expect to be.

Background

The caravanserai is his and has been for twenty years. Before that, it was somebody else’s, and before that somebody else’s, and the well was here for all of it. He does not consider twenty years a long time.

Connections

• Wadi al Tih — his.
• Hassan — twenty years of the same road.
• Gerald Hewitt — recognises him at the gate.

Appearances

Outcome (Session 6)

The arrival beat landed exactly as designed. Freddy watched Abu Yusef’s face change the moment Hewitt came through the gate, the old water-reserve grudge surfacing in a single unguarded look that a careful eye could catch. After the murder, Georgiana consulted him on the question of legal authority, and he confirmed what he already knew, that no Ottoman official held jurisdiction over a dead British subject and nobody wanted the case. He was the session’s second innocent, the man with every reason and no crime, and the party cleared him. Freddy then paid him a generous sum of Spanish silver to dispose of Hewitt’s body and to take in Rajan, the masterless servant, who now stays on at Wadi al-Tih under his care.