Omay watched it all, his gaunt face impassive. It was hot in his Fishbowl.

That was what he called the sheets of impenetrable Plexiglas that had been constructed out of necessity around his balcony--the Fishbowl. The bulletproof glass had been added during the 1980s as a security precaution made necessary because of his overtures to the West. And to Israel.

As he stood there, absorbing the heat of his personal tomb, the crowd seemed to fade from the landscape.

This was supposed to be a day of great celebration for both Ebla and its leader. However, Sultan Omay sin-Khalam's thoughts were not on this day, but on another. Long ago...

MAY 7, 1984. THAT WAS the date everything had changed. It was then that he had discovered the lump.

The small nation of Ebla, which was nestled in the desert north of Lebanon, did not have many doctors. The best in the country resided in the Great Sultan's Palace itself. But even though they were the best doctors in Ebla, the sad fact was they were still not very good.

Perhaps at one time the sultan's doctors had been good. But Sultan Omay sin-Khalam had been as healthy as a horse all his life. Even at sixty years of age, he'd had no need for doctors.

Years before, the sultan's advisers had hired several of the finest Eblan-born and Western-educated physicians money could buy. A staff of ten was kept on duty full-time in case of emergency. But aside from the handful of scrapes and bruises that had resulted from a few riding accidents, they went unused for decades. Over the years the doctors-who were all older than the sultan at the time they were engaged in service-passed away. As the men had died off, they were not replaced. By the time Omar discovered the lump in his armpit, there were only two doctors left.

That fateful day the sultan sat in the airconditioned coolness of his private infirmary. Although it was the 1980s, the room seemed to have been locked in time somewhere just after the Second World War.