"America is best," agreed the first. "But Ebla is not on good terms with America."

The sultan listened to them with increasing agitation. These two were already sending him off to treatment in the hated West and neither one of them had yet told him his suspicions.

Omay slapped his hand loudly on the examining table. The two old men stopped chattering, turning their wide, rheumy eyes on the leader of Ebla. There was a look of sad fear in their bloodshot depths. "What is it?" Omay sin-Khalam demanded. The answer they gave shocked him. Lymphatic cancer.

Younger doctors were immediately brought in from abroad. They echoed the prognosis of the older physicians. It was cancer. The sultan, who had never been sick a day in his life, was suddenly faced with the grim specter of the most frightening of diseases.

Since the time of the revolution against Great Britain almost twenty years before, Ebla had been involved in the shadow campaign of terrorism against the nations of the West. It had joined Iran, Libya, Iraq and Syria in condemning the imperialism of America in particular. This secret war had claimed many victims over the years-nearly all of them innocent civilians. But with his diagnosis came the dawning of a new reality for Sultan Omay. To the shock of all outside observers, he publicly denounced the use of terror to achieve political ends. In particular he condemned state-sponsored terrorism, singling out countries he had once called allies. In a move that shocked the Arab world, he even announced that Ebla would now recognize the sovereign state of Israel.

It was a conversion unlike any since Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.

The change was heralded as a breakthrough in relations between the Mideast and the West. Sultan Omay was lauded for his new ideals. Gone were the condemnations of the now repentant advocate of terror. Banished forever. Laurels took the place of denunciation.

Of course, the hospitals of the West were opened to him. His cancer was treated in New York. Further proof of his spiritual rebirth was the fact he used Jewish doctors almost exclusively.