A Traveller's Life (12 page)

By some miracle no limbs were severed, no blood flowed, and none of us suffered anything but severe shock, probably because the four of us were such a tight fit in the cab; although the other three, one of whom weighed more than sixteen stone, fell on me when the truck landed on its side.

The Australians took us back to their camp and fed us and gave us beer after their medical officer had pronounced that we were relatively unscathed. Then, when we were all safely tucked up in one of their tents, they salvaged our truck which they immediately proceeded to cannibalize, being desperately short of spare parts for their own transport in this remote spot, so that when, the following morning, we tottered over to eat breakfast with them and asked how our truck was we were met with a lot of level gazes and the words, ‘Which truck, sports?'

It was difficult to argue with people who the previous day had saved our lives and who looked perfectly capable of cannibalizing us and burying us in one of their gun-pits if we continued to argue the toss with them. So, after procuring a document from their transport officer testifying that our truck had gone up in flames and had become a total loss, we thanked them for their hospitality, stole a pair of their binoculars from the tent in which we had passed the night, and accepted a lift from them into Latakia.

We spent the next couple of days listlessly lying around in a rather decrepit casino which enjoyed fine views over the sea, most of the time trying hard not to burst into tears – we really had been badly shocked. Fortunately there were no croupiers, otherwise it might have been difficult to resist the temptation to use some of the imprest money we had been given for Operation Aluite to play at one of the tables. After this we began to feel better and started work.

We then hired from an Armenian entrepreneur a big, beat-up, black American automobile in which, armed as we were, we looked
rather as if we were setting off to massacre the Moran Mob in Chicago on St Valentine's Day, 1929.

The next weeks were the best that any of us had so far experienced in the course of the war, and the best that many of us were ever likely to experience: swimming about in lonely coves, taking soundings with long canes cut in some convenient plantation; pacing out base lines and using our compasses to make triangulations across the fields of wheat and barley; searching out caves and rock tombs, in which the coast abounded, that might serve as caches for explosives; swinging about like apes among the girders of railway bridges; meeting primitive-looking goatherds, one of whom, a rather elderly Sunnite Muslim I found sitting on a rock, had been an itinerant pedlar in the United States before returning home to marry a Syrian girl, a marriage which he said he had arranged by post.

In the course of our travels we encountered a remarkable diversity of religions and nationalities. There were Alawites, Druzes and Ismailites, whose religions contained elements of Muslim, Christian, Indian and Persian beliefs. There were Armenians who had either been deported from Turkey during the First World War by the Turks or who had left it of their own volition to avoid being slaughtered – it was some Armenian Orthodox Gregorians who invited us to a village near the Turkish frontier for a play in Armenian lasting eight hours, which was a kind thought but a great trial to all of us. There were Armenian Catholics and Maronites and Greek-Catholic Melkites and Syrian-Catholic Syriacs and Chaldean Catholics and Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox and Syrian Orthodox, which included Jacobites and Nestorians, and there were even some Protestants. There were Sephardic Jews and there were Sunni and Shiah Muslims, the latter so fanatical that if they were forced to feed an infidel they destroyed the crockery as soon as the visitor had departed. And in Syria
there were some very odd people indeed, whom we never saw, called Yezidis, who believed that God had passed the administration of the world over to the Devil, which on second thoughts did not seem odd at all. None of these conflicting sects seemed particularly fond of one another.

We also occasionally met the dreaded coastguards, with whom we endeavoured to ingratiate ourselves when they looked like turning nasty, which they often did, by offering them cigarettes. Once we were shot at, as the NOIC had predicted we might be, by one who was a damn sight too loyal to la France de la Métropole, considering he had probably never been there. At night we either slept under mosquito nets beneath the stars, or among ruins, or very occasionally in rude, malodorous inns, the most rude and malodorous of which was called Le Grand Fleur de Tartousse built over one of the medieval sewers with which this famous town was riddled. Tartus was the last mainland stronghold of the Templars before they escaped to Cyprus, and their great fortress, built of enormous blocks, with the hall of the Order within it, still had the postern gate by which the knights made their escape to their ships when it was captured by the Mameluke Sultan Qalaun in 1291. There was also an empty, echoing cathedral, Our Lady of Tortosa, that had been constructed on the site of a chapel which housed an ikon of the Virgin. Together with the altar, the ikon survived a severe earthquake in 387, and thereafter both ikon and altar became objects of pilgrimage and veneration.

Offshore was the island of Ruad, the Phoenician Arvad. Half a mile long and a quarter broad it had a population of three thousand Sunnites, the women more heavily veiled than any others we saw on the entire coast. The men, who were all either sailors or shipwrights or both, wore striped shirts, huge baggy trousers and Phrygian caps. The walls of Ruad rose straight from the sea and tiny, conical windmills of whitewashed stone with canvas sails,
which could be furled when not in use, stood among the rocks. In the harbour were caïques with mainsails set on sprits and with square topsails and lots of jibs set on enormously long bowsprits, and brigs and other rigs either forgotten or unknown in Europe. On the seaward side of the island were the shipyards to which trunks of trees were floated out from the mainland, where they were trimmed and shaped using methods that had probably not changed much since the ships of the Pharaoh Snefru visited these coasts around 3200 BC. Here I bought a beautiful model of a caïque, commissioned by some ambassador in Cairo who had not yet turned up to claim it.

One night we slept among the ruins of Marqab, one of the castles of the Knights Hospitallers. Built of black basalt and reached by a spiral track nearly four miles long, it occupied a fantastic situation, high on a spur of an extinct volcano. It looked impregnable but it had finally been captured by Qalaun in 1285 after a forty-day siege, although it had food supplies for five years; but even so it was a much better site for a fortress than the one that was being built down the hill in Tripoli, as good as Monte Cassino, and as difficult to take.

In its chapels, halls and passages and on its circuit walks, sheep and goats wandered. It was cool up there and we built a great fire in one of the rather smelly halls. We thought the flickering of the light on the walls and the giant shadows highly romantic until we were infested by bats, attracted by the flames, which were so numerous that they eventually forced us to retreat to one of the roofless towers. There we passed the rest of the night free of them and the rotten-chocolate smell of their excrement.

We used to start work as soon as it was light, then rest in the heat of the day. We had soon lost most of our external military characteristics. Down on the shore, under the mountains, it was much too hot to wear anything but shorts and sandals and straw
hats, and the sergeant acquired a long, lean hunting dog. We were dressed like this, the sergeant with his dog on a rope leash and carrying the Sten gun, the others armed with pistols and the long canes we used for taking soundings, when one morning the Duke of Gloucester, on a tour of inspection with a convoy of military big-wigs, looked down incredulously on us from his motor car as he whizzed past, covering us with dust.

During the hot, midday hours we used to sprawl in the shelter of an ilex or an over-size boxwood tree in which the coast abounded, more often than not surrounded by ruins – we soon learned that the ancients had already identified for us all the best landing places, however insignificant. There we reclined drinking wine, eating chickens we had bought from some cook shop, carving up big loaves of bread that looked as if they might have been baked by Phoenicians, dreamily listening to the droning of unidentifiable insects, the shrill screaming of the cicadas or the endless din set up by the frogs in some nearby marsh, and sniffing the pungent smelly
maquis
.

We worked at Ibn Hani, a place lost among olive groves, where there were the remains of a temple and an amphitheatre, and at Ras Shamrah, the site of Ugarit, a famous city of the Phoenicians but with origins far older, going back to 5000 BC, perhaps further. Much of Ugarit was buried under Ras Shamrah, but a French expedition had continued to excavate it until the war put an end to their labours. Now it was completely unprotected – there were no custodians to harass us – and unvisited. In places one could look down, strata on strata, fifty feet or so, through different levels of civilization to where people had lived who had worshipped Baal, the God of Rain, and Dagon, to levels at which the inhabitants had had relations with Egypt and Crete in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before Christ; to where later, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, they had installed sanitation
and constructed burial vaults; and to the level where, in the thirteenth century, the Mycenaeans had lived in it until its final extinction by some peoples of the sea in the twelfth century. It was here at Ras Shamrah that, scrabbling among the rubble in the fearful afternoon heat with my stick, keeping watch while the others slept, I discovered two exquisite miniature bronze bulls which subsequently reached England, only to be stolen from over a fireplace in a drawing-room while we were having a Christmas party.

On Saturday mornings we used to return to Beirut in pursuit of pleasures to which the ancients themselves were no strangers. Together with the officer who, like me, had been attracted by the two Greek escapees from Athens, I used to put up at the St George Hotel, where they continued to stay. We saw nothing of the city. Once or twice we all four lunched together at a restaurant perched on the cliff overlooking some impressive offshore stacks called the Grottes des Pigeons. Another time we went to the mountains and stayed in a village. For the rest of the time we sunbathed with them on the hotel beach, swam, made love, drank, sunbathed, swam, made love, ordered up club sandwiches and so on until, at dawn on Monday morning, I used to board our sinister-looking motor car to cries of ‘Oh, do hurry up, sir!' and roar away for Ras Shamrah, Tartus or wherever we happened to be making our maps. We were completely exhausted, unlike our partners who, unknown to us, had other bedfellows of a more senior, stay-at-home kind during the week. We had met our match, we both agreed, in these girls, who, for us at least, did everything for love.

Our only real problem during these wild, acrobatic weekends was what to do with the bulging haversacks which contained those fruits of our labours which we were still working on – those maps and reports that, once they were completed, were immediately despatched by way of the NOIC to Combined Operations
Headquarters in Cairo, a world away. We resisted the suggestions of the manager of the hotel, always solicitous for our comfort, who saw us encumbered with them on the beach and at the bar, that we should entrust these haversacks to the hotel safe, in the same way as other guests no doubt had consigned their bibelots from Cartier & Boucheron before the war. Neither, however irresistible they were on other planes, did we have sufficient faith in our companions to put them in their hands, although they never asked us to do so. Their means of sustenance which allowed them to stay week after week at this expensive hotel was, to put it mildly, mysterious (although our suspicions proved to be unfounded). In the end the best, if not the only solution, seemed to be, apart from spending the weekends among the ruins of Ras Shamrah, to continue to do what we had been doing up to now – carry them with us always and when we were with the girls stow this material under them and the mattresses.

During this time, in the brief intervals when I had time to read anything, I read Symons on Baron Corvo, wishing that I could lay hands on the Baron's own book,
Hadrian the Seventh
, and also a lot of Hemingway, whose feeling for the sun-drenched open air and the pleasures of a physical existence seemed, almost uncannily, to complement the kind of life that we ourselves were living. Among them was
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, which had only recently been published. I gave it to the officer masquerading as a sergeant to read, and eventually almost everyone in the SBS read it. Up here in the Levant we could not hear the bell tolling; up here in the Levant in the spring of 1942 you would have needed an ear trumpet to hear it.

After this extraordinary, almost dream-like interlude in our military careers, we all returned to the fields of action from which that fickle goddess Fortune had fancifully removed us. However, before doing so, we delivered to the DCO by way of the NOIC
the final instalments of our labours which, altogether, were of almost encyclopaedic proportions.

This mass of material, flavoured with a surprising amount of newly-acquired culture – the reports of the cultivated and gallant sergeant made particularly good reading – had an extremely short life. Consigned to the most secret archives, the whole lot was used a few months after we delivered the final sections to stoke the already huge funeral pyres of documents that were on no account to fall into enemy hands – although what use they would be to the Germans with Egypt already in their hands it was difficult to imagine – pyres which created a dense pall of smoke over Cairo in that summer of 1942, when it seemed more than probable that Rommel would arrive in the city in person.