From The Holy Mountain (24 page)

We whooped as we passed the shepherd's sheiling and were again chased by the enormous wolf-dog; we cheered and accelerated away down the bumpy potholed track, throwing up a thick dust-trail into which the slavering beast disappeared. As we crossed a ridge and saw Midyat laid out below us, we talked excitedly about what we would do that night, Mas'ud reeling off the enormous dinner his wife would prepare for him when he returned. He was still detailing the different kinds of Kurdish sweets with which he would end this meal, when an army Land-Rover suddenly pulled out from its hiding place behind a pile of discarded roadbuilding material and blocked the road in front of us. As Mas'ud screeched to a halt, only narrowly avoiding crashing into the Land-Rover's side, three soldiers appeared on top of the gravel and levelled their carbines at us.

We got out with our hands raised. The officer asked for our documents, and taking them from us, read out the details down his walkie-talkie. There was a crackle of static and some instructions. Putting our documents into his top pocket, he told us to get back into our car and follow him. The Land-Rover turned around and the soldiers jumped in, keeping their guns pointed in our direction.

At the crossroads in the town centre, the officer conferred with the plainclothes security police in their dark glasses. Two of them got into a waiting white Fiat and followed behind us. Sandwiched in this way, we were escorted out of town to a barbed-wire enclosure a mile or so on the far side of Midyat. Mas'ud looked accusingly at me, but neither of us spoke. I hid my notebooks under my seat. The officer jumped out and indicated that we should follow him. After a week in the company of the Suriani with their Turkish horror-stories, I half-imagined the Turks within to be preparing their thumbscrews and racks. To my alarm and disgust, I saw that my hands were shaking.

Inside, however, we found to our surprise that the Turkish army could not have been much more polite had we been visiting dignitaries from Ankara. After a short wait in a corridor, we were escorted to the office of an army Captain. He turned out to be young and educated and bored, and seemed surprised and rather pleased to see us. Speaking in fluent French, he told us to sit down while the officer from the Land-Rover related the circumstances of our arrest and handed over our documents. When he had finished he saluted and left the room. The Captain took out a packet of cigarettes and offered it to us, calling at the same time for tea to be brought. Where was I from, he asked. Scotland? Did I have any Johnnie Walker in the car? He was from Istanbul, he said, and was looking forward to going back home on leave. He had had enough of this barbarous end of the country. He asked whether I had been to Istanbul, and I gabbled away nervously about the beauties of his home city. He briefly asked what I was doing in these parts, and I told him I was writing about Byzantine architecture. After twenty more minutes of general conversation, he dialled a number and spoke briefly to the person who answered. Then he apologised to us for the trouble he had caused us and said we were free to go.

Back in the car, Mas'ud leaned back in his seat and exhaled loudly.

'I don't believe it,' he said.

'If the police have been following us,' I said, 'they certainly didn't tell the army about it.' 'He was so friendly.'

'Let's go,' I said, 'before they change their mind.'

Mas'ud twisted the key in the ignition, turned the car around, and drove forward. He had nearly passed through the gates when from the building behind us there came a series of loud shouts. In the mirror we could see two armed recruits running frantically towards us, shouting for us to stop. I felt a lead weight sink to the pit of my stomach. The soldiers beckoned us back, and Mas'ud slowly reversed the car to the command post. We sat there without getting out, wondering what might be coming. There must have been a call from the secret police: who had I talked to? What had they said? Where were my notes?

Seconds later, the Captain came down the steps and walked over to the car.

'Messieurs,' he said gaily. 'Vous etes idiots.'

So this was how it was going to be. Our eyes met.

'You've forgotten these,' he said.

In his hand he held my passport and Mas'ud's ID card. 'Bonne chance!' he said, smiling broadly and waving goodbye. "Visit us again soon! Bon voyage!'

III

The Baron Hotel, Aleppo, Syria,
28
August
1994

The Baron is a legendary place. Everyone from Agatha Christie to Kemal Ataturk has stayed here, while Monsieur T. E. Lawrence's unpaid bill of 8 June 1914 is still displayed in a glass cabinet in the sitting room. Downstairs, the decor, untouched since the 1920s, is so redolent of the Levant between the wars that you can almost hear the swish of flapper-dresses and baggy tropical suits echoing from the now chipped and silent dance-floor.

Despite the chaos of Syria's Ba'athist economy and the decay of many of its towns, the Baron is still, from the outside, rather a magnificent building: a stone-built Ottoman villa with a blind arcade of mock-Mameluke arches giving onto a wide first-floor terrace. At the top of the facade are sculpted the words
Baron's Hotel 1911, Mazloumian Freres,
in French, Armenian and Ottoman Turkish. Inside are high-beamed ceilings and brass chandeliers; a large notice dating from the early years of the French Mandate proclaims that the Baron is 'L'unique hotel de lere classe a Alep: confort parfait, situation unique,' while another of the same period, decorated with a watercolour of Ctesiphon, announces that the Simplon-Orient Express can transport you in 'safety, rapidity and economy' from London to Baghdad in seven days (the original promise of six days, obviously over-optimistic, is crossed out).

Yet for all its charm, it would be dishonest to pretend that the Baron has not seen better days. The rooms - which look as though

they haven't been painted since Leonard Woolley stayed here on his way to dig the Ziggurat of Ur in 1922 - are now shabby and unloved, with peeling wallpaper and potholed parquet floors. Moreover the
situation unique
— the shady cypresses, the gardens and bubbling canals which Lawrence writes of in his letters - have long since given way to lines of seedy hard-porn cinemas covered with lurid posters of nearly-naked American girls (this week
The Last Virgin in Las Vegas)
into which crowds of hungry-looking Arab boys pour each evening.

In the streets, jammed bumper-to-bumper, 1940s Pontiacs exhale a thick fog of black exhaust. The pollution wafts into the streetside restaurants and clings to the layers of grease dripping from the grilling doner kebabs. In between the
kebabji
and the blue-movie theatres lie the heavy-engineering shops and garages -
Sarkis Iskenian Caterpillar Parts, A. Sanossian Grinding: Vee Rubber Wambo Superstone
- belonging to the Armenian entrepreneurs who for the last forty years have dominated what is left of the once-vibrant Aleppo economy. If, like Lawrence, you tried to go shooting 'one hundred yards in front of the Baron', today you would be more likely to hit either a Bedu aficionado of the
Emmanuelle
films or some grimy-faced Armenian mechanic than the duck Lawrence was after.

Nevertheless, it is still easy to see why this hotel appealed so much to a former generation of English travellers. At eight this morning I woke up, momentarily confused as to where I was, and looked at the wall beside my bed. There hung an English coaching print and a framed portrait of a black retriever with a pheasant in its mouth emerging from a village stream beside a thatched cottage ('The most useful and adaptable of all the retrievers, with a formidable record of wins at county shows, the black retriever has a strong otter-like tail well suited for swimming'). It was then that the penny dropped. The inexplicably horrible food, the decaying neo-Gothic architecture, the deep baths and the uncomfortable beds: no wonder Lawrence and his contemporaries felt so much at home here - the Baron is the perfect replica of some particularly Spartan English public school, strangely displaced to the deserts of the Middle East.

And yet, despite its best efforts, I feel this place growing on me. I have always loved the fact that in Syria you can still walk on Roman roads that have not been resurfaced since the time of Diocletian, or stand on castle walls that have not been restored since Saladin stormed them. In the same way, perhaps I should be pleased that in the Baron you can sleep in sheets that have not been washed since T. E. Lawrence slept there, and even be bitten by the same colonies of bedbugs that once nibbled the great Ataturk.

As I sit here with a glass of whisky under an endearingly ludicrous picture of two top-hatted English coachmen, the troubles of Mar Gabriel feel a world away. But I must record how I got here from the roadblocks and minefields of the Tur Abdin.

After our arrest in Midyat, Mas'ud and I retraced our footsteps along the heavily guarded main roads to Mardin, and there, within sight of the Byzantine domes and cupolas of the monastery of Deir el-Zaferan, drove steeply downhill into the baking mud-steppe of Mesopotamia. From there we headed east again, along the Syrian border, on the main military road which leads through the plains towards the Iraqi frontier and Baghdad. Twin electrified border fences and a minefield flanked us immediately to the right; beyond stretched the plains of northern Syria. The smooth, wide military road was quite empty but for the occasional Turkish tank rumbling slowly in the opposite direction.

Delayed by our arrest and the interminable gauntlet of army checkpoints, we were in danger of failing to get to the border post before it closed for the day. But Mas'ud drove at breakneck speed, and after less than forty minutes the towers of the border town of Nisibis rose shimmering from the plain ahead. During late antiquity Nisibis passed back and forth between the Byzantines and the Sassanian Persians, finally being surrendered to the Persians in 363
a.d
. Yet the town somehow managed to maintain an effervescent intellectual life despite its frontline position and the incessant skirmishes between its Persian garrison and that of the

Byzantine frontier post of Dara, less than forty miles to the west.

For after the Sassanian takeover of the city, Nisibis became the principal centre of Persia's large Nestorian Christian minority. Its university of eight hundred students came to rival that of Edessa. Indeed it was through Nisibis - along with the two other great Nestorian university cities, Jundishapur (near Teheran) and Merv (now in Uzbekistan) - that the Nestorians played an important part in bringing Greek philosophy, science and medicine first to the Persian and thence to the Islamic world. Moreover it was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis - via Moorish Cordoba - that many of the works of Aristotle and Plato eventually reached the new universities of medieval Europe.

As far as the Greeks were concerned, however, the loss of the town remained a continual slight to Byzantine pride; and the fact that it came to shelter a population of Christian heretics only made this worse. As a result the city figures surprisingly prominently in Byzantine letters, and John Moschos tells a story about Nisibis which, for all its piety, gives an intriguingly detailed and convincing picture of bazaar life in a Mesopotamian border town in the sixth century.

The anecdote concerns a Christian woman married to a 'pagan' (presumably Zoroastrian) soldier. The soldier had a small sum of capital which he wanted to invest. But his Christian wife (presumably a Nestorian) persuaded him to give it instead to the poor who waited in front of the five-arched portal of the Nisibis cathedral, promising that the god of the Christians would reward him many times over.

'Three months later, the couple's expenses exceeded their ability to pay. The man said to his wife: "Sister, the god of the Christians has not paid us back, and here we are, in need." In reply, the woman said, "He will repay. Go to where you handed over the money and he will return it right away." So her husband set off to the church at a run. When he came to the spot where he had given the coins to the poor, he went all round the church, expecting to find somebody who would give back to him what was owing. But all he found was the poor, still sitting there. While he was trying to decide which of them to speak to, he saw at his feet on the marble floor one large
miliarision
lying there, one of those which he himself had distributed. Bending down he picked it up and went back to his house. Then he said to his spouse: "Look - I just went to your church, and believe me, woman, I did not see the god of the Christians as you said I would. And he certainly did not give me anything, except this
miliarision
lying where I give fifty away." '