In Xanadu (8 page)

After passing through the length of its buried catacomb-passages, we climbed the winding stairs of a tower and stood on the battlements, looking down over the al-Garb. I tried to link the ruins with the legends I had pored over in libraries in Cambridge. Where was Henry of Champagne standing when the
fida’
i
leapt over the walls? Where was the library which so impressed Yves the Breton? During a truce he had been sent as an envoy from the French crusader, St Louis, and had been allowed to delve among the scrolls of the Assassins. Among a myriad of spells, cures and incantations he had found the text of an apocryphal sermon addressed by Christ to St Peter, who, the sectaries told him, was an incantation of Abraham, Noah and Abel. When he returned to the crusader camp at Acre, he took with him presents from the Old Man of the Mountain which included a 'crystal elephant very well carved, and an animal they call a giraffe, also in crystal, balls of divers sorts also in crystal, and backgammon and chess boards, and all these were ornamented with amber, and the amber was attached to the crystal by fair filigree of pure gold. When the coffers in which these things were packed were opened it seemed as if the whole chamber were filled with spices so fragrantly did these things smell.'

After Masyaf, the second castle we visited was a disappointment. We took a bus some fifteen miles down the al-Garb and arrived at the Sheizar soon after midday. The castle was badly mined and the village at its base was an unappealing expanse of mud brick and dung.

But, with a little imagination, you could just see why the crusaders tried so hard to capture the fort they called ‘La Grande Cesare'. In its day it must have been an impressive sight. It stands on a great hogsback ridge above a bend in the Orontes, with sheer cliffs on two sides, and a steep slope on the third. The slope was glazed with a smooth glacis of neatly fitted stone, the cliffs topped with a curtain wall and on the fourth side, where nature provided no defence, a great fosse hid been sunk into the rock, one hundred feet deep by thirty feet wide. This was crowned with a keep of carefully dressed yellow-ochre stone, its smooth face broken by courses of reused classical columns laid horizontally into the wall.

We entered the castle through its great Saracenic gateway, and climbed up along the length of the hogsback to the keep, where in the cool of the shade we sat and chatted until the sun had sunk lower. As with Masyaf, Sheizar is more remarkable for its romantic associations than its architecture. Anyone who knows the Marcher castles of Edward the First or the keeps of the Scots Borders can easily be disappointed by the much-vaunted crusader castles, which, with the exception of Krak, Saiyoune and Safita are often quite modest buildings. Where they are exceptional is in the depth of their recorded history, and this is especially so of Sheizar, where the memoirs survive of one of its castellans, the urbane and civilized Usamah ibn-Munquid. Usamah lived a century or so before Polo, but his writings give a unique picture of everyday life in the mediaeval Middle East and, perhaps more than any other manuscript of t he period, put flesh and blood on the dry bones of the world of Polo's
The Travels.

Usamah was a gentleman and a scholar. He was observant, literate and intelligent yet obsessed with the twin loves of the mediaeval nobility - war and hunting - so that in his memoirs some very touching, homely scenes sit alongside gruesome descriptions of battles, wounds and natural disasters. At their best the memoirs read rather like an eleventh-century version of Turgenev's
Sketches From A Huntsman's Album.

In Sheizar we had two hunting fields, one in the mountains to the south of the town for partridges and hares; and another on the bank of the river in the cane fields to the west, for waterfowl, francolins, hares and gazelles ... Those were carefree days....

We would start for the hunt from the gate of the lower town, then walk to the marshy cranebrakes. The cheetahs and sakes [large hawks] would be kept outside the field, while we would go into the brakes with the falcons. If a francolin rose, the falcon would strike it. If a hare jumped we would throw a falcon upon it. If the falcon seized it, well and good; otherwise as soon as a hare got beyond the canebrakes, the cheetahs would be loosed upon it... .

My father had a way of organizing the hunting party
as though it were a battle or a very serious affair. No
one was supposed to engage in conversation with his
companion, and everybody was expected to have one
concern only, scanning the ground to spy out a hare or
a bird in its nest 

Through a long series of anecdotes, Usamah, like Turgenev, gradually builds up a wonderful picture of the country life of his time. We meet the two Majaju brothers who rent Usamah's mill at Sheizar. The mill is profitable, but is next to a slaughter yard which is full of hornets, and one of the brothers is stung twice and dies. We meet al-Zamarrakal, the old brigand, who Usamah encounters dressed in women's clothing about to steal horses from the crusaders. A day later he sees him again, wounded, but a horse, a shield and a lance the richer. We meet Muzaffar, the merchant, who suffers from a scrotal hernia and is cured by eating stewed ravens.

Usamah had a magpie mind and nothing was too silly or inconsequential for inclusion. Thus soon after a serious passage about a siege of Sheizar by the Byzantines and their terrifying mangonels, Usamah recounts a number of ridiculous stories about a cat who committed suicide on seeing a lion skin, his fearsome warrior uncle who was terrified of mice, and a tame lion in Damascus which was chased around a courtyard by an angry sheep.

Usamah was a maverick, eccentric enough to record these stories (and in his old age to compile the
Kitbal-'Asa,
the 'Book of the Stick', an extremely odd anthology of anecdotes, proverbs and sayings all on the subject of sticks), but he was also a war hero who repeatedly repulsed the massed attacks of the crusaders, and a serious poet whose town house in Damascus became a literary salon for the intelligentsia of the most cultured of Arab capitals.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Usamah's books are his reflections on his European neighbours, the crusaders. He admired their military skill, their courage and their horsemanship. But the aesthete in him was disgusted by their habits and bored by their conversation: 'They are animals,' he wrote, 'possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, just as animals have only the virtues of strength and carrying loads -but: nothing else.' A story from the memoirs illustrates the point:

Isamah was in his family's bath house at Ma'aret when a Frankish knight wandered in stark naked. The Franks refused to conform to the Arab practice of wearing a cloth round their waist when bathing, and the knight went up to the bath attendant, Salim, an old retainer of Usamah's. and snatched away his loincloth. When he saw that Salim had, in the Arab manner, shaved his pubic hair, the knight got in a great state of excitement and bawled at the top of his voice across the bath house. 'Salim! It's magnificent! You shall certainly do the same to me.' To Usamah's horror the knight lay on his back. 'His hair,' he comments was as long as his beard.' But there was worse to follow. When the bath attendant had shaved him, the knight felt the place with his hand and, says Usamah, found it agreeably smooth. "Salim," cried the knight, "you will do the same for my dama." ' The knight sent a valet to fetch his wife, and when they returned and the valet had brought her in, she too ay down on her back and was shaved while the local Arab gentry looked on. Usamah was disgusted: 'The knight thanked Salim,' he adds, 'and paid him for his services.'

By five the sun had sunk low, casting long shadows over the broken walls and fallen pillars of the castle. The mid-afternoon haze had disappeared and you could see clearly down the valley, over the fields to the tell of Apamea, and the barley-sugar pillars of the old Roman Imperial Stud; beyond rose the mountains, butter-coloured in the evening light. Nearby, a cloud of dust indicated that shepherd boys were already leading their flocks back home for the night, and we slid down the glacis and walked over to the old arched bridge which spanned the Orontes. In the evening cool the women of the town were doing their washing in the river and the handles of their basins flashed in the sun. A little boy in shorts led
a
milk cow through the sedge and bulrushes, and over the piles of clothes drying on the riverbank.

We sat on the bank and dangled our feet in the water, Nizar said that sometimes when he was
a
boy he used to come to Sheizar to fish. He would sit in the dust in the shade of a tree reading a novel, with his line tied to
a
branch and a maggot wriggling in the current. If he caught something he might roast it on a charcoal fire; or else he would sell it to the villagers and when he had saved enough money he could take a bus into Horns and buy another novel. Perhaps he would get a Joseph Conrad or another Thomas Hardy. He liked Thomas Hardy.
I
talked to Nizar of Usamah and told him the story of the Majaju brothers whose mill must have stood nearby. He shrugged his shoulders.

'Your English books are full of good things.
I
am not understanding why you like so much our Arab writing.'

'Usamah is also full of good things.'

'Not so full as your Henry Fielding.'

'I've never read any Fielding.'

Oh, Mr William, you are big fool. Missy Laura has read much Henry Fielding, I think.' Laura nodded.

Henry Fielding,' said Nizar smacking his lips, 'is the father of your English fiction.' 'What about Chaucer?'

'I do not know this Chaucer. He is older than Henry Fielding?' 'Certainly.'

'And he is good writer?" 'Very good.'

'I think you wrong. If Chaucer was good writer I would hear his name on "Kaleidoscope". All the good writers they are on "Kaleidoscope". But never your Mr Chaucer.'

'Is Shakespeare on "Kaleidoscope"?' asked Laura.

'No, but sometimes I have heard him and his renowned company mentioned. You know of Shakespeare, Mr William?'

A little.'

He was great English playwright and patriot, and he was a friend of the Arabs.' Are you sure?'

Oh yes, he was great English playwright.' 'No, I mean about the Arabs.'

Mr William, at my university I am studying a drama called
The
Merchant of Venice.
It is about a good merchant called Mr Anthony, and a wicked Israeli called Mr Shylock. Always Mr Shylock he wants the body of Mr Anthony, but in the end because he is wicked, greedy and a Jew, the judge throws him in prison and he is killed. It is a great symbol of the struggle of the Arabs and the Israelis.'

That can't have been the original meaning.'

'Oh, you are wrong. Mr Shakespeare loved very much the Arab people. So did your Lord Byron.'

'He didn't like Jews either?'

'No, Mr William. Always you make mistake. Mr Byron didn't like the Turks. Always he is fighting with the Arabs against the Turks who many years ago were enslaving the Arab peoples.*