NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (66 page)

“What is his name?” I asked Riaz.

Riaz said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” and looked wildly around in the traffic.

Two or three miles north of the city was Ras Shamrah. It had been an unimportant village until, in 1928, a farmer plowing on a nearby hill bumped his plow blade against the top edge of a symmetrical wall, buried in the ground. Further digging revealed it to be the wall of a large building, a palace in fact, and in time the foundations of an entire city were uncovered, thirty-six hectares of a royal town which was dug up in stages throughout the 1930s. That sort of discovery—even the detail of the plow blade—had happened many times before in the Middle East (and it was also a poor farmer in China who—with a hoe—found the terra-cotta warriors at Xian); peasant plowmen were probably the world’s first archaeologists. But Ugarit yielded a real treasure in the form of small beadlike clay tablets on which was inscribed the precursor of the alphabet I am using now. (Guidebook: “The writing on the tablets is widely accepted as being the earliest known alphabet. It was adapted by the Greeks, then the Romans, and it is from this script that all alphabets are derived.”) There were trinkets, too, bracelets and beads and spear points and knives; but the implications of the tablets the shape and size of a child’s finger bone were that this might be the earliest examples of human jotting.

Ali the caretaker apologized before charging me four dollars in Syrian piastres—it was almost his week’s pay—to look at the ruins. And he followed me, pointing to the crumbled walls and weedy plots, saying, “Palace … Library … Well … Aqueduct … Flight of stairs … House … Archway … Stables … Mausoleum …”

It was no more than a mute ground plan, spread over several hills, where with their narrow hooves balanced on the flinty walls goats cropped grass and pretty poppies grew wild. Having been excavated, it had been so neglected it was becoming overgrown, with rubble obscuring many of the walls; no pathways, no signs, no indication at all of what had been what. Ugarit (“once the greatest city in the entire Mediterranean”) was turning back into a buried city. It had been looted of all its trinkets and artifacts—they were on display in the Damascus Museum.

I liked being here alone, and felt it was all a throwback to an earlier time on the Mediterranean shore, when a traveler might stumble upon an ancient site and be shown around by a simple soul who lived nearby. The temples and villas of rural Italy, and Carthage and Pompeii and the ancient marble structures of Greece, had once been treated like this—just crumbling curiosities, where goats and sheep sheltered. Every so often a peasant would raid them for building blocks or marble slabs. That was definitely a feature of the Mediterranean—the temples turned into churches, the churches into ruins, the ruins buried until they became quarries for anyone who wanted to build a hut. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—we have the evidence of splendid engravings—Greece and Italy looked just like Ugarit did today, the ruins were novelties, broken cellars and fallen walls and stairs leading nowhere and tombs robbed of their artifacts and bones.

Sitting on a wall to admire it—the sun on the flowers and the grass that grew higher than the ruins—I was approached by Ali again.

“Alphabet there!” he said.

He pointed to a small enclosure, where in a shady muddy corner in a clump of weeds, the tablets had been found. It was as though it was sacred ground. In a sense it had been hallowed, by printed words, some of the first in this hemisphere. Five thousand years had passed since then. And here, in Syria, the very place that had given the world this elegant script, half the people were still illiterate.

On the way back to town, I asked Riaz, “Are there any ships that go from here to Cyprus?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“So can I get a ship to Cyprus from Latakia?”

“I think.”

“You think yes?”

“I think no.”

He was right—no ferries ran anymore, though there were plenty of container ships in the port. The town was small and tidy and sunny, and with vaguely European architecture, unlike cold, dusty and oriental Aleppo. It seemed to me amazing that in the space of a single morning I had passed from one climate to another; and not only the weather here, but aspects of the atmosphere, were identical to a hundred other places I had seen on the Mediterranean shore. Latakia was another example of a town that had much more in common with a port in Greece or Albania or Sardinia than any of its own inland towns, the sunny Mediterranean culture of the languor, the bougainvillea and palms and stucco house, the seaside promenade.

“You want to see Lateen?”

He meant a Christian church, a Latin. (Christians in Syria are called
Masihi
for their belief in the Messiah.) There was one in Latakia, a Frenchified two-steeple cathedral dating perhaps from the 1930s. (The French had controlled Syria from 1926 until independence in 1946.) There was a sense of life in Latakia that was self-contained; the town was seldom visited by any foreigners—foreigners hardly came to Syria and when they did they kept to Damascus and avoided the rather stagnant and vandalized coast. Better than any bricks and mortar were the tangerines and oranges of Latakia. I paid off Riaz, and bought some fruit, and walked the streets, and went to bed early.

Sixty miles down the coast, two hours on the slow bus, was Tartus, a new town enclosing an ancient walled city. I walked around it and thought: How has it changed? The people still lived among goat turds and foul garbage piles and they scrubbed their laundry in washtubs and hung it from their windows, where the sun struck through the archways. The children played in the narrow lanes where open drains bore foul water to the sewers. Rats darted between bricks and in the ruined nave of a church there was more laundry. There were old and new parts of the walled city, but it was hard to tell them apart. People had extended the old houses, added
rooms and stairways and vaulted ceilings and cubicles. Old men still sat under the arches of the city gate. I imagined that people here on the Syrian coast had more or less always lived like this, apparently higgledy-piggledy, but actually with great coherence, using all the available space, protected by the city walls and the privacy of their solid stone houses, in this honeycomb of an old town.

There was an island just off shore called Arwad. I wanted to look at it, but I could not find any boatman willing to take me there. So I walked along the beach. Tartus had the filthiest beach I had seen anywhere in the entire Mediterranean: it was mud and litter and sewage and oil slick. Perhaps that too was just as it had always been, the disorder and filth and carelessness. Swimming as a recreation and the craze for a suntan were recent novelties. In terms of its being regarded as an enormous sewer by the people who lived on its shore, the Mediterranean was perhaps no different from any other sea in the world.

“The sea in Western culture represents space, vacancy, primordial chaos,” Jonathan Raban wrote to me when I asked him why every sea on earth is treated like a toilet. Jonathan, one of my oldest friends, was the editor of
The Oxford Book of the Sea.
The biblical “waters” implying emptiness and chaos is specifically the Mediterranean. Jonathan indicated a passage in
The Enchafed Flood
in which Auden warmed to this theme of the disorderly sea: “The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that
‘there was no more sea’.”

“Put rubbish into it, and it magically disappears,” Jonathan said. “Water being the purifying element, you can’t pollute it—by definition.” Before the middle of the eighteenth century, “the sea was a socially invisible place; a space so bereft of respectable life that it was like a black hole. What you did in or on the sea simply didn’t count, which is partly why the seaside became known as a place of extraordinary license.” And he went on, “The sea wasn’t—isn’t—a place; it was undifferentiated space. It lay outside of society, outside of the world of good manners and social responsibilities. It was also famously the resort of filthy people—lowcaste
types, like fishermen … It was a social lavatory, where the dregs landed up.”

Nothing held me in Tartus. Wishing to see the great Crusader castle known variously as the Krac des Chevaliers and Qal’at al-Hisn, I made a deal with a taxi driver named Abdallah, who said he would take me there and then on to Homs, where I could get a bus or a train to Damascus.

“Lebanon!” he cried out after twenty minutes or so, gesturing towards the dark hills to the south.

And then he turned north off the road and headed for the heights of the mountain range that protected the interior of Syria, and commanded a view of the whole coast. At a strategic point, above the only valley that allowed access, was the most beautiful castle imaginable. After a childhood spent reading fairy tales, and believing in valiant deeds, and associating every act of love, chivalry, piety and valor—however specious they seemed in retrospect—it is impossible to belittle the Crusader castles of the Mediterranean, the scenes where such deeds were first defined for such a child as I was.

The knight in armor, a sword in one hand, his crested flag in the other, is such a potent symbol of virtue that I never questioned it. I was inspired by the fantasy and the idea, not the historical truth of the Crusader Knights. To a great extent, Westerners derive their notions of self-sacrifice and morality and romantic love from the stories of Crusaders—and incidentally their prejudices against Muslims and Jews—and a sense of style, too, of jousting and armor and pennants and castles. The Krac was the epitome of that sort of dream castle, with ramparts and dungeons and symmetrical fortifications, and a chapel and stately watchtowers.

“Neither a ruin nor a showplace,” T. E. Lawrence wrote of the Krac in his obscure book on Crusader castles. In 1936 Lawrence walked one thousand miles in the three hottest months, to do his survey of these magnificent structures. And he was not exaggerating when he called it the “best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world.”

Leaving the castle, I said to Abdallah, “How far is it to Damascus?”

Giving me the distance in kilometers, it seemed to be little more than
a hundred miles. There were still a few hours of daylight. We made another deal. He would take me there for forty dollars.

It was a rash move. I should have looked closer at his car. The road passed behind the mountains that border Lebanon, Al Jabal ash Sharqi. More important, the road passed along the edge of the Syrian desert.

“Sahara!” Abdallah yelled at the wasteland out the window.

Sheep cropped grass on the western side of the road. On the eastern side they would have starved. Camps of nomads, dark tents and flocks of animals were visible in the distance.

Just before darkness fell the engine faltered and Abdallah cursed, and the car replied, coughing one-syllable complaints, and then we were stuck.

“Okay, okay,” Abdallah said. To prove he was confident he took my picture and he screamed into the wind.

His high spirits were unconvincing. It was an electrical fault, he said. He waved to a passing car and said he would be right back. Then he was sped into the failing light, and dusk fell. I sat in the car, tuning my shortwave radio—news of the Israelis shelling southern Lebanon and blockading the fishing ports. Every so often a large truck went by, and the thud of its slipstream hit Abdallah’s car and shook it, and me.

Cold and unsettled at the edge of this desert, feeling thwarted, this enforced isolation filled my mind with memories of injustice—put-downs, misunderstandings, unresolved disputes, abusive remarks, rudeness, arguments I had lost, humiliations. Some of these instances went back many years. For a reason I could not explain, I thought of everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. I kept telling myself, “So what?” and “Never mind,” but it was no good. I could not stop the flow of unpleasant instances, and I was tormented.

From time to time, I laughed to think I was so removed mentally from Syria, but then I concluded that being in the middle of this desert had something to do with it. It was pitch dark and silent except for when the occasional trucks thundered by. I supposed that I was fearful and disgusted; I disliked the desert, I had been abandoned by Abdallah in this howling wilderness, where there was darkness and no water.

A pair of oncoming headlights wobbled off the road. Abdallah got out and approached the car laughing, carrying a gas can. Saying it was an electrical fault had been a face-saver.

It was late. Returning his gas can to the town of Deir Atiyeh, he stopped the car and I told him I was bailing out. There ensued a great whinging argument, as he pleaded, berated, complained and demanded more money than we had agreed on. I bought you oranges! he howled. I thought: I hate this nagging man. Then I said: Do I care? I gave him what he wanted and swore at him, and afterwards realized that the whole incident irritated me because I had been planning to tip him the very amount he had demanded.

In Deir Atiyeh, where I stayed the night, I had time to reflect on Assad’s personality cult. There was a large statue of the Father-Leader skating—perhaps on thin ice—in the center of Deir Atiyeh. There were also signs which a helpful citizen translated for me: “Smile! You Are In Deir Atiyeh!” “Be Happy—We Are Building the Country!” and “We in Deir Atiyeh Are All Soldiers of Hafez Assad.”

I have to call my informant Aziz, which was not his name, or else he will be persecuted and thrown into prison—the Syrian cure for dissenters—when the Commander of the Nation reads what I have written. “Aziz” was defiant. He said Assad’s vanity was ridiculous. “He was saluted at school each morning,” he said, when the kiddies entered the classroom. They chanted, “Hafez Assad, our leader forever!” and another one that started, “With blood, with soul, we sacrifice ourselves to you!” And it was he who told me that his palace in Damascus, built at a cost of $120 million—and of course no one but the Commander was allowed to enter it—was called Kasr el Sharb, The People’s Palace.