The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (26 page)

We left Ras Karkar by its western slope, which was its slum slope. Weird limestone sculptures had been carved by the rain, standing out from the slope like ghouls and
hoodoos
. Around their bases were children’s shorts, dead dogs, flip-flops and thousands of nappies, flung dirty from the balconies of the houses. Most of the nappies had split and rotted, and the absorbent gel with which nappies are packed had spilled out in grey crystalline slews.

Raja and I were accompanied by a German geologist called Clemens Messerschmid. Truly, that was his name. Messerschmid was tall. His hair was grey and long. Hanks of it fell across his face, and he used his little fingers to tuck them back behind his ears. He walked with a hungry bouncing lope. His passion was geology, and he barely talked about anything else. For years, he had been studying the flow-rates of the springs and rivers in Wadi Zarqa. The Israelis didn’t want him working in the West Bank, but he had developed methods of avoiding their attentions when he travelled in and out of the country, and thwarting their attempts to hinder his research.

Messerschmid seemed to know everything about the region through which we were walking. He was familiar with every footpath and every side valley, and graded each according to the relative likelihoods of meeting settlers or soldiers. He liked to describe the geomorphology of each new area, and his language was unselfconsciously lyrical. He drew explanatory diagrams for me in quick black ink. I loved listening to him. He told me patiently about the ‘
anticline
cross-section’ of the West Bank and the location of the two vast and crucial aquifers which hydrate the dry land. He explained the colours of the landscape; how the loose iron in the soil is mobilized by the dry climate, such that it rusts the earth orange and brown. He pointed out the three main surface rock formations of the area: the plated limestone and marl horizons of the ‘Bethlehem’ formation, the marl of the ‘Yatta’ formation, and the karstified limestone of the ‘Hebron’ formation, with its Swiss-cheese holes, which Melville had disparaged.

Geologists describe the solvent action of rainwater on limestone as creating ‘preferential pathways’. With each rainfall, water-drops are sent wandering across the surfaces of the limestone, etching the track of their passage with carbonic acid as they go. These first traverses create shallow channels, which in turn attract the flow of subsequent water, such that they become more deeply scored into the rock. Through the action of water, a hairline crack over time therefore becomes a runnel, which becomes a fracture site, which becomes an escarpment edge.

In a landscape where the limestone is a major surface formation, like the West Bank, these larger-scale fissures are often decisive in the development of terracing and footpaths. Humans and animals, seeking a route, are guided by the pre-configured habits of the terrain. These pedestrians create preferential pathways, which in turn attract the flow of subsequent pedestrians, all of whom etch the track of their passage with their feet as they go. In this way the path of a raindrop hundreds of thousands of years ago may determine the route of a modern-day walker.

Later, we were walking up a wadi bed towards a refugee camp. The stones of the wadi had been rinsed, turned and graded by its intermittent flow, so it was like walking a cobbled street.

‘These are the most natural paths of the landscape, and certainly the oldest,’ said Messerschmid.

I saw a rounded lump of
chert
; bent down and picked it up. It resembled a white eyeball wrapped in layers of brown linen. Messerschmid took the stone from my hand, eyed it back and weighed it thoughtfully.

‘A nice piece of chert, this.’

I told him about the questioning I had received at Tel Aviv concerning my flints. He smiled.

‘Ah, well, you know that chert, a flint, is the favourite stone of the intifada!’

He tossed up the eyeball and caught it again.

‘The young Palestinians have told me that chert is their favourite throwing stone, that it makes the best missile. It’s sharp, hard, and heavy in the hand.’

Toss. Catch.

‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the stones”.’

Messerschmid tucked a hank of hair behind his ears. Raja walked on down the path with careful steps. A bulbul fluttered out from a gum tree. Yesterday’s rain soaked down through the
karstic
pipes into the aquifer 40 million years beneath our feet.

‘Not far from here,’ said Messerschmid, ‘I once came across two chameleons making love in a fig tree. One of them had turned black, the other had turned red. It was unclear which one was enjoying itself.’

Miles later, down in Wadi Zarqa, we stopped at a trough chiselled into a limestone cliff, into which spring water trickled. Messerschmid bent over and drank from the spring with two cupped hands.

‘They call these the bleeding hills, or the crying hills,’ said Messerschmid, pointing to the spring, ‘because they weep water. In January, February, when the proper rainfall happens here, many springs run. They are the consequence of the meeting of geological layers: where karstic limestone encounters marl, the Hebron meeting the Yatta, the water can’t descend further and so it emerges as a spring. The springs run, and the hills weep.’

He indicated a dark slur of stain on the limestone with his little finger.

‘We call such springs “contact springs”. They occur when two different kinds of rock formation encounter one another. Permeable and impermeable combine, and the result is a kind of generosity.’

We left the spring and walked west through hot, still air, past a freshly ploughed field. Sweat beaded on my eyebrows. Mosquitoes buzzed around my head. We passed stands of eucalyptus with their peeling bark, a species introduced by the British, and then among irrigated terraces of aubergine and chilli plants, cages of netting draped with vines, the vegetation startling against the tan soil. I remembered that British army snipers were taught to glance at something bright green just before firing, as the best way to clear the eyes.

Figures appeared on the western skyline, backlit, silhouettes. A ripple of concern passed between Raja and Messerschmid. Settlers? Then a sheep moved onto the skyline to join the figures. Bedouin. Raja relaxed.

Back in Ramallah that night, I walked the streets, enjoying the cool air and the feeling of enclosure that the city and the darkness brought, after the exposure of the day. On waste ground by the side of a busy four-lane road, I passed a skip whose contents had been set on fire, and out of which rose and shifted a column of black smoke. A single trainer hung over the outside of the skip, hitched by its laces to its unseen partner on the inside. I waited to cross the road, while the pedestrian crossing flashed its orders:
WALK, DON’T WALK; WALK, DON’T WALK
.

11

Roots

On pilgrimage — ‘Bees of the Invisible’ — The Rule of Resonance — The Library of the Forest — A demonstration of dominion —
The Mask of Henry Moore
— A winter storm —
Zarzamora virgen
—
Senderismo
,
cañadas
&
caminos
— The survival of the old ways — The witches of Galicia — Valley as heartland — A gentle Green Man — Eternal light, resinous air — Miguel’s observatory — Moss-pillows — Black vulture — A miracle of levitation — Magical Zen garden — Prometheus unbound — Under a hot-coin sun — River-bathing — The pollen shower — A vulture feather across the path — Into Segovia — City of birds — North-west into the heat haze.

‘We have been,’ wrote the poet Edmund Blunden in 1942, ‘
increasingly
on
pilgrimage
.’ We are once again increasingly
on
pilgrimage. In Spain, medieval hostelries on the roads to Santiago, closed for centuries, are reopening to cater to the volume of new custom along the Camino. Across Europe a revival is underway, with pilgrimage numbers steadily increasing even as churchgoing figures steadily fall. Shortly after I returned from Palestine, I came across a beautiful short essay by a Czech writer called Václav Cilek, entitled ‘Bees of the Invisible’. ‘
The number of quiet pilgrims
is rising,’ it began. ‘Places are starting to move. On stones and in forests one comes across small offerings – a posy made from wheat, a feather in a bunch of heather, a circle from snail shells.’ I recognized these insignia of passage – minor rearrangements of the world, serving as temporary waymarkers – having encountered them often on my walks. Indeed, it seemed that every month I had been walking the old ways, I had met or heard tell of someone else setting out on a walk whose purposes exceeded the purely transportational or the simply recreational, and whose destination was in some sense sacred. Thousands of these improvised pilgrimages seemed to be occurring, often unguided by the principles of a major world religion, and of varying levels of seriousness and sanctity. The hinterlands were filling with eccentrics, making their odd journeys in the belief that certain voyages out might become voyages in.

The words ‘pilgrim’ and ‘pilgrimage’ have become, at least to secular ears, tainted with a tiresome piety. But the people I was meeting on my walks were inspiring and modest improvisers. All were using walking to make meaning for themselves – some simply, some elaborately; some briefly, some life-dominatingly – and I couldn’t find a better name for them than pilgrims: Raja out on his
sarhas
, Finlay MacLeod and Anne Campbell on the moor paths of Lewis, Steve treading his track between his circle of stones, Ian sailing his sea roads through storm and sunshine, even Clemens Messerschmid, trying to understand politics by means of geology. Back among the dead were Thomas, Shepherd and dozens more.

Stories reached me of other such ‘quiet pilgrims’, undertaking their slow travels. A young man, influenced by George Borrow, had set off and walked from Cambridge to St David’s in Pembrokeshire, following only footpaths and green ways across the country. Three folk singers called Ed, Will and Ginger had sold their possessions, left their homes and taken to the paths of England, sleeping in woods and earning their food by singing folk songs they learnt along the way. A woman had walked from Paris to Jerusalem over the course of a year, and met her husband en route. A man had walked the boundaries and footpaths of the county of Northamptonshire (home of Britain’s boot industry), sleeping in barns and church porches as he went. One day, in conversation with a friend who walks, I noticed that tattooed in a continuous circle around his bicep was probably the best-known line in Spanish poetry: Antonio Machado’s ‘
No hay camino, se hace camino al andar
’ – ‘
there is no road, the road is made by walking
’.

A man I’d never met wrote from Dorset to tell me of a long walk he had made along the Ridgeway, with a close friend who had been released after four years in prison. He sent me blurred photographs, taken through heat hazes, showing chalk paths disappearing over green hills into the uncertain distance. ‘Once walked,’ he wrote, ‘the old ways inhabit us. Even here, now, in the green and low south-west, I often find myself looking high for a beaten chalk path, and recalling those days of strange liberation.’ I didn’t dare ask what the friend’s crime had been that had brought such a sentence with it. One day I walked twenty-five miles with a young man called Bram Thomas Arnold who, after the death of his father, had set out from London and walked to St Gallen in Switzerland (where he had lived as a child), carrying his father’s ashes with him, sleeping in a small tent by the sides of vast alfalfa prairies and cropfields in northern France, making camp after dark and striking camp before first light in order to avoid farmers and police.

There was also Cilek himself, a geologist specializing in rare minerals, who was born in a country he chose to refer to as ‘
Bohemia
’. Thirty years previously Cilek had started to wander across his own country, feeling inexplicably compelled by the desire to explore what he called ‘underground empires’. He did not do so with any purpose in mind, in terms of the acquisition of understanding or of experience: he was ‘a pilgrim, not a conqueror’. Over the last ten years, however, his curious compulsion had sharpened into an obsession, and he had taken to walking as often as he could through hallowed places, castle sites, cloisters and churches. He had spent a week walking the thirty-mile-long maze of subterranea at Monkton Farleigh Quarry near Corsham. ‘I find I understand much better those landscapes and places where I can get underground, or at least sleep in nature,’ he wrote. Cilek proposed a series of what he called ‘pilgrim rules’. Of these, the two most memorable were the ‘Rule of Resonance’: ‘A smaller place with which we resonate is more important than a place of great pilgrimage’; and the ‘Rule of Correspondence’: ‘A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.’

I read Cilek’s rules not long after returning from Palestine, and soon afterwards I travelled to Madrid to walk a branch-line of the most famous pilgrimage route of them all, the Camino de Santiago, from Madrid north up through the pine forests of the Guadarrama mountains, then down to the medieval city of Segovia and out onto the scorched yellow
meseta
– the high tablelands – towards Santiago. I also wanted to meet a man called Miguel Angel Blanco, who has created one of the most astonishing libraries in existence, dedicated to the archiving and documenting of his many hundreds of quiet pilgrimages.