The Road to Oxiana (3 page)

The affinity of the landscape is with Asia rather than the other Greek islands. The earth is bleached to whiteness; only a green patch of vines or a flock of black and tawny goats relieves its arid solitude. Trees were planted along the immaculate tarmac road that brought me from Larnaca to Nicosia, casuarinas and cypresses. But the wind has defeated them, a furious hot blast which gets up off the sea every afternoon and turns the countless water-wheels. These gaunt iron skeletons stand in groves on the outskirts of the towns; their choral creaking is the island's chief song. In the distance are always mountains. And over the whole scene hangs a peculiar light, a glaze of steel and lilac, which sharpens the contours and perspectives, and makes each vagrant goat, each isolated carob tree, stand out from the white earth as though seen through a stereoscope.

The prospect is beautiful in the abstract, but violent and forbidding as the home of man. Even flowers are lacking, at this season, but for a small asphodel,
grey
in colour, whose nod is the nod of a ghost. The Greeks call it “candle-flower”. The north face of the mountains, between Nicosia and the coast, is more hospitable. Here, the earth is red, as though more nourishing, and the terraced fields are dotted with carob trees. The carob harvest was in full swing as I passed: men bashing down the fruit with long poles; women loading it into sacks
and loading them on to donkeys. The carob is exported to make cattle-food. It looks like a shrivelled banana and tastes, I found, like a glucose doormat.

I called on the Archbishop in Nicosia, to ask him for a letter to the clergy of Kiti. His attendants were disobliging; for the Church leads the opposition to the English, and they could hardly have known I had spoken for their cause in the English press. But the Archbishop, though old and deaf, seemed pleased to have a visitor, and caused the letter to be typewritten by a secretary. When it was done, they brought him a pen ready dipped in red ink, and with this he signed it, in virtue of a privilege granted by the Emperor Zeno in the Vth century: “+Cyril of Cyprus”. The secular Governors of the island have since usurped this privilege. The Turkish ones did so to annoy, the English to be picturesque.

I went to Bella Paese this morning, to see the abbey. My chauffeur went to see his fiancée, who lives in the adjacent village. She and her aunt gave me coffee and a preserve of sugared walnuts. We sat on a balcony, surrounded as ever by pots of basil and carnations, and looking down across the village roofs to the sea. The aunt's son, aged two, kept pushing chairs about and yelling “I'm a steamer, I'm a motor-car”. When the real motor-car, with me in it, left, he broke into a howl of disappointment, which followed me down the mountain.

This afternoon, at the castle, a gentleman wearing a white topee and white beard was pointed out to me as Mr. Jeffery. Since he was responsible for the antiquities of the island, I introduced myself. He recoiled. I tried to make amends by mentioning his book on the sieges of Kyrenia. “I've written many things”, he replied. “I can't possibly remember what. But
sometimes, you know, I read them, and I find them
quite interesting
.”

We proceeded to the castle, where we found some convicts engaged in desultory excavation. As we appeared, they threw down their spades, threw off their clothes, and ran out of a side door into the sea for their afternoon swim. “A pleasant life”, said Mr. Jeffery. “They only come here when they want a rest.” He produced a plan of the XIIIth-century foundations, as revealed by the convicts' digging. But exposition made him dry, and we went to the office for a drink of water. “The worst of water is,” he said, “it makes you so thirsty.”

Kyrenia
,
August 30th
.—Mounted on a chocolate-coloured donkey with ears eighteen inches long, I rode up to St. Hilarion's Castle. At the walls we tethered the donkey, and also its fellow brute, a grey mule bearing cold water in a massive clay amphora stopped with carob leaves. Precipitous paths and flights of steps led up through chapels, halls, cisterns, dungeons, to the topmost platform and its sentinel tower. Below the gleaming silver crags and stunted green-feathered pines, the mountain fell three thousand feet to the coastal plain, an endless panorama of rusty red speckled with myriads of little trees and their shadows, beyond which, sixty miles away across the blue sea, appeared the line of Asia Minor and the Taurus Mountains. Even sieges must have had their compensations when solaced by such a view.

Nicosia
(
500 ft
.),
August 31st
.—“Mishap necessitates delay one week so arriving Beyrut fourteenth have informed Christopher stop car not plant at fault.”

This gives me an extra week. I shall spend it in
Jerusalem. “Plant”, I suppose, means the charcoal apparatus. Considering the cost of telegraphing, I can only assume this doesn't work. Otherwise, why bother to deny it?

Long ago, at the Greek Legation in London, I was introduced to a nervous boy in a long robe, who was holding a glass of lemonade. This was His Beatitude Mar Shimun, Patriarch of the Assyrians; and since he is now an exile in Cyprus, I went to call on him this morning at the Crescent Hotel. A sturdy bearded figure in flannel trousers greeted me in accents peculiar to the English universities (Cambridge in his case). I offered my condolences. He turned to recent events: “As Ai toeld Sir Francis Humphreys, the paepers in Baghdad had been proeclaeming a Jehad against us for months. Ai asked him if he could guarantee our saefety, he said he could, and soe on and soe forth. They put me in prison four months agoe—even then he did nothing, though every one knew what was coming. From here I shall goe to Geneva to plead our cause and soe on and soe forth. They took me away by aeroplane against my will, but what will become of may poor people, raeped, shot down bay machine-guns and soe on and soe forth, Ai doen't knoew.” And so on and so forth.

Another landmark in the Betrayal Era of British foreign policy. Will it never stop? No doubt the Assyrians were intractable. But the point Mar Shimun made, which I believe to be true, is that the British authorities knew, or had ample means of knowing, what the Irakis were intending, and took no steps to prevent it.

Famagusta
,
September 2nd
.—There are two towns here: Varosha, the Greek, and Famagusta, the Turkish. They are joined by an Anglo-residential suburb, which contains the offices of the administration, the English club,
a public garden, numerous villas, and the Savoy Hotel where I live. Famagusta is the old town; its walls flank the port.

If Cyprus were owned by the French or Italians, as many tourist boats would visit Famagusta as now go to Rhodes. Under English rule, the visitor is thwarted by a deliberate philistinism. The Gothic nucleus of the town is still completely walled. That this nucleus can still be defaced by any building that anyone likes to put up; that the squalor of the old houses is excelled by that of the new; that the churches are tenanted by indigent families; that the bastions are daily carpeted with human excrement; that the citadel is a carpenter's shop belonging to the Public Works Department; and that the palace can only be approached through the police station—these manifestations of British care, if inartistic, have at least the advantage of defence against the moribund atmosphere of a museum. The absence of guides, postcard-sellers, and their tribe is also an attraction. But that, in the whole of the two towns, there should be only one man who knows even the names of the churches, and he a Greek schoolmaster of such diffidence as to make rational conversation impossible; that the one book, by Mr. Jeffery, which can acquaint the visitor with the history and topography of the place, should be on sale only at Nicosia forty miles away; that every church, except the cathedral, should be always locked and its keys kept, if their whereabouts can be traced at all, by the separate official, priest, or family to whose use it has been consigned, and who is generally to be found, not in Famagusta, but in Varosha; these manifestations were too much even for me, who, though speaking some Greek—which most visitors cannot do—entirely failed in three whole days to complete a tour of the buildings. The spectacle of such indifference has an interest of its own, to students of the English commonwealth.
But it is not the kind of interest to draw shiploads of profitable sightseers. For them there is only one gratification, “Othello's Tower”, an absurd fiction which dates from the English occupation. Not only cabdrivers uphold this fiction. There is an official placard on the building, as though it were “Teas” or “Gentlemen”. This placard is the sole direction which the authorities, or anyone else, can vouchsafe.

I stand on the Martinengo bastion, a gigantic earthwork faced with cut stone and guarded by a rock-hewn moat forty feet below, into which the sea once flowed. From the bowels of this mountainous fortification two subterranean carriage-drives debouch into the daylight at my feet. To the right and left stretch the parapets of the encircling walls, interrupted by a succession of fat round towers. The foreground is waste; across it moves a string of camels led by a Turk in baggy trousers. A small depression is occupied by two Turkish women, cooking something beneath a fig tree. Beyond them starts the town, a medley of little houses, some of mud, some of stones ravished from the monuments, some of new white stucco roofed in red. There is no plan, no regard for amenity. Palms stand up among the houses; allotments surround them. And out of this confusion tower the crockets and buttresses of a Gothic cathedral, whose orange-coloured stone cuts across the distant union of sky and sea, turquoise and sapphire. A range of lilac mountains continues the coastline on the left. A ship steams out of harbour towards it. A bullock-cart emerges from the ground at my feet. The camels lie down. And a lady in a pink frock and picture-hat is gazing sentimentally in the direction of Nicosia from the top of the next tower but one.

Larnaca
,
September 3rd
.—The hotel here is not up to
standard. Elsewhere they are clean, tidy, and above all cheap. The food is not delicious; but even English occupation has been unable to change Greek cooking for the worse. There are some good wines. And the water is sweet.

I drove out to Kiti, eight miles away, where the priest and sacristan, both wearing baggy trousers and high boots, received the Archbishop's letter with respect. They took me to the church, whose mosaic is a beautiful work; its technique seems to me of the Xth century, though others ascribe it to the VIth. The Virgin's robe is smoky mauve, almost charcoal-coloured. The angels beside her wear draperies of white, grey, and buff; and the green of their peacock wings is repeated on the green globes they hold. Faces, hands, and feet are done in smaller cubes than the rest. The whole composition has an extraordinary rhythm. Its dimensions are small, not more than life-size, and the church is so low that the vault containing it can be examined from as near as ten feet.

S.s. “Martha Washington”
,
September 4th
.—I found Christopher on the pier, adorned with a kempt but reluctant beard five days old. He has heard nothing from the Charcoal-Burners, but welcomes the prospect of Jerusalem.

There are 900 passengers on board. Christopher took me a tour of the third-class quarters. Had their occupants been animals, a good Englishman would have informed the R.S.P.C.A. But the fares are cheap; and being Jews, one knows they could all pay more if they wanted. The first class is not much better. I share a cabin with a French barrister, whose bottles and fopperies leave no room for another pin. He lectured me
on the English cathedrals. Durham was worth seeing. “As for the rest, my dear sir, they are mere plumbing.”

At dinner, finding myself next an Englishman, I opened conversation by hoping he had had a fine passage.

He replied: “Indeed we have. Goodness and mercy have followed us throughout”.

A tired woman struggled by, leading an unruly child. I said: “I always feel so sorry for women travelling with children”.

“I can't agree with you. To me, little children are as glints of sunshine.”

I saw the creature later, reading a Bible in a deck-chair. This is what Protestants call a missionary.

PALESTINE
:
Jerusalem
(2800
ft
.),
September 6th
.—A Nicaraguan leper would have fared better with the port authorities of a British Mandate than we did yesterday. They came on board at 5
A.M.
After waiting two hours in a queue, they asked me how I could land without a visa and when my passport was not even endorsed for Palestine. I said I could buy a visa, and explained that the system of endorsement was merely one of the cruder forms of dishonesty practised by our Foreign Office, which had no real bearing on the validity of a passport. Another busybody then discovered I had been to Russia. When? and why? O, for pleasure was it? Was it pleasurable? And where was I going now? To Afghanistan? Why? Pleasure again, indeed. I was on a pleasure-trip round the world, he supposed. Then they grew so absorbed with Christopher's diplomatic visa that they forgot to give him a card of disembarkation.

A frenzied crowd seethed round the head of the gangway. Physically, Jews can look the best or the worst bred people in the world. These were the worst. They
stank, stared, shoved, and shrieked. One man, who had been there five hours, began to weep. When his rabbi failed to comfort him, Christopher offered him a whisky and soda out of the bar window. He refused it. Our luggage, by degrees, was handed into a boat. I followed it. Christopher had to go back for his card of disembarkation. There was a heavy swell, as we negotiated the surf-bound reef which constitutes the “port” of Jaffa. A woman was sick over my hand. Her husband nursed their child, while supporting in his other arm a tall plant of veronica in a pot.

“Upstairs, please!” The sweating, malformed mob divided into two queues. After half an hour I reached the doctor. He apologised for delay, and gave me a medical certificate without an examination. Downstairs the boatmen were clamouring for money. The transport of ourselves and luggage cost
£
I : 2s. “Do you write books?” asked the customs officer, scenting an author of dutiable obscenities. I said I was not Lord Byron, and suggested he should get on with his business. At length we found a car, and putting the hood down in compliment to the Holy Land, set out for Jerusalem.