In Xanadu (6 page)

In European ports immigration officials are hard to avoid. In Syria you need the instincts of a homing pigeon to find them. They lurked in a large and dimly lit hangar, through a labyrinth of alleyways full of growling mongrels, past loading cranes, skips, piles of rusting wire and tangles of disused netting In one corner an official was standing on a platform with a pile of passports, auctioning them off to anyone who raised their hand. At the opposite end two harassed clerks in military uniform were slaving over a pair of enormous ledgers.
Shriek
ing Arabs were waving their passports at them, and shouting their date of birth and the details of their grandparents' religious beliefs. In between sat miserable groups of women, children and packing cases, and near them, on one side, sprawled a group of immigrants sucking feverishly at hookahs. It reminded me of a Hieronymous Bosch hell-scene. A hand clutched my arm; it was the merchant again.

‘Good sir,' he said. 'This country has no order. You should come and stay with me in Lebanon.'

That's very kind.'

I live in Ba'albek. It is a very beautiful town.'

'So I have heard,' said Laura, 'but isn't it now the headquarters of the Hezbollah?'

'Yes it is. They are good men, Hezbollah. Very religious peoples. Always they are giving prayers.'

'Really?' said Laura. 'Well you know that's awfully kind of you, but I'm afraid we are in rather a rush. We've got to be in Pakistan in one month.'

Later, when the merchant had gone, I asked Laura why she had been so quick to refuse the invitation.

'Do you know who the Hezbollah are?' she replied.

'Never heard of them. But they sound rather charming, don't they?'

'They're the most extreme terrorists in the entire Middle East, responsible for most of the recent kidnappings in Beirut, They keep their prisoners in the Sheik Lutfullah barracks in Ba'albek. We wouldn't have lasted two hours had we gone to stay with that man.'

She gave me one of her withering looks.

'You know, William, you really should read the papers.'

I left Laura with the luggage while I went to retrieve our passports, and register with the clerks. Having queued and fought and sworn my way to the front I was then redirected to a different hut which dealt with Europeans. Here I was persuaded to part with an 'entry tax' and face a lurid inquisition.

Why you come Syria? You like Arab peoples? Good. You like Arab boys, eh? No? Arab womens then? No? Who then?

(Opens Laura's passport.)
This picture your wife? She pretty womans. How much she cost? No - not your wife. Girlfriend then? If you drink
raki
then you make your girlfriend many times in one night. Once I make my girlfriend THIRTEEN times. You not believe? Thirteen times I tell you. My friend Abdul - he knows. Hey Abdul, I make my friend thirteen times, eh? You see. I very virile man.
Big
minaret! Abdul knows, eh Abdul?'

(Continues describing minarets, drinking feats, girlfriends etc. etc. until I manage to move the conversation back onto passports. Then:)

'This is you? Hey Abdul, look at the picture of the Ingliz! He wears necktie and jacket! You look very high man, very rich man. No? Neither? Why then necktie? You poor man? How come to Syria then? I don't believe. I poor man. You want
raki?
We ALL want
raki!
Abdul, fill my glass. Yes! Yes! You no like Arab boys? I know nice place. You don't want? Nor want womens? I tell you Arab womens the best in world. No? What can I say? More
raki.
You want stamp? Abdul, he wants passport stamp! Here. You my friend. I give you special stamp. No extra cost. Allah be with you. Goodbye, my friend. Yes, next time we go with little boys. ABDUL, THE
RAKI.'

I fled. I found Laura and got a taxi to a hotel. It was a horrible place, with a pigeon in the shower, but at least the door locked. We shut out Arabia and went to sleep.

The following morning started badly. After a hazardous shower, we went down for breakfast. The proprietor narrowed his eyes at us:

'Que cherchez-vous?'

'Vous avez des oeufs?'

'Oeufs mauvais.'

'Du fromage?'

'Fromage mauvais.'

Une tasse de the?'

'The mauvais.'

'Pouvez-vous nous appeller un taxi?'

Taxi m . . . O.K. Je vais vous appeller un taxi. Mais ca va couter cher.'

He rang for a taxi, and added it to the bill.

A twenty-minute ride took us to the bus station, through the ruinous streets of Latakia. It is a hideous place, but strangely fascinating. The streets seem almost wilfully neglected; Roman columns, Byzantine capitals. Arabesque lintels and Ottoman vaulting lie together on roundabouts and street corners, great dusty piles of masonry mixed up with plastic bottles, abandoned shoes and broken water pipes. The food - if you can find it - is the worst in the Middle East, the people the least friendly. They mix Arab deviousness with colonial French arrogance, and add to this a surliness which is uniquely their own. Yet beneath the ugliness, grime and smut, there is a sense of the corrupt which is curiously compelling. There is something conspiratorial about the beckoning pimps and the cockroach cafes, something which always makes one want to pry behind the closed doors and shuttered windows.

If this is true of Latakia as a whole, it is particularly so of the
bus
station. It is a large, flat wasteland on the outskirts of the town, the sort of place which the traveller occasionally comes across, into which all transportation leads and from which none ever seems to emerge. The previous year I had got stuck here for what seemed like weeks, under constant assault from nui vendors and noxious-smelling kebab salesmen, terrified by the mobs of unruly Arabs who would converge on incoming buses, howling horribly as if bent on their destruction.

But this year, with Laura in the lead, it all seemed much easier. We got aboard on our third attempt. Ten school years of cold scrum practice in wet, February North Yorkshire were finally put to good use; we charged forward like a pair of prop forwards, swinging our rucksacks, mercilessly knocking everyone flying; only the Bedouin got in before us. We seized a patch of floor beside the running board which we shared with a
we
ak-bladdered billy goat and defended it against all comers.

Inside, the bus was lovingly dressed up, rather as the English decorate their Christmas trees. Plastic birds balanced on plastic leaves; garlands of azaleas and silver tinsel hung around a framed picture of the Syrian president, Haffez Assad. The roof was coated in gaudy polychrome lino, and along the length of the bus, shiny baubles, plastic Korans and large bunches of plastic grapes swung from the luggage rack. The passengers were less lovingly cared for, squashed into an impossible space with their baggage, their children and their livestock. A few were in a bad way: some of the old men had that glazed, shell-shocked look that comes over you after a few hours at the Latakia bus station.

But before long things began to improve. In low gear the old bus chugged off, up into the Syrian Jebel, the lovely hill country which divides the coastal plain from the valley of the ai-Garb, and beyond that the Badiet esh-Sham, the Great Syrian Desert. As we went we shed some of our excess passengers and climbed on up through sweet-smelling slopes of mimosa, and past thickly wooded banks of cypress, spruce and cedar of Lebanon.

Our destination was the village of Masyaf. Although Polo never came to Syria and instead went straight to the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, he does discuss a sect who in 1271 had their headquarters at Masyaf, the order known to history as the Assassins. For centuries the Assassins embodied everything that Europeans distrusted in Asia. They were fanatical Muslims said to indulge in strange sexual perversities and unusual narcotics. The tales smack more
of One Thousand and One Nights
than real history. Yet where it is rare among millions of similar myths from the East is that when stripped bare by modern historians the reality is quite as interesting as the myth.

The Assassins were a militant wing of a heterodox Sh'ia sect, the Isma'ilis. For a short time in the eleventh century the Isma'ilis had gained political power in Egypt under the Fatamid caliphs, but in Persia and elsewhere in Islam they remained an unpopular minority who were intermittently persecuted. To kill them,' wrote one Persian mullah, 'is more lawful than rainwater. It is the duty of sultans and kings to conquer and kill them, and cleanse the surface of the earth from their pollution. It is not right to associate with them, nor eat meat butchered by them, nor enter into marriage with the m. To shed their blood is more meritorious than to kill seventy infidel. . .,'

It was in response to this persecution that the Assassins were founded, and under their first Grand Master, Hasan-i-Sabbah, they became the original terrorist group. Their first victim was the Seljuk vizier of Persia, Nizam al-Mulk. He, Omar Khayyam and Hasan were said to have been school friends, but Nizam tried to control the growing powers of the Isma'ili and in 1092 he was stabbed to death in his litter by an Assassin disguised as a Sufi holy man. He was on his way from the audience hall to the tent of his harem.

Hasan built up his followers into an order, united in strict obedience to himself. During the twelfth century large number of princes hostile to the Isma'ili met their death by the Assassins' daggers: the Prince of Horns was followed by the Prince of Mosul, the Wazir of Egypt and even the heavily guarded crusader king, Conrad of Jerusalem. Their enemies were forced to take elaborate precautions to protect themselves. When Polo's predecessor in the East, Friar William of Rubruck, arrived at the Mongol capital of Karakoram in 1254, he was amazed at the security arrangements. 'We were separately brought in and they asked us where we came from, and why, and what we wanted. And they proceeded to question us minutely,' he wrote. It was only later that he discovered that the interrogation was a response to the intelligence that no less than forty Assassins were abroad in the town, and that in various disguises they had all been sent to murder the Khan.

Such behaviour left the Assassins with few friends. Little was known about them and wild rumours abounded. Muslims said they ate pig meat and prayed with their backs to Mecca. There were rumours of sorcery. Stories even reached Christian Europe. They are accursed,' wrote the priest Brocardus. They sell themselves, are thirsty for human blood, kill the innocent for a price and care nothing for life or salvation. Like the devil they can transfigure themselves into angels of light.' Others echoed his words. They make use of all women without distinction,' wrote one anxious cleric, 'including their mothers and sisters.'