On the Shores of the Mediterranean (31 page)

He took us to his own tent and introduced us to his younger
brother, who was dressed in the same subfusc way; then to his wife, a tall, lithe, beautiful woman in her early thirties, a queen among women, and to their daughter, who was half her age and although good-looking, showed less promise of becoming as impressive as her mother. Both were dressed in flower-patterned
salvar
, the baggy trousers and short jackets of wildly contrasting colours which somehow contrived to look as if they had been carefully coordinated to go with one another. On their heads they wore what looked like hats, or rather the sort of helmets worn by the Crusaders, but were, in fact, neither hats nor helmets, being simply tightly wound scarves ingeniously arranged and knotted. On their feet they wore thick woollen socks with a red and green pattern knitted into them, and rubber sandals made from old motor tyres.

They sat us down in a depression in the ground on a couple of kilim rugs, alongside one of the lambing-pens where, miraculously, there was no wind. There was a fire going and all the primitive artefacts of the Yürük kitchen, made of wood and horn and iron and copper, including an enormous shallow vessel more like one of King Darius’s chariot wheels than a cooking receptacle, were lying against the wall of the pen. There was also a wooden bowl scooped out of the trunk of a tree, full of recording tapes.

Now the daughter stirred the fire, put on some more
tezek
, dried animal dung, and began to boil water for the tea. At the same time she switched on the radio and got Ankara.

Yürüks are not gypsies – some are settled permanently in the plains near Tarsus and Adana. They bear no relationship to them in any way, except perhaps in their hardiness and love of movement, neither in appearance, behaviour – Yürüks do not beg – or in their way of life, which is pastoral, and, among the women, exceptionally creative.

The men, because of their exceptional powers of resistance, make good soldiers; the women, who are often extremely beautiful
as well as faithful, are reputed to make excellent wives, so excellent that they are often sought out by less mobile Turkish gentlemen who marry them and make them sedentary. They are notable weavers of rugs and saddle bags, using designs that are never committed to paper but are memorized and handed down from generation to generation. Some of the colours they use are still produced with vegetable dyes, blues with indigo or a plant containing a similar substance, madder for reds, cochineal for pink reds, and a number of plants producing yellows, although now more rarely because chemicals have been widely used for almost a century. There are many thousands of Yürüks and other nomads in Turkey, and those on the borders, especially those on the Iranian and Syrian borders, but to a lesser extent on the borders with the USSR, have always tended to cross them when the spirit moved them without asking anyone’s permission.

The wife took us into the tent. It was beautiful in its neatness, everything not needed being stashed away in woven saddle bags. Next to it there was a smaller tent with a vertical weaving loom against one wall on which she had just finished making a kilim, what is known as a weft-faced tapestry woven rug, otherwise a flat-woven rug. The loom was nothing but a simple frame made with two side-pieces and a couple of cross-pieces from which the warp threads hung. It had been used for this special method of weaving, in which the spools bearing the different coloured wool for the weft threads for the motifs, are made to pass back and forth through the warp threads. The result is a smooth-faced carpet woven like tapestry, without any knots.

The kilim was hanging there on the loom, a thing of primitive beauty, glowing in the semi-darkness of the tent, a wonderful medley of green, orange, wine-red, white, dark indigo and black, disposed in grouped arrangements constantly reiterating themselves, some five feet wide and eleven feet long.

Later, sitting outside in a hole in the Plain of Issus, drinking the sweet tea made with water from the tank which had been boiled over the dried dung, the
tezek
, eating their yoghourt which was like sharp-tasting clotted cream with great glogs of yellow stuff in it, listening to the wind, Radio Ankara and what I now called the Queen of the Yürüks describing to Ince how she had made the carpet and how her daughter would now never make one as she wanted to live in a town, looking out over the plain past the ruins of aqueducts and cities to the snow-clad mountains on one hand and to the distant Mediterranean on the other, I knew that eventually, quite soon, a moment would come in which we would offer to buy the kilim and the offer would be accepted, and we would take it away from these wild shores to enliven the greyness of an English winter. And thinking of this I experienced a feeling of pure, ephemeral, unadulterated happiness.

Hemmed in by young Turks and old Turks as anxious as I was in such weather to get some steam up I sat on the
göbek tasi
in a
hamam
in the bazaar quarter of Antakya, the ancient Antioch, the hottest seat in any Turkish bath, now rapidly thawing out after a mad attempt to make a circuit of the walls in a blizzard. Somewhere round the corner Wanda had taken refuge in a similar establishment for ladies only and I hoped for her sake that her navel or belly stone was as hot as ours was in the men’s department.

Meanwhile outside, the snow continued to fall in enormous flakes which down here in the valley of the Orontes River immediately turned to slush on what must have been, in its several heydays, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Crusader, which had continued off and on until it had been completely destroyed by the wretched Egyptian Mamelukes, if not among the most beautiful cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, one of the most splendid, one of the most fascinating, and certainly among the
most profligate. It fell in the Bazaar where at the street corners the
hamals
crouched over fires fuelled with bits of broken packing cases in the gathering gloom, waiting to be commissioned but not caring much as they are paid whether they work or not, and very well by Turkish standards. ‘The ruin-seeking traveller pushes on to Antioch,’ Rose Macaulay, here at some more clement season, wrote in
A Pleasure of Ruins
, one of my favourite travel books. ‘He is exalted, almost intoxicated by the magnificent mountain path through the oleandrous glen of Daphne, whose gushing streams and aromatic odours and smiling ghosts from the richly licentious past set the right mood for the ghosts of the glory and luxury of ancient Antioch.’

We, too, ruin-seeking travellers, had pushed on to Antioch through the Plain of Issus and over the Beilan Pass in the gathering darkness and by the time we reached the city it had begun to snow again. The next morning the oleandrous glen of Daphne, five miles from Antioch, where the colossal image of Apollo erected by the Macedonian kings of Syria had looked down on what some writer had described as ‘an unending festival of vice’, was frozen solid and even the famous waterfalls and rivulets that poured down through it were muted. Here, one suspects that in ancient times, when it snowed and the temperature fell to freezing point, even vice, used to flourishing in the open air, must have had a close season.

Inspired by Miss Macaulay’s description of the wall of ancient Antioch and what amounted to a challenge to follow in her vigorous wake, ‘The great wall which it is the tourist’s duty and pleasure to walk round will have with its seven-mile circuit over crag, mountain and ravine, a bracing, tonic effect, counteracting the enervating mood of voluptuous luxury’, we set off to make the tour of what is left of it after a succession of earthquakes and innumerable invading armies have done their worst. Although
great tracts had been flattened of a wall that in early times had been broad enough to allow a four-horsed chariot to be driven along the top of it and in subsequent ages had risen to a height of fifty or sixty feet, what remains is one of the wonders of the Mediterranean world. Said by Miss Macaulay to be seven miles in circumference, the wall seemed longer as we followed in her long-lost footsteps up a steep mountainside to a plateau filled with ruins over which the blizzard was raging, then along the edge of precipices, passing huge hulks of masonry, all that was left in some places of the great square towers that had stood in profusion along the length of it until they were thrown down by an exceptionally violent earthquake at the end of the eighteenth century, providing the Turks, the last invaders, with a further supply of ready-shaped building blocks with which to build their mosques and minarets down below on the banks of the Orontes, of which there was already a superabundance.

We followed her and the wall to a point where, still unbroken, it spanned a deep and narrow river gorge with a caravan route, perhaps to Aleppo, running through it. Beyond this it was lost to view in the whirling snow on a mountainside so steep that it was impossible for us to climb it. We decided to give up. We had already been more than the five hours she had allotted for the purpose, we were soaked to the skin, and there was more to come.

‘I bet she never did that next bit in spite of writing all that stuff about counteracting the enervating mood of voluptuous luxury,’ Wanda said as we went down the gorge to the city, passing on the way a church in a cave in which St Peter had preached to the always dissolute Antiochians.

Here in Antakya, so far as the Turkish shores of the Mediterranean and proceeding any further south from it were concerned, we were to all intents and purposes at the end of the line. A few miles away to the south was Syria which, in spite of having exchanged
visiting cards with Dr Abd el-Aziz Alloun, Director of Tourist Relations at the Ministry of Tourism at Damascus, we were still as far off visiting as we had been when we had swapped them at a party in London, one of the reasons being that there was a war on. And beyond Syria was Lebanon, where there was a total war on, which neither of us was particularly keen to visit.

Instead we went back to Istanbul and took a plane to Tel Aviv.

On the way to Israel in an El Al plane, Wanda asked me what I most wanted to see, to which I replied that I thought it a damn silly question, and this led to a certain coolness between us up there for a couple of hundred miles or so which was eventually overcome when I suggested that we should play a game called ‘What I most don’t want to see in Jerusalem’, using as source material a couple of magazines entitled
Hello Israel: The Only Country-Wide Weekly Guide
, and
This Week in Jerusalem
, now in its twenty-second year, with which we had been presented gratuitously by the airline – no wonder they were in a financial mess – the players to choose alternately and the game going on until one or other of us got bored, Wanda to have first service.

‘I don’t want to see the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo,’ she announced. ‘“The Biblical Zoo”‘, quoting from the
Guide
, ‘“attempts to bring to life the powerful imagery of the Bible, with living creatures that run, jump, eat and play against the backdrop of Jerusalem, in their natural setting … cages are equipped with plaques quoting the most appropriate Biblical sources in the original Hebrew and in English translation. The verses of the Bible suddenly take on a new meaning and vividness after seeing the animals mentioned in their natural habitat … Tickets for Saturday should be purchased in advance”.’

‘OK, what about this? Arieh Klein’s Olive Wood, at 34 Bar Ilan Street: “The selection of items ranges from key rings and coasters to rare carvings, mostly from exquisitely gnarled and whorled olive wood, dried by a unique method” – it sounds like I feel – “… Klein has achieved the great distinction of being invited by Israeli and foreign governments to make special olive wood gifts for presentation to visiting dignitaries and heads of state”.’

‘I don’t want to visit his Olive Wood either,’ Wanda said. ‘My next selection is the Chung Ching Kosher Chinese Restaurant, “under the supervision of the Jerusalem Rabbinate-Catering service for all addresses in the city: Beit Hakerem, by the Smadar Gas Station”.’

‘My next selection is a visit to Ben Gurion’s Hut. “Next door to the Sdeh Boker Inn”.’

‘You can’t have that,’ Wanda said, after studying the appropriate page in
Hello Israel
. ‘It’s in the Negev, half an hour’s drive from Beersheba. Why do you always have to try and cheat?’

‘All right, smartyboots,’ I said, ‘try this for size. If I can’t have a presidential hut, a visit to the Tomer Company on Herbert Samuel Street, “Now is the Time to invest in ‘The Jerusalem You Love’, 4½ and 5½ Room Apartments in the Exclusive Residential Quarter, Kiryat Isaac Wolfson, THE LAST HIGH RISE NOW
COMPLETED, with a Panoramic View of rolling gardens, the Knesset and the Valley of the Monastery of the Cross. Don’t hesitate to call”.’

‘I’m fed up with this game,’ Wanda said. ‘In spite of having been there I can’t remember how many times, I really want to go back to Jerusalem. That’s why I came. Now it’s putting me off.’

‘I know you do,’ I said. ‘So do I. It’s only a game.’

Having been extruded through the security checks at Ben Gurion airport that leave one feeling like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, but which nobody in their right mind blames them or any other airport for carrying out, we were transported into Tel Aviv, a seething city by the sea which, when I first saw it in 1942, when it was still seething although smaller, I compared, quite irrationally, not having ever seen one, to some eastern European city, whereas, in fact, it is like no other city but itself. Whatever it was now, I knew that it was too much of a handful to write about. So instead of trying to wrest its secrets from it we spent a rewarding but sometimes rather harrowing afternoon in the Beth Hatefutsoth, otherwise the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Diaspora, which is on the outskirts of the city, on the University campus.

The following morning we caught the 08.18 train for Jerusalem from the Beneii Beraq station, choosing to do so because it was something we had never done before, which is always a good reason for doing anything.

The only guide book we had about us which describes this journey in any detail, most of the rest of the inhabitants having abandoned it long since to travel to Jerusalem by road, the most modern of which, a four-lane highway, cuts the distance from sixty miles by the train to about thirty-five by road, is the extremely rare Baedeker’s
Palestine and Syria, with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and the Island of Cyprus
, published in 1912. This
guide book was produced during the reign of Sultan Mehmed V, who had succeeded his brother, Abd ul-Hamid II, in 1909. At that time he still ruled over an empire which included Syria and Palestine with Jerusalem, Mesopotamia and immense areas of Arabia including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The only disadvantage of this otherwise excellent book was that names of places then rendered in Arabic were now in Hebrew. This meant that I found some difficulty in identifying the various places along the route as we chugged along, at first through what in 1912 had been orange groves and sandy wastes inhabited by Beduin, snakes, lizards and jackals, now occupied by enormous buildings, then through the coastal plain towards the Judaean Hills, blue in the distance. What the Israelis called Lod, for example, the Arabs called Ludd and everyone else called Lydda. It had been sacked by the Mongols in 1271 and according to the Prophet was the place at the gates of which Christ will slay Antichrist.

It was an interesting journey. We passed Er-Ramleh, now Ramla, which its Christian inhabitants firmly believed was the site of Arimathea but Baedeker, equally firmly, said wasn’t, a town in which Napoleon had once spent the night and which had a mosque with an enormous tower beneath which Muslims believe forty companions of the Prophet, and Christians believe forty martyrs, repose in the vaults. We had views, more or less distant, of Akir, otherwise Ekron, one of the five cities of the Philistines, where Baron de Rothschild founded a Jewish colony in 1881; of the ruins of Gezer, on a hill with cave dwellings in its lower levels that were occupied between 3000 and 2000 BC, a city later captured by the Pharaoh Psusennes, who reigned
c
. 984–950 BC, and who gave it to Solomon, his son-in-law. And we rode past the site of the city of Bittir, in which the Jews were besieged by the Romans for 3½ years after Simon Bar-Cochbar’s great insurrection in AD 132, before it was finally taken and they were put to the sword.

After all this the train began crawling up what used to be known as the Wadi el-Werd, the Valley of the Roses, the line of the old caravan route from Jerusalem to Gaza and Egypt, past Philip’s Well, in which the apostle baptized a eunuch in Palestine on a visit from Ethiopia where he was in charge of all the treasure of its queen, Candace; past the Well of the Magi, where they saw for the second time the guiding star; past another well at the Monastery of Mar Elyas, from which the Holy Family drank, where there is also a depression in the rock said to have been made by the Prophet Elijah when he lay down on it to rest. After all this, the train, more or less on the level now, ran through an industrial zone and a series of enormous suburbs, and across the plateau confusingly known as the Rephaim Valley, on which the Philistines were defeated by David, finally coming to rest, Cook’s Overseas Timetable says 60 miles, Baedeker says 54 miles, and two hours and seventeen minutes from Tel Aviv in the Central Railway Station, built by the Turks in 1892 as the terminus of what was the first railway line in the Middle East. Here, outside the walls of the Old City, across the Valley of Hinnom from Mount Zion, and only three-quarters of a mile from the Jaffa Gate, we parked our baggage to be collected later.

How King David, a thousand years before Christ, came to choose such a site for his capital, having captured it from the inoffensive Jebusites, is a bit of a mystery. One of the reasons must have been because it was isolated and therefore free from corrupting outside influences, something that would have been inescapable down on the shores of the Mediterranean, where every ship that arrived was a harbinger of innovation and change. Two thousand five hundred feet up in the air on an almost bare plateau, more than thirty miles from the sea as the crow flies, it was devoid of almost every amenity. The only cultivation that could be said to
flourish on these rocky hillsides was of the grape and the olive, almost everything else grew better elsewhere. There were no minerals, just endless limestone of varying degrees of excellence, and it was this proliferation of stone and the absence of anything else for the inhabitants to do, other than build and think, which made the city a place where architecture shot up in much the same way as wheat would have done in a more hospitable environment, and where ideas came into being, some of them extremely dangerous ones.

The greatest problem was the complete absence of any drinking water up on the plateau on which the city stood. Nearly 1000 years were to pass before the first aqueduct was built in the time of Herod and another 130 years or more before Hadrian, having obliterated Herod’s city and rebuilt it, at last constructed aqueducts and cisterns that were more or less adequate for the needs of the inhabitants.

The nearest drinking water was outside the walls in the Valley of the Kidron, deep down at the foot of Mount Ophel, at the southern end of the plateau on which the Jebusites had perched their city, a spot also used since the beginning of recorded time as a rubbish dump. From this spring, the Spring of Kidron, known to Christians as the Spring of the Virgin, and from other sources, the water was either carried up into the city by what must have been endless files of women balancing pitchers on their heads, or, less picturesquely, on the backs of camels and donkeys. There was also a steeply inclined tunnel leading down from within the walls and ending in a perpendicular shaft above the spring, which enabled the inhabitants to draw water from it in times of trouble without exposing themselves to danger, and this is perhaps the route by which Joab, David’s commander, was said to have gained access to the city, surprising the Jebusites.

Later, in the time of King Hezekiah, who reigned from about
715 to 687 BC, a tunnel more than 580 yards long, which still exists, called the Siloa Canal, was cut which carried the water into what are known as the pools of Siloa which were then within the walls. Even today drinking water is pumped to the city from miles away on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, which is itself nearly 700 feet below sea level, more than 3000 feet below the Jerusalem plateau.

Once the city was in his hands, which was in about 1000 BC, David transferred to it the Ark of the Covenant and at the same time acquired a threshing floor from Araunah the Jebusite on which to set up an altar to the Lord. By doing so he made it the federal capital of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and set in train the process by which Jerusalem was to become, under his son, Solomon, the Holy City.

The city was not only difficult to get to, as the Israelis were to find in 1949 when they themselves had to fight their way up to it; it was also difficult to hang on to, as successive waves of invaders, many of them intent on destroying what they found and starting again with, as it were, a clean slate, discovered: Egyptians in 922 BC; Assyrians in 700 BC; the Babylonians who, in 586 BC, destroyed the city and Solomon’s Temple and led the people into a captivity that lasted for fifty years from which they returned to build the Second Temple; Alexander the Great, whose Macedonians took it in 332 BC without any blood being shed on either side; the Seleucids, the abominably cruel Hellenized Syrians, who took it in 198 BC; the Maccabean Jews who, after a short but bitter campaign, freed Judaea and Jerusalem from the Seleucids in 164 BC; the Romans who took it twice, in 63 BC and AD 70; the Byzantines who first arrived in the fourth century; the Persians who sacked it in AD 614; the Muslims who took it in AD 638; the Frankish Crusaders in 1099; the Muslims again in 1187; the Egyptian Mamelukes who began to rule over it in 1250; the Mongols who sacked it in 1271; the Turks who took it in 1517;
the British who entered it in 1917 and the Israelis themselves who finally occupied it in 1967.

Even the Romans avoided making Jerusalem a capital, sickened of it, perhaps, by too much bloodshed. They preferred Caesarea, built by their deputy Herod in 13 BC, in a magical situation down on the foreshore where to this day a great aqueduct stretches away along it among the encroaching sand dunes and the ground underfoot still sparkles with the fragments of their iridescent glass, a site still more or less unchanged since I had last seen it forty years previously, apart from an enormous industrial plant which looms over it now to the south. It was Herod, who reigned from about 37 BC until 4 BC, to whom the Romans left it to rebuild Jerusalem after the enormous damage done to it in 63 BC by Pompey’s legions when the question of who among the Hasmoneans (the dynasty of Jewish priest-kings) was to succeed to the throne led to a civil war.
¹
In Herod’s lifetime it became one of the most splendid cities in the Middle East.

These splendours were to endure for little more than seventy years after the death of Herod. In AD 66 the Jews revolted against their Roman masters. In the course of a five-month siege of the city by Titus, which was defended with what one historian described as ‘all the grim tenacity of which the Semite race is capable when on the defensive’, 1,000,000 of the 3,000,000 inhabitants of the country are estimated (by the Jewish historian Josephus) to have died, and a further 100,000 were sold into slavery when the city finally fell and was left a heap of smouldering ruins, after which Jerusalem became nothing more than a camp for the Tenth Legion. These events are recorded on the Arch of Titus in Rome, on which the Jews are depicted being led into captivity and the famous seven-branched golden candlestick, the Menorah,
is being carried up to the temple of Capitoline Jove. And it is this date, AD 70, that the Jews regard as the traditional beginning of their world-wide dispersion, the Diaspora.