The Towers of Trebizond Read online

  When I had explained to David about the Church for some time, I felt sleepy and full of wine, and said that now we would go and find a camel driver who would take charge of my camel and bring it after me to Iskenderon. So we asked the manager of the hotel in which we were going to sleep where was a camel driver, and he sent a porter out with us to find one and he was a well-known camel man and trustworthy, and was setting out for Iskenderon next morning early, with other camels, so I gave the camel into his charge and he told me the address in Iskenderon to call for it at in three or four days, and I told him it must not be excited, as it was a little mad, and must not have affairs with the other camels, but must just be kept trotting quietly along, unloaded, because it needed a rest after all it had been through lately. Then I patted it and bade it good-bye for the present, feeling delighted that I should be spending to-morrow bowling along in a car, with someone else driving, and me sitting back looking at the interesting country, and the road would climb up towards the Cilician Gates and through them, and so down to the plains and to the Gulf of Iskenderon, and by then it would be evening, and we should drive round the head of the Gulf to Alexandretta on its southern shore, and moored off Alexandretta would lie the press lorďs yacht, twinkling with lights in the smooth dark sea, and Vere would have left a message for me at the Mediterranean Palace Hotel, and we should meet either that evening or next day, that is, if the yacht was already there. This would all be so much better than sitting on the camel for three or four days while it lurched along tiring my legs and back, that I grew fonder and fonder of David, and felt almost inclined to give him Charles's manuscript at once, for even if I did this he would still go on with his acts of kindness in order that I should not tell people what I knew. However, I decided to wait for a little while, till we had done the drive to Iskenderon, he buying food and drinks for me all day, and stopping when I wanted to look at anything, though usually one has little power over the driver, who is very loath to stop, whether for lunch or to look at anything, he feels impelled to drive on and on, and I feel the same when I am driving.

  The day went by as agreeably as I had planned. No one could have been nicer than David was to me, and he knew a lot of archaeology, so we stopped and looked at Seljuk archaeology and Hittite archaeology and Roman archaeology, and we stopped for lunch and for drinks and for coffee, and spent quite a long time seeing Tarsus, where we were so hot that we had a bathe in the Cydnus, in spite of its having formerly been so cold that bathing in it had almost killed Alexander during a campaign, and, apparently, quite killed Frederick Barbarossa, and it seems rather surprising that this emperor should have been given to bathing, but I have a theory that all our Ancestors bathed, and that we have invented the theory that they did not. Anyhow, the Cydnus was not too cold for David and me, and after it we thought about Cleopatra sailing up it to Tarsus to meet Anthony, and about the ancient famous university of Tarsus, and about St. Paul, of whom I told David, for he did not know much about this missionary before, and he pretended to be much interested, and said he might read St. Paul's letters sometime, as I told him they were full of interest. I remembered that Father Chantry-Pigg had said that his father the Dean, who was so interested in St. Paul and had been writing his life till death ended this task, had visited Tarsus and spent a long time in it, sorting out all the Pauline remains and looking into what had been the university curriculum at that time, and, as he had been an imaginative dean, he reconstructed it, and all the university buildings, and made a plan of them for his book, and a list of the subjects studied. Archaeologists ought always to have the help of people like Dean Chantry-Pigg, because they imagine and reconstruct so well, or anyhow so freely, though I felt that David might scorn his reconstructions. While I told him about St. Paul, I felt that a little perseverance on my part might easily persuade him to enter the Church, whose doors he never darkened but for architecture, weddings and funerals, and I thought aunt Dot would have said I ought to go on with this good work while he was so malleable, but I did not, owing to thinking he would not make a good churchman, but would become immediately lapsed like me.

  So we drove to the Alexandretta Gulf after dark, and round it to Iskenderon, and the Gulf pushed deeply into the shore and lay shut in it like a dark, shining river, spangled with lights from ships and boats and from the shore. A battleship lay in the bay, all lit up, and it looked British. Nearer in shore there was a yacht, and this was lit up too, and we could read its name, and it was called Argo, and this was the yacht of the press lord who was Vere's friend, and there would be a message waiting for me at the Mediterranean Palace about when we could meet. David said we would both stop there that night, and he meant that he would not desert me until I had met my yacht friends and acquired money.

  But what I saw when we entered this hotel was Vere standing at the reception desk and giving a note to the reception clerk, and so we met, and then nothing else seemed to matter.

  At eleven o'clock Vere returned in the launch, with some other yacht passengers, to the Argo, and I went too, to meet the press lord and his other guests. But before that I said good night to David and thanked him very much for his kindness to me, and gave him Charles's manuscript, which he had certainly earned. I told him I should not speak about it to any one, which he probably did not believe, and he was right, for here I am writing all about it, but anyhow such matters never remain secret for long, owing to tittle tattle and people being so little trustworthy and so quick to think the worst and not having mostly read what St. Paul wrote about charity and St. James about bridling the tongue, which is full of deadly poison and is set on fire of hell. So all was guessed or suspected presently about David and Charles and the book, without my help. I did not feel it was any business of mine, and I thought, live and let live, David can do as he likes about all this, it is between him and his conscience and he must find his own way through it and I shall not tell tales.

  Chapter 16

  I cashed English bank cheques on three kind Argonauts, including Vere, so now I had plenty of Turkish liras again, enough to be able to push on south on the camel into Syria and Jordan when the Argo sailed away, which would be in three days. Till then Vere and I enjoyed the pleasures of the charming pretty Frenchified town curving round the gulf, set with palm trees and very gay. We drove to Antioch in a dolmuç, along a road that began as a wild steep mountain zig-zag and ended by prosily ambling through flat cultivated fields, till there was Antioch, Antakya, a Turkish town of tiled houses on the slope of a hill. Golden Antioch, Seleucid and Roman Antioch, was a remote ghost brooding high above us on the hill where the citadel had stood and the great walls climbed about it; we drove up to it, and British archaeologists were busy digging up mosaic pavements. We drove down again to Antakya, saw the tiny early church in its rock cave on the rocky hill side, and drove out to the groves of Daphne, once the haunt of votaries of pleasure from Greece and Rome, very licentious, and a perpetual festival of vice, so Vere and I went to see it, but it must have been better once, when all the temples and shrines and orgies were there. Now there were cascades and stone steps and a steep hill with woods going down to a valley, and terraces with people sitting playing tric-trac and drinking drinks that were mostly soft, and it was not so much more licentious than other laid-out landscapes with woods and steps and cascades, and there did not seem very much for the votaries of pleasure to do there, except that votaries of pleasure seem to create their pleasures round them wherever they go. But Vere and I thought that all those waterfalls, and the shade of the trees, made the place rather dank and like Cintra or Scotland, so we did not spend long in Daphne, but drove back to Antioch and explored the medieval Turkish quarter, where there is much more pleasure in the crooked winding streets and deep arches and little tiled mosques, and donkeys and camels hitched to rings in the open squares which had once been caravan halts, and trees growing about, and carpenters and potters and goldsmiths and coppersmiths all working away in tiny shops in their trade streets. Here we bought Roman and B
yzantine coins, which we gave to each other, then we dined in a garden restaurant under tree lamps, with the Antakya radio also in the trees and blaring down at us, then we went to the Turizm Hotel for the night. When we walked in the streets boys howled at us and shook their fists, and a German archaeologist whom we met in the hotel said that Antakyans did not care about the British, they only liked Germans, and this was an old tradition because of the Dardanelles attack, but we thought it was just rude boys being spiteful to foreigners, and we did not really care, because we were so glad to be together, and we each understood what the other said, and we laughed at one another's jokes, and love was our fortress and our peace, and being together shut out everything else and closed down conscience and the moral sense. We used to wonder how long we should live in this doped oblivion if we had been married, and I supposed that the every-day life which married people live together after a time blunts romance, but we did not think we should mind that, if we had all the other things, even the tedious things, to do together, and could plan our holidays and argue about the maps and the routes and one would read aloud from a guide book while the other drove and we would be very fair about equal turns of driving and equal shares of everything, and I suppose we should like our children, and marriage would still be our fortress and our peace, just as love was now when we could be together but could be a sadness and a torment when apart.

  Anyhow love lit up Andoch for us like fairy lamps, and it was awful when it was time for us to return to Iskenderon because the Argo was off to Cyprus. We drove in to Iskenderon an hour before it sailed, and said good-bye on the quay where the launch went from. After it had gone, and was dashing away for the Argo in a splurge of foam, I went off to the camel stables and found that the driver had brought in my camel from Kayseri, and it seemed well and fresh, and I decided to start for Aleppo and Syria next day, when I had got my Syrian visa, which I had forgotten to do in London.

  That evening David and I dined together at the Mediterranean Palace. He was much easier in his mind now that he had Charles's manuscript, but still had a few anxieties and was a little self-conscious. He asked me how my book was getting on, now that I was doing it alone. I said it was not getting on, and I had never really meant to write a book alone, only to contribute bits, and of course pictures, to aunt Dot's. Then he said what about contributing pictures and bits to his instead, and I could see that he missed Charles, and would like to have me involved in this book, partly to keep me quiet about it. But I said I was still expecting aunt Dot back from Russia, and must keep any contributions I wrote for her book, and I could see that David thought that this was unfortunate, my being still involved in a rival book. He said, "Oh well, let it go," and offered to cash a small cheque for me if I still wanted money. But I told him I could get on all right now, and he saw that I was drifting away from him and that all he could do was to trust in God.

  Next morning I went to the Syrian Consulate, which was open every day between 11.30 and 12, and filled in the visa form. The consul looked at what I had written, and at my passport, suspiciously, as if he did not care for either.

  He said, "Have you ever been in Israel?"

  I said, "Israel? Good gracious no. Why on earth should I want to go there, of all places?"

  "It is," he said, "I who am asking the questions. Have you been to Israel?"

  "I've told you once. No."

  He looked through my passport, turning the pages with covetous inquisitiveness, as if he suspected them of obscenity.

  "Profession," he then said, very loudly and angrily. "Why have you not written it here? You have written 'Independent.' "

  "Yes. I couldn't think what else to put."

  "Independent, you have written."

  "Yes," I agreed. The conversation seemed rather repetitive.

  "You know what means independent?"

  "Yes, I think I do. It means no one pays me regularly for working."

  "Independent," he said, turning the word over on his tongue in some disgust. "That means spy."

  "No," I said. "Not in English. Spies aren't independent, they get wages."

  "You are not here in England." He sounded as angry as people usually do when they make this remark. "In the East, independent is spy. I do not give you visa."

  Too proud to plead, I rose to go.

  "Just as you please. No doubt I can get one elsewhere."

  "You cannot get a visa anywhere, for you do not get your passport back. I keep it."

  "No. I keep it. It is mine."

  "I keep it," he said, and threw it into a drawer, which seemed full to the brim of purloined passports.

  As he seemed to be in the stronger position, I left him, saying coldly, "I go to the British consul."

  "You may tell him that I keep your passport, since you are a spy, and spoke insolently to me, and wish to visit Israel."

  I went to the British Consulate. The consul said, "It is quite difficult to get out of the Syrian Consulate with your passport. The consul likes to collect them. I will ring him up, and you will hear. Get me the Syrian Consulate."

  Someone got him this. The conversation they had seemed more or less one-sided. Presently the consul hung up, and said, "He says you can't have it at present, he must make some enquiries about you. Have you a second passport?"

  "Yes."

  "Endorsed merely Israel, no doubt. That won't get you far, unless you fly direct there, and then you won't get out of it except into the sea."

  "No," I said, "I won't fly," and I felt rather grand that he should think I had as much money as that. "Actually, I am on a camel."

  "Then you'll have to stay here till the Syrian consul has finished his enquiries. You may get your passport back. I will do what I can, but he is an obstinate man . . . Are you a spy, by the way?"

  "Unfortunately, no."

  "And are you independent?"

  "Just now, unfortunately, yes."

  "Well, that seems about all we can do for you. Look in another day and have a chat. Good morning."

  I went out.

  I spent three days in Iskenderon, and got to know it pretty well. It was very hot and humid; in the mornings and evenings there was a mist, but all day it was bright and clear, and the sunsets were red as if a great smoky fire burned over the sea to the west. The horse-shoe bay curved round, decorated with palm trees all along the front, and battleships lay in the bay, lit up all night. The bright little streets looked rather French, and there was still some French spoken in the shops. No one stared at foreigners, for they had been trained to this strange sight for years. From 9 a.m. on till evening men played games in cafés along the front. Boys bathed on the shore, and I walked a mile up the coast and bathed too. I got to know an agent of Shell Company and his wife, who were very kind to me. I should not have minded spending some time in Alexandretta, it was so gay and amiable. The girls were friendly and we chatted in French on the front. Dr. Halide had said that the Alexandretta women and girls were bird-witted, and perhaps they are, I don't particularly mind. When they asked me what I did, and whether I was married, I said I was a celibate missionary, which impressed them, so then I told them about the Church of England, of which they had not heard till then, though they knew about Roman Catholics. Dr. Halide said that Moslems would make better Anglicans than they would Roman Catholics. This may be so, but we did not make any, so we cannot know. But we did not talk much about religion in Alexandretta, and the girls were quite western and emancipated, and Atatürk would have liked them.

  Every morning I called at the British Consulate for news of my passport, but it seemed the Syrian consul still had it. On the fourth morning, however, I was told that this consul was now ready to give it back to me, and would even grant me a visa, so I supposed that his enquiries had discovered nothing but good about me. When I got there, his affairs must have been going much better, for he did not scowl, but smiled and shook my hand and handed me my passport as if he were giving me a diploma or a cheque, and said he hoped I would enjoy my visi
t to beautiful Syria. There was Aleppo, he said, and Palmyra, and Baalbek, and Homs and Damascus and Saida, and many magnificent Syrian castles, such as Crac, and he talked on like a tourist leaflet, and quite forgot about how I was an independent spy. So we parted in kindness and pleasure, and I went off and loaded up the camel and we trotted away along the Aleppo road.

  As I now had plenty of liras, and was not in a hurry, I enjoyed my weeks of camel travel in the Levant very much. I ambled along, sitting back comfortably on the soft saddle, while the camel tossed its head and its white ostrich plumes waved, and it pawed the ground and sometimes cried "Ha ha" like a war horse, and sometimes it would canter along roaring, either from excitement, pleasure, annoyance or love, and I never discovered which it was. I felt like one of the seventeenth century travellers who trekked across the Levant with so much zest, and that I and the camel were part of the gorgeous pageant of the East. I remembered how Evliya Efendi of Istanbul had written, "Forming a design of travelling over the whole earth, I entreated God to give me health for my body and faith for my soul," though he had also said "according to the tradition of the Prophet, a journey is a fragment of hell," which of course it can also be. But not when one has money for food and drink and a bed, and a camel to ride on, and travels the caravan routes across Syria, and sees Aleppo and Tortosa and Ruad and Byblos and Beyrout and the mountain garden coast of Lebanon, and Baalbek and Palmyra and Sidon and Tyre and Damascus and Amman, and Jerash emerging in Corinthian splendour from its rocky hill, and half a dozen Crusader castles, and deserts and mountains and valleys, and at last, after many weeks, one is in Judaea and Palestine, and this country is where my Murray's Guide, which is a century old, says beware of the inhabitants, who are Bedawins (and they sound dangerous when spelt like that), and behind many a rock, says Murray, you catch sight of the gleam of a matchlock or a tufted spear, and the country can only be traversed safely with an escort of this same type of person, and the Fellahin, who cultivated the soil, were nearly as bad, and all this tends to show that foreign travel is much tamer than once it was. But it is equally hot, and I went down a thousand feet beneath the sea to Jericho as if it was a descent into the fiery pit of hell. It was too hot for any one to be excavating; I went over the Ummayad palace they had been digging up, but this, though it had been a fine palace once, was too hot too, and the Ummayad kings had only used it in winter, and I saw that they were right. As for Canaanite Jericho, that city of palms and balsams and stately buildings whose walls had been too ill-built to stand up to trumpet blasts, and as for the Jericho which Antony gave to Cleopatra, and the Roman Jericho which Herod built up and beautified, I saw little of any of them and thought I had better come back in about twenty years, when the excavators had made more of them, for dug-up bits and pieces had palled on me by now, and I wanted buildings that stood up. So I rode through modern Jericho, which Murray had called a filthy and miserable village, and its few inhabitants both poor and profligate, having retained the vices of Sodom, but modern Jericho now has a smart, respectable appearance, not at all like that, though of course appearances are deceptive, and I hurried through it to the Dead Sea, and soon I found myself seated on this sea, clasping my hands round my knees and swaying to and fro as if I was in a rocking-chair or in the Droitwich baths, and gazing up at the mountains of Moab, while the camel dabbled its paws in the tiny waves that sizzled on the shore. Afterwards I had a Coca-Cola in the little Lido café and bathed in the Jordan to cool myself and wash off the stickiness, and I sluiced the camel, and it drank till it was full of water, and then, in the cool of the evening, I rode on to Jerusalem.