Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  The old explorer also smiled.

  I seem to recall some such conversation when you were a small child. Well what do you think about these properties I mentioned. Are you interested in having them?

  No.

  Why?

  Because I don’t intend to become a real estate dealer.

  Just so, fine, that’s taken care of then. One less legacy you’ll have to worry about from my old century.

  All the same I don’t think I’ll display myself naked at a diplomatic reception in Cairo the night I sail.

  An apocryphal tale, no such thing could ever have happened in the Victorian era. Now come, we’ve arranged your escape from the past and it’s time to join Ya’qub for dinner. He has been laboring all day over his pots preparing a feast and he must be hungry for talk.

  He must be?

  Hm. Did I ever tell you about the time I assembled certain evidence to deduce the cycle of Strongbow’s Comet?

  Stern laughed. He knew his father was really as excited as he was, his leaving bringing back all the memories of that night in Cairo seven decades ago when a laughing young genie had given eyes to a blind beggar and himself set forth on his journey.

  I don’t think so, Father. Could it possibly involve incidents from the lives of Moses and Nebuchadnezzar and Christ and Mohammed? A few lesser known passages from the Thousand and One Nights? An obscure reference or two from the Zohar? A frightened Arab in the desert who was alarmed because the sky was unnaturally dark? Who later turned up as an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem? In whose back room you wrote an anthropological study of the Middle East? No, I don’t believe you have ever told me about it.

  No? That’s odd, because it was quite a remarkable affair. Do you think Ya’qub would be interested in hearing about it?

  I’m sure he would, he can never get enough of hearing anything. But of course he’ll immediately jumble all your facts and rearrange them to his own liking.

  Yes he will, an incorrigible habit. Those eternal jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes he sees everywhere. Well we’ll just have to keep our wits about us and take our chances.

  In Europe Stern dreamed deeply of his future. He considered composing symphonies or dramas, painting murals and planning boulevards and writing epic cantos. Unarmed and undefeated, he threw himself fearlessly into these projects.

  He haunted museums and concert halls and restlessly paced the streets until dawn, when he fell into a chair in some workingmen’s café to smoke and drink coffee and fortify himself with cognac, totally immersed for a time in this one great achievement.

  In Bologna he ignored his medical lectures and covered canvases with masses of colors. But months later when he examined what he had done he found it lifeless.

  In Paris he ignored his law courses to study music. Whole scores of Mozart and Bach were memorized but when the time arrived for him to write down his own musical notations, none came.

  He turned at once to marble. He pored over drawings and eventually attempted sketches, only to find his own designs for fountains and colonnades resembled Bernini’s.

  Poetry and plays came next. Stern provided himself with a stack of paper and a hard straight chair. He boiled coffee and filled the ashtray on the desk with cigarettes. He tore up sheets of paper, boiled more coffee and filled the ashtray again with cigarettes. He went out for a walk and came back to begin again but still there was nothing.

  Nothing at all. Nothing was coming from his dreams of creation.

  Looking down at the heaped ashtray he was suddenly frightened. What was he going to do in life? What could he do?

  He was twenty-one. He had been in Europe three years yet there was no one to talk to now, he had no friends at all, he had been too busy dreaming alone. He had come here with ideals and enthusiasm, what had gone wrong?

  He sat up unable to sleep thinking of the hillsides where he had played as a boy, recalling that Ya’qub had said he would never really leave them, remembering his father on their last evening together wondering aloud what it might mean to be born in the desert with its solitude rather than to have sought it as he had done.

  He poured cognac and closed his eyes, images tumbling before him.

  A blind beggar in Cairo crying out triumphantly, a march the length of the Sinai without food or water, the Arab village at Aqaba, the great divide of the wadis of northern Arabia, an antiquities dealer’s shop in Jerusalem, floating down the Tigris into Baghdad, leeches and opium near Aden, a fever after swimming across the Red Sea, the holy sites of Medina and Mecca in disguise.

  Disguises. Strongbow striding back and forth for forty years disguised as a poor camel driver or a rich Damascus merchant, a harmless haggler over pimpernel or a collector of sorrel, an obsessed dervish given to trances and an inscrutable hakïm, a huge immobile presence in the desert speaking with his eyes.

  Strongbow the genie changing and changing his size and shape.

  Ya’qub the shepherd waiting patiently on his hillside.

  And finally, a former hakïm gently led home to rest, brought home to peace.

  What was it? What was he trying to find in those three lives?

  Stern threw his glass at the wall. He picked up the bottle and crashed around the room knocking over chairs and smashing lamps on the floor. He hated Europe, all at once he knew how much he hated it. He couldn’t breathe here, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t hear with his own ears or see with his own eyes, the noise, the crowds pushing in on him, everything cluttered and unclear, so far from the quiet hillsides of his childhood, the stillness of the shifting sands in the Temple of the Moon.

  He’d done nothing here but dream futile dreams and fail, dream hopelessly and fail because this wasn’t his place. He had been born in the desert, he couldn’t live here. The desert was his home and he had to go back to it now, he knew that.

  And do what?

  Again he saw the three men. Strongbow marching from the Nile to Baghdad. Ya’qub in his tent in the Yemen. The hakïm at dawn deep in the desert sitting with a troubled bedouin, telling him to fix his gaze on the flight of a distant eagle and saying Yes, they would find the oasis.

  Why did they keep returning to him? To tell him what?

  An Englishman, a Jew, an Arab. His father and his grandfather relentlessly striding on, patiently going nowhere, his land and his home and heritage.

  The vision burst upon him. A homeland for all the peoples of his heritage. One nation embracing Arabs and Christians and Jews. A new world and the Fertile Crescent of antiquity reborn in the new century, one great nation stretching majestically from the Nile through Arabia and Palestine and Syria to the foothills of Anatolia, watered by the Jordan and the Tigris and the Euphrates as well, by Galilee, a vast nation honoring all of its three and twelve and forty thousand prophets, a splendid nation where the legendary cities would be raised to flourish once more, Memphis of Menes and Ecbatana of Media and Sidon and Alep of the Hittites, Kish and Lagash of Sumer and Zoar of the Edomites, Akkad of Sargon and Tyre of the purple dye and Acre of the Crusaders, Petra of the Nabataeans and Ctesiphon of the Sassanids and Basra of the Abbasids, sublime Jerusalem and the equally sublime Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights.

  Stern was delirious, the vision was overwhelming, far grander than the promise he had made to his mother as a child. He sat down at his desk and began scribbling feverishly, and when he emerged two weeks later he had not only conjured up the memories of a thousand and one ancient tribes and civilizations and fused them together, he had also written the basic laws for the new nation and designed its flag, sketched some of its impressive public buildings and considered its universities and theaters, pondered its national anthem and listed the components of its constitution.

  At the age of twenty-one he had arrived at his plan for life.

  Quickly then he packed his bags and left Paris. Having decided who he was, nothing remained but to become that man and work toward the common bonds that perhaps had existed in his homeland three thousand
years ago, not since.

  This new promise was solemn and certain and he knew he would never break it, not even if it turned in time to break him.

  15 The Jordan

  From the soft green heights of Galilee, rich in gentle fields of grain and kindly memories, a promised stream plunging down and down.

  STERN DROVE BACK TO the Middle East in a ten-horsepower French automobile, after being trapped briefly in Albania by the outbreak of the first Balkan war. Once there he converted the automobile into a tractor car to use in the desert. Clattering and backfiring, the tractor roared down wadis and rumbled over mountains covering distances that had taken dozens of painful camel marches in his father’s day.

  But the clouds of sand raised by the tractor attracted the attention of the bedouin. He needed a more surreptitious means of transport and naturally he thought of a balloon.

  Stern had first experimented with balloons as a boy by suspending a basket beneath a sack sewn from tents. Above the basket was a crock holding a camel-dung fire. The hot air filled the sack and sent him bumping down a hillside.

  Later he increased the heat of the fire many times by burning oil sludge from outcroppings in the desert rock. With this new buoyancy he could lift a larger sack and sail much higher. Alone as a boy dreaming on the wind above the Yemen, Stern had learned to read the stars.

  Now he built a large balloon with a compact gondola that held a narrow cot, a small writing table and a shaded lamp. The balloon was fed by bottles of hydrogen which he cached in various remote ravines in the desert where he could descend at dawn and remain hidden during the hours of daylight, to sleep and plan the next leg of his trip while keeping secret the passage of his ship.

  For Stern was careful to travel only at night. Sometimes he worked at his desk but more often he extinguished his shaded lamp and mused his way silently across the dark sky, invisible to those below when only the stars lit the desert, perhaps suggesting a tiny distant cloud when the moon was waxing through its quarters.

  Back and forth he sailed from Aden to the Jordan, from the Dead Sea to Oman, hovering before daybreak to drop gently into a cleft in the rocks to anchor his ship. Stealthily then he made his way on foot down some narrow wadi to a village where he had arranged to meet a nationalist leader, sailing from intrigue to intrigue increasingly suffering from chronic headaches and chronic insomnia and chronic fatigue, celibate and isolated in his balloon, occasionally given to heart palpitations when he drifted too high in the starry night sky, already a victim of the incurable dreams he had known as a boy in the Temple of the Moon.

  For as soon as he had his balloon equipped and set out to explore his mission, he discovered his cause had been reduced to a question of smuggling arms and nothing more. He had conceived of his great nation as healing the divisions of the past, his own role in helping to found it much like that of a hakïm. But the men he talked to during those first months when he was making contacts could think about nothing but guns. If he raised other subjects they cut him short.

  Idiot, yelled a man in Damascus, why do you persist in this foolishness? A constitution? Laws? There’s no time for that here, you’re not at the university anymore playing with theories. Guns are what we need. When we kill enough Turks and Europeans they’ll leave, that’s the law, that’s our constitution.

  But someday, Stern began.

  Of course someday. Ten years from now, twenty, thirty, who knows. Someday we may have all the time in the world to talk but not now. Now there’s only one thing. Guns, brother. You want to help? Good, bring us guns. You have a balloon and can cross borders at night. Good, get on with it. Guns.

  It sickened Stern and he tried to resist it because it was driving him to secret despair. He was appalled to think his splendid vision could so quickly degenerate into nothing more than smuggling arms. But he couldn’t argue with those men, he knew what they said was true and if he wanted to play a part it would have to be this.

  So he sadly took all the inspired notes and lists and beautiful sketches he had made during those feverish and ecstatic two weeks in Paris, carried them high up above the desert one night and burned them, lit them one by one and dropped their flaming ashes into the blackness, then floated away to the east and early the next morning, the first day of 1914 or 5674 or 1292, depending on the prophet quoted, he delivered his first secret shipment of arms for the sake of a vast peaceful new nation he hoped to help build in the new century.

  Stern’s most significant act during those early years was also the least known, a brief yet extraordinary encounter that took place accidentally in the desert. To Stern it meant nothing and when he met the same man again after a lapse of eight or nine years, in Smyrna in 1922 when the man saved his life, he didn’t even remember having seen him before.

  But for the old Arab it was the most important moment in his long life.

  The chance meeting occurred in the spring while Haj Harun was on his annual pilgrimage to Mecca, as usual traveling alone far from the customary routes. And as usual at all times of the year, Stern was drifting invisibly above the desert on one of his clandestine missions. At dawn he dropped from the sky to anchor his balloon and found he had nearly landed on a wizened old Arab who had been dozing like a lizard with his head under a rock. At once the barefoot man flung out his arms and prostrated himself.

  He appeared both starving and lost. Stern offered him food, and water but the Arab refused to raise his face from the dust. At last he did so although nothing could induce him to rise from his knees. In that position he ate and drank sparingly as if performing some ritual.

  Seeing the pathetic thinness of the man’s legs and the unnatural luster of his eyes, which he took for fever or worse, Stern begged him to accept his waterskins and other supplies. He even offered to float him to the nearest oasis if he was unable to walk, as seemed likely. But the wretched man abjectly refused everything. Instead he asked in the humblest of whispers, his voice trembling, if he might have the honor of knowing his host’s name.

  Stern told him. The Arab thanked him reverently, whereupon he backed away still on his knees and continued doing so for the rest of the morning until he had crossed the horizon and was out of sight.

  Once during the morning Stern happened to glance across the desert in the direction of the retreating Haj Harun who was now a mere dot on the crest of the dunes, still struggling backward on his knees, but Stern didn’t really see him and the crazed behavior of the old man made no impression on him. Instead he was busily turning the pages of his notebooks planning new routes for smuggling arms.

  Initially there were some successes.

  In 1914 the kaiser’s government was persuaded to pay regular bribes to both the Sherif of Mecca and his chief rival Emir ibn Saud, and Stern ferried German revolutionary orders from Damascus to Jidda. But nothing came of it because the Arabs wouldn’t do anything and the English were soon paying them more.

  That same winter he arranged a secret meeting near Cairo with an influential English suffragette, a composer of comic operettas who had recently returned from an expedition to the Sudan where she had spent a long afternoon in the privacy of her riverboat cabin photographing a comely young hermaphrodite, a camel breeder currently known as Mohammed but formerly the wife of a tribal sheik.

  The sheik had beaten his wife constantly, as the suffragette learned in the course of taking her photographs. Moved by the compassion she always felt for a woman who had suffered the prejudices of the world, she ended the afternoon by making passionate love to Mohammed. But to her great disappointment none of her photographs had turned out.

  Stern took her to a Greek artist in Alexandria who was able to render exactly what she had seen, thereby gaining the suffragette’s support and propaganda for his cause in her subsequent operettas.

  In 1918 Zaghlul was freed from internment and returned to Egypt to demand independence. In 1919 Kemal embarrassed the British by defying the sultan and the Persians resisted their British treaty. Shortly therea
fter there were Arab revolts in both Syria and Iraq.

  But there were also signs of coming failure in those early years.

  In Constantinople the sultan had confiscated modern textbooks because he had learned they contained the subversive formula H2O, which meant that he, Hamid II, was secretly a cipher and good for nothing.

  In 1909 the Turks had massacred twenty-five thousand Armenians in Adana. In 1915, deciding there would no longer be an Armenian question if there were no Armenians, the Turks began marching them into the Syrian desert and murdering them along the way to speed the devastations wrought by starvation and epidemics.

  By 1916 legions of spies had descended on Athens only to be surpassed three years later by the even greater hordes of spies congregating in Constantinople, where it was found that certain national representatives on their way to the Versailles peace conference could neither write their names nor recognize them when spoken to.

  At a little-known meeting in 1918 between Weizmann and the future Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the dignified and seemingly innocent Arab revealed his profound capacity for delusion and hate by softly quoting passages from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  And worst of all for Stern, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War wiped out the investments his father had left him after the former explorer and hakïm, on the eve of Stern’s departure for Europe, had performed what he thought was his final act of healing by relieving his son of the burdensome legacy of that Empire he had acquired before Stern was born, an irony immense enough to divide their two centuries forever.

  After 1918 Stern never had any money again. He had to sell his balloon and thereafter he became poorer and poorer, continually begging and borrowing from everyone he met in order to live, his income from smuggling, when there was any, always going for more arms because he wouldn’t touch it himself.

  Yet somehow as he sank deeper and deeper into debt in 1920 and 1921, so deep he knew he would never retrieve himself, he still managed to give the impression he was completely confident in what he was doing, a trait he had learned from observing his father and grandfather perhaps, although with them the confidence had been real.