The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  After visiting the orange-belt and the opera-house, we went to bathe. Suddenly, out of the crowd on the sea-front, stepped Mr. Aaranson of the Italia. “Hello, hello—you here too? Jerusalem’s so dead at this time of year, isn’t it? But I may look in tomorrow. Goodbye.”

  If Tel Aviv were in Russia, the world would be raving over its planning and architecture, its smiling communal life, its intellectual pursuits, and its air of youth enthroned. But the difference from Russia is, that instead of being still only a goal for the future, these things are an accomplished fact.

  Jerusalem, September 10th.—Yesterday we lunched with Colonel Kish. Christopher entered the room first. But the Colonel made for me with the words: “You, I can see, are Sir Mark Sykes’s son”—the implication being, we supposed, that no Englishman of such parentage could possibly wear a beard. During lunch our host informed us of King Feisal’s death in Switzerland. On the wall hung a fine painting of Jerusalem by Rubin, whom Mr. Gordon had meant us to visit in Tel Aviv if he had not been away.

  I went to swim at the Y.M.C.A. opposite the hotel. This necessitated paying two shillings, the waiving of a medical examination, changing among a lot of hairy dwarves who smelt of garlic, and finally having a hot shower accompanied by an acrimonious argument because I refused to scour my body with a cake of insecticide soap. I then reached the bath, swam a few yards in and out of a game of water-football conducted by the Physical Director, and emerged so perfumed with antiseptic that I had to rush back and have a bath before going out to dinner.

  We dined with the High Commissioner, most pleasantly. There were none of those official formalities which are very well at large parties, but embarras small ones. In fact, but for the Arab servants, we might have been dining in an English country-house. Did Pontius Pilate remind his guests of an Italian squire?

  There was a dance at the hotel when we got back. Christopher met a school friend in the bar, who begged him, in the name of Alma Mater, to remove his beard. “I mean to say, Sykes, you know, daffinitely, no I don’t like to say it, well I mean, daffinitely, never mind, I’d rather not say daffinitely, you see old boy it’s like this, I mean daffinitely I should take off that beard of yours if I were you, because people daffinitely think you know, I mean, no honestly I won’t say it, no daffinitely I can’t, it wouldn’t be fair, daffinitely it wouldn’t, well then if you really want to know, you’ve pressed me for it haven’t you, daffinitely, it’s like this, I mean people might think you were a bit of a cad you know, daffinitely.”

  When everyone had gone to bed, I walked to the old town. The streets were shrouded in fog; it might have been London in November. In the church of the Holy Sepulchre, an Orthodox service was in progress at the Tomb, accompanied by a choir of Russian peasant women. Those Russian chants changed everything; the place grew solemn and real, as the white-bearded bishop in his bulbous diamond crown and embroidered cope emerged from the door of the shrine into the soft blaze of candles. Gabriel appeared, and after the service shoved me into the sacristy to have coffee with the old man and the treasurer. It was half-past three when I got home.

  SYRIA: Damascus (2200 ft.), September 12th.—Here is the East in its pristine confusion. My window looks out on a narrow, cobbled street, whose odour of spiced cooking has temporarily vanished in a draught of cool air. It is dawn. People are stirring, roused by the muezzin’s unearthly treble from a small minaret opposite, and the answer of distant others. The clamour of vendors and the clatter of hoofs will soon begin.

  I regret having left Palestine. It is refreshing to find a country endowed with great natural beauty, with a capital whose appearance is worthy of its fame, with a prosperous cultivation and a prodigiously expanding revenue, with the germ of an indigenous modern culture in the form of painters, musicians, and architects, and with an administration whose conduct resembles that of a benevolent Lord of the Manor among his dependants. There is no need to be a Zionist to see that this state of things is due to the Jews. They are pouring in. Last year permission was given for 6000: 17,000 arrived, the extra 11,000 by frontiers which cannot be guarded. Once in Palestine, they throw away their passports, and so cannot be deported. Yet there appear to be means of supporting them. They have enterprise, persistence, technical training, and capital.

  The cloud on the horizon is Arab hostility. To a superficial observer it seems that the Government, by deferring to the susceptibility of the Arabs, is encouraging their sense of aggrievement, while obtaining none of their goodwill. The Arabs hate the English, and lose no opportunity of venting their ill-manners on them. I cannot see why this should support their case in the eyes of the Government. They have not the Indian excuse, the colour-bar.

  At dinner here last night Christopher was talking of Persia, when he noticed a party at the same table gazing at us. Suddenly he heard them talking Persian. He tried to recall, in whispers to me, if he had said anything derogatory to the Shah or his country. We seem to be approaching a mediaeval tyranny of modern sensibilities. There was a diplomatic incident when Mrs. Nicolson told the English public she could buy no marmalade in Teheran.

  Damascus, September 13th.—The Omayad Mosque, though much restored after a fire in 1893, dates from the VIIIth century. Its grand arcade, with gallery above, is as well proportioned, and proceeds with as stately a rhythm, in its bare, Islamic way, as the San-sovino Library in Venice. Originally, its bareness was clothed in a glitter of mosaics. Some remain: the first landscapes of the European tradition. For all their Pompeian picturesqueness, their colonnaded palaces and crag-bound castles, they are real landscapes, more than mere decoration, concerned inside formal limits with the identity of a tree or the energy of a stream. They must have been done by Greeks, and they foreshadow, properly enough, El Greco’s landscapes of Toledo. Even now, as the sun catches a fragment on the outside wall, one can imagine the first splendour of green and gold, when the whole court shone with those magic scenes conceived by Arab fiction to recompense the parched eternities of the desert.

  Beyrut, September 14th.—To come here, we took two seats in a car. Beside us, at the back, sat an Arab gentleman of vast proportions, who was dressed like a wasp in a gown of black and yellow stripes and held between his knees a basket of vegetables. In front was an Arab widow, accompanied by another basket of vegetables and a small son. Every twenty minutes she was sick out of the window. Sometimes we stopped; when we did not, her vomit flew back into the car by the other window. It was not a pleasant three hours.

  The post has brought newspaper cuttings describing the departure of the Charcoal-Burners. Even The Times has half a column. The Daily Express writes:

  Five men left a West-end hotel last night on a secret expedition. It may prove to be the most romantic expedition ever undertaken.

  They left London for Marseilles and the Sahara Desert. After that, few men know what their destination will be.

  A PREMATURE ANNOUNCEMENT MIGHT ENTAIL SERIOUS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES.

  These five men will travel by two lorries driven by portable gas plants. The fuel used is ordinary charcoal, and re-fuelling is necessary only every fifty or sixty miles. It is the first time this new invention has been used, but it is probable that it will be universally utilised for road transport in the future.

  It is a nuisance to find one’s name associated with such rot.

  We now await the Champollion, with cars and party on board.

  Beyrut, September 16th.—My forebodings have come true.

  I went on board the Champollion at daybreak. Goldman? Henderson? Deux camions? No one had heard of them. But Rutter was there, with a tale of disaster and absurdity.

  The cars broke down at Abbeville. They might have continued on petrol, but have been secretly returned to England, where the invention is to be further perfected and a new start is to be made, this time unknown to the press, in a month or so. Lest I also should return and give the failure away by my presence in London, Rutter has been sent on ahead to expedite me safely into Persia. In fact I
am gratuitously invested with the powers and character of a blackmailer.

  We have spent most of the day in the sea, recovering from shock, and have booked places in the Nairn bus for Baghdad on Tuesday.

  Mr. Nairn himself came in for a drink this evening, inquisitive about the charcoal cars. Having known of the invention for many years, or others like it, he was sceptical, and with the best will in the world we could not oppose much faith to his doubts. All Syria is excited by the pictures of his new Pullman bus, which is to arrive in November.

  Damascus, September 18th.—Since our arrival on these coasts, Christopher and I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved. Our technique was nicely employed in the hotel at Baalbek.

  “Four hundred piastres for that room? Four hundred did you say? Good God! Away! Call the car. Three hundred and fifty? One hundred and fifty you mean. Three hundred? Are you deaf, can’t you hear? I said a hundred and fifty. We must go. There are other hotels. Come, load the luggage. I doubt if we shall stay in Baalbek at all.”

  “But, sir, this is first-class hotel. I give you very good dinner, five courses. This is our best room, sir, it has bath and view of ruins, very fine.”

  “God in heaven, are the ruins yours? Must we pay for the very air? Five courses for dinner is too much, and I don’t suppose the bath works. You still say three hundred? Come down. I say, come down a bit. That’s better, two hundred and fifty. I said a hundred and fifty. I’ll say two hundred. You’ll have to pay the other fifty out of your own pocket, will you? Well do, please. I shall be delighted. Two hundred then? No? Very good. (We run downstairs and out of the door.) Goodbye. What? I didn’t hear. Two hundred. I thought so.

  “And now a whisky and soda. What do you charge for that? Fifty piastres. Fifty piastres indeed. Who do you think we are? Anyhow you always give too much whisky. I’ll pay fifteen piastres, not fifty. Don’t laugh. Don’t go away either. I want exactly this much whisky, no more, no less; that’s only half a full portion. Thirty, you say? Is thirty half fifty? Can you do arithmetic? Soda water indeed. Twenty now. No not twenty-five. Twenty. There is all the difference, if you could only realise it. Bring the bottle at once, and for heaven’s sake don’t argue.”

  During the five-course dinner, we complimented the man on some succulent birds.

  “Partridges, sir,” he replied, “I make them fat in little houses.”

  Admission to the ruins costs five shillings per person per visit. Having secured a reduction of this charge by telephoning to Beyrut, we walked across to visit them.

  “Guide, Monsieur?”

  Silence.

  “Guide, Monsieur?”

  Silence.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous désirez, Monsieur?”

  Silence.

  “D’où venez-vous, Monsieur?”

  Silence.

  “Où allez-vous, Monsieur?”

  Silence.

  “Vous avez des affaires ici, Monsieur?”

  “Non.”

  “Vous avez des affaires à Baghdad, Monsieur?”

  “Non.”

  “Vous avez des affaires à Téhéran, Monsieur?”

  “Non.”

  “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous faites, Monsieur?”

  “Je fais un voyage en Syrie.”

  “Vous êtes un officier naval, Monsieur?”

  “Non.”

  “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous êtes, Monsieur?”

  “Je suis homme.”

  “Quoi?”

  “HOMME.”

  “Je comprends. Touriste.”

  Even “voyageur” is obsolete; and with reason: the word has a complimentary air. The traveller of old was one who went in search of knowledge and whom the indigènes were proud to entertain with their local interests. In Europe this attitude of reciprocal appreciation has long evaporated. But there at least the “tourist” is no longer a phenomenon. He is part of the landscape, and in nine cases out of ten has little money to spend beyond what he has paid for his tour. Here, he is still an aberration. If you can come from London to Syria on business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you must be very rich. No one cares if you like the place, or hate it, or why. You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species, which exists to be tapped like a milch cow or a gum tree.

  At the turnstile, that final outrage, a palsied dotard took ten minutes to write out each ticket. After which we escaped from these trivialities into the glory of Antiquity.

  Baalbek is the triumph of stone; of lapidary magnificence on a scale whose language, being still the language of the eye, dwarfs New York into a home of ants. The stone is peach-coloured, and is marked in ruddy gold as the columns of St. Martin-in-the-Fields are marked in soot. It has a marmoreal texture, not transparent, but faintly powdered, like bloom on a plum. Dawn is the time to see it, to look up at the Six Columns, when peach-gold and blue air shine with equal radiance, and even the empty bases that uphold no columns have a living, sun-blest identity against the violet deeps of the firmament. Look up, look up; up this quarried flesh, these thrice-enormous shafts, to the broken capitals and the cornice as big as a house, all floating in the blue. Look over the walls, to the green groves of white-stemmed poplars; and over them to the distant Lebanon, a shimmer of mauve and blue and gold and rose. Look along the mountains to the void: the desert, that stony, empty sea. Drink the high air. Stroke the stone with your own soft hands. Say goodbye to the West if you own it. And then turn, tourist, to the East.

  We did, when the ruins closed. It was dusk. Ladies and gentlemen in separate parties were picnicking on a grass meadow, beside a stream. Some sat on chairs by marble fountains, drawing at their hubble-bubbles; others on the grass beneath occasional trees, eating by their own lanterns. The stars came out and the mountain slopes grew black. I felt the peace of Islam. And if I mention this commonplace experience, it is because in Egypt and Turkey that peace is now denied; while in India Islam appears, like everything else, uniquely and exclusively Indian. In a sense it is so; for neither man nor institution can meet that overpowering environment without a change of identity. But I will say this for my own sense: that when travelling in Mohammadan India without previous knowledge of Persia, I compared myself to an Indian observing European classicism, who had started on the shores of the Baltic instead of the Mediterranean.

  Yesterday afternoon at Baalbek, Christopher complained of lassitude and lay on his bed, which deferred our going till it was dark and bitterly cold on top of the Lebanon. On reaching Damascus, he went to bed with two quinine tablets, developed such a headache that he dreamt he was a rhinoceros with a horn, and woke up this morning with a temperature of 102, though the crisis is past. We have cancelled our seats in the Nairn bus for tomorrow, and booked them for Friday instead.

  Damascus, September 21st.—A young Jew has attached himself to us. This happened because there is a waiter in the hotel who is the spit of Hitler, and when I remarked on the fact the Jew, the manager, and the waiter himself broke into such paroxysms of laughter that they could hardly stand.

  As Rutter and I were crossing a bit of dusty ground left waste by the French bombardment, we saw a fortune-teller making marks on a tray of sand, while a poor woman and her emaciated child awaited news of the child’s fate. Near by was a similar fortune-teller, unpatronised. I squatted down. He put a little sand in my palm and told me to sprinkle it on the tray. Then he dabbed three lines of hieroglyphics in the sand, went over them once or twice as though dealing out patience cards, paused in thought before making a sudden deep diagonal, and spoke these words, which Rutter, who once spent nine months in Mecca disguised as an Arab, may be supposed to have translated with sufficient accuracy:

  “You have a friend of whom you are fond and who is fond of you. In a few days he will send you some money for the expenses of your journey. He will join you later. You will have a succes
sful journey.”

  My blackmailing powers, it seems, are working of their own accord.

  The hotel is owned by M. Alouf, whose children inhabit the top floor. One evening he led us into an airless cellar lined with glass cases and a safe. From these he took the following objects:

  A pair of big silver bowls, stamped with Christian symbols and a picture of the Annunciation.

  A document written on mud-coloured cloth, between three and four feet long and eighteen inches broad, purporting to be the will of Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, and said to have been brought from Medina by the family of King Hussein in 1925.

  A Byzantine bottle, of dark-blue glass as thin as an egg-shell, unbroken, and about ten inches high.

  A gold Hellenistic head, with parted lips, glass eyes, and bright blue eyebrows.

  A gold mummy in a trunk.

  And a silver statuette nine and a half inches high, which, for lack of anything to compare it with, M. Alouf called Hittite. This object, if genuine, must be one of the most remarkable discoveries of recent years in the Near East. The figure is that of a man, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. On his head he wears a pointed cap as tall as his own body. His left arm is broken; his right carries a horned bull in its crook and holds a sceptre. Round the waist are bands of wire. This wire, the sceptre, the tail and horns of the bull, and the cap are all of gold. And the gold is so pliable that M. Alouf gaily bent the sceptre at a right-angle and put it straight again. No persuasions could induce him to let me photograph the object. One wonders when and how it will be rescued from that cellar.

  Christopher got up on Wednesday, and Rutter took us to tea with El Haj Mohammad ibn el Bassam, an old man of seventy or more, dressed in Bedouin clothes. His family befriended Doughty and he is a famous figure to Arabophils. Having made a fortune out of camels in the War, he lost £40,000 after it by speculating in German marks. We had tea at a marble table, which the height of the chairs just enabled us to touch with our chins. The noise of the Arabic conversation, punctuated by gurks and gulps, reminded me of Winston Churchill making a speech.