The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  He would not let me go. The perfect hospitality. A self-contained flat at my disposal, absolute freedom and horses to ride. He hoped I would be kind enough to give him the pleasure of my company every day at dinner and any other time I chose. He insisted that he needed my help. I took that a mere courtesy; but, as you will see, from his point of view I had dropped on him from heaven—or the moon, let us say.

  At that time of year when the spring rains were just ending, the beasts were in magnificent condition. The white bull was running free in a well fenced meadow below the eastern hill, sheltered from the rest of the estate by a belt of eucalyptus. It was Pierre who named him Antiochus. He visited him daily to clean out his private spring and give him something pleasant to crunch. I recommended that, if he wouldn’t hear of a ring in Antiochus’ nose, at least the bull ought to have a headstall. But Pierre saw no need. His animals were all a part of that organic whole, and he expected them to know it and to behave as reasonably as playful children. Mukhtar, his Arab stallion, used to follow him around licking the back of his neck. I have never seen so consciously proud a horse. He was generous with his strength, whether he was obliging his master or his mares.

  That was the prevailing mood of Pierre de Valence. And animals in close contact always reflect the character of the human friend. He was an immensely appreciative man—of his life, his estate and his abiding luck. He didn’t like to talk about it. Who does? But one morning when we were gazing down on Bukeia from the upland stream which fed the reservoir he did go so far as to say: ‘Looking after Bukeia—there must be something.’

  I was encouraged by sun and scented distances and wind from the sea—all far away from the gropings in darkness which worry and get us nowhere—to ask him what sort of something he believed in.

  ‘I do not know,’ he answered frankly. ‘But in this country the unseen is always present.’

  That was true enough. There are seventeen separate religions between the Taurus and Jerusalem. The One, the Merciful, with whom a Mohammedan is content to be alone in the desert, is not enough for the fullness of the Syrian shore.

  He dismounted from Mukhtar, and I from Lys. She was a big, eight-year-old brood mare from Turkestan with a will of her own. Mukhtar stayed close to his master, listening for whatever important event had caused him to take to the ground.

  ‘Sometimes I want to worship,’ he told me. ‘Just to say “thank you”. That’s all. Not asking for this, that and the other! Not bothering powers which, if they exist, don’t want to be bothered!’

  We had been to visit the Greek Orthodox monastery in the next valley. Pierre had bought part of his land from them and frequently sent the monks casual gifts of the season. They struck me as a lot of dirty, greedy old men; but they were warm and grateful, and their chanting was marvellous. I suggested that Pierre could say his ‘thank you’ very well within the conventional limits of Christianity.

  ‘I can’t accept those monks as intermediaries between me and the divine,’ he said. ‘They are just creatures of habit. They have been at it so long that all the goodness has gone out. And I—I am a revivalist, if I’m anything.’

  It was a queer word to use, yet it pointed his meaning. A revivalist brings the fresh, emotional content back to any religion, often with spectacular results—which you, as a good Catholic, very rightly distrust.

  ‘I always felt you would understand,’ he went on. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you about it. Let’s go!’

  I thought he was about to ride down to the house. Instead, he led me round the edge of the bowl towards the bare hill which closed his valley on the east. It was higher than I thought. From the top the view was limitless, all the dust of the air washed out by rain. I could see the golden flash of the Orontes at a bend, and if the earth had been flat I could have seen the Euphrates too. To the north-west, through a gap, was a broad arrow of Mediterranean around Antioch.

  Just over the brow of the hill was the marble pavement of a small temple, the stones of its precinct and the drums of slender columns scattered over the turf. I asked Pierre if anything was known of it—a stupid question in our Europe which treasures its remains of the classical period, but a reasonable one in the Syrian hills where there are so many exquisite little sacred sites never mentioned in the literature of the time and still awaiting the spade to identify them. What was exceptional about this ruin was that the altar still stood: a block of stone indestructible, though cracked, weathered and tilting.

  ‘Yes, a little,’ he replied. ‘It’s a shrine of Artemis. They used to ride up here after sacrificing to Zeus Casios on the Jebel Aqra above Seleucia. You can see the heaps of ash and bones on it to this day—’ he pointed out the peak to me, forming part of the slope which framed the wedge of sea ‘—I feel I know why they came. For a sort of spiritual picnic. No holocaust of victims. Just a single sacrifice for the more fastidious. There may have been another reason, too. Artemis was much more like a living woman than other goddesses—jealous, very easily offended, very fussy about her sacrifices. And there all day long was the smoke rising from the Jebel Aqra, and nobody paying any particular attention to her!’

  I saw the direction in which his thought was running, and that he had jumped at the conversational opening I had given. I said awkwardly that Artemis, the goddess of hunting, wouldn’t be much good to him.

  ‘Of the beasts as well as hunting,’ he answered. ‘I like to think that she had her sacred park at Bukeia.’

  Behind the altar, the substructure of the temple had all vanished under lumpy turf infested by big, black ants of one of the scavenging species. Pierre suggested that they had been there, generation after generation, ever since the first colony fed on the dried blood from the sacrifices. Like so many of his imaginings, that could very well have been true. One reads of the intolerable cloud of flies over the pagan altars, so why not ants? And, if experience on my own land is anything to go by, once ants, always ants. Even modern insecticides only reduce the number.

  This lot was decidedly carnivorous. While I was looking for reliefs on the eastern face—which the winds had long since scoured away—four of the little devils were crawling up my socks. They all bit in very quick succession, I suppose because they reached bare skin at nearly the same time. That was not the only shock which had to be relieved. I remember being ashamed of my language in such a thyme-scented silence and hoping that the virgin goddess was broadminded.

  ‘After three thousand years of angry Syrians,’ Pierre said, ‘I expect she finds you unimaginative.’

  The dry, ironic voice was uneasy. He had been following my eyes as I closely examined the carved sump of the blood channel.

  ‘It was you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. A lamb.’

  ‘But you don’t believe?’

  ‘It isn’t a question of belief exactly. I told you. I must show my gratitude. As well here as elsewhere.’

  That was true enough. It was a place made for worship, where prayer alone would have its greatest possible effect. When I said so, he replied that prayer received but could not give: that life could only communicate with Life through life.

  An obscure theory. I did not know enough of pagan mysticism to argue. I could only say that I thought he hated killing.

  ‘I do. But sacrifice—well, you must feel pity. You must admire the victim. Oh, I don’t suppose the priests did. Like the monks, it became a habit and there was no response.’

  ‘Was there any for you?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I felt revolted. Partly by the blood. Much more because I knew I had not done the thing properly. Such a sense of inadequacy implies a standard of comparison. Whose standard? I haven’t any myself. What was disappointed and telling me that I had made a mess of it?’

  I exclaimed that of course he had, that it wasn’t surprising he felt a fool.

  ‘I did not,’ he replied. ‘I felt incompetent. I was much too afraid to feel a fool.’

  He told me how he had studied and rehearsed the rites, hi
s own purification, everything proper to the worship of Artemis and the moon goddess Astarte, which was her Syrian avatar. In a thin voice he chanted to me a bit of the Greek hymn, then translated it into French.

  I saw him for the first time—in spite of his Syrian friends and the Ministry of Agriculture—as a hermit, cut off from his kind and finding the lost Europe in its roots: roots which had meant a lot to him in some sun-lit library of sweet France, fired his imagination and left it receptive to the city walls and temples which still stood serene among agitated Arabs. And I was sure that he, like most hermits, was escaping from himself and something in his past which made him unworthy of his beloved Bukeia. Rumour had it—but rumour would—that awkward questions might be asked if he went home. Nobody knew how he had acquired his capital.

  ‘Will you help me?’ he asked. ‘It’s difficult alone, and my people would be horrified if they knew.’

  I couldn’t refuse outright. I was already very fond of him, and he depended on me. You, Desmond, will feel pagan sacrifice to be actively wrong. I did not. Both he and his hill-top made it seem pure and even beautiful. And his motive was unexceptional. I have stretched out my own arms in gratitude when some combination of life on a spring morning has made me thankful to be part of it, though I have never imagined that killing could help me to express what I thought.

  I explained that I had not the sort of tingling temperament which would welcome Artemis into the twentieth century, and that he would not get me anywhere near the altar. As an act of disapproving friendship I was prepared to come along and hold the horses, but that was all. He thanked me warmly, promising that, if I liked, I could go away at once after I had helped him to lead Antiochus as far as the temple.

  The name exploded inside me. It was utterly unexpected, yet plain and obvious once mentioned. I protested. I said it was indecent to waste the life of such an attractive young creature. And then I began to splutter away into nothing as I realized the hollowness of my argument. If Pierre decided that the beast ought to go for beef—which was all he was worth—a Mohammedan butcher would give him the same quick, clean end as he was going to get. And if he preferred to feed himself spiritually instead of on steak, he had a perfect right to do so. In any case, Antiochus had had an idyllic year of life to which, economically, he was not entitled.

  Pierre had it all worked out before he made me buy the bull. That was why Antiochus was in a field by himself, near to the hill and far from the herdsmen; that was why only Pierre himself attended to his wants. He proposed to make it look as if he had carelessly left the gate open, and the bull had wandered off into the mountains. He doubted if the ritual roasting of the meat was necessary; the offering and the sincerity of the spirit behind it were the essentials. Jackals would do the rest, as they always had, with the leopard helping if he happened to be in residence. He knew where to hide the carcass, and intended to drive his breakdown truck, tracked and with a winch on it, up the hill the day before.

  There was a new moon two nights later: an acceptable occasion, I gathered, for this dubious act of worship. I was glad of that. A delay of a week or more might have tended to exaggerate my reluctance. For twenty-four hours Pierre was not to be seen. Somewhere in the silence of the house he was fasting and submitting his body to the formalities of purification. I could not help being impressed. A certain reverence was unavoidable. The man had nothing in common with the lunatic fringe, playing about inefficiently with witchcraft and black magic. What he was doing was holy and had, after all, been holy to men and women of first-class intellect with spiritual yearnings just as eager as our own.

  At dusk we rode down to the bull’s pasture—myself keeping well behind Pierre on the narrow path, for he had asked me not to touch him even by accident. He was dressed like an Arab in a white kaftan, bare-legged and bare-headed. Antiochus, a big, grey ghost in the last of the twilight, came plunging up. He tried to eat the garland of wild iris and narcissus as Pierre lifted it over his head, but after that was docile and affectionate. Pierre walked alongside him, caressing the curls between the horns. Mukhtar followed to heel. I led Lys up the steep grass track, curiously moved and even wishing that I had not excluded myself from all participation.

  Near the top we passed the dark bulk of the truck and its winch. It was a mistake to have that cold, modern reminder on the spot. It should have been further away and forgotten. I find it hard to explain what I mean. Put it this way: one does not want a bed in the aisle at a wedding service. We know that the ceremony leads to it; but for the moment proceedings are on a higher plane.

  As our heads rose above the last slope, the brilliant new moon came into sight as if it had been climbing up from the Orontes to meet us. I stopped fifty yards from the ruins with Lys and Mukhtar. Pierre and Antiochus walked together to the altar, his hooves clattering on the marble. He was interested and submissive. Vanity? It might have been. Animals of high intelligence can all feel something of the sort. But I retained in the rag-bag of memory that it was always considered a favourable omen if the sacrifice walked willingly to the altar. So it must once have been a common occurrence, whatever the reason.

  They were all silver—the mass of Antiochus, the crescent moon, the curved blade lying on the altar. Pierre murmured some prayer which I could not hear and picked up the knife. He buried his left hand in the curls and pulled back the head, throwing his full weight into the movement. The steel flashed in the moonlight, and that was all. He let the head drop, and turned for a moment to the altar with outstretched hands. Then, with a sudden attack in which I thought I could discern desperation, he tried again. I saw the meekly elongated throat very clearly against the sky. It seemed to remain erect even after the knife had tinkled on the pavement.

  Pierre came straight over the turf to me, shaking with emotion. ‘I cannot do it to him,’ he said. ‘I cannot do it.’

  ‘Of course you can’t!’ I answered with a heartiness which offended me. ‘It amazes me that you ever thought you could.’

  ‘Take him back, will you?’ he asked.

  I left him with the horses and walked up to Antiochus. He waited, perfectly motionless, his eyes shut. His neck under my hand felt slightly unnatural: a stiffness either of hair or muscle. He was in a kind of trance. The double flash of the steel under his eyes may have caused it.

  While I wondered whether to give him an irreverent slap, there was a commotion among the horses. Pierre came running, twisting like a snipe, followed as usual by Mukhtar. But not in the usual way. He just managed to get in among the fallen stones as Mukhtar struck at him with his forelegs. The stallion chased him round to the back of the altar, and then seemed to come to his senses. Myself, I took cover behind the still motionless Antiochus, yelling out to know what was wrong.

  ‘I cannot imagine,’ Pierre answered. ‘The scent of fear, perhaps. Or of shame.’

  He realized that the fit of hysteria which had possessed the stallion was over, and leaned across the altar to stroke his nose. Mukhtar whinnied with pleasure; he seemed quite unaware of what he had done. Pierre gentled and petted him for a good minute, then led him out through the tumbled masonry. He was so confident that when they reached the open he sat down to pick off the ants. I was never so impressed by his self-control in the presence of animals, and told him so. He replied that he had been forced to be patient, that any exclamation or excitement might have upset Mukhtar all over again.

  Meanwhile, Antiochus returned to normal, more than normal. He began to behave like a healthy young bull waking up from a pleasant dream and impressed by his own excellence. He butted me in the wind and cavorted around inviting me to butt him back. Pierre and Mukhtar headed him off and let him work his energy out of his system on the way down the hill. We returned him to his paddock and went home ourselves.

  Next day we hardly discussed what had happened, for it was only too evident, when considered in the light of the sun upon a scientifically managed estate, that the four living beings concerned—I leave out Lys who, as befit
ted an experienced mother, had remained a mere spectator—could not look back on themselves with approval. I left Pierre to his business, and in the evening drove the truck down from the hill for him and put it away in the barn.

  On the third day I noticed that he was walking with a limp. When I asked him if he had sprained an ankle, he replied that he might have wrenched something running away from Mukhtar, but that he had not noticed it at the time. The leg, he said, was a bit painful in the thigh and groin.

  That seemed a likely result of dodging among the drums of fallen columns, and I thought no more of it till the following morning when one of his little Alaouites visited my flat. She said that she had been giving her lord hot fomentations, that he had fever and that she did not like the look of his leg. He had insisted that it was nothing, that he had probably caught a chill and that his leg hadn’t anything to do with it.

  I was up in his bedroom at once. The girl was right. He had such a temperature that he was incapable of clearly examining his leg or any other object. The flesh was noticeably dark, with streaks of red. The doctor who attended him and the Bukeia families was down at the coast in Latakia—many hours away if one had to open up communications by messenger and police post. So I took command. I got some of his men to smash down the door-posts of his bedroom so that we could lift the whole bed out without disturbing him. We lashed it down to a two-ton truck and made a bolt to Latakia hospital.

  God, the speed of the thing! It was too late to amputate, and he seemed resistant to penicillin and every other injection in their dispensary. When they had given him up and the fever dropped in the hour before death he had a short interview with his lawyer—he wouldn’t hear of a priest—in which he left Bukeia to a co-operative of his workers. He whispered to me: ‘I have left you Antiochus. Do not tell them why!’