From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  I wandered in, through a series of gatehouses each designed to expose any attacker to the full field of fire from the loopholes and wall-walks above. For an emergency measure, built in secret and disguised as a church, it was really an extremely competent piece of military architecture.

  Within, the church was still in use. Lamps and fairy lights were festooned over the chancel arch, and the walls were cluttered with sacred images: icons of Eastern warrior saints; sentimental nineteenth-century oleographs of the Holy Family; brightly coloured textiles showing the Sacred Heart or a selection of weeping Madonnas.

  As I sat at the back, a very old hunchbacked woman stumbled in, frantically crossing herself. She walked up to the altar and kissed an icon, then touched a cross painted on the apse wall. Turning back, she saw me and came straight up, chattering excitedly in Turoyo. From her imitation of a Maxim gun, it was clear that she was telling the story of the siege, but without Yacoub to interpret I couldn't understand what she was saying. She seemed unconcerned by my lack of comprehension, and pulling at my sleeve, led me up into the corkscrew staircase of one of the towers, chattering without ceasing as we climbed. From the terrace at the top you could see out over miles and miles of the surrounding hills and valleys, the slopes falling away steeply from the base of the towers.

  So overcome was I by the beauty of the view that I did not at first see the bags of mortar and the trowels discreetly hidden in a corner of the roof terrace. It was only then that I noticed what I had missed from below, and what no one in Mar Gabriel had told me. The walls of all the towers had recently been reinforced and strengthened. New mortar had been applied to the walls, and the loopholes had been reconstructed. I felt sure it was more than a renovation. The fortress, the last refuge of the Suriani, was being quietly rebuilt, and was now nearly ready for an emergency.

  The Suriani were expecting the worst; and the lessons of 1914 had not been forgotten.

  Mas'ud and I drove back to Midyat in high spirits. We had got away with it: we hadn't hit a landmine, hadn't been kidnapped by the PKK, and had avoided being threatened by Kurdish village guards or hauled into a Turkish prison. Now we were finished. I had seen everything I wanted to see. I could get out of the war zone and cross the Syrian border; Mas'ud could return to his family. I had not realised the oppressiveness of the sense of imminent danger until now, when I felt its pall rising from us. It was a wonderful feeling: like coming up for air.

  We whooped as we passed the shepherd's sheiling and were again chased by the enormous wolf-dog; we cheered and accelerated away down the bumpy potholed track, throwing up a thick dust-trail into which the slavering beast disappeared. As we crossed a ridge and saw Midyat laid out below us, we talked excitedly about what we would do that night, Mas'ud reeling off the enormous dinner his wife would prepare for him when he returned. He was still detailing the different kinds of Kurdish sweets with which he would end this meal, when an army Land-Rover suddenly pulled out from its hiding place behind a pile of discarded roadbuilding material and blocked the road in front of us. As Mas'ud screeched to a halt, only narrowly avoiding crashing into the Land-Rover's side, three soldiers appeared on top of the gravel and levelled their carbines at us.

  We got out with our hands raised. The officer asked for our documents, and taking them from us, read out the details down his walkie-talkie. There was a crackle of static and some instructions. Putting our documents into his top pocket, he told us to get back into our car and follow him. The Land-Rover turned around and the soldiers jumped in, keeping their guns pointed in our direction.

  At the crossroads in the town centre, the officer conferred with the plainclothes security police in their dark glasses. Two of them got into a waiting white Fiat and followed behind us. Sandwiched in this way, we were escorted out of town to a barbed-wire enclosure a mile or so on the far side of Midyat. Mas'ud looked accusingly at me, but neither of us spoke. I hid my notebooks under my seat. The officer jumped out and indicated that we should follow him. After a week in the company of the Suriani with their Turkish horror-stories, I half-imagined the Turks within to be preparing their thumbscrews and racks. To my alarm and disgust, I saw that my hands were shaking.

  Inside, however, we found to our surprise that the Turkish army could not have been much more polite had we been visiting dignitaries from Ankara. After a short wait in a corridor, we were escorted to the office of an army Captain. He turned out to be young and educated and bored, and seemed surprised and rather pleased to see us. Speaking in fluent French, he told us to sit down while the officer from the Land-Rover related the circumstances of our arrest and handed over our documents. When he had finished he saluted and left the room. The Captain took out a packet of cigarettes and offered it to us, calling at the same time for tea to be brought. Where was I from, he asked. Scotland? Did I have any Johnnie Walker in the car? He was from Istanbul, he said, and was looking forward to going back home on leave. He had had enough of this barbarous end of the country. He asked whether I had been to Istanbul, and I gabbled away nervously about the beauties of his home city. He briefly asked what I was doing in these parts, and I told him I was writing about Byzantine architecture. After twenty more minutes of general conversation, he dialled a number and spoke briefly to the person who answered. Then he apologised to us for the trouble he had caused us and said we were free to go.

  Back in the car, Mas'ud leaned back in his seat and exhaled loudly.

  'I don't believe it,' he said.

  'If the police have been following us,' I said, 'they certainly didn't tell the army about it.' 'He was so friendly.'

  'Let's go,' I said, 'before they change their mind.'

  Mas'ud twisted the key in the ignition, turned the car around, and drove forward. He had nearly passed through the gates when from the building behind us there came a series of loud shouts. In the mirror we could see two armed recruits running frantically towards us, shouting for us to stop. I felt a lead weight sink to the pit of my stomach. The soldiers beckoned us back, and Mas'ud slowly reversed the car to the command post. We sat there without getting out, wondering what might be coming. There must have been a call from the secret police: who had I talked to? What had they said? Where were my notes?

  Seconds later, the Captain came down the steps and walked over to the car.

  'Messieurs,' he said gaily. 'Vous etes idiots.'

  So this was how it was going to be. Our eyes met.

  'You've forgotten these,' he said.

  In his hand he held my passport and Mas'ud's ID card. 'Bonne chance!' he said, smiling broadly and waving goodbye. "Visit us again soon! Bon voyage!'

  III

  The Baron Hotel, Aleppo, Syria, 28 August 1994

  The Baron is a legendary place. Everyone from Agatha Christie to Kemal Ataturk has stayed here, while Monsieur T. E. Lawrence's unpaid bill of 8 June 1914 is still displayed in a glass cabinet in the sitting room. Downstairs, the decor, untouched since the 1920s, is so redolent of the Levant between the wars that you can almost hear the swish of flapper-dresses and baggy tropical suits echoing from the now chipped and silent dance-floor.

  Despite the chaos of Syria's Ba'athist economy and the decay of many of its towns, the Baron is still, from the outside, rather a magnificent building: a stone-built Ottoman villa with a blind arcade of mock-Mameluke arches giving onto a wide first-floor terrace. At the top of the facade are sculpted the words Baron's Hotel 1911, Mazloumian Freres, in French, Armenian and Ottoman Turkish. Inside are high-beamed ceilings and brass chandeliers; a large notice dating from the early years of the French Mandate proclaims that the Baron is 'L'unique hotel de lere classe a Alep: confort parfait, situation unique,' while another of the same period, decorated with a watercolour of Ctesiphon, announces that the Simplon-Orient Express can transport you in 'safety, rapidity and economy' from London to Baghdad in seven days (the original promise of six days, obviously over-optimistic, is crossed out).

  Yet for all its charm, it would be dishonest to p
retend that the Baron has not seen better days. The rooms - which look as though

  they haven't been painted since Leonard Woolley stayed here on his way to dig the Ziggurat of Ur in 1922 - are now shabby and unloved, with peeling wallpaper and potholed parquet floors. Moreover the situation unique — the shady cypresses, the gardens and bubbling canals which Lawrence writes of in his letters - have long since given way to lines of seedy hard-porn cinemas covered with lurid posters of nearly-naked American girls (this week The Last Virgin in Las Vegas) into which crowds of hungry-looking Arab boys pour each evening.

  In the streets, jammed bumper-to-bumper, 1940s Pontiacs exhale a thick fog of black exhaust. The pollution wafts into the streetside restaurants and clings to the layers of grease dripping from the grilling doner kebabs. In between the kebabji and the blue-movie theatres lie the heavy-engineering shops and garages -Sarkis Iskenian Caterpillar Parts, A. Sanossian Grinding: Vee Rubber Wambo Superstone - belonging to the Armenian entrepreneurs who for the last forty years have dominated what is left of the once-vibrant Aleppo economy. If, like Lawrence, you tried to go shooting 'one hundred yards in front of the Baron', today you would be more likely to hit either a Bedu aficionado of the Emmanuelle films or some grimy-faced Armenian mechanic than the duck Lawrence was after.

  Nevertheless, it is still easy to see why this hotel appealed so much to a former generation of English travellers. At eight this morning I woke up, momentarily confused as to where I was, and looked at the wall beside my bed. There hung an English coaching print and a framed portrait of a black retriever with a pheasant in its mouth emerging from a village stream beside a thatched cottage ('The most useful and adaptable of all the retrievers, with a formidable record of wins at county shows, the black retriever has a strong otter-like tail well suited for swimming'). It was then that the penny dropped. The inexplicably horrible food, the decaying neo-Gothic architecture, the deep baths and the uncomfortable beds: no wonder Lawrence and his contemporaries felt so much at home here - the Baron is the perfect replica of some particularly Spartan English public school, strangely displaced to the deserts of the Middle East.

  And yet, despite its best efforts, I feel this place growing on me. I have always loved the fact that in Syria you can still walk on Roman roads that have not been resurfaced since the time of Diocletian, or stand on castle walls that have not been restored since Saladin stormed them. In the same way, perhaps I should be pleased that in the Baron you can sleep in sheets that have not been washed since T. E. Lawrence slept there, and even be bitten by the same colonies of bedbugs that once nibbled the great Ataturk.

  As I sit here with a glass of whisky under an endearingly ludicrous picture of two top-hatted English coachmen, the troubles of Mar Gabriel feel a world away. But I must record how I got here from the roadblocks and minefields of the Tur Abdin.

  After our arrest in Midyat, Mas'ud and I retraced our footsteps along the heavily guarded main roads to Mardin, and there, within sight of the Byzantine domes and cupolas of the monastery of Deir el-Zaferan, drove steeply downhill into the baking mud-steppe of Mesopotamia. From there we headed east again, along the Syrian border, on the main military road which leads through the plains towards the Iraqi frontier and Baghdad. Twin electrified border fences and a minefield flanked us immediately to the right; beyond stretched the plains of northern Syria. The smooth, wide military road was quite empty but for the occasional Turkish tank rumbling slowly in the opposite direction.

  Delayed by our arrest and the interminable gauntlet of army checkpoints, we were in danger of failing to get to the border post before it closed for the day. But Mas'ud drove at breakneck speed, and after less than forty minutes the towers of the border town of Nisibis rose shimmering from the plain ahead. During late antiquity Nisibis passed back and forth between the Byzantines and the Sassanian Persians, finally being surrendered to the Persians in 363 a.d. Yet the town somehow managed to maintain an effervescent intellectual life despite its frontline position and the incessant skirmishes between its Persian garrison and that of the

  Byzantine frontier post of Dara, less than forty miles to the west.

  For after the Sassanian takeover of the city, Nisibis became the principal centre of Persia's large Nestorian Christian minority. Its university of eight hundred students came to rival that of Edessa. Indeed it was through Nisibis - along with the two other great Nestorian university cities, Jundishapur (near Teheran) and Merv (now in Uzbekistan) - that the Nestorians played an important part in bringing Greek philosophy, science and medicine first to the Persian and thence to the Islamic world. Moreover it was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis - via Moorish Cordoba - that many of the works of Aristotle and Plato eventually reached the new universities of medieval Europe.

  As far as the Greeks were concerned, however, the loss of the town remained a continual slight to Byzantine pride; and the fact that it came to shelter a population of Christian heretics only made this worse. As a result the city figures surprisingly prominently in Byzantine letters, and John Moschos tells a story about Nisibis which, for all its piety, gives an intriguingly detailed and convincing picture of bazaar life in a Mesopotamian border town in the sixth century.

  The anecdote concerns a Christian woman married to a 'pagan' (presumably Zoroastrian) soldier. The soldier had a small sum of capital which he wanted to invest. But his Christian wife (presumably a Nestorian) persuaded him to give it instead to the poor who waited in front of the five-arched portal of the Nisibis cathedral, promising that the god of the Christians would reward him many times over.

  'Three months later, the couple's expenses exceeded their ability to pay. The man said to his wife: "Sister, the god of the Christians has not paid us back, and here we are, in need." In reply, the woman said, "He will repay. Go to where you handed over the money and he will return it right away." So her husband set off to the church at a run. When he came to the spot where he had given the coins to the poor, he went all round the church, expecting to find somebody who would give back to him what was owing. But all he found was the poor, still sitting there. While he was trying to decide which of them to speak to, he saw at his feet on the marble floor one large miliarision lying there, one of those which he himself had distributed. Bending down he picked it up and went back to his house. Then he said to his spouse: "Look - I just went to your church, and believe me, woman, I did not see the god of the Christians as you said I would. And he certainly did not give me anything, except this miliarision lying where I give fifty away." '

  His wife told him to stop complaining and to go off and buy some food with the coin. Later the man reappeared with some bread, a flask of wine and a fresh fish. While his wife was cleaning the fish, she found inside a beautiful stone which she suggested he try to sell.

  'He did not know what it was, for he was a simple man. But he took the stone and went to the moneychanger. It was evening, time for the changer to go home, but the soldier said, "Give me what you will," and the other replied, "Take five miliarisia for it." Believing that the merchant was making fun of him, the man said, "Would you give that much for it?" But the merchant thought the soldier was being sarcastic, so he said, "Well, take ten miliarisia then." Still thinking the merchant was making fun of him, the soldier remained silent, at which the other said, "All right - twenty miliarisia." As the soldier again kept silent and made no response, the merchant raised his offer to thirty, then to fifty miliarisia. By this time the soldier realised that the stone must be very valuable. Little by little the merchant raised his offer until it reached three hundred large miliarisia.''

  Almost nothing appears to survive today of late antique Nisibis save the cathedral baptistry, dated by a Greek inscription to 359 a.d. Otherwise, Nisibis's muse has long departed, and as Mas'ud raced through the crowded bazaars, sending barrow-boys and pack-donkeys flying into ditches, there was no sign that the town had ever been more than what it was now: a dusty, flyblown frontier post, crawling with Turkish soldiers and gun-wield
ing security guards. We reached the crossing point - a tin hut and a coil of barbed wire standing beside a single, enigmatic line of Byzantine pillars - just five minutes before it closed. I embraced Mas'ud, wished him luck, and paid him double the amount we had agreed in Diyarbakir.

  The Turkish border guards rifled through my rucksack, sniffing suspiciously at the mosquito repellant but, thankfully, ignoring the notebooks. Finally, at two minutes to three, in the sweltering heat of a Mesopotamian summer afternoon, I crossed the no-man's land into Syria.

  Immediately the atmosphere changed. Ten years ago, on my first journey around the Near East, I remember my nervousness at leaving the then peaceable countryside of south-east Turkey for what I conceived to be the sinister terrorist state of Syria. Now the roles are reversed. Syria may still be a one-party police state, but it is a police state that leaves its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics; certainly it feels like the Garden of Eden compared with the tension on the other side of the border. At the immigration shed, Kurdish and Turoyo were being spoken openly. On the roads there were no checkpoints, no tanks, no armoured personnel carriers and no burned-out car-skeletons. The taxi drivers seemed relaxed and happy to drive at night. No one spoke, in hushed voices, of 'troubles', of emptied villages or relatives who had 'disappeared'.

  Indeed, at the Hotel Cliff in Hassake where I spent that first night (the name, disappointingly, turned out to be a reference to the Ottoman Caliph, not an ageing pop star), only the endless ranks of framed portraits of President Asad and his sinister son Basil (recently killed in a high-speed car crash) reminded one that Syria was still a Ba'athist dictatorship with a ubiquitous mukhabarat (secret police). The regime's claim to legitimacy still rests on the shaky foundations of a series of East European-style 'elections' that are so openly rigged they have become something of a national joke. I remember a story about them from my last visit. After one particularly dubious poll, a group of Asad's advisers is said to have gone to see the President with the results.