'There is good news, Mr President,' they said. 'You are more popular with the people of Syria than ever before. 99 per cent of the people voted for you. Only 1 per cent abstained. What more could you ask?'
'Just one thing,' Asad is said to have replied. 'Their names and addresses.'
The following morning I wandered around Hassake. Behind a modern gloss of avenues, roundabouts and streetlights lay a warren of mud-walled compounds, a timeless labyrinth that could have been built at virtually any time between the Tower of Babel and Operation Desert Storm.
It was in one of these compounds that I found George Joseph, a cousin of one of the monks at Mar Gabriel. George was a huge man with a thick black beard and an enormous paunch. He was very well educated - had picked up some sort of diploma in London - and now made his money running a taxi service and various dubious-sounding import/export businesses operating over the Iraqi and Turkish borders. When I introduced myself he shouted for tea, and quickly persuaded me to take his taxi to Aleppo. I had been planning to take the bus, at a fraction of the cost, but soon found myself convinced by George that his taxi was the only sensible choice.
While a flunkey went off to fill George's pick-up with petrol, we talked about the history of the old Nestorian university in Nisibis, and I asked whether there were any Nestorians still left in the area.
'There weren't any until the Gulf War,' replied George. 'But in 1991 fifty thousand Nestorian refugees fled here from western Iraq. They saw what had happened to the Kurds, and feared Saddam Hussein would use his poison gas on them next.'
'So where are they now?' I asked.
'Most have got away,' said George. 'Some got visas for the West; others have sneaked across the Turkish border. It is easier to get fake passports and visas in Turkey than here.' He broke into a sly grin. 'Smugglers and fakers are not so active in Syria,' he said. 'You have to be very good - very good indeed - to get away with that sort of business here.'
'And the Nestorians who are left?'
'There are about ten thousand of them, still incarcerated in a refugee camp ten miles from here, towards the Iraqi border. It's a horrible place. They're locked up in a barbed-wire pen with only two thousand devil-worshippers for company.' 'Devil-worshippers?'
'Yezidis,' said George. 'They're an Iraqi sect. Strictly speaking they're actually devil-propitiators, not devil-worshippers. They call Lucifer 'Malik Tawus', the Peacock Angel, and offer sacrifices to keep him happy. They believe Lucifer, the Devil, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as Chief Angel, supervising the day-to-day running of the word's affairs.'
'And how do they get on with the Nestorians?'
'Actually very well,' said George. 'Some people believe that the Yezidis were originally a sort of strange Gnostic offshoot of the Nestorian Church. I don't know whether that is true, but the Yezidi priests and the Christian bishops certainly make a point of visiting each other on their different feast days.
Either way, I thought, it was a wonderfully exotic idea: respectably robed Nestorian bishops presenting their compliments to the Chief Priest of the devil-worshippers on the occasion of Satan's birthday. As George talked, I could not stop thinking about the extraordinary camp full of Yezidi devil-worshippers and Nestorians, the most ancient heterodox (and, in the eyes of many, heretical) Christian Church still in existence.
The Nestorians had initially disagreed with the Orthodox over the exact nature of Christ's humanity, maintaining that there were two entirely separate persons in the incarnate Christ, one human, the other divine, in opposition to the Orthodox belief that Christ was a single person, at once human and divine. Expelled from the Byzantine Empire in the fifth century, the Church had taken root with astonishing speed further to the east. By the seventh century Nestorian archbishops watched over cathedrals as far apart as Bahrain, Kerala, Kashgar, Lhasa and Sigan-Fu in north-west China. By 660 a.d. there were more than twenty Nestorian archbishops east of the Oxus, and Nestorian monasteries in most Chinese cities. Genghis Khan had a Nestorian guardian, and at one point the Mongol Khans very nearly converted to Nestorianism, which might well have made the Church the most powerful religious force in Asia. But instead, by the early years of the twentieth century a series of genocidal reverses had brought the Nestorians to the verge of extinction. This latest sad imprisonment in a wire pen in the desert was only the most recent in a long series of disasters for the Church that had once brought the secret of silk farming to Byzantium, Greek medicine to Islam, and which, most importantly of all, had helped transmit the forgotten philosophy of ancient Athens back to the West.
Separated from the rest of Christendom by their extreme isolation, the Nestorians have preserved many of the traditions of the early Church which have either disappeared altogether elsewhere, or else survived only in the most unrecognisable forms. Their legends - about the Holy Wood of the Tree of Life and the Holy Spices of the Tree of Knowledge - are fragments of fossilised early Christian folklore, while their eucharistic rite, the Anaphora of the Apostles Addai and Mari, is the oldest Christian liturgy still in use anywhere in the world.
Once, browsing in a library in Oxford, I remember stumbling across a rare copy of The Book of Protection, a volume of Nestorian charms and spells. It was a strange and wonderful collection of magical formulae which purported to have been handed down from the angels to Adam and thence to King Solomon. The spells - the Anathema of the Angel Gabriel for the Evil Eye, the Names on the Ring of King Solomon, the Anathema of Mar Shalita for the Evil Spirit, the Charm for the Cow which is Excited towards her Mistress - gave a vivid picture of an isolated and superstitious mountain people, surrounded by enemies and unknown dangers. They also emphasised the Nestorians' backwardness in the face of the artillery of their enemies - among them was a charm for Binding the Guns and the Engines of War:
By the Power of the Voice of our Lord which cutteth the Flame of the Fire, I bind, expel, anathematise the bullets of the engines of war, and the balls of the guns of our wicked enemies away from him who beareth this charm. By the prayers of the Virgin, the Mother of Fire, may the stones which they fling with the machine and with the guns not be moved, nor heated, nor come forth from the mouth of our enemies' machines against the one who beareth these charms, but let our enemy be as dead as in the midst of the grave ...
Yet this desperate primitiveness in war was apparently coupled with an unwise enthusiasm for violent blood feuds with their neighbours. Alarmed Anglican missionaries who tried to make contact with the Nestorians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century reported that they would go into battle against their tribal enemies led by their bishop, wearing his purple episcopal trousers, and that their priests would return bearing the severed ears of their victims. On one occasion a dog-collared Anglican vicar was invited to lunch by a Nestorian chieftain and had the temerity to refuse, offering some lame excuses. 'It is my hope that you will come and stay,' repeated the chieftain. 'If you do I shall be proud to receive you; if you do not, my honour will make it needful for me to shoot you.'
I told George how much I wanted to try to get into the camp and talk to the Nestorian refugees. But even as I was speaking he shook his head. It was impossible for outsiders to get in or out of the camp, he said. It was surrounded by barbed wire, and the only gateway bristled with mukhabarat. I would be wasting my time even to try. The most I would achieve, he said, would be to get arrested by President Asad's secret police, something he strongly advised against. 'But you could always try to interview some Nestorians when you get back to England,' he suggested.
'What do you mean?'
'I believe there is a very large Nestorian community in ... is there somewhere in London called Ealing?'
'Ealing?’
'Yes, I think that's right,' said George. 'It was in Ealing that the current Nestorian Patriarch was crowned. There should be far more Nestorians in London than here. Ealing has the largest Nestorian community in Europe.'
Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the la
te twentieth century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you find they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.
I threw my rucksack into the back of George's pick-up; we drove through the streets of Hassake and out into the cotton fields beyond. It was a bright late-summer day. A strong wind was blowing, and billowing clouds were gusting over the steppe. Unveiled Bedouin women were standing in lines in the fields, picking the white buds with babies strapped to their backs. Their faces were tattooed, and their headdresses were fringed with glinting silver coins. Their dresses were of deep purple velvet, belted at the waist.
We crossed the bridge over the Khabur River, and almost immediately we entered the desert. The road stretched straight ahead, its converging lines bisecting a flat horizon of dry and lifeless sand.
'My father was nearly killed on this road,' said George, breaking the silence. 'How?'
'It's a long story.'
'This is a long drive.'
'Well,' said George, 'in 1929 my father bought sixty thousand acres of desert near Hassake on the Khabur River. Until the Mandate, the area was deserted except for Bedouin. But the French offered land to anyone who would irrigate it and grow crops. My father was a younger son and inherited nothing from his father, so he took on the challenge. It was backbreaking work and he nearly went mad in the heat of the desert. But after five years of hard work, of watering and planting the land, he finally had a very successful harvest and made a big profit: fifty gold pounds. It was more than enough to pay off the money he had borrowed to buy the land. But he had a problem: he did not know how to get the gold from Hassake to Aleppo, as the road used to be famous for its brigands. But he knew it was probably less safe still among the Bedouin in Hassake, so he asked an Armenian driver with an old model-T Ford to take him the next time he went to Aleppo. The day came, and my father put the money under his girdle and set off with the Armenian.
'Halfway along the road, in the early evening, in the middle of the desert, they saw a very old Bedu. He was standing in the road, hitchhiking. My father said, "Poor man, let's pick him up," but the Armenian said he never took in strangers. They drove on, but then they began to feel guilty, for they knew the old man would be stuck in the desert all night. So they went back and picked him up. The Bedu was very grateful; he said, "Salaam alekum,' and sat smiling in the back.
'Then ten minutes later the old man pulled out two revolvers. He put one against the neck of my father, the other against the neck of the Armenian, and ordered that they stop the car. My father went mad: he was carrying on him every dinar he had earned for five years. So he begged the Bedu to be honourable and show mercy to two men who had tried to help him. But the Bedu merely sneered and said: "Undress." The Armenian undressed and turned out his pockets, but he had only a small amount of money. So the Bedu pointed a gun at my father and said that now he should undress. My father undressed very, very slowly. The Bedu began to get impatient. He said: "Hurry, hurry." My father took off his jacket, then his shirt, then his vest. "Hurry," said the Bedu. So my father took off his trousers, and as he did so the fifty gold pounds fell out and rolled onto the ground.
'The Bedu could hardly believe his eyes, and he jumped to catch the coins before they rolled off the embankment. As he did so my father kicked him in the face. The Bedu took off - into the hands of the Armenian. The Armenian held him while my father grabbed the guns. There they were in the road in the middle of the desert, two of them in their underpants, all of them scrabbling around trying to kill each other. The Bedu produced a knife, but the Armenian got him into an armlock with one hand and tried to strangle him with the other. All this time my father was punching the Bedu. He had lost all control: he had the strength of a madman. At first it was fear, then it was for revenge.
'After a while the man was overpowered, but not before all three of them were covered with blood. So the Armenian said: "We cannot leave this man here. Tomorrow he will be waiting for us to return, and he'll have forty other tribesmen with him.
We must kill him." But before my father had time to answer, the man fell down. He was stone dead.
'The Armenian said, "What did you do?" To which my father replied, "You killed him." "No," said the Armenian. "You killed him." They argued for a few minutes, then drove on in silence, leaving the dead Bedu by the road. They were very nervous. Neither of them had ever been in such a situation. After fifteen miles they came to a French patrol. The officer ordered them to stop and asked them what they were doing on the road so late. He could see how nervous they were, and became suspicious. So he ordered them out of the car, and as soon as they got out he saw the blood covering their shirts.
'The Armenian said, "It was his idea. He's just killed a Bedu hitchhiker." My father answered, "No, no - it was him." The Frenchman told both of them to be quiet. He put them in handcuffs and searched them. In the back of the car he found the Bedu's ID. "Was this the man you just killed?" he asked. Both men were silent. Then the policeman said: "Perhaps I should tell you that this is Ali ibn Mohammed, the most wanted brigand in the Near East. There is a reward of one hundred gold pounds for anyone who finds him, dead or alive." "Ali ibn Mohammed?" said my father and the Armenian, both looking at each other. "The most dangerous robber in Syria?" "It was me that killed him," said my father. "He's lying," said the Armenian, "I killed him." "No. I did ..." '
'What happened?' I asked.
'They split the reward,' said George, smiling. 'In the end. After much argument.'
Towards late afternoon we saw in front of us a trickle of molten mercury: the Euphrates lit up by the sinking sun. It was pale and ghostly and shrouded by a thin halo of mist. To one side rose the hump of a prehistoric tell, and beside it a modern suspension bridge guarded by two sleeping Syrian army guards. We rolled over the bridge and onto the Aleppo highway.
The desert was now flecked with round, white Bedouin tents. Around them were flocks of thin sheep, each one throwing up its own faint slipstream of dust. Occasional villages of mud-brick rose from the sand, their shattered beehive domes clustered like a line of broken eggs in a punnet. Usually these villages seemed to be deserted, but some were still occupied, their ancient curves topped by television aerials and telephone wires.
As we drove on, the Bedouin encampments became more frequent. Then we came to a hillside covered in graves. The shanty towns and slums of Aleppo's outer suburbs opened up before us; and ahead rose the earthen drum of Aleppo's great citadel.
Aleppo, 2 September
Yesterday evening I fulfilled a promise I had made in Mar Gabriel.
Just before I arrived there, the Abbot had received from the printers in Istanbul a set of postcards. They reproduced some of the more remarkable illustrations from the medieval Syriac manuscripts in the Mar Gabriel library. The Abbot was very excited by his new pictures, and begged me to deliver a boxful to his Metropolitan in Aleppo.
Getting to see Metropolitan Ibrahim, however, proved more of a struggle than I had expected, if only because I made the mistake of accepting the offer of one of the Baron's own taxi drivers to take me there. The man was an Armenian which, I figured, would make him more likely to know his way around Christian Aleppo than a Muslim driver; but in the event all it actually meant was that he had a healthy thirst for Armenian cognac, a half-drunk bottle of which lay in his glove compartment, and from which he occasionally took a swig when we stopped at traffic lights. Thus fortified, he drove me at high speed around a bewildering variety of cathedrals, belonging in turn to the Chaldeans, Latins, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics, before finally admitting that he had no idea where the cathedral of the Syrian Orthodox was situated.
Eventually we pulled in at a rival taxi rank: 'Please,' I said to one of the drivers, 'I am looking for the Syrian Orthodox cathedral.'
Taxi driver: You want cathedral? Which cathedral? We have
many cathedral in Aleppo. W.D.: I'm after the Surianis' cathedral.
Tax
i driver: Which Surianis? We have many Surianis in Aleppo. Syrian Catholics, Syrian Protestants, Syrian Orthodox...
W. D.: I want the Syrian Orthodox. I think I said that to begin with.
Taxi driver: Which Orthodox? In Aleppo ...
W. D. (getting irritated): Syrian Orthodox.
Taxi driver (surprised): You want Syrian Orthodox?
W.D.: Yes.
Taxi driver: Not Syrian Catholics?
W.D.: No.
Taxi driver: Not Assyrian Orthodox?
W.D. (explosive): I WANT THE SYRIAN ORTHODOX
CATHEDRAL.
Taxi driver (pensive): Syrian Orthodox cathedral. (Pause) That
I don't know.
Luckily, someone at the next stand did know, and after he had explained its whereabouts we set off again at terrifying speed, the Armenian driver attempting to mollify me with a display of his party trick, changing gear with his foot.
'Where you from?' he asked, changing down to second with his right foot while his right hand fumbled for the bottle in the glove compartment.
'Scotland.'
'I have been to New York and to L.A.'
'Holiday?'
'Little bit holiday.'
'What do you mean?'
'I went for operation. American hospitals very good. Last year I had car accident. Big problem .. .'
The Syrian Orthodox, it turned out, had cunningly secreted their cathedral behind a filling station in the Suleymaniye district of the city; we had already passed it several times without noticing it. The Metropolitan's Palace was even more successfully hidden: it lay tucked in behind the back of the cathedral. I was met at the gates of the palace by a raven-robed flunkey and led up, past the long black cathedral Cadillac (emblazoned on its back window with a colour sticker of the Metropolitan's coat of arms) to a first-floor reception room. There I was shown to a gilt armchair beneath a huge photograph of a beaming President Asad, and a fractionally smaller portrait of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch.
From The Holy Mountain Page 16