‘But—’
‘Hurry up!’
‘But you’re not coming!’ wailed Ishmael.
‘Hasn’t it penetrated your thick head that I am? Get over!’
Ishmael swung a fat leg over the gears and edged himself nearer to Sarah. He bent his head to hide a quivering face.
They set off and for the first five minutes or so no one spoke. Sarah, indignant for Ishmael and fearing a possible setback to her plans, turned her head away from Alan and looked out of the window. The Thornes, sensing tension around them, maintained an embarrassed silence.
The big car turned down Avenue Bliss and along the Corniche past the swimming clubs. On the red dunes, where the evening before Sarah had seen a grey stallion prancing on the sand, stray donkeys wandered and dogs nosed about in the rubbish dumps by the nomad camps. A few stunted pines, beaten into slanting growth by the wind, stood here and there on the smooth, gently curving billows of sand. The road was practically deserted and a blind beggar kneeling beside it, his silvery eyeballs raised to the glare of the sun, looked saintlike in his loneliness.
Ahead the mountains rose up, their snowy summits hanging high above the warm, torrid plain. At the foothills the car turned northward and, taking a narrow lane that led through banana plantations and groves of bamboo, crossed the Beirut River. The party began to look about with interest and the tension relaxed between them. The Frenchmen enthusiastically discussed a Roman aqueduct and Margaret ventured to put a question to Alan that she had been longing to ask for some time.
‘Excuse me, Mr Crawe, but when you spoke a moment ago of a wild goose chase, did you mean that we ought not to be going to Baalbek, because of the crisis, I mean?’
‘Oh really, darling,’ murmured Nigel.
‘If I thought you shouldn’t be going,’ Alan replied tersely, ‘I wouldn’t be taking you.’
Only partially reassured, Margaret leaned back in her seat. Nigel felt for her hand, but the superior note in his voice had annoyed her and she drew it away. She looked out of the window and tried to take an interest in the scenery. How delightful it was! she told herself. The pretty farms, the children picking flowers at the roadside, the loquat trees tied up in huge brown nets. Yet somehow it was not as delightful as it ought to have been. She felt irritated and on edge.
On the turn-off into the Damascus road they ran into a line of fast-moving traffic and police patrols every few miles or so. The first of these waved them through, but they eventually fell victim to a patrol stationed outside a café a few miles from Aley.
Everyone had to get out, Sarah with a nonchalant air that was far from reflecting her feelings, for she had just remembered that she had no passport and that Inspector Malouf had told her not to leave Beirut. The officer in charge, however, being a Muslim, looked upon the two women as politically nonexistent, waved them aside and occupied himself with questioning the men.
Sarah strolled to the edge of the road and stood looking down over the neat bushy tops of umbrella pines to the orchards and vineyards below. In the distance the buildings of Beirut shimmered, pearly and brilliant, but on the mountains all was sharp, hard and dry. Thorn bushes and spiny thistles growing at the roadside stood out rigid and delicate as though etched on the bright air. Someone called out, ‘Come on! We’re going,’ and the sounds hung in the air, clear and thin, as though rounded and polished by the sunshine.
Sarah turned to find Ishmael standing behind her.
Staring at me again, she thought. What’s the matter with him?
‘We’re going,’ Ishmael repeated mechanically.
Sarah spoke abruptly. ‘I suppose he’s told you that you can’t take me to Chakra.’
He looked away down the stony slope. ‘What did he want to come for?’ he said sadly. ‘Why does he have to interfere? It’s none of his business.’
They turned and began to walk back to the car where the rest of the party stood waiting. ‘It’s only that it’s going to be more difficult,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We’ll have to wait for an opportunity. You won’t go off on your own?’ he added sharply. ‘Keep your eyes on me. I’ll fix it. You promised!’
It did not occur to Sarah, as they got into the car, that somehow the tables had been turned, and that it was Ishmael who had promised to take her to Chakra, not she who had promised to go with him.
Again they set off, pulling out into the road to join the long shining serpent of cars that coiled up through orchards and vineyards to Aley and Sofar on the higher slopes above.
Although it was still early in the season, the annual migration from the coast had begun and crowds were already thick in the Aley streets. Sarah did not care much for Aley—she could never imagine why the Beirutese went there when they could just as profitably have stayed at home. She supposed it was some ancient racial habit, instinctive and irresistible, like the migrations of birds, that sent them rushing up every summer from the coast. For it was perfectly evident that the mountains offered little of interest to them, apart from altitude and the enjoyment of driving at high speed round dangerous corners. Nature, they believed, needed improving, and there were as many cafés, casino and modern hotels in Aley, Sofar and Brummana as in Beirut itself. Indeed, if it had not been for the cool air and for an occasional glimpse of pine forests between the tall houses, one might have been in Bab Edriss or the Avenue des Francais.
Ishmael, on the other hand, thought highly of Aley; there was nothing he liked more than spending a summer weekend in this gay, noisy place. But this day he was too preoccupied to pay much heed to it.
The car slowed up to pass through the thronged streets; he did not even notice where they were. The town was full of shouting taxi drivers, the blare of horns, radios playing in open cafés; he heard nothing of this. He sat between Alan and Sarah, staring blindly before him, and Aley passed as in a dream. Memories, vivid and terrifying, possessed his mind.
He was still living in the night before, in the still, dark hour between eleven and twelve. A small bar in a narrow street near the Hotel St George, the atmosphere dim with cigarette smoke, a jukebox playing softly in the corner, the fat Damascene leaning forward, his elbows on the table …
Ishmael shuddered as he remembered the Damascene.
His name was Fuad. His round, smoothly shaven face shone as though rubbed with coconut oil. He picked his teeth meditatively with an ivory toothpick, all the time watching Ishmael, his eyes like half-shuttered windows, the thick brown lids hanging over them. He rarely said anything, rarely moved; but sat, heavy, lethargic, picking his teeth. Ishmael was terrified of him.
He was not nearly as frightened of Fakhr, though Fakhr had twice the brain of Fuad. He could tell that to look at him. His narrow, bony face was sensitive with intelligence; he suffered from conjunctivitis and his eyes were always blood–shot, but they looked straight at you, disconcertingly, with an expression of penetration and contempt. It was Fakhr who only two weeks before had held a knife at his throat and threatened to kill him if he didn’t go on; and it was Fakhr who had first threatened him six months ago in a café in Damascus, saying, ‘Help us to get the Jews out of Jerusalem.’ Yet still he was not afraid of him as he was afraid of Fuad. For something told him that if ever it should come to the point and they did kill him, as they sometimes said they would, it would be Fuad who would do it, who would stand up slowly in his lethargic way and stab him in the breast.
But now I’m finished with them, he thought. Now I’m finished! He had bought his freedom from them the night before with the last desperate venture. A gust of hope rushed over him, bringing the blood to his cheeks and filling him for an instant with sweet, false joy.
He looked down and saw Sarah’s knee beside his own, the yellow linen of her dress drawn tight across it. Her naked arm touched the sleeve of his coat. That morning he had looked at her and felt anguish for his victim, in all her youth, warmth and beauty. Now he had no feeling about her. He did not think of what lay ahead. He pursued his destiny blindly, fortified
by an unquenchable hope that something at the eleventh hour would intervene between him and disaster. And just as, six months ago in a Damascus café, he had cast barely a thought to the possible consequences of his actions, so now, full realisation of what he was doing awaited a future moment, a final, inescapable, dreadful revelation yet to come.
It is a fact of Middle Eastern life that men seem often able to escape just retribution for their follies and crimes. Fate, in the very moment of punishing them, suddenly drops them, as though bored at the last moment with the notion of justice. So it happens that murderers go free, conspirators are captured and released to conspire again, and bad men, their crimes still freshly printed on their foreheads for all to see, sit cynically in high places. This amiable tolerance toward the wrongdoer, so clearly manifest all about him, had kept Ishmael well infused with optimism in the past and sustained him now.
Something would happen to protect him—something would turn up. The very insecurity of life provided a safeguard against private disaster. He might be caught and put in jail but, then, before they could do anything to him, there might be a revolution, or a war—the Syrians might invade Lebanon, or the Egyptians—or even the Jews.
C H A P T E R 1 0
At eleven they had reached the Beka’a and were driving swiftly toward Baalbek. Already in the distance the celebrated six columns—all that are left standing of the fifty-four that once enclosed the Temple of Jupiter—stood out, tall and distinct from the surrounding fields.
The town from this distance showed as a mere smudge on the hills behind and the six columns stood alone commanding the plain. But as they approached nearer, the town became articulate, its flat mud houses set on the bare hillside of the anti-Lebanon. They could pick out minarets, winding lanes and stone walls. The hills behind became mountains patterned with snow drifts and the sliding purple shapes of cloud shadows; these looked westward across the wide green valley to the other mountains—the Lebanon itself—higher, more massive and more deeply locked in snow.
Those of the party who had not seen Baalbek before drew a breath of wonder, for now the ruins appeared so huge they were out of scale with everything but the plain on which they stood and the mountains on either side. The mud houses of the town were abased by the enormous ruin, and the poplar trees growing in dense groves at its foot looked like silver-stemmed, green-leafed rushes.
Conversely the mountains, though they dwarfed the town, could not dwarf the ruins. The huge rosy columns, the massive broken walls towered up above the tops of the poplar trees, to stand against a blue sky and against the tawny, ragged flanks of the anti-Lebanon. Those who had built the temples had matched them against their inspiring situation; the great shafts of rose-gold stone, the enormous lintels and carved capitals stood displayed against a background of natural splendour, comprising an entrance hall, a majestic introduction to sky, snow and mountain.
The road followed the outer wall of the acropolis and came to a wide open area outside the main gate. Here Alan stopped the car and everyone got out, to be instantly importuned by a camel driver offering rides on an attendant beast, and a dealer selling fake Greek coins. Small ragged boys swarmed about the car and, making instinctively for its most vulnerable occupant, fastened upon Margaret; one, carrying a black and white kid, wanted money, presumably for looking charming; another thrust a half-dead flower into her hand and begged payment for this. Alan brushed them away and swiftly shepherded his party through the temple enclosure.
‘If you want to take photographs, take as many as you like in here,’ he told them. ‘But don’t photograph the town. The people don’t like it.’
‘I don’t want to photograph the town,’ said Margaret. ‘It doesn’t look very interesting and I expect it’s filthy.’ The boys by the car had set her nerves on edge.
The two Frenchmen threw off their coats, an operation which brought to light brightly coloured sports shirts, elaborate with tucks, pleats and buttons and, hurrying through the propylaea, quickly set up their tripods in the main courtyard.
Sarah, sauntering close behind them, listened with respect to a lively discussion concerning such matters as composition, shutter speed and reflected light; her association with Marcel had done little to eliminate her English awe for the French language and this particular conversation, though quite innocent of profundity, sounded obtuse and learned to her ears.
‘Je vous en prie, Madame, mais passez donc—Vous êtes dans ma photo,’ called out the younger of the two, a slender young man with a blue shirt and hair clipped across the top like a newly cut lawn. Sarah moved out of the way and entered the other Frenchman’s picture.
‘Alors, quand même pas dans ma direction!’ shouted this enthusiast impatiently.
She left them and made her way over the ruined court, where in the heyday of the Heliopolitan Jupiter worshippers gathered before the steps of the great temple, and in the surrounding sanctuaries the gods of the Roman world looked out from two hundred and fifty niches.
The sun, which as Jupiter and Hadad-Baal had reigned on this spot since before the days of Solomon, still possessed it. The sky flung its light upon the court as into a receptacle fashioned to receive it, and burned there at such intensity that even the shadows bloomed a warm, tawny gold. The six columns, towering up from the massive platform that had been built to support the Jupiter temple, glowed rose red—their shadows lay across the floor of the temple so emphatically that Sarah’s instinct was to leap over each one, as across an impediment.
There were quite a few people about—tourists from Europe and America who, determined to snatch some intellectual benefit from their visit, went about book in hand, or clustered around hoarse-voiced guides. Only the Lebanese took Baalbek lightly and, making no attempt to master its archaeological mysteries, climbed around the walls happily, or chased pretty young women around pillars and under doorways. They were used to Baalbek. They had lived with it for over two thousand years and looked upon it principally as a good place for a picnic.
By the eastern wall of the Temple of Jupiter a broken stair led down from the higher level of the temple itself to a courtyard below; this was flanked by a row of columns that earthquakes had toppled from their pedestals, the huge shafts still lying in a debris of broken pieces.
Sarah sat down on a stone within the shadow of the wall and watched the rest of the party trail up the long flight of steps into the Temple of Mercury. They formed a straggling group, its units separated, she supposed, by incompatibility or anger.
The Frenchmen went first, side by side and talking volubly. Then came Margaret, walking alone, Nigel a short distance behind her.
They’ve had a quarrel, thought Sarah. She was not surprised. She was beginning to like Margaret. The girl seemed honest and sincere and Nigel had made affected remarks about Baalbek, calling it vulgar, comparing it to Hollywood and the wide screen, which must have tried her patience.
Alan and Ishmael brought up the rear. They were talking to each other excitedly—at least Ishmael was excited, judging by the way he waved his arms about. She saw Alan’s head turn for an instant in her direction before they disappeared into the temple.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she murmured aloud. ‘I’m still here and what can I do with you hanging onto Ishmael by his ears?’
The sun had made her sleepy. She leaned back and the warmth from the hot stones behind her seeped into her body. Yellow flowers with sage-green leaves dabbled their shadows on the temple wall and lizards that looked as hard and desiccated and ancient as the stones lay rigid in the sunlight. She watched them drowsily. She felt relaxed, comforted, her excitement of the early morning subdued by the heat. She glanced at the Temple of Mercury, half expecting to see Ishmael hurrying down the long stairway, but Ishmael and the rest of the party had disappeared.
A short distance from her a man was kneeling on the ground trying to measure the girth of a fallen column with a dressmaker’s tape measure. Sarah watched himidly.
That he belonged to
the Middle East there could be no doubt. The sun shone on his black hair and brown face. He was dressed in a khaki uniform liberally decorated with brass buttons, ribbons and snow-white lanyards; field glasses and camera dangling from his shoulder kept impeding his efforts to adjust the tape measure; a shooting stick leaned on the column shaft beside him. He applied himself to his task eagerly, without reserve, whistling noisily through white teeth and every now and again giving little exclamations of annoyance as the ends of the tape measure slipped from his fingers. He seemed not to think it possible that he might be watched or to consider the need for concealing his smallest feelings. Sarah thought he looked like a goat—like one of the black, blunt-headed, mad-eyed Lebanese goats that seemed to have survived from the youth of the world.
He looked up and saw her watching him. ‘Madame! Madame!’ he called. ‘Please help me! I cannot get these two ends to stay together.’
She went over to him and put her finger on one end of the tape measure. He wound it around the column and noted the measurement in a small black book. ‘I am a journalist,’ he explained, when this was done. ‘I have to be accurate in my profession.’
She looked at the card he gave her and handed it back. ‘I thought you were in some army or other.’
‘No! No!’ He touched the lanyards on his shoulder lovingly. ‘A uniform is always useful, it gives one authority. Iranian boy scouts, first class.’ They regarded each other solemnly, and it was the Iranian who burst into a peal of laughter.
Sarah smiled. ‘Are you working for an Iranian newspaper?’ she asked.
‘No! No! I am writing a travel book. One moment!’
Putting the notebook and tape measure away, he took from another pocket a rather larger and much-handled volume. ‘This is my last book. It is about a trip around Turkey.’ He opened it to display smudged type and a murky-looking photograph just recognisable as himself. ‘It is called Nightingales and Roses. I would like to give you this book as you have shown such interest in my work, but it is the only one I have left. I brought fifty copies with me, but I have had to give them all away.’ He put the book away and, jabbing his shooting stick into a crack between some stones, sat on it decisively. ‘And now, Madame, tell me your impression of this big ruin.’
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