A Writer's World
Page 6
In fact, though, this little courtroom was alive with terrible emotions, with fears and loyalties and defiances, and all the conflicts of human judgement that are the basis of revolutions. The touching young lovers were facing death and had (if the charges against them are true) been perfectly prepared to blow any number of strangers to oblivion to further the cause of nationalism. Sweet was their obvious affection, and pretty the girl’s dress, and delicate her crucifix, but they were living close to savage things. The nervous young prosecutor, fiddling with his tie and smiling ingratiatingly at the brigadier, was relying upon alleged confessions obtained by methods of remorseless violence; perhaps he was only thinking of his promotion, poor chap, but if he looked across the room he could see the great blue weals still, as that crippled prisoner painfully moved an arm to pull the towel closer around his head.
The brigadier, presiding so forcefully over the hearing, knew that he might well be writing his own death sentence too; the forces he was judging are much more powerful, much more irresistible than the strength of his own authority, and if ever at last revolution reaches Amman itself he will doubtless suffer the penalties of loyalty. They were all anxious people, every one, judges and prisoners and prosecutors and jailers and all, caught cruelly in the whirlpool of change.
And what of the audience, metaphorically sucking its thumbs on its kitchen chairs? It represented that bog of apathy in which the human conscience, perceptive or misguided, sparkles like a diamond. It sat in the middle of great emotions; a tortured man on one side, a pair of star-crossed lovers on another, and you could almost hear its unspoken communal plea, above the harsh pronouncements of the president: ‘Pass me my work basket, will you, dear, and I’ll get on with my knitting while you men have a good old talk. What I always say is, you can’t change human nature, can you?’
I never heard what became of the accused, but revolution never erupted in Jordan anyway.
Jerusalem
In the late 1940s I had soldiered in the British mandated territory of Palestine, but the British had withdrawn from the country in 1948, leaving its Arab and Jewish inhabitants to fight for its possession. Jerusalem, sacred to both parties, seemed an insoluble obstacle to an agreement between them. In 1955, when I wrote this report for The Times, the walled Old City of Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands, considered part of Jordan and garrisoned by soldiers of Jordan’s British-founded Arab Legion, while the modern parts of the city were held by the Israelis.
Old Jerusalem is golden still, especially seen from the Mount of Olives or through the gnarled trees of Gethsemane on a late summer evening. It is still the holiest of holy places, still a magnificent Islamic city, still a fortress. Its buildings, scarred in the recent fighting, stand mellow and serene; through its tortuous streets move the pilgrims and priests, Beduin, bootblacks, coffee-sellers and gowned merchants of its tradition; upon its ramparts, guarding the embattled frontier with Israel, soldiers of the Arab Legion stand guard in pink-checked kuffiyahs and battledress.
It would be alien to its tradition for Jerusalem to be peaceful. Deaths and battles, armies and sieges, bloodshed and privation are the normalities of the city. Among its sparse hills the place certainly lies in a wonderful silence, calm and cool, with the first chinks of lights appearing and the call to evening prayer ringing from the mosque on the Hill of Ascension. But an implacable frontier divides the Old City from most of its modern suburbs, and the blaze of lights on the western ridge marks the centre of New Jerusalem, in the hands of the Jews and as inaccessible to the Arabs as Bhutan. An enemy is literally at the gates.
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The spirit of Jerusalem has withdrawn from the grand new suburbs, now mostly in Israel, into the walled city where it belongs. The streets are crowded, prosperous and clean. Big American cars are driven precariously up ramps along stepped alleyways, for many rich Arab retailers, driven from New Jerusalem, have set up shop within the walls. They will tell you, as you drink their spiced coffee, of the enormous emporia, the vast estates, the bursting bank balances they invariably seem to have left behind – a myth of vanished opulence, a sort of gilt-edged Atlantis of the soul. Sadly such unfortunates will take you to the top of their buildings for a view into No Man’s Land. There it runs, a strip of depressed and littered soil, cluttered with derelict buildings, coils of wire, piles of miscellaneous rubbish. Into a few tumble-down buildings near the Arab line a few poor house-hunters have surreptitiously seeped; in the middle an Israeli housewife, oblivious of international asperities, has hung her washing; and on the very edge, close to the walls of the Old City, a small Jewish army post sits boldly behind sandbags on top of a ruined terrace.
It is another world across that frontier, bland and barred, as if some totally foreign and aloof civilization has implanted itself there. The Arabs can only look across and wonder, but they live in the second holiest city of Islam, and their own world survives. The glorious Dome of the Rock was damaged in the fighting, but surrounded by its wide courtyards, its arches and stairways and old walls, it is still of a shimmering splendour, and the peasants still stand reverent and awestruck before it.
Christians too, as they wander the sacred sites, may feel their philosophies secure. The Franciscan pilgrims make their way as always along the Via Dolorosa, the brown-robed monks, the American women in their cotton frocks, the family of Italians kneeling on the hard cobblestones beside the Stations of the Cross. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, split, shuttered, disfigured and profaned by ancient schisms and rivalries, the Latins process each evening: cultured voices and Gregorian chants, a visiting English priest, a stream of pilgrims carrying lighted tapers. A few moments later come the Greeks, their music harsh and discordant, their aged bishop so enshrouded in his vestments that only his spectacles and a few white hairs can be glimpsed beneath his hood in the half-light. An old woman lays down her stick and raises her hands in worship in the subterranean chapel of the Armenians; a tall Abyssinian monk stands, lost in meditation, silent among the pillars; in the little Coptic chapel behind the Sepulchre a moon-faced kitchen clock ticks tinnily upon the altar.
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So the piety of Old Jerusalem survives, and countless sects of Islam and Christendom still thrive among its walls. But this city is never at ease, and in its southern section, inside the Dung Gate, there is a wide expanse of ruin, flattened houses and crumbling courtyards, inhabited only by unhappy scabrous refugees begging bakitesh. The Jews have left their quarter of Jerusalem, and their houses are laid waste. The Wailing Wall is deserted, with never a crumpled paper inserted between Herod’s gigantic stones, and cabbages grow in the Jewish cemetery above the Vale of Kedron.
In 1967 the Israelis were to seize the whole of Jerusalem, and since then – well, you know the rest.
Iran
Persia, as Iran was generally called then, was still governed by the Shah-in-Shah, King of Kings, successor to the dynasties of the Qajars, the Afsharids, the Safayids and the Ilkhans. The Times was chiefly interested in the affairs of the huge Anglo-Iranian oil refinery at Abadan, in the south, but I preferred to potter around the Shah’s cities of the interior, because I greatly relished the peculiar tang of their ancient civilization, not yet coarsened in the world’s reputation by Iranian fanaticisms to come.
Persia makes its own rules. There never was such a tortuous, inside-out, back-to-front way of thinking as the Persian way; never such a fascinating, will-o’-the-wisp, unpredictable community of people; nowhere buildings so inexpressibly lovely, nowhere a landscape more peculiar than the wide Iranian plain, sometimes bleak beyond description, sometimes warm and multi-coloured, often queerly criss-crossed with the big round craters that mark the passage of underground water channels. Ask a Persian which is his right ear, and he will put his left hand behind his head and point it out from behind.
Life in Persia is largely governed by a sense of humour, and depends for its continuity upon a series of non sequiturs, so that affairs there progress bumpily but soothingly, like an opi
ate with grit in it. It has long been so, for through centuries of despotism the Persian has erected around himself an indefinable screen of humour, slipperiness and oddity, a smoke-screen or camouflage, a false trail, a tear gas, behind which he can dive when trouble approaches him, to the bewildered chagrin of his tormentors. All this old tang and quiddity of Persia is best sniffed or experienced in the bazaars of Isfahan. Of all the splendid bazaars of the Middle East I enjoy these most. They are winding and rambling and mysterious, lit by shafts of sunshine streaming through the roof, full of fabrics and carpets and jewellery and vegetables, with exotic turbaned figures wandering through them, and a constant pushing and tumbling and shouting and bargaining; the whole conducted in a series of vaulted corridors of faintly ecclesiastical character. Women get short shrift in this Islamic mart, and are pushed out of the way with donkeys or sworn at mercilessly, and sometimes the vivid gusto of the place evolves into the macabre or the eerie.
I was once walking through the bazaars when a young man fell off his bicycle; a package wrapped in newspaper, fastened to the carrier rack, came undone, and there rolled on to the pavement the complete head of a horned sheep, its eyes glassy, a thin trickle of blood oozing from its neck. Obscurely disturbing, too, is the antique camel mill which works in a kind of dungeon near the entrance to the bazaars. You enter it down a flight of worn steps, and find yourself standing in a windowless subterranean cavern. In the middle of this awful place two aged camels, their eyes padded, lope round and round a grinding mill in the half-light, with a smell of dung, hair, straw and burning wood, and the flicker of a flame from a distant corner where three old camel-men in rags are cooking themselves a meal.
In such a place you can clearly hear the beat of the Persian heart – old, shuttered, wily, erratic. There is an edgy feeling to the crowds that shuffle and barge through these draughty arcades, and in the Persian’s eye, though he has a gaudy streak of the buffoon to his make-up, there is always a look of deep and calculating introspection. You never feel remote from the desert in Isfahan; you are never divorced from Islam; there are many reminders that the city stands on the brink of wild, unworldly territories, inhabited by roaming bands of tribesmen and coloured by many a lingering taboo and superstition. This is the home of the Zoroastrians and the great Persian mystics, and the nurturing-place of the fragile Persian poets of antiquity. To this day, up more than one winding and rickety staircase in the bazaars, amid the dust and the sweet smoke of the hubble-bubbles, you will find the miniaturists still at work, squatting cross-legged on their benches with their pupils around them.
Isfahan is both bitter and perfumed: and if you are ever lulled into sentimentality by the charm of it all, there will soon come swaggering by some figure of glorious insouciance in turban, cloak, fur hat, sheepskin boots, cummerbund, limpid gown or tight-belted jerkin, the very personification of the perennial Persia. His astringent image haunts the scene, and breathes a spiced breath upon most of its activities.
Tehran, the Shah’s capital, was in those days hardly less rich in piquancy. If I illustrate the trait with a comic anecdote, it is not because the trait itself was comic, but because Persian characteristics were so often served up soufflé style – their flavour fluffed about in humour, but none the less strong and subtle beneath.
It is said of the great Reza Shah that he was once making an inspection tour down his new trans-Iranian railway when a preceding locomotive was derailed and capsized beside the track. The railway workers did not want His Imperial Majesty to see this evidence of their ineptitude. Desperately they worked to put the engine on the track again, or at least on its wheels, as the royal train sped down the line towards them. But they failed to move it an inch, and only just in time hit upon a spaciously Persian solution. They buried it.
Persia’s ambiance is pungent and defensive – as distinctive a national flavour, perhaps, as any on earth – and the foreigner is easily absorbed by it. In the vaults of the Central Bank of Persia, in Tehran, are kept the Crown Jewels, an astonishing collection of gems and objets d’art which provide backing for the national currency. They have been assembled over several royal generations, and are rich in spoils of war, begemmed weapons, enormously expensive baubles and gifts from other kingly dynasties. Kept in a huge underground strongroom seething with plain-clothes men, the collection has become a great tourist attraction.
I was down there one crowded weekday morning, among the blue-rinsed coiffures and jangling charm bracelets of my fellow marvellers, when I came across an agreeable case of brooches and little jewelled watches – more to my scale, I thought, than the colossal diamonds and tiered crowns that set the general tone of the exhibition. I stooped to examine these ornaments more closely, and as I did so the treasure-house suddenly reverberated with the ear-splitting blast of an alarm hooter. Everyone froze. Not a word was spoken. Not a pixie-charm tinkled. We waited aghast for the sound of splintered glass, gunshots, handcuffs or explosions. The hooter went on hooting. For a moment nothing else happened: then a smart young woman in green walked with composure across the room. She avoided the case containing the Gika of Nadir Shah, with its diamond ornaments of bayonets and gun-barrels around a monumental emerald. She ignored the sceptre presented to Reza Shah by the people of Azerbaijan, with its gold lions rampant around a jewelled globe. She took no notice of the Sea of Light, sibling to the Koh-i-Noor, inherited from the first Mogul emperor of India by way of the treasury of the Qajar tribe. Instead she walked calmly, with a loud clicking of her heels, directly across the vault to me.
‘May I please ask you’, she said with an amiable smile, ‘to remove your elbow from that metal bar around the jewel-case?’ I moved my arm. The hooter stopped. She thanked me. I kicked the last sand over the buried railway-engine, and the glory of Persia proceeded.
Oman
In the winter of 1955 the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, a faithful client of the British Empire, decided with London’s encouragement to establish his authority over the disputed interior of his country, the Omani part, which he had never visited and where it was hoped there might be oil. It would entail a royal journey across the south-east corner of Arabia that had never been made before, starting from Salalah on the Arabian Sea, where the Sultan had his southern palace. I went along with the Sultan as representative of The Times, the only European among the Beduin guides and Nubian slaves of the enterprise – for Muscat and Oman then was one of the most shuttered states on earth, and slavery as an institution still existed. I later wrote a book about our journey, called Sultan in Oman.
In the courtyard of the palace there stood a stubby, powerful American truck, piled high with baggage, and beside it the Sultan stopped and unfolded the map. I stood over him, taller by a foot or more, and examined his face while he pointed out the route to me. He was only 44, but the voluminous dignity of his robes, his stately bearing, his heavy turban and his luxuriant beard all combined to make him look much older. His eyes were large, dark, long-lashed and very serious. His mouth, though kindly and humorous, looked to me capable of an occasional sneer, and often seemed to act independently of the rest of his features. It was an antique, melancholy face, such as you might see in old pictures of the East, as profoundly enigmatic, I thought, as the Pyramids.
The driver of the truck stood trembling beside its door, and the Sultan climbed in athletically. I watched him hitch up his robe, adjust his sword, arrange his papers and settle himself in the front seat. With deliberate care he put on a pair of sunglasses, and the driver jumped in and started the engine.
‘Now, Mr Morris,’ said the Sultan. ‘If you are ready I think we might start. It will be an interesting journey, I think. I hope you will be comfortable, and if there is anything at all you want, please let my people know.’
I bowed; he smiled; the retainers clanked their rifles; and I walked from the inner courtyard into the big yard outside. There stood our convoy, ready for the journey. There were six more American trucks, all identical, piled almost to overturning wi
th stores and bags. Each carried its complement of strong Negro slaves, wearing blue jerseys like sailors of the Royal Navy or skippers of Skylarks at faraway piers. In one vehicle five small goats, doomed but stoical, stood with their heads just showing above its sides, their ears waggling vigorously. In the front seats of others a strange assortment of dignitaries was sitting, and I had a smudged glimpse of beards, turbans, rifles, daggers and bright eyes as I hastened across the yard. There was a champagne feeling in the air.
The Sultan was evidently a man of punctuality. The engines were already racing, the slaves were clinging precariously to the mountains of stores. ‘Here, Sahib! This way!’ said two smiling Negroes, running across the yard to meet me. ‘Your bags are in. Welcome!’ And practically frogmarching me across the yard they guided me to my truck, its door already open, its driver grinning at me from inside. I jumped into my seat; the slaves climbed agilely up behind; and at that very instant there was a loud insistent blare of the Sultan’s horn. The trucks leapt away like dogs from the leash, manoeuvring for position. Exhaust smoke billowed about the palace. We were off! The slaves struck up a loud unison fatha, invoking blessings on our mission. The household retainers lining the several courtyards bowed low and very humbly, and some of the men prostrated themselves. The keepers of the portals swung open the gates with a crash. The bystanders waved their sticks and shouted loyal greetings. Slave-girls, after preliminary reconnaissance, ran giggling into their houses with flying draperies. With a tremendous roaring of engines we rushed through the town and into the plain, and even the old camels, labouring around their wells, looked up for a bleary moment to watch us pass.