UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

Palmyra

By W. K. F. BOSWELL (Peterhouse, Cambridge)

IN the heart of the desert an ancient city and a modern village lie side by side. Long ago men used to rest there after days of travel, bathe their sweating bodies in the warm, sulphurous spring that gushes miraculously out of a hill, and ease their camels' backs of rich merchandise from eastern lands.

What induced them to build there, so far from anywhere, a powerful and mighty city, with pillars of slender' beauty, worked by skill inherited from Persian, Greek and Roman ; temples dedicated to pagan deities that the great empires of the inland sea had worshipped? Strange wisps of legends of kings and queens, of armies and generals, time has left us, and as their proof these broken relics. Zenobia once ruled here, they say, whose queenly office and re-embodied soul an Englishwoman for a short while usurped.

With a cloud of dust follolving us and irritating nose, throat and eyes in exasperating fashion, we flung into the town, our broadcloths wrapped around our faces. Each vulgar way, edged by mud-built huts, offered us no apparent hope of lodging ; bearded bedouin and mincing town-boy turned in wonder to see a scruffy pilgrim and an anxious orientalist borne past on an overloaded Ariel motor-cycle, its makers' colours long since lost beneath layers of white dust. The night before we had turned away from the Euphrates, searched out a convenient hollow, and passed the night in cold discomfort beneath a single blanket ; why not avoid the hostile, searching eyes by running through the village tonight ? To-morrow we could return. A sudden sharp command broke our silent conversation. Two armed police halted us from before ; a third hurried up ,from behind to make certain of their catch. We were conducted before the local commandant, an army captain, and asked to explain, half in Arabic, half in French, why we were roaming over country that could be of no interest to God or man. For a New Order had come to this land, and it looked with suspicion upon foreigners who wandered off the beaten track. The fastness of the desert had been broken by civilisation, by war and politics, machine-guns and barbed wire.

This outpost had passed through the hands of Germans,. British and French in succession. Bullets had chipped more flints off broken architraves. In the retreat of weary bedouin and much- travelled merchant had been planted a camp for political prisoners. The door was quickly opened again, and in walked a small, shifty- eyed man in nondescript uniform, displaying no badges of rank.

Here was the representative of Husni Zaim's security police, whose purpose was to keep the country well within the mailed fist and instill the fear that is essential to dictatorial government in its early stages. He took us off to his but with billy a few quick words in French. The door was locked. Every scrap of our baggage was turned inside out, every letter read word by word. The pilgrim's cassock came to sight. Why a holy man should always provoke such suspicion I cannot say. Perhaps it is part of the legacy of hatred left by the French. Rumour also had it that Jews habitually adopted such disguise when engaged on the nefarious business of escape.

The pilgrim was stripped and examined by glowering eyes and rough fingers. Unfortunately his father had had him circumcised.

Proof was mounting up, for good Christians never followed such

a custom. When my turn for examination came, I became unaccountably shy, but I was fortunate enough to escape with but a cursory glance on this occasion. Then in expostulatory French Bashir, the officer, maintained his thesis that the pilgrim was one of the Yahudin. There the poor fellow was, standing unclothed and nonplussed, unable to pick up the threads of our ridiculous argument about social customs among our kind. 1 think I allayed official suspicions, if only a little, for we spent that night in a small, dirty Arab pension, leavaig the Hotel' Zenobia for more affluent visitors. Our mount and baggage were locked behind stout doors. The next day we entered the radio-telegraph office to send a message to Aleppo and inform our friends that we had arrived

safely. They had arranged to search for us in the desert if no news came after four days. However, the lines were down, the radio dead and the office closed—or so the postmaster asserted in unbending terms. We left and rejoined Bashir.. The little man had an air of self-satisfaction on his face. Whenever we tried to express the urgency for our message, my Arabic became incomprehensible and his French uncomprehending. Time was passing in the slow, steady, oriental way.

Ramadan and fasting were drawing to a close, and the preparations for the three-days festival were well in hand. We were drawn into the concourse of excited people, gripping and embracing, with the salutation of 'Idek Mubarek on everyone's lips ; we tasted here as in many other places something of the hospitality and kindness of the Arab to strangers, and the hours hurried by in the conviviality of drink and food unstinted. At times we swayed amid the swelling crowds in the streets, to the accompaniment of bursting fireworks, at others we were overwhelmed by the welcome of a sheikh, or embarrassed by the generosity of some humble villager.

The third day we were again seated in Bashir's office when a truck, travelling from T.4-on the oil pipeline to T.3, stopped outside and a red-faced Englishman strode in. When he had finished his business, I asked him to send our message by telephone from T.3, but, before he could answer, Bashir thrust in between us like a_ rapier and bundled him out of the door, for he knew not what we might be up to, as he did not speak our language. That afternoon, almost at zero hour, I finally persuaded !iim. He wrote a short message in Arabic, and then escorted us to the telegraph office. The doors sprang open at his bidding, electricity streaked back to the set, and the lines that were down immediately resurrected themselves. In ten minutes we knew that the message had reached Aleppo.

In the evening this wily specimen of a modern political Arab was kind to us, and led us up to the verandah of the Zenobia to

drink coffee and look out across the age-old temples, gaunt and white against the gathering gloom. He talked of our country and his, of politics and creeds. He called up a peasant boy standing near and questioned him kindly about his school and what he learnt there, his home and the games that he played. Then he turned to me in quiet pride and said, " This boy is only a paysan and yet he can speak grammatical Arabic and knows more about his country than his old peasant father. We shall yet build something out of this new nation of ours. There is much to do, but we are now free to do it." Not long after we left, the dictator he served met a sudden death, and not long after that his successor was also overturned. Nonetheless the sincerity of such nationalism had a touching effect on me, for it cloaked an ardent desire to build up a heritage for a nation's youth.

The next morning a dossier was completed on each of us and we were given strict instructions to report at Damascus before leaving the country. One oriental touch before we departed. Bashir picked out my compass, which he had admired before, and put it in his pocket. He took it because he wanted it, and as a mark of the strange friendship which had grown up between him and me. It was only after half an hour's polite conversation that I succeeded in making him believe that we might well be lost without it. We emptied our reserve petrol supply into the tank, gave the tin to the expectant-looking owner of a donkey, and then accelerated down the track to Damascus, leaving the towering ruins on our left and the mud huts full of friendly souls behind us. Over a slight rise and then into the vast expanse of stony, sandy waste.