Old Stones in the Desert

The next morning found me bumping along in an “air conditioned” coach, the term simply meaning that the windows could not be opened. The sun was hot on the glass but I leant my head on it all the same and stared out at the brown stones of the desert, flat and lifeless. My companion in traditional dress sat working through his prayer beads with one hand and occasionally opening his Koran with the other, mouthing its words silently. A corny Arab film blared and flickered its way from the video screen at the front of the bus. We flew past a turn-off with a sign in Arabic and English indicating the way to Baghdad. There was not a tree, a bush, a single blade of grass to be seen anywhere. With time the plains gave way to more mountainous terrain, in short, a truly biblical landscape, a place to cleanse oneself, to find that savage clarity the Desert Fathers sought and sometimes found. 40 days and 40 nights in a place like this and the angels ministered to him. I suppose in Aramaic. Just a man like me.

By some prior arrangement of which I was blissfully unaware, I was dropped on the outskirts of the sprawling township of Palmyra, by shear coincidence directly opposite the Hotel Al Faris. Mr. Faris was there to greet me and physically coerce me into his rather empty looking establishment. I decided to take the path of least resistance and acquiesce. It turned out to be just fine.

A few hours later I found myself hiding back in my hotel room having been rained on by a desert storm of an entirely meteorological nature. Thanks to tourism, I suppose, the people of Palmyra have developed a whole new way of relating to visitors, which could stand in no greater contrast to my experiences of the day before in Damascus. Come to think of it, there’s nothing terribly new about it – it’s already been tried and tested in tourist traps in Egypt and countless other places. Pestering kids who rudely and loudly ask where one is from in order to then demand that one purchase something from them, a tour guide too on the make to be honest about the price he was charging. Others trying to flog t-shirts, headdresses, whatever, whether you’ve said no once or a thousand times. No one interested in anything other than extracting money from the filthy rich foreigner who is so wealthy that he could afford to fly across the sea, just to look at a pile of old stones in the desert.

Walking back to the hotel, kids shouted “baksheesh” at me, one even made a half-hearted grab at my pocket. So this is the future for Syria. The desert rains had passed, the kids were playing football again on the level ground across the road. Dark, dark clouds, along the horizon to the southeast, guarded the border to Iraq. They cast no shadow on the light earth here.

The sorry residents of Palmyra guard one of the world’s greatest archaeological treasures. The well preserved ruins of a city that lived for millennia here on one of the great trade routes of the ancient world. An Aramaic city, ruled in the end by a queen, Zenobia, whose hunger for power (read: to take Caesar’s job) was her eventual downfall. I wonder if news of her spread all the way across to the other edge of the empire, Brittania, where some of my ancestors shivered and coughed in a hovel somewhere and never dreamt of a place so cultured and civilised as this.

Central to old Palmyra was the ancient temple of Baal – even in Zenobia’s day old beyond all memory. Baal pops up everywhere in this part of the Near East – for all ancient cultures in the region, he was the supreme god amongst many, creator and life-giver. Often he is depicted nobly as an eagle with wings outstretched. Perhaps it was him who old father Abraham was worshipping in a ziggurat in Mesopotamia when he heard a voice telling him to leave his home and journey to Canaan, a migration that his father Terah had embarked on but never managed to finish. And the sons of Abraham? At least two of them are still quarrelling –Jacob (Israel) and Ishmael still unable to live together in the Land of Promise.

Watching over Palmyra is the relatively new citadel of Saladin – less than 1000 years old. I sat after a forgettable dinner on my balcony looking up at it through the power lines in front of the hotel. A crescent moon hung fittingly above the motionless landscape.