The High Place (2 page)

The reason for my choice of Syria was simple; I had enjoyed myself there. In 1942 I was left with an unmilitary digestive system, after a fragment of 88 mm. shell had carried away some
inessential coils, and the doctors said that for a year or two it would not stand up to desert rations and shortage of water. So I became a political officer in Syria. I had no qualifications
except that I spoke French and could stammer a little Arabic. My appointment and my destiny thereafter were due to my accidental presence in the depot adjutant’s office when he opened the
envelope.

For three years of the war Syria and the Lebanon were my hobbies and my home. I learned to love the country: the line of little towns, Rouad and Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, that seemed to float,
their rocks half awash, upon the tideless sea: the red-roofed villages set on the bends of narrow roads, one above another, to the ragged top of Lebanon: the Moslem cities threaded along the
straight highway between mountain and desert, gate leading to gate from Aleppo to Hama, to Homs, to Damascus. This variety of beauty predisposed me to like the peoples by whose variety of race and
religion it had been created, and to taste that Arab culture which had given to them all their language, their courtesy and their easy acceptance of frustra­tion.

I was not homesick, for England was less of a necessity to me than to my fellows. Between the university and my father’s death I worked for a firm of manufacturing chemists which
specialized in the needs of agriculture. We were consultants to the Colonial Office, to great producing companies of sugar and rubber and wheat, and occasionally to foreign governments in trouble
with their experimental crops. I became the man who went to the spot and reported, and often remained season after season with my finger on the vast pulse of prairie or plantation. I was no
chemist, but I had listened to farmers’ problems ever since I was old enough to come down to lunch; to the worried parent of an anaemic harvest or a lazy soil I was a more welcome
representative of my firm than a technician.

So, when I came to choose a home, I had enough experience of foreign ground to know where I myself would be most fruit­ful, and that my roots were healthy enough to stand so drastic a
transplanting. Now, as I write, it is easy enough for me to see that I ran away to Syria for my own selfish pleasure, but pleasure at least it was. My duty, of course, was to sacrifice my liberty
for what I believed—to stay, to refuse my taxes, and to force the government to imprison me. Humanity against the State has only one weapon: neither escape nor political action, but the
passive resistance of the individual. The farce, however, is too slight to bear such a moral, and it is over. I shall have nothing more to say of England and its Yealms.

2

My house was in El Mina, the old port of Tripoli. It was offered to me a few weeks after my arrival in the country, while I still had to decide whether my base should be Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus
or, as a bad fourth, Tripoli. By itself it made up my mind. The house was on the western side of El Mina, well away from the harbour, and was built into and out of the remains of the ancient wall.
On the ground floor were a ware­house, the servants’ quarters and kitchen. Above was the living accommodation of four whitewashed, box-like rooms, presenting a blank wall to the street
and opening on to a terrace of masonry which faced the unbounded sea.

I can best describe the airy, clear delight of the place by saying that time which most satisfied me was the radiant quarter of an hour between breakfast and the office. First I would approve
the sea, whatever its mood, and watch through the white geraniums, whose tiled boxes lined my parapet, the ex­cited dance or slow procession of the morning water; then, to my right, I looked
down into a little walled garden, visible only from the terrace and made for the jealously guarded walk of women. To pass by a mere turning of the head from limit­less blue and white into a
finite heaven where there was no more sea tempted me with a moment of joy, never to be re­sisted, before the day’s work began.

At the far end of the garden a door gave on to a lane, hedged by cactus and floored by the natural rock, which hooves of donkeys and the winter torrents had worn into a passable sur­face.
This was a truly Mediterranean door. Outside it was a desiccated world of dust and sand-dunes and all the sun-baked filthy litter that blows on the outskirts of an Arab town; within were moist
black flower-beds surrounding a well, and so shaded by the thick foliage of pomegranates that until eyes grew accus­tomed to the green twilight they could not tell white rose from lily.

My warehouse was cool as the crypt of a great church—and such, indeed, it may have been, for the vaulting was Crusaders’ work. It was a typical and traditional Arab place of
business; and down the long aisles where generations of traders had stacked their bales and tubs gleamed the reds and blues and yellows of my agricultural machinery. The tractors looked more
engine-like, more full of hidden omnipotence for wealth, than behind the showroom windows of the Western dealer.

In that light, so much diffused by space and thickness of masonry, I first met Elisa Cantemir. Therefore, I think, my first impression was of a voice, a grace undefined by any bound­ing
line, a fascination that was wholly sexless. Nothing could have been more prosaic than our conversation. She wanted to know about the latest types of cultivators—ideal for working the narrow
hillside terraces of vine or fruit or tobacco. She gave me no information about herself. Her English, though spoken with a faint foreign accent, was more than fluent; often indeed her flying
thought seemed to test the very wings of the language. I wondered if she were the European and energetic mistress of some princely Arab landowner.

I asked her if she would like a demonstration of the culti­vator. My voice must have sounded professionally inviting, but what I was after was to find out in whose rich acres of plain or
mountain she held her court.

‘Salesmanship?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Here?’

‘What’s odd about it?’

‘Your stained-glass tractors,’ she said. ‘One doesn’t expect, somehow, the bazaar carpet-seller to bring out a Hoover.’

I took her upstairs to the terrace, desiring no doubt to show her that not all of me was Levantine trader. She said little, and I admired her for knowing that her swift look of surprise was a
better tribute than any flow of conventionalities. In the fierce spring sun she took shape, though its delicacy was no more to be measured and memorized than that of a thin tongue of flame.

She was still, I think, more character than flesh to me. At any rate my curiosity about her was far more insistent than any admiration. I had never felt quite the same quality of interest in a
woman unless she were beyond the age of desire. That may be the reason why I never married. I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur of women. It is an empty and inhuman phrase which most vilely
smells of a seaman’s brothel. Yet I had upon me the curse of the Don Juan: that I was for ever seeking the binding of two lives into one, and always aware that what I found—or made,
perhaps—was nothing but a working model.

‘Your estate is in the Lebanon?’ I asked.

It was the spring of 1948. I had been in the country two years, so I was astonished that I couldn’t place her.

‘In Syria,’ she replied. ‘At Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘Good God! Are you all alone there?’

‘Oh, no!’ she laughed. ‘Not the last of the wives!’

Kasr-el-Sittat was about thirty miles from the coast in the broken Alaouite downland, where the valleys and even the rounded tops of the hills had plentiful remains of forest. That green
remoteness formed a soft and gentle threshold to some of the wildest country in Western Asia, stretching away along the Turkish frontier to Lake Van Ararat.

The settlement had a reputation that was sinister, and comic only to a European, for it had been deliberately constructed around the scattered stones of a pre-Phœnician attempt to house
the wives of God. In the early days of the occupation of Syria, God had been a standing joke among us, the political profes­sionals. He was a pagan Arab who had simply set himself up in
business as the Almighty and had a following of some thousands. I knew him, I won’t say well, but well enough for him to accept a drink from me when he visited the Latakia hotel like a plain
mortal. He had quite a reasonable theory to explain the failings of his humanity; to refute him you needed to be up in all the theological subtleties of the fourth century.

Upon what his spiritual power depended I cannot imagine; it may merely have been that he claimed to be God. So astonish­ing an assertion was alone enough to impress the simple. His livelihood
was the growing of hashish, and his amusement the collection of wives. In his remote district he preserved an absolute gangster’s power by the old game of playing British against
French—until at last his divinity went to his head and he defied both of them simultaneously. After that his widows retired to secular life, and the bungalows, so far as I knew, had remained
empty and derelict.

‘Someone is living there?’ I asked, surprised.

The group of little houses served no economic purpose what­ever. The surrounding villages were enough for the sparse population of the district. God had chosen the site not for
con­venience, but for the sake of its religious prestige—the lonely hill had been a vague centre of superstition ever since the decay of whatever cult had served its altar—and he
had given it the current name of Kasr-el-Sittat, meaning the Fortress of Holy Women.

Elisa Cantemir explained to me that towards the end of 1946 the deserted settlement had been discovered and bought by a communal colony of European refugees. The sacred houses, she said, were in
fair condition. They hadn’t even been quarried by the poor for timber and metals. And on the spot was most of the material needed to finish the paths and drainage.

‘A desirable building site, partly developed,’ I suggested.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it did look like that at first. I wonder why God had such a liking for red brick.’

I could tell her that. It was a symbol of his modernity, imported at enormous expense, like the lavatory pans, purely to decorate the squat stone house; and to a faithful wholly un­familiar
with red brick, porches and casements were bright as the gates of Paradise.

‘To us, too,’ she declared, with a bitter and sudden smile. ‘We were all homeless, you see.’

‘You are Jews?’

‘Have they a monopoly of suffering? No, just displaced persons.’

‘Back to the land?’

I knew as I uttered it that the phrase carried a suggestion of hope and inefficiency that didn’t fit her at all.

‘If you like,’ she answered. ‘But a good many of us were brought up on it.’

She turned the conversation to business, and compelled me to become a salesman and talk cultivators. She emphasized that most of Kasr-el-Sittat’s farming was done on straight capitalist
lines with hired labour.

‘If you were amateurs,’ I said at last, ‘the cultivator would be the thing for you. If you employ local labour it is not.’

‘That’s what I think,’ she replied with some amusement. ‘But why do you?’

‘Because two of my cultivators would put a whole village out of work. The poor devils are always on the edge of starvation as it is.’

We stared at each other. I well remember that long, veiled, almost emotionless marriage of our eyes. When I look back on this first meeting with her, it seems to me that our spirits,
disregarding the momentary antagonisms, had carried their drinks, as it were, into a corner of the room and were satisfying their curiosity about each other with all the wordless intimacy of old
friends.

‘I only meant,’ she said, ‘that manpower in this unsettled world is likely to be surer than petrol. So we are agreed that I am not to buy a cultivator?’

‘I am afraid so,’ I answered with mock severity.

She left me without any spoken invitation to come and see her colony. It was a proof of her wisdom. Those who were attracted to Kasr-el-Sittat came of their own accord; and thus a process of
natural selection weeded out both visitors and colonists before ever the more fallible human selection came into play.

During the next few weeks I was busy and gave little thought to Kasr-el-Sittat, dismissing the visit of Elisa as one of those delightful, inconclusive episodes from which, after first youth has
passed, one expects no more than a bank cashier from the passing over his counter of a single but most lovely foreign coin.

Like the Syrians themselves, I was perfectly accustomed to colonies of cranks. The Middle East is so full of the floating spawn of dead cults and living hopes that monasteries, com­munities
and societies for hocus-pocus take root and flourish wherever there are solitude and running water. It is hard now to remember what I expected of Kasr-el-Sittat, but certainly that it would be some
experiment of innocent idealists, destined to be short-lived.

I might never have gone to the place if it had not been close to the tobacco villages. Some of the small growers who kept up the standard of the finest home-cured Latakia leaf were, for
illiterate villagers, unexpectedly careful of their soils. They couldn’t distinguish between science and witchcraft—I’m not sure that I can myself—but they consulted me. I
admired their interest, and gave to them far more of my time than their few piastres worth of orders ever justified.

So, one early afternoon when I was within ten miles of Kasr-el-Sittat and weary of referring my customers to Allah to ex­plain the inexplicable, I decided that I would be no more a trader
for that day, and turned my car into a brown dirt track which led northwards. For a sturdy vehicle the district was not difficult of access, but it was poor, primitive, almost unpoliced. and on the
way to nowhere at all but an uninhabited stretch of frontier. There was no reason for merchant or stranger or even government official to take himself and his car up the slopes graded for pack
animals and down across the fords.

The road improved as I approached Kasr-el-Sittat, and swept purposefully round the foot of a ridge into the long glen that led straight to the colony. God’s primordial creation had been
tidied up. Ahead of me, on a low but prominent hill, which divided the narrowing valley like a wedge of turf, was the gay group of little flat-roofed houses.