The High Place (4 page)

Among my friends was Captain Ashkar of the Syrian Gendarmerie, who was in charge of the mounted patrols along the western section of the Turkish frontier—a tangle of forest and little
precipitous foothills through which none ever passed but the smugglers and Ashkar’s troopers. His headquarters were well back from the frontier, and easily accessible from Djisr-ech-Choghour,
a god-forsaken village where the road from Latakia to the great plain of northern Syria crosses the Orontes.

I had not seen Ashkar for some months, and on my way home from Aleppo to Tripoli I decided to call on him. Be­tween dusk and midday he might be out with his patrols or inspecting frontier
posts or visiting his agents; but in the after­noon he was always to he found sitting outside the comfortable cottage where he had billeted himself and regarding the hills and his horses with
idle benevolence. He slept when and wherever there was a chance to sleep; and I suppose that in his life of waiting for something to happen on the spot where it was likely to happen, his odd hours
of sleep added up to a sufficient total.

Ashkar was in his late forties. He had begun his military training under the Turks and completed it, with honour, under the French. He looked like a stocky, greying, French colonial officer,
though he was of the purest mountain blood—Canaanite rather than Arab—and had a fleshy hooked nose that might have come straight off an Assyrian statue. He was a Christian, and held his
post in a country of Mohammedans and Alaouites merely because the government knew he would favour neither of them. So good a soldier should have been at least a colonel, but he had never been
popular with the politicians of his own nation; he had served the French a little too faithfully, and he was renowned for scrupulous honesty. I won’t say that honesty actually told against
him, but it deprived him of the suppleness, the little touches of diplomacy, which were necessary for advancement.

As I drove cautiously over the bare, water-worn rock into which his village road had degenerated, I looked forward to his solid welcome and to his geniality over a jug of the heavy, dry country
wine. He shared my perverted taste for the stuff, and we would argue fantastically for and against the bouquets of cow-dung, charcoal or tobacco flowers which gave character to the wine according
to the barns where it had been made and stored.

His reception of me had the warmth that I expected, but as soon as I steered the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, telling him that I had stayed there and been most favourably impressed, he became
polite and ceremonious. To any stranger passing the cobbled forecourt where we sat, especially if the stranger had been a European, we should have appeared the closest of friends; yet the proper
note of intimacy had vanished. When I admired a pure-bred Arab three-year-old which some friendly official in Damascus had just sent him as a remount, he kept on insisting that it was mine to take
away without even the twinkle in his eye which would have told me he knew his offer to be conventional nonsense.

It was obvious that Ashkar shared the general sense of caution in discussing Kasr-el-Sittat, and this was the more sur­prising since, in the cause of law and order, he feared neither
influence nor superstition nor the complexities of high policy. In the bad old days of Kasr-el-Sittat he himself had upended the bare soles of God’s feet, when no one else dared to carry out
the arrest, and given him eighteen strokes of the best with a steel-centred quirt.

His opinions of the colony were non-committal as those of the villagers, but his exaggerations were more amusing. He declared that Kasr-el-Sittat was a lunatic asylum for Europeans which the
Turks had paid the Syrians to accept in their terri­tory; alternatively—and with a wealth of detail—that it was an experimental station for discovering new ways to perpetuate the
race.

This gave me an opening. So far as my Arabic allowed, I took upon myself the character and flowers of speech of an old Aleppo roué, and lectured on the beauties within the walls of
Kasr-el-Sittat—thus accounting for the enthusiasm with which, unwisely, I had spoken of the colony. Ashkar swallowed the bait, and I could see that his old brown eyes were no longer fixed on
me so warily. The memory of Elisa Cantemir lent a note of sincerity to my voice: so much so that I felt disgusted with myself, as if I had been describing beloved rather than imagined women.

The captain fetched another jug of wine, which he swore had been made by a Maronite priest and tasted of incense. It did—and we passed to a fanciful project of obtaining three barrels from
a Yezidi, a Druse and an Alaouite (all more or less pagan religions flourishing within a hundred miles of the Mediterranean) and analysing the difference. I knew that confidence had been restored,
and that Ashkar no longer thought there was any likelihood of my being involved in the private affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat.

He even opened up a little, and told me how the colonists had drifted down from Turkey, singly and in groups, to their curious home. They had attracted more than a routine attention from Syrian
and foreign police; but even the British and French legations, to whom a list of the colonists’ names had been discreetly submitted, could report nothing definite against them. Since their
arrival they had proved themselves, from a policeman’s point of view, desirable citizens. They were generous employers, entertained exceedingly well, neither ran around naked nor refused
their taxes. They were, he insisted, welcome guests—but his old gendarme’s mind was still worry­ing at an invisible bone. Before I left he said mysteriously that he was about to
investigate a little further, that he might need my advice—since I was his father and friend and knew the colony—and that he would come and see me at Tripoli in a week or two when God
willed.

About a fortnight later I stood on my terrace in the freshness of the morning, lighting my after-breakfast pipe, when I observed a poor and ragged Christian Arab sitting discreetly in the dust
at such a distance that I could just see him over the garden wall. Why an Arab should choose to squat in one small unyielding patch of the Levant rather than another, neither he nor his fellow can
know; but the spot this squatter had selected was so unattractive that I guessed he wished to speak to me, and that he was aware—as who was not in that little town?—of my morning
routine.

I opened the garden door, and exchanged with him a formal blessing. He came down into the lane, adding a further and more flowery salutation, and presented me with a letter from Ashkar. I read
that he intended to call on me the following night, and that he would take it kindly—assuming it was not an intolerable inconvenience to dismiss my devoted clients and retainers—if I
could arrange for us to have a private chat.

The devoted retainers to whom Ashkar had politely referred consisted of Boulos, my Lebanese cook, and an unemployable young cousin of his, to whom, for the sake of conscience and family honour,
he gave board and lodging in exchange for such work as was too undignified for his own attention. I was per­mitted to give the cousin an occasional tip, but to preserve the polite fiction that
he did not live at my expense.

Nothing was easier than privacy in that delightful house. The owner had but to close the staircase door, and not a slit nor window could command his love, his business or his riotous nights.

On the following morning Boulos set out drinks and a cold meal for two by the garden well, and returned to his quarters, smirking lasciviously. I unbolted the gate into the lane, and about nine
o’clock Ashkar came in. He was wearing civilian dress and a tarboosh on his head. I was impressed by this exaggerated discretion. The captain in civilian clothes was in­conceivable; he
lived in and of his uniform. Had I wished to form a mental picture of Ashkar in bed, my imagination would certainly have dressed him in boots and breeches until common sense protested that a
night-shirt (not, I think, pyjamas) was by far the more probable wear.

We talked personalities and politics, horses and silkworms, while I waited for Ashkar to decide that the proper atmosphere of disinterested friendship had been created. He had obviously been
attacked by one of those fevers of caution to which policemen and frontier guards, poised as they usually were be­tween the threat of dismissal if they did their duty and of black­mail if
they did not, could have no resistance.

It was not uncommon, he began at last, for a gendarme in his position to receive unofficial instructions—that, of course, I, as a former political officer, would understand. Sometimes it
was in the interests of governments that their frontiers should not be too zealously guarded. Individuals had to be let out or let in, and it was left to the discretion of the officer in
charge—very properly, didn’t I agree?—to arrange such delicate matters with or without the help of his Turkish colleague across the border.

He had had, he said, a request, an indication—nothing so unmannerly as a definite order—that if his patrols were to pick up anyone with a temporary identity card proving residence at
Kasr-el-Sittat, they might—if Ashkar had no objection—take it for granted that he was a colonist and in the frontier hills on innocent business. Twice his patrols had in fact run into
such wandering foreigners, and it was fair to assume that they had crossed or intended to cross the border.

Ashkar declared with pride that he was no hidebound police­man, but, as I knew, the very soul of tact. He stopped for con­firmation, and I assured him, with extensive mental
reserva­tions, that so he was. In view of his long experience, he went on, he was as ready to obey a wish as an order; but it was essen­tial he should know what was going on. His frontier
was wide open. Anybody and anything could travel between Turkey and Kasr-el-Sittat, and the colony itself was certainly immune from search. If the government fell or policy changed or a politician
retired on his winnings, Ashkar would be left holding the baby.

He had therefore been compelled to carry out his responsi­bilities as best he could. He did not apologize at all, he told me, for being on friendly terms with a few Turkish smugglers and
hashish runners for just so long as he had insufficient proof to arrest them; in his job one might be exchanging shots with an unknown traveller at dawn, and drinking peacefully with him in the
evening. He believed that European police, too, were often on good terms with criminals, were they not? It was per­missible to allow a man liberty to do a little petty crime him­self in
return for gossip about bigger criminals.

The next time a traveller from Kasr-el-Sittat was seen riding towards the frontier, Ashkar dutifully looked the other way but sent immediate word to one of his friendly enemies over the
border—a free-lance bandit named Selim—that if the traveller were followed and discreetly high-jacked, and the contents of his saddle-bags handed to Ashkar in person, there might be
favours to come.

I had no doubt his tale was true. There must have been plenty of picturesque scoundrels in the Turkish villages only too ready to earn the goodwill of the incorruptible but otherwise
com­plete Levantine who guarded the Syrian border. His pasha’s trick was excellently plotted; he would never be suspected of complicity in a sordid frontier crime, which anyway happened
outside his jurisdiction, and Selim would hand him over all he wanted to know. In fact, however, Selim handed him nothing but the quite ordinary contents of pockets and suitcase, and the
embarrassing news that the traveller had resisted too fiercely and was now indiscoverably buried at the bottom of a ravine.

Ashkar had brought with him the traveller’s passport. I lit the lamp that stood on the table between us. The dead man was Eugen Rosa, that serious idealist who made one of our table at
Kasr-el-Sittat a fortnight earlier.

This placed me face to face with Elisa, as if she instead of the slow-speaking Ashkar had been my companion in the dark garden. Rosa was one of her couriers, whose free passage across the
frontier had been—to judge by the captain’s hints—bought at a fair price from some corrupt official in Damascus. I sym­pathized with the colony. Since Kasr-el-Sittat was
busily en­gaged in collecting recruits and money from countries that did not readily permit the export of either, it was not surprising that they needed an occasional clandestine messenger. I
con­tinued to pretend to the captain that human life was not par­ticularly sacred in the foothills of Taurus—as indeed it was not—but I was profoundly shocked by the whole
episode. It was fortunate for Ashkar that there was no proof of the story but his word.

The passport was Nicaraguan. Nothing could be more neutral, more discouraging to any guesswork. Whatever Eugen Rosa’s true nationality, it was not Nicaraguan. I came to more interesting
ground when I discovered that Rosa had a valid Turkish visa. There seemed no reason why he should not have travelled north in comfort and safety by the Taurus Express. Ashkar, however, with his
professional knowledge of indecipher­able frontier stamps and squiggles, pointed out that according to the passport its owner had never left Turkish territory.

‘Wasn’t he carrying anything at all?’ I asked. ‘No letters?’

‘By God, nothing! Nothing but a box of cigars! Not even enough of them to make a profit,’ answered Ashkar disgustedly. ‘And those Selim stole!’

‘Did he tell you?’

After all, Ashkar couldn’t have known about them unless Selim had confessed. He seemed remarkably honest for a bandit.

‘The devil was in his tongue,’ Ashkar grumbled. ‘He was drunk and afflicted. It was God’s mercy that I was alone, for he came to me in the woods shouting that he had
killed the man, that he was Selim the Fearless and that he would kill me too. So I took away his gun and searched him, and found the cigars in his trousers. Then I stayed with him, listening, till
he was sober.

‘Well, a man’s heart is beyond knowledge. I tell you I have sat with Selim for hours, filling him with his foul Turkish araq till he stank, watching for an unguarded word like a cat
over a hole, and never has he said anything about himself that I did not already know. Yet this time, when I trusted to his discre­tion, he talked and boasted as if to an Aleppo whore. As soon
as he was sober, I showed him my note-book, with the names and addresses he had given me written out large in simple Tur­kish that he could read. I shall have no more trouble with
Selim.’