In Xanadu (3 page)

For a month Louisa and I planned the expedition. We argued over maps and atlases, sat in the Cambridge University Library reading up the history, toured the different embassies; I even managed to persuade my college to part with £700 to help finance it. With exams looming, I then disappeared into my books for two months, forgot about the trip and saw very little of Louisa. A fortnight before we were due to depart I met Lou for a drink outside a pub in Hammersmith. There, between delicate sips of sweet white wine, I was presented with a
fait accompli.
There was (sip) a new man (sip) and a new destination (sip); 'Edward' and 'Orkney' respectively. Reeling from the blow, I went off to a dinner party where I poured out my heart to the stranger who was sitting on my left. The recipient was called Laura. Although I had never met her before her reputation had gone before her. She was renowned as a formidable lady, frighteningly intelligent, physically tough, and if not conventionally beautiful, then at least sturdily handsome. I had heard that she was an Oxford ice-hockey blue and a scholar; I also knew that she was a fearless traveller. During her father's latest posting in Delhi, Laura had taken the opportunity to explore the entire subcontinent. Stories of her feats of endurance were common currency; if one half of them were true, she had by the age of twenty-one made Freya Starke look like a dilettante. It was said that travelling on her own she had penetrated the most inaccessible corners of the Deccan, cut a swathe through the jungles of Bengal, scaled some of the highest peaks in the Himalayas. Her finest moment had come in the communal riots that engulfed Delhi on the death of Mrs Gandhi. Trying to rescue a Sikh friend from street gangs, Laura had been cornered in a cul-de-sac by a party of rapists intent on violation. She had beaten them off single-handed, and, so the story went, left one of them permanently incapacitated.

I had not been told that Laura was as impulsive as she was formidable. At the end of supper she announced that she would take Louisa's place, at least as far as Lahore, whence she could make her way home to Delhi. She had been planning to explore the Andes, but the Ayatollah's Iran sounded just her cup of tea. She would ring me in three days' time to confirm.

Three days later, at the ominously early time of seven-thirty a.m., the telephone went. Of course she was coming, she told me. If I would meet her at the Syrian embassy in one hour we could begin collecting the necessary visas. Over the next two weeks Laura swept me around London as she slashed at red tape, assaulted passport officials, and humbled the bureaucracy of the Asian embassies. Under her supervision I was inspected, injected and protected against diseases I had never dreamt existed. My maps were thrown away and replaced with a set that looked as if they had been prepared by the CIA: they were covered in unexplained figures and inscribed the chilling warning AIRCRAFT INFRINGING UPON THE NON-FREE FLYING TERRITORY MAY BE FIRED UPON WITHOUT WARNING.

Meanwhile, the full weight of Laura's connections was put into the planning of the expedition. Through devious means, visas were obtained for us for Iran. A way was found to get us from Israel to Syria: telex messages to Odessa led to us obtaining tickets for a ship which ran between Haifa in Israel and Limassol in Cyprus; berths were then booked in another ship which ran from Lamaca, at the other end of the island, to Latakia in Syria. There were still some problems. We had to make sure that the Israelis did not stamp our passports, nor let the Cypriot authorities indicate in any way how we had come to their island, if we failed in this we would be unable to enter either Syria or Iran. There were also worries as to our reception in Iran. The previous year a British student of our own age had been arrested while travelling through the country and was still languishing in an Iranian jail on espionage charges. Most serious of all was the shadow of gloom cast by a travel article which appeared in
The Times
only two days before our departure. It claimed that while the Karakoram Highway was indeed open to foreign travellers, only those foreigners who were part of a tour group would be allowed into China. The only exceptions were those who had booked accommodation at Tashkurgan, the first town in China. This, claimed the article, could only be done via Peking, and took six months to arrange.

The next morning I got a phone call from Louisa. She had heard that I was still planning to go on the trip. She would be back from Orkney by mid-August. Would I like her to come on the second half of the journey, from Lahore to Peking? I said yes. I did not tell her about the article. That hurdle would have to be jumped when we came to ii.

Thus I committed myself to travelling across twelve thousand miles of extremely dangerous, inhospitable territory, much of which seemed still to be closed to foreigners, with two companions, one a complete stranger, the other completely estranged. Perhaps I should have consulted a doctor; instead I went to a travel agent and bought a ticket to Jerusalem.

I got back from the Holy Sepulchre in time for breakfast. Laura and I were staying, on slightly dubious credentials, at the British School of Archaeology, the creation of the great Dame Kathleen Kenyon and still surviving as a piece of turn-of-the-century Oxbridge-in-the-Orient. Sheer obscurity seemed to have saved it from the late twentieth century in general and government cuts in particular. It was the home of a collection of shy, bookish scholars who pottered away digging up remote crusader castles in the Judean Hills and editing multi-volume works on the Roman sewer systems of Jerusalem. The week we were there the diggers had just found a small, rather plain waterleaf capital which was the cause of great excitement.

The tone of the school was formal. This was particularly so of the meals, and of these, none more so than breakfast. The school serves certainly the best (and possibly the only) bacon and eggs east of Rome. However, not wishing to embarrass any local Palestinian archaeologists who might be staying, the school also serves a supplementary course of feta cheese, olives, tomatoes and pitta bread - and throws in watermelons, yoghurt, toast and marmalade for good measure. This agreeable feast is served in two shifts. The first is at five a.m. and is meant for the diggers. The second and slightly larger sitting is at eight a.m. and is intended for researchers, post-excavation experts and anyone else who has managed not to be woken up by the diggers three hours earlier. On the morning in question this included Laura, who was deep in her bacon and eggs when I returned from my rendezvous with Brother Fabian. I was looking forward to spending a leisurely few days at the school, seeing Jerusalem and generally acclimatizing before setting off to the unknown horrors of Syria. But it was not to be.

At breakfast Laura produced for the first time a document that was to terrorize the rest of the trip: Laura's Schedule. This harmless-looking piece of paper was filled with a series of impossible deadlines culminating in the laughable goal of reaching Lahore by the end of August. Its immediate import, however, was that we were to leave Jerusalem at lunchtime. My protests were quickly quashed. If I wanted to see the city a last time I was free to do so, Laura announced, but I had to report back by twelve-thirty. One of the researchers, a young hen-pecked academic doing a PhD on Mameluke pottery took pity on me and gave me a lift to Jaffa Gate in his van; I had three hours to explore.

The town had woken since my dawn visit. Occidentals now outnumbered orientals by about two to one. The streets were filled with elderly Saga pensioners on pilgrimage from Preston; in the Via Dolorosa weeping Evangelicals sung 'Kum-ba-ya' against the background of wailing
muezzin.
There were a few miserable-looking Presbyterians, some rotund Eastern European widows and an Ethiopian cleric in his flowing cassock of grey serge. Pallid, short-sighted Orthodox Jews shuffled past clutching Uzi sub-machine guns. The Arabs -wearing pin-stripe for practicality, and
keffiyeh
to attract tourists - had taken up station outside their shops:
Rainbow Bazaar. The Omar Khayyam Souvenir Museum. Magic Coffee House, The al-Haj Carpentry Store.
To get to the Dome of the Rock there was no option but to run the gauntlet:

'Yes please, you like?'

"Wallah! I give you souvenir, no price. Come with me.' 'Upstairs sir, I show you
everything.'
Sir, sir, you want guide? I show you church six thousand years old. No problem!'

'Friend! My carpet awaits you.'

This pantomime of subservience has gone on day after day for centuries. Jerusalem has always been a tourist town. The pilgrims have changed, religions have come and gone and empires with them; only the knickknack sellers remain. The objects in their shops are a fascinating compendium of the junk on sale all over the Islamic world. There are the same hookahs that are on sale in Istanbul outside Hagia Sophia; there are the soap-stone boxes from the bazaar in Agra; painted wooden camels familiar from Cairo. Christian religious souvenirs are generally imported from Europe: Palestine does not claim the azure madonnas or the plastic Stations of the Cross but the crucifixes are stamped 'wood from the Garden of Gethsemane' and marked up 200 per cent. Nothing appears to be of native manufacture.

The Dome of the Rock is a world apart from this chaos. The great marble platform of the Haram al-Sharif may be one of the Holy Sites of Islam but apart from Friday prayers it is nearly always deserted. It is only when you get here and have a moment to sit, and think, and look back, that you come to realize how little the tawdriness matters and how beautiful Jerusalem still is: the bleached stone, the hills, the miles and miles of untouched crusader bazaar, the white walls of Suleiman the Magnificent.

The charm of the Dome of the Rock takes a little longer to appreciate. The gaudy Ottoman tile work and the flashing dome have both been recently renovated by the Jordanians and in no way prepare one for the breathtaking beauty of what lies inside. The golden mosaic work bears the hand of the Byzantines: the amphorae and the cornucopiae, the acanthus leaves and the geometric designs, are all in the old Hellenistic tradition. So is the building itself. It is the climax of a tradition of centrally planned churches that embraces St George in Thessaloniki, San Vitale in Ravenna and, long before either of these, Santa Constanza in Rome. The Dome is the smallest, yet despite its size it is still the most impressive. Its marble work is more refined, its mosaics more harmonious, the whole more satisfying. But the Dome is not, of course, a church (although the crusaders turned it into one during their occupation of Jerusalem). It was built as a mosque, and was probably the first such; certainly it was the first major artistic endeavour of Islam. It was built by Caliph Abd al-Malik in 687 and so is the rough contemporary of the Synod of Whitby and the very earliest Saxon churches in England: the crypts at Hexham and Ripon, and the choir of Bede's church at Jarrow. It was as old by the time of Marco Polo as most of the mediaeval abbeys in England are today. The specifically Islamic character of the building becomes apparent on a second glance. Already the arches have the beginning of a point, and in the mosaics there are no saints, no angels. The Koranic ban on the portrayal of living creatures had already taken effect.

But only when you study the Dome for a considerable time does the full programme of its builders become clear. Suspended in the vinescrolls, low down on the inner arcades, are the insignia of the defeated Byzantine and Sassanian empires: crows, double- winged diadems, jewels and breastplates. They have been hung on the walls of the mosque like hunting trophies on the walls of an English country house. Far from being a purely religious or aesthetic monument, this first mosque is a celebration of victory. The Koranic scrolls are chosen to show Islam as the successor to Christianity; the same spirit located the building directly on top of the Jewish temple and used captive Greeks to build it. The Dome dominates Jerusalem and deliberately eclipses the buildings of Judaism and Christianity. It is an indication of both the self-confidence and the intolerance of the new Islamic conquerors of Jerusalem. Ravishing to look at, it is, in a way, a deeply disturbing building.

If history repeats itself anywhere, it does so in Jerusalem. When the crusaders captured the city they slaughtered the Muslims (many of whom took refuge on the roof of the Dome) as well as the Jews and the native Christians whom they had purportedly set out to help. The bazaars which today give the Old City its character were punched through the homes of its previous occupants. Now the Jews, more subtly but equally firmly, are evicting the Palestinians. Israeli soldiers terrorize the Old City; the Orthodox are slowly colonizing the Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters of East Jerusalem. Since 1948 the Christian population has dropped from thirty-five thousand to eleven thousand; there are no opportunities for the young people beyond selling knickknacks or washing dishes. Only the lazy stay; the ambitious and the better educated emigrate.