"From the Holy Mountain" by William Dalrymple

 In the mid 1990s, Dalrymple sets off from Mount Athos, the autonomous theocratic collection of monasteries in Greece, to follow the route of John Moschos a Byzantine monk who, in 587, travelled through the Byzantine empire, through Anatolia and the Syrian-Lebanese-Palestinian coast into Egypt.

The modern journey, set before the more recent Syrian civil war, chronicles the plight of the Eastern Christians of a variety of persuasions (including Armenians, Maronites and Copts), a community with roots dating back to the Apostles, who are persecuted by the more recently introduced inhabitants of the various lands: the increasingly Islamist Turks, the non-Maronite communities following Lebanon's civil war, the Israeli government and the West Bank settlers, and the increasingly Islamist Egyptians. The complaint throughout is of neglect from governments and persecution from religious terrorists leading to mass emigration and dwindling communities facing extinction.

Clearly things have changed. Dalrymple's Lebanon is newly recovering from civil war, Syria, the country in which Dalrymple finds most harmony, has fallen in war and anarchy, in Egypt Mubarak has been toppled. Yet one suspects that the beleaguered communities, many of them making the point that they were inhabiting their villages before the arrival of the Ottomans, or the Moslems, or the Jews, are probably still persecuted. If they still exist.

He repeatedly makes the point that there was (usually) more tolerance in the past. In the monastery of Mar Gabriel, in Tur Abdin, a 1600-year-old Syriac monastery in Turkey close to its border with Syria, he witnesses Christians worshipping prostrate, as Moslems do now: "exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow ... the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice." (2)

It is rather depressing. But the sadness is offset by some wonderful descriptions, some bizarre characters (especially many of the monks encountered) and by incisive observations. 

Many, many memorable moments:

• Descriptions:
• "I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently applied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms." (2)
• "The yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city's skyline" (2)
• "When you think of the French Romanesque ... you are left with an impression of teeming life: biting beasts entwined around capitals; tympana crowded with the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse busily fiddling on their viols; angels blowing the Last Trump; the dead resurrecting, emerging like uncurling crustaceans from their sarcophagi." (3)
• "A cortege of elderly priests conducted the service, accompanied by a string of echoing laments of almost unearthly beauty, sinuous alleluias which floated with the gentle indecision of falling feathers down arpeggios of dying cadences before losing themselves in a soft black hole of basso profundo." (3)

• Observations:
• "As the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it: 'Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife." (1)
• "What has most moved past generations can today sometimes only be tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith." (2)
• "Those who are content to live in sin do not suffer from the temptations of the Devil so badly as those who try to live with God." (4)
• "Just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled water, so also the soul ... It is like two lovers. If they want to discuss their love they want to be alone." (4)
• "Being a hermit was like being a fire. At first it smokes and your eyes water, but ... after the smoke disperses, the light and the heat comes." (4)
• "I am the policeman of my soul. Demons are like criminals. Both are very stupid. Both are damned." (5)
• Others
• "Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats ... They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot." (1)
• "The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you cab choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias." (2)
• "Relics were holes in the curtain wall separating the human from the divine." (2)
• "Gregory the Great always used to recommend making the sign of the cross over a lettuce in case you swallowed a demon that happened to be perched on its leaves." (2)
• "The dust from his clothes was more powerful than roasted crocodile, camel dung, or Bithnyian cheese mixed with wax - apparently the usual contents of a Byzantine doctor's medicine chest." (2)
• "Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent." (2)
• "You don't understand the police here. You think they are like the English policemen we see on the television, the fat man with the blue hat, the little stick in his hand and the old bicycle." (2)
• "It was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis - via Morrish Cordoba - that many of the works of Aristotle and Plato eventually reached the new universities of medieval Europe." (30
• "Yezidis ... and iraqi sect ... they're devil-propitiators ... They call Lucifer 'Malik Yawus', the Peacock Angel, and offer sacrifices to keep him happy. They believe Lucifer, the Devil, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as Chief Angel, supervising the day-to-day running of the world's affairs ... they get on with the Nestorians ... very well ... Some people believe that the Yezidis were originally a sort of strange Gnostic offshoot of the Nestorian church." (3)
• "The Fount of Knowledge [by John Damascene] contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, which, intriguingly, John regards as a form of Christian heresy closely related to Arianism (after all, like Islam, Arianism denied the divinity of Christ)." (5)
• "Sounding sincere in one's appreciation of the monks' culinary abilities was a task that needed advanced acting skills." (5)
• "In all the Byzantine sites excavated in Palestine and Jordan only two lavatories have ever been discovered, and one of those was located directly over a monastic kitchen." (5)
• "It was the custom in [early CE] Egypt to bury those who could afford it in mummy cases onto which were bound superb encaustic (hot wax) portraits of the disease ... the oldest icons in existence are to be found in St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai ... they are painted in the same encaustic technique." (6)
• "There are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other  Western Chruches. In both, the bishops wore crowns rather than miters and held T-shaped Tau crosses rather than crooks or croziers. In both the handbell played a very prominent part in ritual." (6)
• "Since the Second World War it has rained only once in Kharga, for ten minutes, in the winter of 1959." (6)

A wise and beautifully written travelogue.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I have also read the following books by William Dalrymple:

• In Xanadu
• City of Djinns

"Tracking Marco Polo" by Tim Severin

Severin is an explorer and travel writer; other works of his include The Sindbad Voyage and The Brendan Voyage. In this trip he used motorbikes to follow the route of Marco Polo, comparing what he discovered with the account in Polo's famous book. His companions were Michael de Larrabeiti, a cameraman who later became a novelist, and Stanley Johnson who later became the father of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson, initially described as "a burly young man with an unruly shock of blond hair" (C 1), becomes a sort of expedition bludgeon who drives his motorbike (which he repeatedly crashes) where it is determined not to go.

Despite still being an undergraduate at the time, Severin showed that many of the features of Polo's narrative could be matched with things still to be seen. For example, he found a family of Armenian descent in a Turkish village still weaving a fine silk cloth that he interpreted as 'buckram', described by Polo. He also ate a nectarine which he believed to be what Polo had called one of the 'apples of paradise' and locates the Village of the Magi, complete with an ancient Zoroastrian fire-temple. There is one moment (in chapter 7), though, where he discovers a water culvert which plunges into a subterranean tunnel and he compares it with Marco Polo's description, seemingly unaware that this might be the reference that Coleridge turned into "Alph the sacred river" which "ran through caverns measureless to man."

The history and travelled are enlivened by the description of three young daredevils on two motorbikes, originally with sidecars, which they couldn't properly ride (they didn't even have licenses for the English section of the journey). By the most brazen good fortune, the expedition repeatedly overcomes catastrophe. This would make a great road trip movie!

There are also a number of passages of extraordinarily brilliant description:

• "The mineraliferous mountains glowed in their reds, purples, greys and browns, where the naked rock lay exposed to the long winter snows and the fierce summer sun. The road itself was little more than a rough stony path along which we twisted and turned the labouring motorcycles, leaving plumes of dust along the steep climbs and round the sharp shoulders of the rocky flanks. From time to time we skidded down into valleys and the track plunged sharply into a rushing stream. Then with the engines roaring wildly, we were forced to slither crazily into the ford, hoping that our momentum would surge the machines across before water was drawn into the bubbling exhaust pipes or we came to grief on a hidden boulder." (C 4)
• "The fabled lakes of Band-i-Amir ... amongst the highest in the world. In the clear air of the Hindu Kush, they lie like a broken ribbon of glowing tortoiseshell, caught between the peaks. The walls of the surrounding cliffs contract and expand, giving strange and beautiful shapes to the cold, clear waters which lie in basins, slivers and goblets of crystal. At one end of the chain, a gentle trickle flows in to feed the series. At the lower end, the same trickle re-appears, lapping gently out over a natural dam of rock. When this outflow spills away over the downstream face of the dam, the mineral deposits from the sheet of water have covered the rock wall with a glowing patina of mingling tints, reds, blacks and yellows. In the heady air of the high plateau with the snow-sheathed peaks gleaming at a romantic distance, the limpid purity of the lakes of Band-i-Amir with their sheen of many colours successfully isolate an unsullied shrine of beauty." (C 10)

Other great moments:

• "The driver was in such a state of intoxication that he kept on getting his arms entwined in the spokes of the steering wheel" (C 3)
• "The lives of ordinary people have always been ruled by the common factors of climate and terrain." (C 11)

March 2020; 164 pages

Other great travel books in this blog:
This is one of a number of travel books reviewed in this blog, of which my favourites include:
Classics:

• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron: Samarkand etc
• Walking through Europe: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water

Travelling in Britain:

• By milk float: Three men in a float by Dan Kieran and Ian Vince
• Walking on the coast (all of it): The Sea on our left by Shally Hunt
• By bike from Lands End to John O'Groats via a lot of pubs: Mud. Sweat and Gears by Ellie Bennett

And others:

• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: mostly the Trans-Siberian railway

"Saladin" by John Man

A biography of the 12th Century Islamic warrior who confronted Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade.

And what a man! Son of a provincial governor, Saladin was a Kurd born in Tikrit (later famous as the home of Sadam Hussein) who grew up in Damascus. He rose to become a mostly successful warrior and a ruler (under his emir and caliph) of an area stretching from Egypt to Turkey. He managed to combine ruthlessness where necessary with justice and mercy becoming famed for his chivalry, his trustworthiness and his generosity and doing his best to negotiate rather than fight. He destroyed the crusader states that had been set up after the First Crusade, reducing the Kingdom of Jerusalem to a tiny coastal strip (which didn't include Jerusalem) although having taken Acre he lost it again to the Third Crusaders,

And what a biography. I read Man's Genghis Khan about ten years ago and found it heavy going but this was a delightful read. There was sufficient scholarship but not too much and lots of fascinating facts and some interesting perspectives: the twelfth century problems of the middle east provide a carefully curved mirror in which to view today's issues. One might almost see modern Israel as a foreign (US) sponsored crusader state in the middle of a fragmented Islamic world; Sunni and Shi'a still scrap, the Assassins were the suicide bombers of their time, and today's civil strife in Syria with its shifting and reshifting alliances are an echo of the division of Saladin's day.

And it had two really helpful maps!

There were lots of bits I thought: I must find out more about this. That's always a good sign. But here are the very best of the good bits:

• In Baalbek in Lebanon there are thousand tonne megaliths which are even today "the worlds's greatest hewn stones ... twenty times the weight of the megaliths of Stonehenge" (p 23)
• "medieval Islam hungered for learning and inspired brilliant scholarship. Paper displaced papyrus, bookshops thrived, libraries graced the homes of the rich ... one street in Damascus had a hundred bookshops." (p 25)
• "The only way to survive was to flee or to fawn: 'Kiss any arm you cannot break'." (p 43)
• On Mount Qasiyoun just north of Damascus "Cain killed his brother Abel" (p 58)
• "He lacks words for what he sees, and then lacks words to describe his own inadequacy." (p 60)
• "seize the chance of undistracted study and seclusion before a wife and children cling to you and you gnash your teeth in regret at the time you lost." (p 62)
• "a grim landscape of forested valleys and bare hills, surging like a wrestler's muscles" (p 68)
• Frank Amalric sealed an alliance with the young Caliph of Egypt with "an ungloved handshake, a precedent utterly shocking to courtiers used to their ruler's untouchability." (p 90)
• "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a princess without a husband must be in need of a prince - acknowledged not by the princess, perhaps, but certainly by those with the power to choose the husband" (p 136)
• "Raymond was a legend for his bravery, good looks, charm and strength: they said he could crush a stirrup with one hand (which seems a silly way to prove one's strength; a horseshoe, maybe, but why a stirrup?)." (p 136 - 137)
• Saladin put the Melkites in charge of the Holy Sepulchre "a sect that traces its rituals back to the Apostles." (p 253)
• "licentious harlots ... selling themselves for gold, bold and ardent, loving and passionate, ink-faced and unblushing" (p 272)
• "Lord Shang, writing in China in about 400 BC ... advised that for those who rule might is right, power everything. Human beings are idle, greedy, cowardly, treacherous, foolish and shifty. The only way to deal with them is to entice, terrify, reward and punish." (p 320)
• "people who had endured terrible experiences, yet come through well psychologically ... shared a belief that the universe is fundamentally a supportive place, that it rewards action, and that any setback is a challenge to be overcome." (p 322)

A wonderful, extraordinarily readable biography. April 2018; 358 pages