A Wanderer in the Middle East

BY P. CHENCHIAH, M.L.

VAGABONDAGE

As in life, so in traveling, a man is rewarded according to the measure of his hopes and expectations. The American who is anxious to ‘do’ a country returns home satisfied with a thinner pocket-book and a thicker note-book. The studious traveler imbibing solid knowledge wherever he goes, endows the public libraries with books of travel that repose undisturbed on the shelves. The ‘sight-seer’ is a grade above these. To him the world is a new film released, with this difference that while he moves the ‘film’ is stationary. Above the plebian crowd, stands the ‘philosophic wanderer’ to whom travel is one long wondrous drama in which he acts the title role. He endeavors to ‘lose’ himself among the ‘people’ he is visiting, to get some insight into the ‘soul’ of the country as limned in the smiling faces of its children, the serious faces of its citizens; to catch a vision of life through the ‘windows’ of human hearts and minds. When you have seen all that could be seen, there is still a strange dissatisfaction which is removed only when you dress like the natives, wander aimlessly in their bazaars, mix promiscuously in their crowds, laugh and chat with them and for a supreme moment feel that you are one of them. True traveling has always a spice of vagabondage and is an end in itself.

THE GREAT MANOEUVRE

To the unimaginative, modern traveling is very prosaic. It has none of the dangers, surprises and thrills that make the adventures of ‘Sindbad the Sailor’ so dear to our hearts. No shipwrecks on the sea no bandits on the land, no magicians who bewitch you, no rocs that carry you into the valley of diamonds, and no princes to welcome, honor, and wed you to beautiful damsels. You enter the ship at Bombay and are deposited safely like the insured luggage at the destination. Yet with a little imagination you can turn your journey into an adventure full of thrills and narrow escapes. To a modern traveler, all the ancient enemies–the wild animals, cannibals, dragons and witches–all are transformed into guides. They beset you on the ‘landing’ at Port Said, lay in wait for you at the entrance of the hotels in Cairo, snare you at Jaffa gate in Jerusalem, capture you in the bazaars of Damascus. The great maneuver consists in dodging them when you can, outwitting them when you have a chance. It is a difficult game requiring a cool head, a stout heart, and strong nerves. The victory in almost every case is with the guide. Yet it is the mark of the intrepid traveler not to succumb without a fight. The guide, to give him his due, is like our pandit. He has a marvelous assortment of futile knowledge which he gets by heart. He knows the sights, and their history. He can take you along the beaten tracks. But for anything more, he is a broken reed. If you are fortunate to escape him, you will wander into uncharted realms, meet adventures, see life. All that is worthwhile remembering in my travels happened to me when I ran away from my guide.

STRATEGIC CENTRES

There is a regular science and art in traveling. When you want to understand a country, you must get hold of its physical and social strategic centres. The uninitiated may wearily ‘rush’ from place to place, from mosque to mosque, ‘dragged’ by the guide hither and thither and left in the end a lifeless inert mass, bored and tired. The ‘wise’ take themselves to the ‘one’ place which unrolls the whole panorama of a city before their eyes. One sees ‘Cairo’ from the citadel. One never knows the spell of Cairo unless one gazes for an hour on that mystic city from that supreme vantage point. There on the outskirts is the endless desert: with the eternal pyramids standing sentinel and the sphinx puzzling out ageless mysteries; Just below you is the forest of flats–uncouth and modern, redeemed by a thousand minarets pointing out their tapering fingers to the heavens as if in protest against ‘modernism’ in human habitations. To see Cairo from the citadel is to realise how truly it is a city of mosques.

There is a winding pathway that zigzags among mountains and valleys as you proceed from Bethphage to Jerusalem–a road sacred to Christians as the one on which Jesus rode when he entered Jerusalem for the last time. As you approach the city, you reach an eminence when without warning the city ‘bursts’ on you. From that height you see the holy city mapped out before you. There is the golden gate, which the Mohammedan tradition says will be opened when Jesus comes again to judge mankind; above it ‘Haram-esh-Sheref’ the beautiful and magnificent mosque with an exquisite porcelain dome that has risen over the ruins of the Jewish temple; beyond is the city of Zion, the dream and solace of a tortured race and in its centre the church of Holy Sepulchre –the traditional place where Jesus was crucified. How can you understand the agony of that crucified race, unless you weep over it from the place as Jesus did on a memorable occasion? How can you enter into the meaning of Christian religion–which symbolises the light that issues out of darkness, resurrection that emerges out of death, unless you ponder over the garden of ‘Gethsemene’ that is beneath you or over the dream of a city before you which as often as it was ‘razed,’ rose triumphantly in Resurrection?"

But to understand Damascus, the oldest city of the world, you need mount no hill, climb no tower, but follow me to a cafe five miles outside the city and sit beside the ‘Arab’ who carries on his person and clothes the stains of a long journey. He has come from Baghdad in a caravan, ten days in the desert, and is now drinking in the sweet music of seven rivulets that are rippling below, with carpets of superb green on the banks, as only a traveler in the desert can. Situated between howling sea and burning deserts, this city of orchards has ever been the praise of the poet. As you sit with this Arab and throw your memory into the dim depths of the ages, conjuring up the visions of the storied past, you can enter into the feeling of Mahomed when he exclaimed, "As there is for man but one Paradise, it should not be sought on earth; and therefore I would not enter Damascus." The Arab's idea of Paradise is Damascus–an orchard with flowing streams and trees laden with fruit.

GATEWAYS OF THE HEART

But how can a traveler enter into the life of a strange city–understand something of the play of its social life? Here too the experienced traveler has his ‘open sesame’ which opens the locked doors. To understand the life of a city to which you are a stranger, here are the pass words. The first entrance is the cafe, which in the Middle East is a key to life. In Cairo there is the ‘Cafe de Nile’ just opposite to Ezbakir gardens. Sit at one of the round tables and clap hands. Like a jinnee at the bidding of a magician, a black Nubian waiter will materialise from somewhere. Speak the magic word ‘coffee’ and as the shoe-shine roughly takes hold of your feet, gently lean and give yourself up to the study of swirling life around. Tram-cars disgorge every minute a most wondrous stream of colored humanity–Beduins, Copts, Turks, Soudanese,–all types and varieties of the Middle East. Spend an hour at the game of guessing what type of beauty smiles behind the Yushmak, what kind of thought simmers beneath the Turbush and you have learned more about Cairo than an army of guides could tell. Right in the heart of the business quarter in Damascus, is the far-famed ice-cream shop. The proprietors guard the recipe, inherited from their fore-fathers, with zealous care. They beat the ice-cream with rollers just as the South Indian housewife pounds paddy in the mortar, till they draw it out like rubber and ladle it to you in generous quantities. Around are marble walls with inscriptions from the Koran, reminding you of the vanity of life and the value of wisdom. A queer setting for eating ice-cream. That is however the key to Damascus social gaiety–pleasure as in paradise with none too obtrusive a suggestion that time is on its wing. This ice-cream shop is the Damascus version of Qmar Khayam's tavern.

Next to cafe is the theatre. The stage is the window through which you can look into the soul of a people. The language may be foreign but the drama–the action and music–leaps into your understanding across the barriers of the spoken word. The dance too, is the true expression of the heart. There is no understanding of the East unless you catch the music of the feet. ‘Thousand and one nights’ is the poetic name, reminiscent of Arabian Nights, of the variety hall in Cairo. On the day I attended, it was a dancer from Stamboul who was drawing the city. Order your tambuk and in the mists of smoke curling upwards enigmatically yield yourself to the charms of the dance. Then you will catch a passing glimpse of life which otherwise is a sealed book.

The bazaar is another key of life. Is there anything more symbolic of Eastern life than the indescribable confusion and bustle of the bazaars? He must be a sorry pessimist, who can toss in the ebb and flow of an Eastern bazaar and yet feel that the Middle East is not a land of Romance. Alas! the bazaar is passing away. Three years ago the glory of Damascus was its ‘Square’ where camels and cars, beduins and city fops, fakirs and tribal Lords, water vendors, lemonade sellers–all wove colored patterns of life. Now a well-ordered, decent, ugly piazza rules where once life rollicked in untramelled confusion. Let us be thankful that no modern innovation can rob Jerusalem of its David Street, with its vegetable markets and grocery stalls. Who is the man that is walking down the street with the dignity of a Nawab and the pomp of a prince, with an elaborate contraption of burnished brass, twinkling bells, strapped round his neck crying out "All ye who thirst come and drink my sharbet"? He is the lemonade vendor–the glory of Jerusalem.

Yet you stand outside the sanctum, till you enter the mosque and bow with the faithful before the august presence of the Almighty. The Arab has not only his gay but serious life as well. After the daily round in the bazaar and cafe he goes to the mosque. In the chaste severity of ornamentation and the chastened purity of architecture, the mosque is the visible embodiment of the spiritual message of Islam. The magic brotherhood, the sustained glory of Islam, perpetually issues out of the heart of the mosque. The stern simplicity, the spontaneous joy of life are the gitt of the solemn spell of the mosque. I have entered many a mosque but never came out without some sense of the vanity of ‘caste’ and the value of brotherhood. Nevertheless it is not in the mosque that you understand the genius of Islam, any more than you discern the spirit of Hinduism in the temple. Mahomed is the prophet of the desert and Islam the religion of the sands. The Middle East is dominated by the desert. Its geography, history, botany, and culture can only be understood when the riddle of the sands is grasped. Every city is an oasis, every river a life giver. The Nile makes Egypt, the Jordan Palestine, the Abada Syria. After a desert journey, you quaff a cup of water with the reverence due to the elixir of life. The ungainly camel becomes the most beloved of the animals as it makes it possible for you to sail across the land seas to the city ports. The feverish thirst for joy, the true abandon of the Arab for music and dance, are born out of the restraints of a desert life destitute of colour and expression. Even his dream of the eternal home is cast after the pattern of cities with a river. A night in a desert is true education in Islam. We pitched our tents for a night in the desert and as the night stole, spent hours in the immensities of its solitude. I looked up to the heavens, There on an ink-black sky, the solitary moon (without the accompaniment of a single star) looked down on an ocean of sand that billowed in endless waves. What a landscape! A bare sketch–not a single object to break its monotonous sweep. Alone in the silent world is the moon–the pallid witness of a mystery which populous civilizations can never apprehend. On a desert night like this, it seemed to me that the heavens proclaimed the creed of Islam–‘There is no God but God’.

A PILGRIM'S REWARD

It is as a pilgrim that I went to Jerusalem this time–not so much to see the sights nor even to understand the Arab life and culture but to get some vision of the meaning and significance of Christianity, whose founder sanctified the history of the Jewish race by his life and death. At first it seemed a hopeless task for one nurtured in the Aryan spiritual tradition to hope to get into the heart of a faith whose body and mind is cast in a culture fundamentally different from ours. The more I saw Jerusalem the less it seemed likely that my prayer for a revelation will be answered. The history of the Jew is like a palimpsest–written over and over again in strange and unknown languages. The Arab and the crusader have changed the form and shape of the life of the Old and New Testaments. Not a scene of the life of Jesus is left untouched, not a Jew remains who looks like Jesus. A mad piety has built with unmeaning zeal a magnificent Sepulchre where Christ was crucified. The incongruous vision of a splendid church has risen over the manger where Christ was born. How can I pierce through these eras of new life and get some insight into reality? A miracle alone can help and a miracle did help. That strange and inexplicable prompting which not infrequently is God's response to prayer, guided my steps tothe Coptic khan–a choultry as we call it–which across centuries of change remains an exact replica of the manger that witnessed the birth of Christ. You can read the story of the birth of Jesus in such a place like that, and see before you every touch and suggestion of that wonderful story realised in brick and mortar. A blind man was singing in one of the rooms–a song which had in it all the pathos and pain of a heart crying out for a love that life cannot give. Just at the entrance was a maid lost in the memories of the song–to me symbolising in her expression of infinite sadness and sorrow the very mother of the Savior. And between them I saw as in a day dream–the infant Jesus. I stood in a sacred place–for was it not such a conjunction–the pain-fraught cry of man and the love fraught compassion of the mother–that brought the very God into a lowly manger?