The High Place Read online

  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.

  My welcome within the gate of Kasr-el-Sittat—a simple, white farm gate—was sufficient, but not at all effusive. I gave my name and asked for Elisa Cantemir. I was told that she was away and would be back in the evening. The few colonists around the entrance and the garage didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I found out afterwards that European visitors invariably came from Aleppo in the colony’s transport, so I didn’t fit into any recognized routine.

  I made things easy for them by playing the expert commer­cial traveller and going straight to the workshops where two tractors and a hopper were under repair. There, over the question of a stripped bevel drive, I proved myself to have the earnest usefulness that seemed to be expected by the colonist; and they, in the intervals of our technicalities, were eager to explain their experiment.

  They had all at some time been refugees or displaced persons, and they ran Kasr-el-Sittat as a communal property on the lines of a Jewish kibutz in Palestine—except that a few rich members had financed the whole venture out of their own capital. Men and women worked at whatever they liked. The workshops, the water and electricity, the laboratory, the hospi­tal and the kitchens occupied those with professional skill. Others, with the full approval of their fellows, were presented with the leisure for intellectual and political interests. A few—those who were accustomed to Mediterranean agriculture—supervized the estates. The colony owned orchards, vineyards and tobacco plantations, and enough pasture and arable land to be self-supporting. I needn’t have bothered about local labour. Kasr-el-Sittat used all the villagers it could get, and wanted more.

  After a while I wandered off to have a look at the ruins. The houses, linked together by irregular pathways, rose up through scattered timber to the bare crest of the ridge, where they stopped short at the edge of a shallow prehistoric ditch. Within the ditch, great flagstones and the drums of fallen columns appeared here and there above the turf. In the middle was the altar, tilted and split but easily recognizable. It was flanked by two magnificent cedars, one to the north of the altar and one to the south. These trees and the open space between the top­most houses gave the impression of a village green.

  I sat in this lovely clearing, which commanded the whole sweep of the vall
ey, and felt, I remember, disappointed. The colonists whom I had met in the workshops and on my way up the hill seemed a prosaic lot to be withdrawn from the world in the little houses of this divine seraglio. True, I felt they were dedicated to something more than their own content; but they inspired in me only pity, and that boredom which often accom­panies it—unless one is a saint or a professional interferer with the lives of others.

  This complacent and somewhat provincial mood of mine was swiftly shaken. A man of indeterminate age—he must have been more than ten years older than the fifty which he looked—strolled casually across the green to join me. In spite of rough and quite neutral clothing, his grey-haired elegance was obvious. Indeed, if he had actually been wearing the London tailor’s country clothes that hung, invisibly, from his shoulders, I think his distinction would have been less. As it was, attention was concentrated upon his bearing and his manner.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr. Amberson,’ he said. ‘They only just told me you were here. You must, I think,’ he added with a smile, ‘be the man who wouldn’t sell Elisa Cantemir what she wanted.’

  I explained that really we had been talking at cross purposes. She hadn’t told me that the estate was pretty well mechanized already.

  ‘Oh, don’t apologize!’ he replied. ‘She has a most disconcert­ing trick of drawing the essentials from any casual acquaintance whom she likes. From you, for example, that you don’t believe in material progress. But I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Osterling.’

  ‘Osterling!’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought that you——’

  ‘No, not dead. Diplomats, you must remember, are like bishops. Their judicial murder is too complicated to be worth the trouble.’

  Osterling’s presence at Kasr-el-Sittat was indeed a signal that I should not judge the colony too hastily. Before the war he had worked for a league of Balkan monarchs, with a possible extension westwards by means of a Hapsburg restoratio; and I had been entertained by his brilliant autobiography which made you think he cared for nothing but the frivolities of aristocracy, and then forced you to admit that the irresponsi­bilities of the professional democrats who followed were in­finitely more inane. His opinions, of course, were anathema to Hitler, and I did not think he had survived the invasion of Austria.

  ‘They always funked it,’ he said, ‘when it came to the point.’

  ‘Was that often?’

  ‘It had ceased to concern me very greatly,’ he answered. ‘So I couldn’t say.’

  ‘But what are you doing in Syria?’

  ‘If you ask yourself the same question, Mr. Amberson, I think—if I am any judge of men—that you will find the answer for both of us.’

  A little puzzled, I replied that I was in the country to stay, and that the life of a Christian Arab with a moderate income would very well content me.

  ‘It would, eh? In other words you prefer the peace of exile to anything that our poor Europe has to offer. Believe me, impatience and disgust have built more empires than any love of country.’

  Osterling showed me round the colony, but did most of the questioning himself—as if his sightseeing tour of my character must necessarily be of far more interest to both of us than bricks and mortar. I fear it was. I couldn’t be proof against such a compliment from such a companion. He may have been suspicious of the motives behind my visit, or perhaps this curiosity had been aroused by Elisa. She had evidently talked about me, though, probably impressed more by my way of living than myself. He wouldn’t hear of my leaving before she returned, pressed me to stay the night and left me at the very comfortable guest bungalow half-way down the colony.

  An hour later I went across to the common-room where any of the colonists who wished gathered at the end of the day. Thirty or forty men and women were standing or sitting in easy groups around the bottles and the glasses. The odd mixture of faces, some conventionally well-bred, some markedly prole­tarian, suggested a political club. The room had its original red-tiled floor and whitewashed walls upon which were hung four ancient Kashan rugs, each like a mosaic of jewels set in golden borders, and a few gay, light landscapes painted by one of the colonists.

  Elisa Cantemir came forward to greet me. After introducing me to a number of her companions, whose names seemed to hail from all over Europe, she played the hostess and apologized for having nothing but local drinks. I assured her, with what must have been obvious sincerity, that Syria produced all a man could want—unless he were indissolubly wedded to whisky and vintages—and a lot of peculiar flavours that he wouldn’t find elsewhere. She immediately asked me to overhaul their cellar and stock it for them. It was extraordinary how she guessed that to me, as a Syrian bon viveur, it would be a labour of love. She didn’t for a moment mean that I should be their wine merchant.

  Because she now had the full reality of a woman in her own chosen setting, I appreciated her, physically, for the first time. She was tall and very thin—though of a thinness that was feminine and tense. I cannot call her slim; the word implies a softness of outline that Elisa had not. She was almost angular, but every one of her angles was delicate and exciting. Her head was small, and her mouth, which was the natural colour of an autumn leaf, was wide and mobile. She had about her an aromatic bitterness that was in sharp contrast to the purposeful benevolence of the general run of colonists.

  In the dining-room she placed me next to her. There was nothing monastic about the seating arrangements, no main table self-consciously round or with awkward top and bottom. The colonists helped themselves from hatches and sideboards, and pulled tables together if any group of them wanted to continue a conversation begun in the ante-room. The talk which I over­heard was mostly in English—by general consent the common language of the colony. Where national parties were sitting together, one heard a good deal of German and the Slav tongues.

  Besides Elisa, Osterling and myself, there were two others at our table. One was a handsome and spectacled American called Lois Tassen; she was a journalist and something of a political philosopher, formidably cynical and well-informed. The other was Eugen Rosa, the familiar spirit whom after that evening I never saw again, alive or dead.

  I began to feel that Kasr-el-Sittat was not so predictable an organization as I had imagined, and I confined my questions to those a mere sightseer would be expected to ask. Elisa, how­ever, satisfied my unspoken curiosity with a frankness that seemed harsh. Or was harshness my early impression of that incisive voice? It had the quality of a cello in the hands of some too resolute but brilliant player.

  Her companions, she told me, had been gathered together by friend choosing friend, by letter, by justifiable blackmail of staffs in charge of displaced persons, by bribery of frontier police and passport officials; and the general scheme of the colony had been conceived by a group of refugees at Istanbul, whose lives and capital were safe in Turkey. It was to Turkey, she said, that so many victims of our modern states had escaped. She seemed to lump all governments together as equally damnable, and equally capable, given the power, of Nazi-Communist methods.

  In my heart I agreed with her, but I protested the platitude that the world had known nothing like the mass murders com­mitted by Russian and German oligarchs since Tamerlane and his piles of skulls. She positively scolded me for shallow think­ing. Her leaf-fine nostrils, which were never wholly at rest, quivered with impatience. She held up Tamerlane as a bene­factor compared to his modern successors; he had merely destroyed the organization of states; he had not taken the slight­est interest in the regimentation of individuals. Where Tamerlane had passed there was less government, and more freedom for those who remained.

  ‘Is there a single citizen of the civilized world,’ she asked, ‘who does not bitterly resent the interference of the State with his daily life, even if he knows he must accept it?’

  Her evident interest in my opinions made me feel that her vehemence was exciting rather than discourteous.

  ‘Not one,’ I answered, ‘except convinced communists.’r />
  ‘Oh, I leave out the governing classes!’ Elisa exclaimed. ‘To interfere is their livelihood. Among all the charlatans of state, communists are only the most conceited.’

  ‘What are your politics, Mr. Amberson?’ Lois Tassen asked, fixing me with an efficient and patronizing eye.

  I told her that I admired politicians too greatly to have any.

  At that she went up in the air. She assumed, I suppose, that I was a hero-worshipper, and nothing is more exasperating to the journalist than that—at any rate in private.

  ‘If you won’t be bored by a perfectly true anecdote,’ I said, ‘I think I can explain.’

  And I told them how, during the Abyssinian campaign, a six-ton lorry broke down on a lonely road. The rocks were full of baboons, and they climbed down and sat in a circle to watch the driver and his mate tinker with the engine. Those two poor devils couldn’t get it started, and had to walk ten miles to the nearest vehicle aid post. When they got back with a mechanic and a breakdown truck, they found that the baboons had mastered the use of that fascinating toy, the spanner, and were unscrewing the lorry nut by nut.

  ‘What’s more, they went on unscrewing,’ I said. ‘It would have cost a man’s life to stop them. Well, my sympathy is with the baboons. I am amazed at their cleverness, their willingness to learn.’

  Osterling was delighted.

  ‘What a pity that politicians have not blue bottoms,’ he exclaimed, ‘so that we could recognize them at birth!’