Nov 7, 2005
On another occasion we had been inspecting an orchard in the general vicinity of the Lebanese border in connection with some scale insect problem on apples. The visit started in style with a magnificent breakfast laid out in a packing shed, with a giant platter of humus with sheets of pita bread and nice coffee. They sure know how to turn it on in Syria.
It is beautiful country up near the border. The hilltops are barren but the valleys are warm and lush, and the fruit trees can be a picture. As it happened we were not far from Abel’s tomb and my hosts decided to show the benighted infidel from the South Seas the shrine where humanity first began. Nowadays the plateau where Abel lies actually forms part of the border and as such is highly militarised, with copious barbed wire, radar scanners and electric cables, and of course guards and check points. We drove up to the checkpoint and the quarantine blokes said something to the young soldier on sentry duty. He took my camera from me and waved us through.
Abel was of course, the first person ever to die. He was a farmer in the days when fat lamb prices were high and he was held in high regard by Adam and Eve, his parents. His older brother Cain was a market gardener, but the bottom had fallen out of the onion business and Cain was continually made to look like a loser in comparison with his young brother, so in the end he slew him.
According to local legend the murder took place in the depth of winter, and Cain carried Abel’s body about for forty days and forty nights wondering, for want of a precedent, how he was supposed to dispose of him. Eventually he observed a bear whose mate had died, and who interred it by digging a hole in the snow. Thus was the technique made clear to him and Abel was at last buried where he lies to this day, on a dry and featureless plateau, high above a little green valley full of fruit trees, which might well have been the garden of Eden.
The shrine is like a little domed mosque with a courtyard shaded by a gnarled and very ancient oak tree. The old man in charge was tall and erect in a long brown robe. He had amazingly blue eyes, and I wondered whether his ancestors, like many Syrians, originated in the Caucasus, that other cradle of humanity. He welcomed us graciously, we kicked off our shoes and were shown into the shrine. It was dimly lit. There was Persian carpet on the floor and carpet covered the tomb or sarcophagus or whatever where Abel’s remains are supposed to be contained. If the tomb is any indication he was well over four metres tall, but evidently incredibly thin, for the top of his coffin is no more than eighteen centimetres wide, broadening to about thirty at the base. Unless Cain was built along similar lines, his brother must have been an awkward burden indeed during those forty days and nights.
I stood there in my stocking feet, trying to contemplate the antiquity of it all and the sadness of Abel’s bones through all those long lonely years. At a loss to know what to do with my hands I put them in my jacket pockets, and was slightly surprised to find an apple there. I must have picked it up at the orchard we had visited. My first impulse was to take it out and examine it, but it occurred to me that in Abel’s family apples had a rather sinister significance, and I thought it better to leave it where it was, at least until we got outside.
At the check point on the way out the young sentry handed me back my camera, and I gave him the shiny red apple. He looked at quizzically for a moment, wondering perhaps whether military discipline was being comprised, but the perpetual hunger of youth won out, and he smiled and put it in his pocket.
I had plenty to think about during our return to Damascus, and it wasn’t just scale insects on apples. What a country!