Jul 3, 2008
I never found out why they sent me to Syria. Perhaps something in my first report on Korea, from which the Korean authorities seem to have gleaned with joy the impression that I was recommending an extra 90 staff for their quarantine unit, had led them to report to FAO headquarters in Rome that I was an exceptional person. More likely, since Syria was a semi socialist autocracy and no great friend of the United States the boffins in Rome had decided that it was too risky a destination to send anyone who was not expendable. Be that as it may, when once I had established my credentials in Damascus, I was joined on a subsequent trip by a Puerto Rican from FAOHQ, (who admittedly knew something about quarantine), and also a Frenchman and his charming Brazilian wife whose Daddy had the Mercedes agency for Brazil, who admittedly did not. It seems the shopping in Damascus was the main attraction.
One of the advantages of working in the quarantine business is that you can usually rely on being met at the airport, so when I first arrived in Damascus I was immediately gathered up by a driver for the plant quarantine service and installed at the “Cham Palace”, a multi-storeyed luxury hotel near the middle of town. He then took me to the Ministry of Agriculture office on the city square. On the stairs I was impressed by a life-sized mural depicting the President of the Republic, Hafez el Assad, somewhat tentatively fingering a mob of fat-tailed sheep. I suppose it is a dictator’s way of showing that he is all things to all men. They never seem to learn.
The boss of quarantine, Ali Mahmoud, was an alert little guy with greying hair. He had trained in Leipzig and could speak fluent German and rather less fluent English, but he knew what he was about, and we got along fine. He took me to the border post at Dera’a where truck loads of vegetables enter from Jordan on route to Europe, mostly. The loads were mostly enclosed, so they could, if necessary be fumigated on board the truck, but the main purpose of the inspection was to check the nature of the load and seal it for its journey through Syria to Turkey (with a police escort). They seemed quite efficient and well organised, though they could have used a better incinerator for disposing of any risky material.
In the town of Dera’a Ali took me to see a friend of his who employed girls to weave real hand made carpets. At $400 a time I didn’t buy any, but I was impressed and I got a photo of the girls at work. It was all so timeless. Syria is like that - living history. Those girls could have been doing the same job with the same equipment three thousand years ago, and possibly for the same rates of pay. We also visited the Roman amphitheatre at Bosra. It is still in such good repair, even after all this time, it seems scarcely to have deteriorated at all. It is still used for ceremonial stage shows on occasion. The desert climate just doesn’t punish stonework You can still place your feet exactly where some ancient Roman’s sandals once smoothed the surface of those same stones.
On the way back Ali pointed out the Gollan Heights away across the desert, and explained that on the other side they sloped down to the Sea of Galilee. I wished Anne Henderson, my Sunday school teacher could have been there. She showed us pictures of such things but never had the chance to see them. It all leaves you with the impression that our own civilisation is so raw and so transient.
Likewise, the following week, on our way north of Damascus towards the Turkish border we stopped at Hamas to admire a giant waterwheel, forty feet high and nine hundred years old, made of wood on a wooden axle! A few of the beams that composed it were obviously new. I imagine it has been in a constant state of repair more or less since it was built. But it is still working, raising water from the Orontes River and tipping what it hasn’t spilt on the way up, into a stone aqueduct forty feet high which conveys it several kilometres away to irrigate the desert. The spillage keeps the axle lubricated. The wheel is propelled by water from a little dam about three metres high, and the little wooden troughs on its rim dip into the water at the bottom of the revolution and are shaped so they tip out at the top. No moving parts except the wheel itself. Not very efficient, nut who cares! It has enough power for kids to ride up on the rim of it and jump off into the millpond when they get near the top.
There’s history again at Bab al Hawa (Eve’s Gate) , which we visited on the same trip, where there is a border post between Syria and Anatolian Turkey. It consists mainly of some single storey office buildings and a large sealed car park in which the great truck and trailer units assemble while their loads of fruit and vegetables heading for the European Common Market are checked off again by Customs and Agriculture. There is no very obvious reason why the border post should be at this particular spot, for it is surrounded by desert, but it stands at the head of a rocky gully between low hills and perhaps this acts as some sort of funnel directing travellers through at this point. . The road runs along the bed of the gully though I saw no evidence of the creek that must have formed it. It would certainly be difficult to get a donkey cart over the bouldered side slopes.
In any case the location as a border post must have some appeal to administrators, for a hundred yards up the road there is a Roman arch surrounded by the ruins of an ancient settlement where ancient Romans checked people through the border, and fifty yards further on there is a Greek arch with even less recognisable surrounding structures, which apparently served a similar purpose in even more ancient times.
From there we went to the ports of Latakia and Tartus where we checked out the quarantine procedures and went on board one of the freighters that was unloading. I was impressed that they had a forty gallon drum near the stern to contain the kitchen refuse. Someone must have told them that it was a quarantine risk to throw it into the harbour. I took a photo of it for future use in training, but that brought the first mate out with a message from the captain. Apparently cameras make them nervous in these politically unstable lands.
We also stopped off at a border post on a bridge across a creek that divides Syria from northern Lebanon. Road traffic was subject to inspection, but I noticed some lawless peasant driving his half dozen contraband cows through the creek without reference to the border control. Perhaps he did it twice a day between milking and grazing, as his ancestors had done since biblical times..
Then they kindly took me to the famous Crusader fortress, the Krak des Chevaliers which is near Homs, inland from Tartus. It is enormous. It housed two thousand knights and their hangers on, and they held it for 160 years. It is actually three fortresses, one inside the other. I suppose the construction of yet another outer defensive wall was a way of keeping the troops occupied in between sieges and forays into the valleys below to steal supplies for the commissariat. No one ever managed to invade it. Saladin, the muslim commander, looked at it and decided to pass it by and seek prizes further north. The entrance to it is through a massive door and up a narrow tunnel spiralling to the right, so that any invaders coming in would have to advance in single file, and would have to fight up hill and use his sword in his left hand as opposed to the right hand of the defender. Left handed swordsmen must have been in demand among the attacking force. It was finally defeated only by a piece of trickery. The garrison was ordered to withdraw by a fake letter form their commander in Tripoli. Perhaps they were sick of it anyway. There was a cunningly conceived escape tunnel that led away to some rocks about three or four hundred metres beyond the wall, and I guess they used that to get away. It wouldn’t have bee very pleasant to stay behind after the surrender. There was no Geneva Convention in those days.
A hundred miles to the east there is another even more amazing ancient construction, the city of Palmyra. There is no quarantine post there, for it lies in the middle of the country far from any border, but kind hearted Ali sent me and Pam there on my second trip to Syria in 1990. You get to it across a continuous flat desert crossed only by a road and a railway, and supporting nothing but stones and scattered salt bushes, nibbled to their bare bones by passing goats, and clothed these days in wind blown plastic bags which twinkle in the sunlight. Today’s Palmyra is on an oasis luxuriant with gardens and date palms and a few modern high rise buildings, including another Cham Palace for tourists. Alongside it in the desert, magnificent even in its ruined state, stands the remnant of the once princely city of ancient times.
Its ruins are scattered over many acres, and although there are marble columns and Greek arches far and near, scarcely a single building is anywhere near complete. Perhaps the nearest, its centre section still standing, though minus its roof, is the great Temple of Baal. Its ninety foot high columns dwarf the big tour bus parked alongside, and though wind blown sand has begun to erode the columns near their bases, their ornate capitals and massive stone corbels and roof beams and the intricate domed ceiling make it clear that no effort was spared in making this structure a pinnacle of the stonemason’s craft. Though most of the other buildings in this vast array are reduced to rows of columns with occasional gables, their magnificence, and the grandeur of the ancient streets whose outlines they indicate is still quite overwhelming. God knows with what pride or terrified awe, the citizens of this paragon of cities must have walked these cobbled lanes and boulevards.
Palmyra was in its day the pride of the East. Its oasis, a jewel in the thirsty desert and a solitary place of rest and refreshment for weary caravans plying between Baghdad and Damascus, it could claim what it pleased from the travelling merchants, for they had no alternative but to pause there. Its king, Septimius Odenathus, became the mightiest power in the region, and was appointed by Rome as the Governor of all that land between Egypt and Constantinople. It was he of whom Shelly wrote, with only minor inaccuracy:
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said : Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandius, king of kings:
Look on my works ye Mighty and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Odenathus did indeed style himself “the king of kings”. When I was there I saw no sign of the statue to which Shelley’s traveller refers, but perhaps it has been removed, or perhaps it was part of the poetic licence which renamed him Ozymandius. There is however, a statue of the roman emperor, Septimius Severus, I think in the Damascus museum, whose visage could well have been the source of the “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”.
Be that as it may, what, you may wonder what could have brought about this “colossal wreck”? It seems that much of Odenathus’ power derived from an alliance with Rome against the Persians. However Odenathus had a wife, Zenobia who was ambitious as well as beautiful. She was said to be more beautiful than Cleopatra, from whom she claimed direct descent. She was also fit and had a strong sense of priorities. She frequently accompanied her husband on lion and deer hunting expeditions, but shared his bed only in the interests of posterity. When Odenathus was murdered by one of his nephews, she became queen, conquering all of Anatolia and in 270 AD declaring independence from Rome. This irritated the then Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who led an army from Constantinople, disciplined Zenobia, and leaving a garrison to keep the city under control set off to return. As soon as he was gone, Zenobia had his garrison murdered, and resumed control of her city. However, one of the garrison must have survived, for by the time Aurelian reached Bab al Hawa, the survivor caught up with him, and delivered the disquieting news. Aurelian immediately turned his legions around and they padded their sandalled feet all the way back to Palmyra, where they dismantled it into something like its present condition. Aurelian also captured Zenobia, and took her back to Rome in golden chains where she was featured in the triumphal procession , along with sundry captive generals and princes, through the streets.
Later however, according to Gibbons, Aurelian provided her with a capacious villa, where she lived out the rest of her life as a Roman matron.
And that, as far as I can recall it, is the story of Palmyra, and of Bab al Hawa, Odenathus and Zenobia. But the bones of it are all there for you to see today. Really impressive.
We went to Palmyra in a Volkswagen Kombi van, and something of Zenobia’s curse must have remained in its stones, for when we came to drive home, the engine wouldn’t start. Sometimes an engine will cough a bit by way of encouragement, but this one sounded as if starting had never been part of its repertoire. It wasn’t a good place to be stuck. As the scientist in the party I felt I should at least show willing so I got out and opened the hatch over the engine. I was encouraged to see the engine looked just like the one in our VW beetle that we bought in Samoa, and which I had serviced many times. However without any tools it was hard to see what one could do, so I contented myself with checking that the distributor leads were plugged in tight and told the driver to try again. Zenobia must have relented, because it started first go. I tried to look modest.