The Pillars of Hercules

The meadows in the distance were like crushed velvet, and closer they were scattered with wildflowers and banked by stands of sturdy blue-green pines. Even that loud music could not distract me from admiring a landscape I had never seen or heard about, and the thrill was that it was ancient, biblical-looking, the land of conquering, slaughtering David and the Valley of Salt. At Jisr ash Shughur on the Orontes River there were flowers everywhere and the town itself lay on the crest of a distant hill, as white as the white stone ridge it was built upon. We were hardly any distance from the Turkish border, and passing alongside it, but these villages were not at all like Turkish ones, either in the design of their houses or the way the people were dressed.

We penetrated the big green mountain range on our way to the shore, and circled the slopes of these peculiarly Middle Eastern-looking heights—so old were they, having been mountains for so long, so tame and rounded, they seemed domesticated by the people who had been trampling them and letting their goats and sheep canter over them, nibbling them since the beginning of the world. They were gentle slopes, with soft cliffs and unthreatening gullies and no peaks, green all over, with pine woods and villages in their valleys. They were not at all like the fierce mountains in the wilderness, with their sharp peaks and sheer cliffs and their raw and serrated ridges and their cliff faces gleaming like the metal of a knife blade.

That was something that I had learned about the Mediterranean. There was not a single point anywhere on the whole irregular shore that had not known human footprints. Every inch of it had been charted and named—most places had two or three names, some had half a dozen, an overlay of nomenclature, especially here in the tendentious and rivalrous republics of the Levant, that could be very confusing.

Three and a half hours after leaving Aleppo (Halab, El Haleb) we were speeding across a flat sunny plain of date palms and orange and olive trees, towards Latakia. It had been a long inland detour, but I was back on the shore of the Mediterranean.

I walked from the station to the center of town and found a hotel. After lunch, I walked to the port. I was followed and pestered by curb-crawling taxis in which young men sat and honked their horns. The only way to discourage them was to hire one—and anyway, I wanted to go north of Latakia, to see the ruins of Ugarit.

That was how I met Riaz, an unreliable man with an unreliable car. He spoke a little English. Yes, he knew Ugarit. Yes, we would go there. But first he had a few errands to run. This allowed me to see the whole of Latakia in a short time. It was not an attractive place. The only beach was some miles outside of the city at the laughably named Côte d’Azur, where on an empty road, a deserted hotel, the Meridien, sat on a muddy shore. That area had the melancholy of all bad architectural ideas exposed to the full glare of the sun.

“Who is that?” I asked Riaz as we passed statues of Assad. There were many statues of Father-Leader here.

Riaz laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. It was not a joking matter to stare at the statues, however silly they seemed. One statue in Latakia showed Assad hailing a taxi—his hand raised. In another he was beckoning—“I have a bone to pick with you, sonny!”—and in yet another he looked, with both arms out, like a deranged man about to take a dive into a pool, fully clothed. “I will crush you like this!” could have been inscribed on the plinth of a statue which depicted Assad clasping his hands rather violently, and a statue at the abandoned sports complex at Latakia showed the Commander of the Nation with his arm up, palm forward, in a traffic cop’s gesture of “Stop!”

Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. Leaving aside the fact that nature had not endowed this spindle-shanked and wispy-haired man in his tight suit to be cast in bronze, the unflattering statues still seemed provocative and irritating. In a hard-up place how could anyone be indifferent or willingly justify such expenditure? Syria was another country, like those of Mao and Stalin and Hoxha, of silly semaphoring statues of the same foolish old man, and in time to come they too would end up being bulldozed onto a scrap heap.

“What is his name?” I asked Riaz.

Riaz said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” and looked wildly around in the traffic.