The Pillars of Hercules

He meant a Christian church, a Latin. (Christians in Syria are called Masihi for their belief in the Messiah.) There was one in Latakia, a Frenchified two-steeple cathedral dating perhaps from the 1930s. (The French had controlled Syria from 1926 until independence in 1946.) There was a sense of life in Latakia that was self-contained; the town was seldom visited by any foreigners—foreigners hardly came to Syria and when they did they kept to Damascus and avoided the rather stagnant and vandalized coast. Better than any bricks and mortar were the tangerines and oranges of Latakia. I paid off Riaz, and bought some fruit, and walked the streets, and went to bed early.

Sixty miles down the coast, two hours on the slow bus, was Tartus, a new town enclosing an ancient walled city. I walked around it and thought: How has it changed? The people still lived among goat turds and foul garbage piles and they scrubbed their laundry in washtubs and hung it from their windows, where the sun struck through the archways. The children played in the narrow lanes where open drains bore foul water to the sewers. Rats darted between bricks and in the ruined nave of a church there was more laundry. There were old and new parts of the walled city, but it was hard to tell them apart. People had extended the old houses, added rooms and stairways and vaulted ceilings and cubicles. Old men still sat under the arches of the city gate. I imagined that people here on the Syrian coast had more or less always lived like this, apparently higgledy-piggledy, but actually with great coherence, using all the available space, protected by the city walls and the privacy of their solid stone houses, in this honeycomb of an old town.

There was an island just off shore called Arwad. I wanted to look at it, but I could not find any boatman willing to take me there. So I walked along the beach. Tartus had the filthiest beach I had seen anywhere in the entire Mediterranean: it was mud and litter and sewage and oil slick. Perhaps that too was just as it had always been, the disorder and filth and carelessness. Swimming as a recreation and the craze for a suntan were recent novelties. In terms of its being regarded as an enormous sewer by the people who lived on its shore, the Mediterranean was perhaps no different from any other sea in the world.

“The sea in Western culture represents space, vacancy, primordial chaos,” Jonathan Raban wrote to me when I asked him why every sea on earth is treated like a toilet. Jonathan, one of my oldest friends, was the editor of The Oxford Book of the Sea. The biblical “waters” implying emptiness and chaos is specifically the Mediterranean. Jonathan indicated a passage in The Enchafed Flood in which Auden warmed to this theme of the disorderly sea: “The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that ‘there was no more sea’.”

“Put rubbish into it, and it magically disappears,” Jonathan said. “Water being the purifying element, you can’t pollute it—by definition.” Before the middle of the eighteenth century, “the sea was a socially invisible place; a space so bereft of respectable life that it was like a black hole. What you did in or on the sea simply didn’t count, which is partly why the seaside became known as a place of extraordinary license.” And he went on, “The sea wasn’t—isn’t—a place; it was undifferentiated space. It lay outside of society, outside of the world of good manners and social responsibilities. It was also famously the resort of filthy people—lowcaste types, like fishermen … It was a social lavatory, where the dregs landed up.”

Nothing held me in Tartus. Wishing to see the great Crusader castle known variously as the Krac des Chevaliers and Qal’at al-Hisn, I made a deal with a taxi driver named Abdallah, who said he would take me there and then on to Homs, where I could get a bus or a train to Damascus.

“Lebanon!” he cried out after twenty minutes or so, gesturing towards the dark hills to the south.

And then he turned north off the road and headed for the heights of the mountain range that protected the interior of Syria, and commanded a view of the whole coast. At a strategic point, above the only valley that allowed access, was the most beautiful castle imaginable. After a childhood spent reading fairy tales, and believing in valiant deeds, and associating every act of love, chivalry, piety and valor—however specious they seemed in retrospect—it is impossible to belittle the Crusader castles of the Mediterranean, the scenes where such deeds were first defined for such a child as I was.