The Pillars of Hercules

He grinned at me, having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the Hafez Assad dictatorship was necessary and that, in the absence of Basil, his second son, Bashar, would be the possessor of the golden formula, the Secret Police—sorry, Mr. Hamidullah! I meant to say the Secret Key.

On my way to Ma’aloula, a village in the mountains north of Damascus, I saw picked out on a hillside in white boulders a motto in Arabic.

“What does that say?”

“ ‘Hail to Our Glorious Leader.’ Meaning Assad,” said Abdelrahman Munif, and shrugged and puffed his pipe.

Munif is the author of a dozen novels. His Cities of Salt trilogy—Cities of Salt, The Trench, and Variations on Night and Day—had been translated into English, to great praise, by my younger brother, Peter Theroux, who suggested I meet Munif when I passed through Damascus. Munif showed me a limited edition of the first book. It was a deluxe large format with loose pages, boxed, with signed and numbered wood block prints by a famous artist, Dia al-Azzawi. I marveled at the prints. Munif smiled. Yes, he said—he had recently finished writing a volume of art criticism—they were very good.

He was born in Amman of a mixed Saudi-Iraqi parentage, and was raised in Saudi Arabia. Vocally out of sympathy with the Saudi leadership, who have banned his books and revoked his citizenship, Munif has lived in many places in the Middle East—as well as Paris—in his sixty-odd years and has held eight different passports-of-convenience, including Yemeni and Omani. Munif is an exile of a sort that hardly exists anymore in the Western world but is fairly common—at least as far as intellectuals are concerned—in the Middle East. He is essentially stateless, but remains unbending. In his last communication with the Saudi government he was told that he could have his citizenship back but he had to promise to stop writing and publishing.

“No conditions. I will not accept a passport with conditions,” Munif said, and that was the end of the discussion.

I liked him from the first. He was laconic, kindly, generous, hospitable. If there was anything I wished to see or do, he was at my disposal. Was there anything I wanted to buy? I had no desire to buy anything, I said. Did I wish him to drive me to Beirut? I said I had been told it might be dangerous. But what suggestions did he have?

“Ma’aloula,” he said. “Saydnaya. These are lovely and very historic places you should see before you leave Syria.”

One of the curious features of Ma’aloula was that Aramaic was still spoken there by three-quarters of the population, who are Christians. Jesus spoke Aramaic. When he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” it was in Aramaic. When he said, “God is love,” it was in Aramaic. In the Bible, Jesus’ cry on the cross, “Eloi Eloi, lama sabacthani,” is Aramaic.

It was hard to find a person in Ma’aloula who spoke English, but Father Faez Freijate spoke it well. He was a plump cheery soul with tiny eyes and a white tufty beard and side-whiskers, like a comical old Chaucerian friar. He wore a brown robe and carried a staff. His face was pink-cheeked and English-looking, but he roared with laughter when I mentioned that to him. “I am Arab and my family is Arab for three thousand years!” He was from Hauran, in south Syria, and was the pastor of the Ma’aloula church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, soldiers in the Roman army who had been martyred in A.D. 300. The church was built in 320.

“Do you speak Aramaic?” I asked.

“Yes, listen. Abounah—” He clasped his hands and began muttering very fast. At the end he blessed himself with the sign of the cross and said, “That was the Lord’s Prayer.”

“How do you say, ‘God is love,’ in Aramaic?”

“I do not know.”

I wanted very much to hear Christ’s words as they were originally spoken. I said, “How about, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her.’ ”

“I do not know.”

“‘I am the light of the world.’ ”

“I just know a few prayers. Ask someone in town,” Father Freijate said with an air of exasperation. Then he said, “Have you seen the altar?”

Small and horseshoe-shaped, it looked like a shallow sink from which the drain has been omitted. It was the proudest ornament of the church, though it looked to me unprepossessing, until the priest explained it.

It was made of marble that had been quarried in Antioch. Its design had been adapted from the pagan altars of the animistic desert faiths—worshipers of bulls and cats and snakes. Such altars had been used for animal sacrifices, which was why their sides were necessary; and the pagan altars had a hole in the center for draining away the animal’s blood. This altar was made before the year 325, Father Freijate said, because that was the year that the Council of Nicea said that all altars had to be flat. It was unique. There was not another one to be seen anywhere else in Christendom.