The Pillars of Hercules

These countries were so small! One of the more marvelous atrocities of our time was the way in which the self-created problems of these countries, and their arrogant way of dealing with them, made them seem larger, like an angry child standing on its tiptoes. They were expensive to operate, too: they had vast armies; they indulged in loud and ridiculously long-winded denunciations of their neighbors. All this contributed to the illusion that they were massive. But, no, they were tiny, irritating, shameless and vindictive; and they occupied the world’s attention way out of proportion to their size or their importance. They had been magnified by lobbyists and busybody groups. Inflation was the theme here, and it was just another tactic for these quarrelsome people to avoid making peace.

Lovely roads, though. That was how I managed to cover so much ground. I was thinking: Why isn’t Route 6 as good as this—why can’t I get to Provincetown this fast? And then I reflected: We paid for those roads and bridges from Jordan to Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv, and they are a hell of a lot better than ours!

After the last shrine to Basil, a triumphal arch at Der’a (where T. E. Lawrence was captured, fondled by a Turkish commander and then abused and whipped—one of the great chapters of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ending “in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost”), and Syrian customs, I was held up by a car of Arab smugglers. Cartons of Marlboros, about fifty of them, had been crammed into the car’s chassis, and they were being removed and stacked at Jordanian customs, under the eyes of the suspects. Then, the green hills of Jordan, the queer Taco Bell architecture of the repulsively spick-and-span city of Amman and—since Jordan does not have a Mediterranean coast—a ten-dollar taxi ride from there to the Jordanian-Israeli frontier at the Allenby Bridge (thirty feet from end to end, another bit of Middle Eastern magnification) into the West Bank, real desert under brooding mountains and Israeli fortresses and gun emplacements; a bus to the Israeli checkpoint, and another ten-dollar taxi to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.

All the way from Syria through Jordan and well into Israel, the truth of this expensive farce was evident in the sight of the tent camps of Palestinians—shepherds with their animals, displaced, hardly tolerated, snotty-nosed children and their ragged elders, despised by Jordanians and Israelis alike, who roar past them in Jeeps and buses, sending up clouds of dust, making a vivid frontispiece for the diabolical next edition of the Bad News Bible.

I stayed in Arab East Jerusalem and made a circuit of the old city again. It was another average day in Zion. Israeli police were in the process of arresting three Arabs near the entrance to the Damascus Gate, and a Jewish protester was being dragged away for holding a “pray-in” at the Temple Mount. At the sacred sites people assumed all the odd postures of piety, on their knees, in their stocking feet, bowing, sobbing, and—at the Western Wall—hundreds, carefully segregated by sex, men here, women there, separated by a steel crowd-barrier, gabbled over their paraphernalia of scrolls and books, men wearing shawls on their heads like the Haurani crones of south Syria, and others had paper yarmulkes, like squashed Chinese take-away cartons, on their heads.

On a blocked back lane an hysterical Lubavitcher in a black hat and black frock coat and billowing black pants hoisted his orange mountain bike in order to squeeze past a van and, struggling through the narrow gap, knocked over an Arab’s stack of cabbages. The men began a futile argument in different languages.

On the Via Dolorosa, near the Flagellation Chapel, I heard a man say to a woman, “So now we do everything you say and you make all the decisions!”

And around the Fifth Station, where the Via Dolorosa ascends steeply to Golgotha, a woman was saying to a man, “Are you sure it’s this way? You’re not sure, are you? You’re just too embarrassed to ask someone directions.”

And farther down the Via Dolorosa, a child screaming, “But you said I could have one!”

Near the Lion Gate there was some Intifada graffiti, which a young mujahideen helpfully translated: Long Live Fatah (Arafat’s Palestinian organization), This Land of Flowing Blood, and In Memory of the Hero and Martyr Amjad Shaheen! (shot by Israeli soldiers).