I was thirty-four and so thin from my physical travails and my sister’s death that other passengers on the cargo ship began to save and wrap foodstuffs for the next time I might happen by. I was a bereaved Englishwoman who’d grown up in Italy and had only just torn free of the octopus of my mother’s demands, a child of privilege who’d lived mostly hand-to-mouth, a lover of erudition who’d been mostly self-taught, and a solitary and fierce believer in independence who was prone to fixations on others. I owed everything to an aunt who’d given me a copy of Arabian Nights for my ninth birthday, a kind-hearted Syrian missionary who’d lived down the hill, a sister who had never lost faith in me, and those long months of illness that had left me the time to negotiate the labyrinths of Arabic and then Persian. Once I was stronger I walked an hour to the station three times a week to take the train to San Remo, where for seven years I furthered my progress with Arabic verbs in the company of an old Capuchin monk who’d lived for half his life in Beirut.
I’d arranged for temporary lodging with the monk’s spinster sister in Brummana, a little village on a series of ledges above Beirut’s harbor. There I continued to study the Koran, since I knew of no better way to begin to know Arabs than through the stories they knew as children, the stories their parents and nurses told them. In the spring I took the slowest train imaginable through the orchards of the Beqaa Valley to Damascus, where the spinster sister had helped me find two rooms up a steep staircase that was opened to the roof. At night I left a column of empty cans on the steps to warn me of uninvited visitors. The ascent was through a canopy of garments and saucepans and old baskets but the rooms themselves were pleasant, if exposed: in all but one nook, the entire street could see me while I dressed. But there I learned that if I didn’t mind about privacy, or for that matter about cleanliness, and made myself independent of other physical needs, I could move about with astonishing freedom for next to no cost. I arranged to attend a girls’ school for Arabic grammar, but was forced to leave when a classmate reminded me too powerfully of Vera. I was dumbfounded by the parade of ethnicities and sects: Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Sabaeans, Yezidi, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews. The Sunni were persecuting the Shia and both detested the Druze, while all three loathed the Alawites as beggarly apostates. I was jolted by the visceral immediacy of their hatreds — for ancient slights! — and reminded that everyone was irrevocably marked by whatever misdeeds their predecessors had committed.
And yet on celebration days everything, from merchants’ stalls to horses’ tails, was overhung with bouquets of peacock-blue flowers, and petals of apricot blossoms rode the ripples in the water basins outside the shops. On my first trip alone out into the desert, I sat in the shade of a parasol until I was finally surrounded by camels, hundreds of them, their huge legs rising around me like spindly and crooked columns before the herd, in its browsing, eventually moved on.
The following year an even slower train finally brought me to Baghdad, though Scheherazade had neglected to report the seasonal temperatures of 105 degrees or the corpses of donkeys and sheep and even men alongside the river traffic on the Tigris. My mother sent aggrieved letters to the consulate which were dutifully held for me as I roamed the streets and alleys, beside myself, for Nineveh was just to the north, and the ruins of the Sumerians and Ur, with the birthplace of Abraham to the south. I’d arrived a few weeks before the stock-market crash, having expended a total of forty-five pounds on the trip, and still had ten remaining, for emergencies, in my saddlebag.
The sky at sunrise was clear, barring one pink cloud. We peered from our bedrolls at a radiant solitude and a horizon of mountain ranges. The only other sound as my companions began the breakfast fire was that of the wind on the sand, endless grains slipping into and bouncing out of equally endless hollows.
Ismail had spent his life between the Caspian passes and was to answer for my comfort and safety. For that I was paying the equivalent of three shillings per day. He’d kept a shop in Baghdad, could read and write, had completed his pilgrimage to the four Holy Cities, and projected an air of serene virtue unhindered by humility. His smile radiated benevolence until he was contradicted. He wore six bags over his white woolen tunic, including the goatskin that held the ancient cheese that made his face so trying at close quarters.
Aziz meanwhile sported for the morning chill a sheepskin cap that gave him a kind of Struwwelpeter appearance. Our lead mule allowed him to loop the water-skin over the saddle’s pommel but then ceased to cooperate and, each time the muleteer approached murmuring reassurances, listened with a lack of conviction before rearing up to put the length of the halter rope between them.
I rolled my sleeping sack and tied it to my saddlebag, which carried a change of clothes and medicines on one side and my notebook and tea and sugar and Polo’s Travels on the other. I kept a little sack of raisins tied to my saddlebow, like Dr. Johnson’s lemons in the Hebrides. I thought I had little enough baggage but was still ashamed whenever I glimpsed my companions’ kit.
In the distance, flocks of sheep in long processions were drawing toward a patch of green that Aziz had informed me was a renowned spring that welled up out of the stones in three pellucid streams. We were heading to its south, and now enjoyed the last good camp before a long stretch of desert. Ismail, when finally satisfied with the disposition of his bags, took the lead.
The plain opened out before us, dotted every so often with far-off low mounds that I assumed to be buried cities. For three full days we encountered no trace of human beings save the occasional heap of stones arranged days or decades ago. While we rode Ismail sang a Kurdish song whose chorus was “Because of my love / my liver is like a kabob” and whose refrain, to which Aziz joined in, was “Ai Ai Ai.”
On the fourth day we shared a folded piece of bread and two pomegranates beside a compact oasis of brackish water from which a pale yellow water snake darted its head at us. And then that precinct’s fertility ceased with the suddenness peculiar to the East, and we were again traversing an expanse covered with black stone that featured fossil shells and fish. For six days more we plodded on toward the sleeping hills through the inhuman emptiness and silence. Every so often Ismail related legends of buried treasure somewhere off in regions to our left or right without turning his head for my response. No one goes a mile into the Near Eastern hills without hearing such stories. I asked if some of those treasures might be burial sites and he answered, with the calm innocence of a Persian telling lies, that he’d never done anything so illegal as open a grave.
How many Europeans had ever seen this country? I knew only of Sir Henry Rawlinson, who’d led his Persian regiment across it some ninety years earlier, imagining as he rode the vanished nations that had preceded him.
The foothills when closer revealed themselves to be symmetrical rust-colored headlands akin to the upturned hulls of ships. The escarpments were long and narrow and end-on gave the impression of a fleet at anchor. The bases of the hills were white with salt and nothing, Ismail remarked, would grow on them.
I was cross-examined on the inexplicable problem of why I was not married. Where to begin, I thought later that night. With my game playing? The clumsiness of my flirtations? The continual revelations as to the scope of my ignorance? Only after four months did the young British officers in Baghdad disclose what they’d found so amusing about my blue hat with the sewn-on clock: its hands pointed to the hours of assignation — five and seven.