A Traveller's Life (28 page)

We sat in the Bar Americain of the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, recovering from our journey through the Balkans on variants of the Orient Express. The bar itself had a shiny brass rail round three sides to support the feet of those whose arches had given way under the strain of attempting to carry out to the letter Herr Baedeker's pre-1914 instructions on what should not be missed in the city, although I had never actually seen it used for this purpose (in fact I had never actually seen anyone sitting at it).

There were three bell-pushes by our table, and when I pressed the one marked ‘Barman' and he appeared, I was tempted to ask him why no one ever sat at the bar, but I knew that his answer would have been because there are no stools. Instead I ordered a bottle of the good red wine called Buzbuq which we had first drunk from a hock bottle in Erzerum twelve years previously, although it would have been cheaper to have bought it at the shop on the corner opposite and drunk it in our room – a practice which is not fair in a hotel such as the Pera Palace if carried to excess, for reasons that will be revealed, but is commendable to all except the weak-minded in, for instance, a Hilton. The other
two bell-pushes were marked ‘Groom' and ‘Garson', so that besides the Buzbuq I was also tempted to order up a horse and an omelette.

The Pera Palace was built in 1898 by the Wagons-Lits Company at about the time when the Orient Express began to run as a
train de luxe
, twice weekly from Vienna, to what was then Constantinople, by way of the Balkans, in seventy-three hours. Much less sumptuous than, for example, the Bristol in Vienna, where guests were so smothered in comfort that they find difficulty in assuming a vertical position, less exotic than the Grand Hotel Oloffson at Port-au-Prince, in which one's last hours on the premises are spent scheming how to leave it without tipping a horde of Negro servants already adequately provided for in the bill, it was until recently my favourite hotel, a melancholy oasis in the eerie labyrinth of Pera, although very few of its rooms now have views of the Golden Horn, other buildings having mushroomed up around it. In 1979 the Pera Palace was closed by a prolonged strike imposed by outside forces who picketed it. It was the antithesis of what most other hotels have already become in these years before the next breakdown when the only thing to stay in will be a concrete bunker reached by an armoured train. (It, too, I am sorry to report, has now gone what seems to be irredeemably ‘off'.) The bedrooms, reached by a wooden lift with silver-painted gates, were a good twelve feet high, the walls were more or less soundproof, and large pieces of furniture, outmoded to the point of being newly modish, loomed over brass bedsteads with knobs on in which the sheets were changed daily – at least ours always were, because we asked for them to be. These great
armoires
were inset with enough mirror-glass to satisfy all but the most jaded tastes, and the chandeliers and candelabra were collectors' items, which is why the worst sort of guests sometimes made off with the irreplaceable glass shades.

They would have probably taken the taps, too, which were
nickel-plated brass, made by Horcher of Paris, if they had had the tools to take them off – what a place for a plumbers' convention! And the baths which they fed were so commodious that, once inside, even the most abundant occupant disappeared from view. The bidets, built on a similar scale, did not engulf the user as completely.

When we first stayed at the hotel, on the way to Persia in 1956, the bath in the room we occupied had the unusual facility of filling itself by way of the waste pipe with water of a rather curious colour, without our having recourse to taps; and we watched this process enthralled, thinking it must be something to do with the currents in the Bosphorus, until we discovered that it only happened when the man in the next room pulled the plug out of his bath. The most eerie suite was the one occupied by Ataturk when he took time off from trying to hoick Turkey into the twentieth century, and was unchanged since he used it.

What was described in the brochure issued by the management as the Salle des Fêtes was the hub of the hotel. It rose through the first floor into a ceiling full of cupolas, and was embellished with brown marble, huge chandeliers of eastern inspiration and on the floor, in the middle of it, there was a great brass vessel for burning incense. All round the first floor beneath the cupolas, latticed windows, as in a harem, opened out on to little balconies, some of which offered a distant view of the reception desk.

One of the things that made the Pera Palace different from other hotels was the staff. If anyone retired or died he was immediately replaced by a moustached facsimile who remembered us from our last visit when he was not there. The female staff never retired and never died. The food, as it always had been, was pretty dull, if not terrible. In fact, when I once wrote extolling the virtues of the hotel, several readers wrote that they thought it was the worst hotel they had ever stayed in and that I must be in the pay
of the management to write as I had done, which only goes to show that among travellers tastes differ.

Another thing that distinguished it from almost every other hotel I had ever been in was that its profits, beyond those required to run it, replace items stolen by the guests and make provision for the staff, went to support a school for poor children, a bequest by the late owner, a philanthropic Turk. It was thus the only hotel in which by simply staying in it, one could be accused of actively helping to do good.

This journey, made in February 1971, to the Monastery of St Katharine in the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula, was one that had been difficult to arrange in the way in which we wanted, which was alone, apart from the escort the Israelis obliged us to take along. At that time a state of war existed between Egypt and Israel, and fighting was quite likely to break out again at any time in the course of which the monastery, together with its priceless contents, might well be destroyed – at the very least the monks might be forced to evacuate it, in which case it would probably be pillaged. At this period the whole of Sinai was occupied by the Israelis, the Egyptians having been driven back across the Suez Canal where they were now engaged in licking their wounds, pondering revenge and infiltrating guerrillas into Sinai across the Gulf of Suez.

On the journey through Sinai to the monastery we were accompanied by three Israelis, all armed to the teeth with Russian Kalashnikov rifles, captured from the Egyptians during the Six-Day War in 1967, and .38 Smith & Wesson Police Specials, the ones with the short barrels that had been made fashionable by Ian Fleming, whose Bond thriller,
From Russia With Love
, had a dust
jacket adorned with a highly realistic depiction of one of these weapons.

The journey from Suez to the monastery used to take eight days by camel, with eighteen days being the minimum time recommended for the entire trip; but it could be done in five days. Two days by ship to El Tor, a quarantine station for pilgrims returning to Egypt from Mecca, which was situated on the west coast of Sinai about one hundred and fifty miles south-east of Suez, then three more days by camel to the monastery. Europeans were strongly advised to avoid making the return journey by ship and to travel instead by camel, as this would enable them to avoid spending two ghastly days in quarantine at Suez.

All this was in the now distant past, long before the Second World War. By 1971 it was no longer possible to travel to the monastery by ship, camel, motor car or any other means from Egypt, now that the Israelis had occupied Sinai. The only practicable route was from Eilat, the port the Israelis had built at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, southwards along the almost waterless east coast of Sinai to a place called Sharm el Sheikh, near the tip of the peninsula; then up its equally desolate west coast to El Tor through a coastal plain which sloped up gradually to the foot of the high mountains of the interior. The track that ran through it had a specially prepared expanse of sand throughout its entire length on its seaward side, which was inspected by patrols and raked daily, so that any footprints left by the then numerous infiltrators who used to cross the Gulf of Suez from Egypt under cover of darkness could be detected.

El Tor by that time was a lonely place, deserted because even the poorest pilgrims now travelled by plane to Jiddah, the port of Mecca on the Red Sea, rather than by ship. There was a small inlet between reefs from the Gulf of Suez (frequented by the dugong or sea cow, whose skins were used for making native
sandals), some jetties, some palm groves, some old rotting boats high and dry on the shore, of the sort once used in the pilgrim trade, some decayed buildings of unburnt brick, some mosques, some modern apartment buildings and the great wired-in quarantine station – eerie as such places invariably are, now all deserted, evacuated during the Six-Day War, the only signs of animation being the columns of whirling sand chasing through this ghost town on the wind.

From El Tor the track continued northwards, past Hammam Seiyidna Musa, the Baths of Our Lord Moses, where some hot springs issued from the base of a hill, past Jebel Nâkûs, the Bell Mountain, an expanse of yellowish-brown sand about two hundred feet high which was supposed to produce deep, swelling, vibratory, moaning noises when disturbed, but failed to do so on this occasion. Then, having reached the mouth of Wadi Feirân, we turned away through it to the east.

Wadi Feirân concealed within it the most beautiful and fertile oasis in all Sinai, where the most delicious dates and the best vegetables were grown. It was the abode of Sheikh el Sheikh Abu Abdullah, chief of the Umzeini Beduin and virtually king of the entire peninsula. It was also the site of a great cathedral monastery, now ruined, that had been the original episcopal see of the bishops of Sinai, the first of whom may have been named Moses, consecrated Bishop of the Saracens in AD 373 or 374. Above it rose Jebel Serbâl, originally identified, rather than Jebel Musa, as Mount Sinai, the mountain on which Moses received the Tablets of the Law. It was for this reason that Wadi Feirân became the seat of the episcopal see, and that the granite fastnesses of Jebel Serbâl and other neighbouring mountains are covered with the remains of chapels and churches and honeycombed with tombs and hermits' cells.

The approach to Wadi Feirân was uncertain country to wander
in at that time. It was full of minefields, relics of the Six-Day War (which by now we were heartily sick of hearing about), some of which had been moved miles from where they had originally been planted by flash floods which happen very frequently in the winter months and which make a bivouac at this season a hazardous proceeding.
¹

And it was undoubtedly penetrated by infiltrators, for it was here that our Israeli bodyguard found prints of the sort of boots worn by Egyptian infiltrators. This discovery thoroughly put the wind up them, and set them cocking their carbines and inspecting their Smith & Wessons, although asking them to enlarge on the subject of infiltrators was rather like asking a nanny how babies are made.

It was soon after making this discovery, while travelling through a defile, that we met the harem of Sheikh Abdullah on the march – a convoy of camels, with the black, tent-like litters in which the women were hidden, on their backs – swaying down to us, escorted by a number of Beduin armed with captured Russian carbines. There was also a very smart jeep, in which the Sheikh's veiled favourite sat in front next to the driver, with two more armed men in the back. Noticing the presence of a European woman in our party she gave orders that we were to halt, and taking Wanda some way off to the shelter of a cliff, where the two of them were beyond the prying eyes of men, proceeded to unveil herself, displaying dazzling charms.

Late in the afternoon of the second day of the journey from Eilat we were in Wadi Turfa, still well to the north of the monastery
which stands at the foot of Jebel Musa, otherwise Mount Sinai, at the bottom dead centre of the peninsula, climbing towards it among a few turfa trees, a sort of tamarisk. In spring and early summer the twigs of these trees are sometimes punctured by an insect, and they then yield a gum tasting of honey, which falls to the ground where it coagulates. The Beduin used to collect these manna-like drops and bring them to the monastery, where they were packed in tin boxes and sold to pilgrims as the Manna of the Israelites. Perhaps they still did sell it to pilgrims. Nothing had changed much in this part of the world since the sixth century when the monastery was built, or since the Israelites had wandered here, for that matter.

At about four o'clock we came to a gorge, the Naqb el Hawi, the Cleft of the Wind. To the left there was a white-capped rock on which the Beduin believe Abraham performed his sacrifice, and another on which Moses sat while tending the sheep of his father-in-law, Jethro.

From this gloomy defile we emerged on to a long, wide, undulating plain flanked by high, jagged and ruinous-looking peaks that looked like heaps of baked and broken bones, in which the black tents of the Tuarah Beduin – Tuarah means ‘mountaineers' – were pitched close in under them on the valley floor.

The Tuarah women (no men were visible) wore long black cotton shirts. They reached to the ground and were gathered at the waist and embellished with strings of white beads and embroidery. They had black kerchiefs on their heads edged with gold braid and over these they wore white, hip-length woollen mantles; from beneath the kerchiefs and the mantles their jet-black hair protruded, which was done up in what looked like buns over their foreheads. The red veils they wore were hung with coins, pearls and gilt or gold chains. When they saw us they drove their goats away as if we might contaminate them.

We came to a couple of whitewashed tombs on a low hill: the larger contained the remains of a notable saint, the Sheikh Nebih Salih, to which the Tuarah turn when they pray instead of towards Mecca, being pretty vague about Islam generally and living in a region where Christian and Islamic myths are particularly mixed up, one with the other. On his coffin stood a green silk turban, and some offerings: a tin-opener, some pieces of mirror, a plastic bag. At one time the tomb was embellished with more picturesque objects; ostrich eggs, shawls, halters and bridles; but no more.

At about five o'clock we came to the foot of a great wall of mountain, scoured with deep ravines and crowned with peaks, with other valleys stretching away on either side of it from the one in which we had now halted, giving distant prospects of other massifs, other peaks.

This great mass confronting us was Horeb, the northern part of what the Arabs call Jebel Musa, Mount Moses, otherwise Mount Sinai, the Mountain of the Law; and the plain below it, on which we had now halted, was the place where some savants and many faithful people believe that the assembled Children of Israel, about two million of them, stood when the mountain was wrapped in smoke, the Lord descended on it in fire, and the whole thing shook to the accompaniment of a prolonged trumpet blast. Seeing it at that moment, with the mountain rearing its shattered peaks above the darkening, desolate plain, it was easier to believe than not to believe that these events had taken place where we were now standing.

The sun was gone from the valley now, except from the summit of a little hill with a Christian chapel and a Muslim shrine standing together on it. This was Jebel Harun, Aaron's Mountain, on which he set up the Golden Calf while his leader was on the mountain above. Here, round about Mount Sinai, practically every site hallowed in the Old Testament is also venerated by Muslims (it would be difficult to overstress the importance which the Prophet
accords to Moses and Mount Sinai and which is expressed in the Koran).

Then having arranged with a young Jebeliyeh, one of the serfs of the monastery, a boy of markedly European appearance, dressed as a labourer rather than a Beduin, to bring camels at four a.m. for the ascent of the holy mountain, we rounded the hill into Wadi Shuaib; and there was the monastery, with the great granite mountains, hot-looking even in shadow, looming over it, those on the left with crosses set up on them in inaccessible places, those on the right outriders of Mount Sinai, exactly as it had been in all the nineteenth-century engravings I had ever seen: a miniature city with a bell tower and a square-towered minaret showing above the immense stone walls which enclosed it, and outside in an enclosure, a small dark forest of cypresses.

By this time it was almost dark. In another few minutes the outer gate and inner doors would be closed for the night, and we would be benighted in Wadi Shuaib. Until the middle of the last century there was no outer gate and there were no doors. Therefore any visitor, having first sent up his letters of introduction or other credentials for inspection in a basket was, if found to be
persona grata
, wound up more than thirty feet in the air into the monastery by a wooden windlass, through a hatch grasping a greasy rope and sitting on a wooden bar attached to the end of it, in much the same way as a visitor to some of the monasteries of the Meteora in Thessalia on mainland Greece used to reach their objectives.
²

Now, instead of being hauled aloft, the driver was sent in through a side gate to negotiate for rooms, which had to be paid for in
advance, and when he returned he grumbled a lot because it cost ten Israeli pounds a head, which to me did not seem excessive in what was in fact the very heart of the Wilderness. Over the centuries the monks have always had difficulty in getting rid of pilgrims and other visitors, especially those already in residence whose credit was exhausted, justifiably aghast at the prospect of being turned loose penniless and provisionless in such barren regions.

We unloaded our gear and went in through the outer postern and three more studded iron doors in the main wall which, before the outer gate was built, led only to the gardens and the charnel house, and up past the mosque built at the beginning of the twelfth century, to the part reserved for visitors in the north-west angle of the monastery. No one is quite sure why this mosque was built, although it must have been an advantage for Christian monks to have a mosque on their premises in times of trouble with the Muslims.

Whatever the reason, when the Khedive Abbas, ruler of Egypt from 1849 to 1854, was ordered to Sinai by his physicians for the good of his health and lived in the monastery, while having a palace built on a nearby mountain top which he never occupied, he prayed in the church, never in the mosque.

We drew bed sheets (having pointed out that we did not relish the ones in our cells which bore the impress of what must have been numbers of previous occupants) from a distinctly worldly, if not depraved, monk of about thirty-five who looked as if he observed the feasts of the church rather than the fasts but was nevertheless an amusing fellow. We then visited the kitchens where we handed over a number of cans of food to a Jebeliyeh cook (visitors had to provide their own victuals). He immediately immersed them unopened in a huge cauldron of boiling water in which lumps of some unidentifiable meats were already seething, where a number of them eventually burst.