Forty Days of Musa Dagh (41 page)

 

 

In an innyard, leftwards from the villa, an unusual scene was being
played. Those dregs of Yoghonoluk not permitted to follow the others into
camp had gathered together there. The keening women, the beggars with
prophetic heads, a few stray brats escaped from their parents, formed
an excited group. That Sato, the orphan of Zeitun, should have been
with them is not to be wondered at. One personality stood out from them,
whose impressive power even Gabriel could not manage to ignore. This was
old Nunik, chieftainess of magic healers and conjuring women. The dark
face of this female Wandering Jew, whose origins were lost in the grey
of ages, was distinguished by more than a nose half eaten away. It was
informed with the ferocious energy by which Nunik had raised herself
to the invincible leadership of her caste. The story that she was well
over a hundred might be mere fraud, a rumor set going by Nunik for
advertisement, and yet her very appearance of timeless age seemed almost
the indestructible guarantee of the worth of her cures and of the healing
quality in the rough life she led. Nunik held between her hard, stringy
thighs a black lamb, no doubt strayed from the herds, and she was slitting
its throat open from underneath. It seemed a very workmanlike slit, done
with the quietest of hands, while her lips parted under the horrible,
lupus-eaten nose from over a gleaming set of magnificently youthful
teeth. It gave her such a look of grinning relish that Bagradian lost
his temper at the sight.

 

 

"What are you all doing here, you set of low thieves?"

 

 

A prophet tapped his way to the front, to inform him with unapproachable
dignity: "It's the blood-test, Effendi, and it's being done on your behalf."

 

 

Bagradian nearly flung himself on the rabble. "Where did you steal that
lamb from? Don't you know that anyone who touches the people's property
can be shot or hanged?"

 

 

The prophet seemed not to notice the base aspersions. "Better watch,
Effendi, to see which way the blood will flow. Towards the mountain or
towards the house."

 

 

Gabriel saw how the lamb's dark blood came throbbing out of it, collected
on the flat, smooth place below it into a thick pool, which rose and rose
in a growing circle until the last drops fell. Still the puddle seemed
undecided, as though it had some secret injunction to obtain. At last,
three little tongues edged charily forwards, but stopped at once, till
suddenly an impetuous ril1 wound itself out, wriggling quickly on --
towards the house. The mob went mad with excitement.

 

 

"Koh yem! The blood goes to the house!"

 

 

Nunik bent down close over the blood-pool -- as though from its nature
and the tempo of its course she could tell with the greatest precision
something of importance. As she raised her head, Gabriel saw that the
twisted grin which had so roused him was the usual look of her ravaged
face. But she spoke in a curiously soft, old voice that did not seem to
be her own: "Effendi, those on the mountain will be saved."

 

 

In that instant Gabriel remembered the coins given him by the Agha, and
left forgotten in the villa. "I'll have those at least," he thought;
"it'd be a pity . . ." He went back. At the door of the villa he hesitated.
Should one ever turn back again from a journey? Then he hurried on,
in long quick strides, to his bedroom, and took the coins from their
case. He held the gold one up to the light; Ashod Bagrathuni's head
stood out from it in the finest chiselling. The Greek inscription round
the edge of the silver coin ran, without divisions into words, into an
almost unreadable circle of letters:

 

 

"To the inexplicable, in us and above us."

 

 

Gabriel put them in his pocket. He left the garden through the west door
in the park wall without turning back to look at the villa. A few steps
farther, he stopped to look at his watch, still absurdly set to European
time. The sun was already above the Damlayik. Gabriel Bagradian noted
carefully the hour and minute at which his new life had begun.

 

 

 

 

Soon after sundown the people of the seven villages, heavily laden,
had moved out in groups or families to toil up the steeps by all the
most available paths.

 

 

A dense moon, incredibly metallic, rose behind the jagged grey peaks of
the Amanus, in the northeast. It sailed on visibly through the sky, nearer
and nearer. It was no longer something flat stuck against the vault of
heaven. The black depths behind it grew more and more distinct. Nor was
the earth, for Gabriel, the usual stable abiding place, but the little
vehicle through the cosmos that it is in reality. And this stereoscopic
cosmos not only extended beyond the plastic moon, but forced itself down
into the valley to bathe in coolness every pore of Gabriel's resting
body. The moon was already half-way over the sky, and the panting groups
still toiled on past him. It was always the same silhouette. In front,
grimly prodding the ground with his stick, the father, loaded with
baggage. A gruff call, a lamenting answer. The women stumbled under
loads which bowed them almost to the earth. In spite of these, they had
to keep a sharp lookout, to see that the goats were not straying. And
yet, now and again, under these burdens, there came a little spurt of
young girl's laughter, an eye sparkling encouragement. Gabriel started
out of a half-sleep. Innumerable children were lifting up their voices
to weep. Hundreds of squalling children -- as though they had all at
the same instant discovered that their parents had gone away. And in
the midst of this the short grunting voices and shrill reproofs of many
grandmothers. But no -- they were not abandoned infants, only the cats
of Yoghonoluk, Azir and Bitias. Cats have seven lives and as many souls,
and each soul its own voice. Therefore, to kill a cat, you must kill
him seven times (Sato had long had this wisdom from Nunik). In real
truth their masters' absence did not move the cats of Yoghonoluk, Azir
and Bitias in the least, for cats serve only the house with their seven
lives, not its human beings. Perhaps they were even squalling for joy in
their new, unbridled lease of life. The dogs really suffered. Even the
wild dog of Syrian villages never quite gets away from men. He can never
find his way back to himself, to fox, jackal, wolf. He may have been wild
for countless generations, he is, and remains, the dismissed employee of
civilization. He snuffles longingly round houses, not merely for a bone,
but to get himself taken back into slavery, to be set to the tasks he
has forgotten. The wild dogs of the villages knew all this. Already they
had nosed out the camp on the Damlayik. But they also knew that this
camp, unlike the village street, was strictly forbidden them. Madly
they scurried up the forbidden mountain, grovelled their way through
brushwood, rustled like snakes under myrtle and arbutus bushes. Not one
of them got the bright idea of going off to Moslem neighborhoods, to beg
bones in Chalikhan or Ain Yerab. They still adored this faithless people
which had now abandoned its common dwelling-place. Their souls seemed to
perish in wild grief, yet few of them dared to utter their monosyllabic
bark, which has long since lost the extensive, much inflected, civilized
vocabulary of European house dogs. These dogs' whole grief was in their
eyes. Everywhere round him in the dark Gabriel caught glints of the green
fire of these eyes, rapturously curious, which dared not venture nearer
forbidden ground.

 

 

The moon had vanished behind the back of Musa Dagh. A faint wind had
come into being. "They're all up there by now," reflected Gabriel, past
whom, over an hour before, the last group had plodded its way. And yet,
either from weariness or the sheer need to be alone, he could still not
tear himself loose from this dark observation post. How could he tell
that this might not be the last time in his life at which he would be
able to be alone? And had not this power to be alone always seemed to
him God's best gift? He granted himself another half-hour of this
extra-mundane peace -- then he would have to push on up to the north
defences to superintend and hurry on the trench-digging. He leaned
back against the oak behind him and smoked. Out of the darkness came
a very tardy straggler indeed. Gabriel heard the clip-clop of hoofs,
and stones rolling away. He saw a lantern, then a man with a donkey,
both piled up with towering burdens. Each step the donkey took was almost
a fall. Yet the man dragged a monstrous sack, which every few minutes he
set down, panting and gasping. Gabriel recognized the apothecary only when
Krikor's sack came thudding at his feet. Krikor's face looked distorted;
the impassive mandarin's countenance had become the mask of some furious
warrior divinity. Sweat streamed over the polished cheeks into the long
goatee, which jerked up and down for want of breath. He seemed in great
pain, and hunched his shoulders, bending far forward.

 

 

Gabriel revealed himself: "You ought to have given your drug-sack to my
people, instead of trying to drag your whole chemist's shop alone."

 

 

Krikor still strove to get his breath. Yet, even so, he could put a
certain aloofness into his answer: "None of this has anything to do with
my drugs. I sent those up several hours ago."

 

 

Gabriel had by now observed that both the chemist and his ass were laden
exclusively with books. For some vague reason this annoyed him and inspired
him with the wish to mock. "Forgive my mistake, Apothecary. Are these the
only provisions you've managed to bring?"

 

 

Krikor's face was again impassive. He eyed Gabriel with all his usual
detachment: "Yes, Bagradian, these are my provisions -- unluckily not the
whole of them." A coughing-fit shook him. He sat down and mopped his sweat
with a monstrous handkerchief. The starlight twinkled. The donkey stood
with its heavy load and melancholy knock-knees on the pathway. Minutes
elapsed. Gabriel regretted his unkind impulse. But Krikor's voice had
regained all its old superiority.

 

 

"Gabriel Bagradian, you, as a Paris savant, have had very different chances
from mine, the Yoghonoluk chemist. Yet perhaps one or two things have escaped
you, which I have perceived. Possibly you never heard the saying of the
sublime Gregory Nazianzen, nor the answer he received from the pagan
Tertullian."

 

 

No wonder Gabriel was unacquainted with St. Gregory Nazianzen's saying,
since Krikor was the only man who had heard it. He related it in his
usual lofty voice, with supreme, lordly detachment -- though, to be sure,
his confusion of Tertullian, the Church Father, with a pagan of the same
name was a sign that Jove can nod.

 

 

"Once the sublime Gregory Nazianzen was invited to dinner by the august
pagan, Tertullian. Have no fear, Bagradian, the story is as short as it is
profound. They spoke of the good harvest and the fine white bread which
they were breaking together. A sunbeam lay across the table. Gregory
Nazianzen lifted up his bread in his hands and said to Tertullian:
'My friend, we must thank God for His great mercy -- for see, this bread
which tastes so delicious is nothing else than this golden sunbeam which,
out in the fields, has changed itself into wheat for us.' Tertullian,
however, stood up from the table and drew down a work of the poet
Vergil from his shelves. He said to Gregory: 'My friend and guest --
if we praise God for a mere slice of bread, how much more, then, must
we not praise Him for this book. For see, this book is the transformed
sunbeam of a far higher sun than that whose beams we can watch with our
eyes across the table.'"

 

 

After a while Gabriel asked in melancholy sympathy: "And your whole
library, Krikor? This can be only a sample of it. Have you buried
the books?"

 

 

Krikor rose as stiffly as a wounded hero: "I did not bury them. Books perish
in the ground. I left them, just as they were."

 

 

Gabriel took up the lantern which the apothecary had forgotten. It was
getting lighter, and Krikor could not hide the fact that tears ran down
his inscrutable parchment cheeks. Bagradian shouldered the old man's sack:
"Do you really think, Apothecary," he said, "that I was only born for
service-rifles, cartridge belts, and trench-digging?"

 

 

Though Krikor protested again and again, Gabriel carried his heavy sack
to the North Saddle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOOK TWO

 

 

THE STRUGGLE OF THE WEAK

 

 

"And the winepress was trodden, without the city . . ."

 

REVELATION xiv, 20

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. LIFE ON THE MOUNTAIN

 

 

Musa Dagh! Mountain of Moses! At its summit, in the grey dawn-light,
a whole population set up its camp. The mountain top, the windy air,
the sea surge, put such new life into this people that the toil of the
night seemed dispersed and forgotten. No more strained and exhausted
faces, but only excited-looking ones. In and around the Town Enclosure
they ran past one another, shouting. No consciousness whatever of the
underlying reality of it all, only a pugnacious stir. Like a spring
torrent, small and overwhelming urgencies swept away all thoughts of
the whole. Even Ter Haigasun, decking the wooden altar at the center
of the camp, and so engaged in getting things shipshape for eternity,
was shouting impatiently at the men who helped him in the work.

 

 

Gabriel had climbed the point selected by him as observation post.
From one of the rocky knolls of the Damlayik, it offered a clear look-out
to sea, across the Orontes plain and those undulations of the mountain
which ebbed away towards Antioch. You could see the valley itself from
Kheder Beg as far as Bitias. The outlying villages were hidden by bends
in the road. Of course, besides this chief observation post, there were
ten or twelve thrust out spying-points, from which single sections of
the valley could be closely observed. But here, well shielded by ridges
of rock, he had a clear view of the general outlines. Perhaps because,
from his position, he stood above the general scurry of the camp,
Bagradian found himself suddenly, sharply confronted, pierced to the
quick, by its reality. There in the north, the east, the south, as far
as Antakiya -- no, as far as Mosul and Deir ez-Zor -- destruction, not to
be evaded! Hundreds of thousands of Moslems, who would soon have only one
objective -- the smoking out of this insolent wasps' nest on Musa Dagh. On
the farther side an indifferent Mediterranean, sleepily surging round the
sharp declivities of the mountain. No matter how close Cyprus might be,
what French or English cruiser would take the least interest in this arid
length of Syrian coast quite out of the war zone? Certainly the fleets
only put out in threatened directions, towards Suez and the North African
coast, always sailing away from the dead Gulf of Alexandretta. Bagradian,
looking over the desert sea, realized how impossibly -- demagogically --
he had behaved both towards himself and his hearers, when he tried, at
the general assembly, to raise hopes of a rescuing gunboat. The scornfully
empty horizon crushed his arguments. All round them, incalculable death,
with not the narrowest cranny of escape -- such was the truth. A huddled,
piteous crowd of villagers, inescapably menaced on every side. And even
that was not the whole truth. For should death from without -- though
not even a madman would have supposed it -- remain benevolently inactive;
though no attack should come, not one shot be fired -- even so, another
death, from within, would rise in their midst, to destroy them all. They
might scrape and spare as much as they pleased, herds and supplies could
not be renewed and, within measurable time, they would be exhausted.