In Xanadu (12 page)

The morning was given over to indolence. I picked halfheartedly through the ruins, but apart from one magnificently vaulted room with bevelled stone voussoirs - perhaps the old Venetian or Genoese consulate - there was little of interest left standing. Successive sacks by Mameluke raiding parties had taken their toll.

I made for a cafe beside the harbour where I found Laura deep in a romantic novel. Laura's penchant for Mills and Boon was a new and unexpected side to her character. The same girl who had swept all before her in the ice-hockey pitches of the Home Counties, who had beaten off a party of rapists during communal riots in Delhi, who had subdued the dons of Magdalen and amazed the boardrooms of the City of London, this same Laura turned out to be nourished by a literary diet of
Prince of Darkness. The Rose of Biarritz, Silent Stranger
and
His Name was Passion.
Clearly, beneath the ferocious, ice-hockey-stick-wielding exterior there lay deeper currents. I ordered a glass of beer (Turkey brews a strong German-tasting lager named Efes Pilsen) and opened Runciman's
Fall of Constantinople.

Three Turks sat at the next table. One, potbellied and clean-shaven, appeared to be the proprietor. He was lecturing his two friends and gesticulating vehemently. I longed to know what subject could merit such gestures: capital punishment? Deep sea fishing? Castration? His two friends watched him throughout their meal. The elder of the two was having trouble with his stuffed aubergine. He bent down so low to the table that the bristles of his beard almost touched the dish. The sleeves of his jacket had got involved too, and as he wiped them clean, he coughed, spat into the napkin and dropped it onto the floor. The other man wore a stained white vest and had dark brown skin and a labourer's biceps. He had a piece of bread on the end of his fork and was mopping it round and around the tin plate.

When the fat proprietor had finished his lecture, he looked across at our table.

‘Deutsch?'

'English,' said Laura.

'Ingliz,' the fat proprietor explained to his friends.

‘Turkey good?' he shouted, asking the same question that was to be put to us by every Turk we met over the next fortnight .

Turkey good,' we replied as we did to every subsequent inquiry. The Turks are very sensitive about their country.

The fat proprietor raised his glass.

'Sherife,' he said. 'Ingliz - chin-chin.'

The waiter brought over a grubby document, creased at the corner and covered with tea stains.

'Ingliz menu,' he said, beaming at Laura.

We opened the menu and studied it closely.

KUJUK AYAS FAMILY RESTRANT

INGLIZ MENUYU

j

SOAP

-----

Ayas soap

Turkish tripte soap

Sheeps foot

Macaront

Water pies

EATS FROM MEAT

Deuner kepab with pi

Kebap with green pe

Kebap in paper

Meat pide

Kebap with mas patato

Samall bits of meat grilled

Almb chops

VEGETABLES

Meat in earthenware stev pot

Stfue goreen pepper

Stuffed squash

Stuffed tomatoes z

Stuffed cabbages lea

Leek with finced meat

Clery

SALAD

Brain salad

Cacik - a drink made ay ay

And cucumber

FRYING PANS

Fried aggs

Scram fried aggs

Scrum fried omlat

Omlat with brain

SWEETS AND RFUITS

Stewed atrawberry

Nightingales nests

Virgin lips

A sweei dish of thinsh of batter with butter

Banane Meon

Leeches

It was a difficult choice. Laura chose some soap, an almb chop and a bowl of leeches. I opted for a meat pide. Then, for pudding, I ravished some virgin lips.

After lunch, revived by a draught of Turkish tea - hot, sweet and very strong - we shouldered our backpacks and tramped off on the dirt track which led towards the old Armenian capital of Sis. It was still very hot and the countryside was flat and dustily fertile. Small cottage gardens full of vegetables soon perhaps to be mutilated at the Kujuk Ayas Family Restrant) gave way to larger fields of cotton and tobacco, lined with windbreaks of cypress. In one field the harvest had already taken place and the meadows were filled with gleaners, faces lowered towards the stubble, amid a scattering of beehive hayricks. Ahead of them a last solitary reaper was bent over his scythe; it was like a marginal illustration
from
a Gothic psalter, or a 'Season of the Month' on the misericord of an abbey quire. We tramped on until exhausted, then sat and waited for a lift. A tractor stopped, and we clambered up into the trailer.

Inside was a vast earth-mother swathed in voluminous wraps of calico and taffeta. Beside her was a small boy, presumably her son. She clucked around him like an old broody hen, wiping his nose and removing hay from his hair. She said nothing, but belched occasionally and fed herself noisily from a nose-bag. Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. Their men are almost all handsome with dark, supple skin and strong features:
good
bones, sharp eyes and tall, masculine bodies. But the women share their menfolk's pronounced features in a most unflattering way. Very few are beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent. Baggy wraps conceal pneumatic bodies. Here, must lie the reason for the Turks' easy drift out of heterosexuality.

The citadel of Sis rises out of the coastal plain, a solitary conical hill in a flat landscape. At the base of the near side of the hill lay an encampment of Yuruks, one of the last surviving tribes ofTurcomen nomads. There were four or five purple felt tents and some wagons, around which sat some wild, dark-skinned women dressed in bright Rajasthani prints, some huge wolf-like dogs, and a few filthy children. I later learned that the encampment was semi-permanent; the Yuruks had settled there a decade before and worked as day labourers in summer, and lived by basket-making and horse-trading in winter. There had recently been an initiative by the government to try and settle the Turcomen, and several hundred had accepted houses in Mersin, where they sat in the bars drinking Efes Pilsen and doubled the crime rate overnight. Others had taken the houses but returned to nomadism in summer; land reclamation had stolen from them many of their traditional pastures, and it was difficult to remain peripatetic for twelve months a year. True nomads are now very few in number.

The tractor driver dropped us off in the market place in the centre of Sis, and leaving our rucksacks at a cafe we set off up the steep cobbled streets towards the citadel. After a while the houses and farmyards gave way to orchards and olive groves and we climbed on up, past the first line of walls, through the outer wards. Above, the great citadel perched on the cliff edge, its horseshoe towers jutting out on overhangs of rock. We passed through the ruins of the old lower town, where the traders and artisans once lived. Little remained of it for, like Ayas, it had been burned by the Mamelukes: in 1266, King Hethoum returned from an expedition to find 'Sis and its chief church given to the flames, the tombs of the kings and princes violated, and their bones torn from this last resting place, burned and scattered as ashes to the wind.' There was nothing left of the Armenian cathedral and the patriarch's palace, both of which were still in use when Sir Henry Yule was writing, late in the last century.

As the incline increased, the soil got thinner and the orchards were replaced by gorse, thistles and yellow cow parsley. We made slow progress or, rather, I made slow progress while Laura shot ahead and I limped up after her. Although it was mid-afternoon, it was still hot, and my shirt was saturated.

Occasionally I would collapse on a ledge, my head resounding to the military band thumping away in my temples, and douse myself with the tepid chlorinated water from the water bottle. Laura seemed impervious to the heat, the exertion, or the imminent danger of dehydration or heart failure. At first she was impatient with me ('Oh get on with it!' 'You should lose weight.' 'When was the last time you took any exercise?') but by
a
bout halfway up she seemed to come to terms with the fact that she was not travelling with an athlete and began to tempt me up with gentle, clucking pensioner-talk ('Come on now, only a little bit further' 'Just think, nearly there!' and, 'Oh well done; one last effort now.')

We made it up in three-quarters of an hour, a remarkable feat I thought, though Laura seemed less impressed by the achievement. I sat on the crenellation of a tower and caught my breath. Then, slowly, I got up and looked around.

It was a fine castle, magnificently positioned, and intriguingly similar to some of the crusader castles I had seen in Syria the previous year. Not only was the general plan the same - a series of horseshoe towers hugging the contours of the cliff, with the keep built into the curtain wall, not separate from it as in Europe - but the masonry was dressed in an identical manner: each block carefully chiselled into an elaborate, embossed shape. Exactly the same features can be found at many of the earlier crusader castles, for example the great fort of Sahyoune, in the Syrian Jebel above Latakia. When the crusaders first set off from Europe to the Holy Land, the art of fortification was still undeveloped and historians have been baffled as to how the crusaders were able to build such remarkable and ingenious castles within a few years of arriving in Palestine. If the early castles are similar to those of the Armenians, then it may be possible that the crusaders learnt the art from them. The unstudied ruins on the hilltop of Sis may contain the clue as to the origin of the crusaders' innovations in castle building - innovations that were in turn transmitted back to Europe to revolutionize castle building there.