On the Shores of the Mediterranean (41 page)

Here, one feels, it is a long way to Tahiti.

My letter to the Leader had said nothing about us wanting to see anything except a cemetery, part of a battlefield and, if possible, he himself in person, and if I had asked for more in all probability our request to come to Libya would not have been granted at all. Now, as we travelled westwards on the long haul back to Tripoli, through the hill country called the Jebel Akhdar, terrifyingly fast and in pouring rain, for a meeting with him which was destined not to take place, I began to wish that I had taken the risk and not been quite so literal about what we wanted to see and what, by implication, we didn’t. Rendered desperate by the thought of seeing nothing at all between where we were and Tripoli, not even stopping except to drink tea, take on petrol and snatch a few
hours’ sleep, I asked Mr Seddik Mabruk, a small, dark, touchy, fanatical man, the representative selected to be one of those accompanying us, if we might at least see the ruins of Cyrene, which we had failed to visit on the outward journey, the reason he had given us then being that as it was not on the schedule there was no time to see it.

By the time we got to the turn-off for Cyrene, it was pitch dark as well as raining cats and dogs, and all we were able to discern by the light of the car headlights of what had been one of the five cities on the Libyan shore of the Mediterranean founded by Greeks from Thera, Crete, the Peloponnese and its islands, which together made up what was known as the Cyrenaican Pentapolis, were some indistinct masses of pale-looking masonry on the side of a hill, 2000 feet above the sea and ten miles inland from it.

We had wanted to see Cyrene ever since we had given ourselves as a Christmas present a large, sumptuous and very expensive coffee-table book full of photographs of these and other remains on the Mediterranean shores.
¹
It had first been colonized in 630 BC by Greeks from the island of Thera, now known as Santorin, one of the islands of the Cyclades in the Cretan Sea. They had been inspired to emigrate there partly because the Oracle of Delphi had urged them to do so, partly because their island was not only earthquake-ridden but was becoming increasingly waterless.

Some of these Greek colonists intermarried with what they called the
barbari
, otherwise the Berbers, a light-skinned people, members of a race which inhabited the whole of the North African hinterland from Egypt to the Atlantic. They spoke, and still speak, Hamitic, a very ancient form of which is preserved in the inscriptions and papyri of ancient Egypt and of which 47 languages and 71 dialects have been identified in Africa north of the Equator.

After Alexander the Great had occupied Egypt in 332 BC, he made an ally of Cyrene. Later, in 304 BC, Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander’s generals, the first of what was to be a line of Macedonian kings of Egypt, annexed Cyrene and it remained subject to Egypt, governed by what were known as Libyarchs or ruled by vassal kings, until 96 or 97 BC. In 74 BC it became a Roman province, as did most of North Africa, producing corn, olive oil and wine; its steppe country, in which the Allied and Axis armies were later to fight their great tank battles, became famous for its sheep, its splendid horses and for its silphium, a much-prized plant yielding a gum resin used as a condiment and a medicine. By the time of Nero, who reigned from AD 54 to 68, silphium had become so rare, destroyed by excessive grazing, that only one plant in the entire country could be found to be sent to him, although less than a century previously, at the beginning of the Civil War, Caesar had 1500 lbs of it stored in the state treasury. Cyrene also carried on an extensive caravan trade with Equatorial Africa across the Sahara.

Its population at this time was mostly made up of Greeks, Hellenized Berbers and a large colony of Jews. In AD 116 in the reign of Trajan, the Jews rose in revolt as they did that same year in Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus and other parts of the Levant. Cyrenaica never recovered from the effects of this insurrection, in the course of which 240,000 persons were slaughtered, although Hadrian, after a visit of inspection in AD 125, in an attempt to fill the gap in the population left by these massacres, imported peasants from Italy to work the soil, as Mussolini was to do some 1800 years later, also after a period of bloodshed.
²

The end of Cyrene as a Roman city came, as for so many other
Roman cities in the Mediterranean, with the arrival of the Vandals from Spain in the fifth century, Germanic-Scandinavian predators who moved and fought on horseback.

In 533 the Vandals were attacked and defeated on both land and sea by the Byzantine general Belisarius, who routed them completely, taking Carthage and carrying their king captive to Constantinople. They left behind them, after more than a century of occupation and the most horrible persecution of Catholic Christians, nothing but ruins, defaced statuary and general misery.

From now onward the Byzantines ruled in North Africa until well into the seventh century, by which time the Arab onslaughts were at their height and battle had already been joined in the course of the incursions they made from Egypt.

The third of these incursions was the most lasting in its effects. It took place in 670 when the Emir Oqba ibn Nafi penetrated deep into what was later to be known as Ifriqiya, present-day Tunis and eastern Algeria. While doing so he received a mystical revelation and this impelled him to found Kairouan, a city that was to become, after Mecca and Medina, the most venerated in the Muslim world.

Now as we roared on again westwards through the red earth and limestone uplands of the Jebel Akhdar, knowing without seeing that they were there because we had seen them on the outward journey, through groves of olive trees, uncountable thousands of newly planted fruit trees, fields of cauliflowers, wheat, barley, grapes that would be eaten here in Libya but never crushed and fermented unless clandestinely, greenhouses full of ripening tomatoes, we sensed the palpable disapproval of Mr Seddik Mabruk, who, if it had been left to him and not the Leader, would not have admitted us to his country under any pretext, a feeling of disapproval which hung over our heads like a cloud of poison gas.

Gratefully we accepted a couple of Mr Khalid Ziglam’s, our bodyguard’s, apparently inexhaustible supplies of Marlboros with which, silly boy, he was apparently trying his best to smoke himself to death.

Now I knew that unless God worked in an even more mysterious way
vis-à-vis
ourselves than he had done up to now not only would we never see Cyrene, but we would never see Leptis Magna either, which I had wanted to visit ever since as a small boy of five and a half I had been taken to see some of its marble columns and other masonry in Windsor Great Park. They had been plundered in 1817 by a British naval commander of antiquarian tastes, who excavated them from the dunes which at that time engulfed the city, fortunately choosing as the site for his depredations the middle of the vast forum where he could do comparatively little damage. Having done so, and having a ship handy, he sent them to England where the Prince Regent, a suitably cultured recipient, had them re-erected or otherwise left about in picturesque disorder on the shores of Virginia Water, an ornamental lake, where they make, surprisingly, a rather lugubrious impression.

I longed to see this Roman city over which everyone who has seen it goes into ecstasies. Formerly a Carthaginian, and before that a Phoenician, settlement, it had been brought to its final state of splendour and perfection by the Emperor Septimius Severus, a very dark, almost black, bearded native of Leptis, son of a noble father and a black concubine, who spoke Latin with an African accent and died at York on 4 February 211.

It must have been a wonderful, perhaps not beautiful, possibly vulgar city, if only for the extraordinary variety of marble, porphyry, granite and other more or less exotic rocks which Severus imported from all over the empire, either in the form of enormous monoliths which weighed so much that more than two
of them put aboard a ship of the time would probably have sent it to the bottom instantly, or as facing stone for what had previously been a city mainly built of a not very inspiring mixture of brick and porous limestone.

I wanted to see the Severan Forum, the most splendid of its kind in existence – finer, according to Sacheverell Sitwell, whom one feels ought to know, than that of Rome because less cluttered – and the Medusa heads on what remained of the arcades that surrounded it, and the headless figures of the Muses on the house of a man called Jason Magnus, whose robes were so lightly carved that one could imagine them to be moving. I wanted to see the enormous temple that the Byzantines had turned into a basilica, and the wonderful white marble statue of Venus Aphrodite with the bracelets on her gleaming upper arms and her plaited tresses, noseless as every other statue the Vandals ever came within striking distance of, striking off these and other natural protuberances which for them perhaps had some curious iconoclastic significance associated with their Arianism, noseless but still beautiful.

‘It’s funny to think, isn’t it,’ Wanda said, as we travelled in through the outskirts of Tripoli to the centre of the city, ‘that the only way you’ll probably ever see anything of Leptis Magna now will be by going down to Virginia Water on a bus.’

Back in Tripoli, feeling that we had trespassed on the Leader’s hospitality sufficiently for the time being, and having received an invitation from him to come back in a couple of months and see him in the flesh as it were, by which time it was hoped that things might have quietened down a bit up at the top and that he would send us a couple of return air tickets (they didn’t and he didn’t, being heavily involved in the nightmare activities in St James’s Square), we decided to press on to Tunis by bus and train and any other means of transport that suggested itself.

To tell the truth, not being accustomed to it except in strictly regulated doses, we were beginning to become sated, even after a couple of days of it, of the sort of luxury which his aides lavished on us on his behalf: the beef which if you hadn’t got a spoon you could practically suck through a straw, the sumptuous lavatories in which we didn’t dare fart, let alone speak, for fear of putting all that delicate East German listening apparatus out of joint, not to mention giving the operators of it the equivalent of shell shock, the provision of which, including all other accommodation, transportation and the constant presence of one mad driver, one bodyguard and one accompanying official, was estimated by Old Libya Hands whom we met in the equivalent of the bar, swigging Pepsi as if it was methylated spirits – Old Hands anywhere being notoriously inaccurate – to have cost the Jamahariyah some £3000 ($4200).

‘You,’ they all said, ‘are the first British tourists.’

They also said that we were insane to go to Tunisia by bus, which further emboldened us to do so, but we began to think that they might be right after having spent a couple of hours down at the bus terminal, which is located in a large puddle outside the walls of the Old City, buying our tickets for the following morning, a Saturday, only to find when we got back to the hotel that they had been made out for the following Wednesday, which was rather similar to what had happened at Antalya in Turkey. After this, worn down by our efforts to be independent in late-twentieth-century Libya, we scuttled off in search of our Libyan nanny, Mr Abdussalem Abouaza, a senior official who himself accompanied us to the bus station and fixed everything for the following morning in ten minutes, which in Britain would be the equivalent of getting a fairly senior ministry official to come down from Whitehall to book us a couple of seats at Victoria Coach Station on a bus going to Aberdeen. He did this at a cost
to us of about £8 ($11.20) a head for a journey of 387 miles which would get us as far as Sousse in Tunisia. There we planned to board the 19.27 train operated by the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fers Tunisiens for the last 90-odd miles to Tunis, travelling as a treat in what the SNCFT described as
grand confort
, otherwise
luxe
, meantime sampling the light refreshment facilities, drinking one hoped Tunisian wine and arriving at Tunis at 22.14, with luck still in time for dinner.

Not only this. Taking pity on our Libyan ruinless state Mr Abouaza drove us that day to Sabaratha, the Carthaginian/Roman city down on the shore, forty miles west of Tripoli which, like Leptis Magna, for so many centuries, until the Italians excavated it, lay buried in the sands down on the seashore, more Greek, more Oriental than Roman, conceived not by an emperor but by some unknown genius or genii, now being buried once more not in sand but under mesembryanthemum.

By the time we reached it, the custodian was already locking up, but he was prevailed upon to let us in and we saw in the last of the sunset, its masonry turned a deep orange by it, a theatre that was itself a stage set, with tiers of colonnades one above the other towering eighty feet or so in the air and with its exits and its entrances reaching out through enfilades of corridors, each one giving a vista of what was a foam-flecked sea. An architecture which has few, if any, parallels in the ancient world, except perhaps in the Nabatean city of Petra; but nearer in spirit, with its tricks of perspective, to those wooden structures of the Renaissance, Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, the Teatro Farnese at Parma or, nearer our own time but in a miniature version, the museum house of Sir John Soane in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

And so, at eight o’clock the following morning, we said goodbye to Tripoli, where the Roman Catholic Cathedral is now a mosque and the bell tower is a minaret which even the most devoted
muezzin might jib at climbing five times a day but has no need to, as he has installed a loud-hailer in it. A city in which there are shops selling almost every known foreign newspaper but not much else, and in which the Old City, now that the
souks
have been closed and replaced by super-
souks
on the outskirts, is now more like a City of the Dead.