Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 28

Near Shechem I reached out a fur-gloved hand and showed my pa.s.senger the approximate spot where, seven months earlier, I was shot down and awoke to find Arab nomads approaching my wrecked machine. Slightly to the west was Nazareth, perched pleasingly on high ground.

The pear-shaped Sea of Galilee flickered with iridescent twinkling in the sunlight. Just north of where the river flows into the lake I picked out the point at which a regiment of the Australian Light Horse, confronted on the far bank by a Turco-German force sent from Damascus to defend the ford, swam their horses across the Jordan and routed the enemy.

The patchwork flatness below changed to more plains of gray-brown grain-country and gray-green orchard land neighboured on the east by the desert that was a populous province in the days when armies of age-old civilizations--a.s.syrian, Babylonian, Medean, Persian, Macedonian, and Arabian--swept backward and forward in waves of conquest and counter-conquest, to and from Nineveh, Babylon, Ctesiphon, and Old Bagdad, until the Turkish hordes swarmed across from Central Asia and ruined all the lands they conquered.

Small and indistinct at first, then expanding into a vivid clearness as we flew toward it, Damascus came into sight; and of all the views from the air that I remember from flights in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, England, and America, this was incomparably the loveliest.

Far away to the west was Mount Lebanon, and from it stretched a line of mountains, growing ever bleaker as they neared the Syrian Desert. The low ground dominated by the heights was a maze of forests, wheat-fields, pasturage, and orchard land, intermingled with patches of sand. Straight ahead was the ancient city of Damascus, a straggling surface of white roofs pierced by the domes and minarets of many mosques, all in a gray whiteness, as if powdered with the dust of its four thousand years of history. Pharpar and Abana, the twin rivers of Damascus, showed up plainly as, converging and diverging, they descended from their sources on the rim of the mountain, and lost themselves in the jig-saw of crooked streets and square-topped houses.

The background is the wide, s.h.i.+mmering desert that loses itself on the eastern horizon.

Having, to the roaring accompaniment of a 1918 Hispano-Suiza aero-engine, circled over this city half as old as time, I spiralled down and landed on the aerodrome.

On horses borrowed from the Sikhs who guarded the aerodrome we cantered towards the city, three miles distant. The road was utterly vile, for apart from Turkish neglect it had for three years been dented and spoiled by German motor lorries. Every few yards we had to edge our horses round some large hole.

Inside Damascus long-disused tram-lines rose high above the roadway.

Through the narrow, winding streets there streamed a medley of camels, horses, fat men riding on thin donkeys, goats, rainbow-robed Bedouins, veiled women in black, and fezzed Syrians and Armenians. All of them--camels, donkeys, horses, and humans--wound in and around each other without any pretence at order.

Under such conditions the least mishap is enough to bring about a block in the haphazard traffic. We were held up for nearly twenty minutes when a donkey, with a huge load of wood straddled on its back, lay down near a hole in the road, and refused to budge. Men, women, and animals mingled confusedly, and exhortation and imprecations were flung at the donkey and its master. The onlookers were raining advice as we halted our horses on the rim of the crowd, but none made an attempt to help.

And the following is an approximate but far from literal translation of a few remarks:

"O thou unfortunate one! He has a donkey with a stubborn spirit. It has deposited itself on the ground and most annoyingly refuses to rise."

"Beat it hard, I say! I have a string of camels which become unruly because they cannot proceed. Beat it, I say!"

"Nay, rather speak kindly and apply gentle pressure to the under-parts.

Then will it lift its forefeet and stand erect. Stubborn donkeys care naught for blows."

"Cow-faced son of an exceedingly fat she-dog! Displace thy heavy hoof from my astonis.h.i.+ngly painful toes!"

"_Ah-ee! Ah-ee!_ But a moment hence I had a money-purse, and it has left me."

"O thou unfortunate one! He had a money-purse, and it has left him. O thou unfortunate one!"

And although all knew that the purse was probably hidden in the folds of some Arab's robe, those near the unfortunate one searched and scratched the ground, probably none more a.s.siduously than the man who could have produced it.

Now if the period had been two months earlier a Turkish gendarme would have taken the donkey-owner apart, and, if he failed to offer a bribe, shot his prostrate beast and hauled its carcase to the roadside. As likely as not it would have been the gendarme who stole the unfortunate one's money.

What actually happened was this. A sun-browned man in light khaki tunic, short trousers, and bare knees sauntered along, a cigarette drooping from the left-hand corner of his mouth.

"_Saa-eeda, Tommy Effendi_," said one of the loiterers, making way for him.

"d.a.m.ned old fool of a moke," said the man in shorts; then bent down and alternately stroked, pushed, and spoke to the donkey. Somehow he persuaded it to rise and start walking. The crowd disentangled itself and its animals from each other, and dispersed. And the man in shorts, his cigarette still dangling from the left-hand corner of his mouth, pa.s.sed on, as casual and unsurprised as if he had been in Brixton or Birmingham.

Both in appearance and in spirit Damascus had changed much since the days of my captivity. Dest.i.tution was yet evident, but far less flagrantly than when I had seen starving babies lying against the walls and crying their hunger. There were no more furtive looks, and many more smiles. The swaggering Germans were supplanted by companionable Tommies, the tyrannous Turkish gendarmes by the headdressed Arab police. In the long, arcaded bazaar the traders had brought out their stocks of carpets, prayer-rugs, silks, and precious stones, h.o.a.rded during the war, and were selling them at prices far below those ruling in war-time Cairo or war-time anywhere else. And everywhere the Arabian flag was prominent.

For many a day the talk in the bazaars had been of a new Arabian Empire, as a reward for the exploits of King Hussein's Arabs--exploits that had not only freed Arabia and helped to free Syria, but had involved the abolition of all blood-feuds in a thousand miles of semi-lawless country. The Emir Feisul, son of King Hussein (and thus a direct descendant of the Prophet), was on his way to the Peace Conference in Paris, accompanied by Colonel Lawrence, the young Englishman who was the soul of the Arab national revival, and of the Arabs' epic campaigns between Mecca and Damascus. And many citizens of Damascus were hoping that he would return with the realization of their dreams that the city was to be the centre of pan-Arabian greatness.

My enquiries at Baranki Barracks, and in the offices of the British Provost-Marshal and the Arab gendarmerie, failed to trace the fate of George; and I had to be content with the memory of a futile little figure standing on the steps of our railway carriage, on the morning after our betrayal, and saying, with despair in his voice: "I have so little courage. I ask pardon."

Of the other intimate characters in the story I can account for all but two. Jean Willi, the Israelite dragoman who was my benefactor at Nazareth, has not yet given me the chance to pay back in part the good deeds that I owe him; but I still have hopes. And I can only guess at what has happened to Michael Ivanovitch t.i.toff, now somewhere behind the screen which, since the Bolshevist reoccupation of last spring, separates Odessa from the normal world. From what I know of his character I am certain that when the Soviet troops arrived he proclaimed himself a Bolshevist, and took full advantage of the conditions whereby the unrighteous have special opportunity to flourish.

Vladimir Franzovitch--a Russian as estimable as Michael Ivanovitch was despicable--died for the country he loved and despaired of, fighting in Denikin's army.

For the rest, I can offer happy endings as conventionally apposite as those of the worst "best-seller" of any lady novelist.

Miss Whittaker, the n.o.ble girl who played in Constantinople the heroic part of an Edith Cavell, is now Lady Paul. Less than a month ago an American wars.h.i.+p took her from Constantinople to Beyrout, where she married Captain Sir Robert Paul, one of the British officers whom she had helped to escape. She now lives in Aleppo, where Paul commands the Arab gendarmerie. In this crowded narrative I have failed to do justice to the brave and gifted woman who many times risked liberty and life in aiding unfortunate countrymen; but only because the last thing she would desire is advertis.e.m.e.nt have I refrained from writing the eulogy she deserves.

Another happy ending, almost too good to be true, was the recent wedding of Colonel Newcombe and Mlle. "X", the girl who arranged his escape from Broussa and concealed him in Constantinople while he worked for a withdrawal of Turkey from the war.

Mr. S., the British merchant who jeopardized his neck in helping no less than seven British officers to liberty, has returned to England, and should be conscious of much merit.

The Turkish armistice happened a few days before Theodore was to have been hanged. Fulton and Stone were released from the Ministry of War Prison, and twenty-four hours later, by means of threats, they obtained reprieve and freedom for the Greek waiter who had hidden them. He was then half dead, as a result of insufficient food, and of the dreadful, disease-ridden, insanitary, crowded state of his dungeon; but he recovered under careful nursing, and returned to his mother and sisters, in the house where the gendarmes had captured Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone.

The Maritza restaurant, near Stamboul station, still flourishes; but Theodore is no longer there. With the money gained by acting as conspirator-in-chief for British prisoners, he talks of coming to London and opening a small restaurant of his own. If this happens, he can count on regular customers from among those who saw him, with his bent shoulders and blue-gla.s.sed spectacles, flicking a secret letter on to the tablecloth, under cover of a menu-card.

Those of us who schemed, escaped, hoped, feared, wore disguises and whiskers, a.s.sumed illnesses and insanities, suffered, and amused ourselves generally are dispersed over five continents. Fulton and Stone are still in Constantinople, but as responsible officials instead of under-dogs of war. White is a quiet-living manufacturer in Melbourne. Hill and Jones, the madmen of Yozgad, Haidar Pasha, and Gumuch Souyou have gone their demobilized ways in sanity and content, one to Sydney, the other to Glasgow. Paul is in Syria, Colonel Newcombe in Egypt. Yeats-Brown, ex-Mlle. Josephine Albert, is in London, with an eyegla.s.s which he kept intact through three years of adventurous captivity, from the day when he was taken prisoner near Bagdad to the day when, from the verandah of his hiding-place opposite the deserted British Emba.s.sy in Constantinople, he looked along the Grande Rue de Pera and learned, from the fluttering Allied flags, that the Turkish armistice had been signed. Last and least, I am now in civilian blessedness and America.

Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, the restful beauty of a Thames backwater, the comforting hospitality of New York, the wealth-conscious heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damascus, watched the intrigues that coloured Constantinople during the twilight of the Turkish Empire, discuss Bolshevism and the price of revolvers with Vladimir Franzovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at Odessa.

And Time, the greatest of romantics, has nearly persuaded me to disregard memory and believe that I enjoyed it all.

THE END