Read Online A Writer's World by Jan Morris - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jan Morris
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Atlantis of the soul. Sadly such unfortunates will take you to the top of their buildings for a view into No Man’s Land. There it runs, a strip of depressed and littered soil, cluttered with derelict buildings, coils of wire, piles of miscellaneous rubbish. Into a few tumble-down buildings near the Arab line a few poor house-hunters have surreptitiously seeped; in the middle an Israeli housewife, oblivious of international asperities, has hung her washing; and on the very edge, close to the walls of the Old City, a small Jewish army post sits boldly behind sandbags on top of a ruined terrace.
It is another world across that frontier, bland and barred, as if some totally foreign and aloof civilization has implanted itself there. The Arabs can only look across and wonder, but they live in the second holiest city of Islam, and their own world survives. The glorious Dome of the Rock was damaged in the fighting, but surrounded by its wide courtyards, its arches and stairways and old walls, it is still of a shimmering splendour, and the peasants still stand reverent and awestruck before it.
Christians too, as they wander the sacred sites, may feel their philosophies secure. The Franciscan pilgrims make their way as always along the Via Dolorosa, the brown-robed monks, the American women in their cotton frocks, the family of Italians kneeling on the hard cobblestones beside the Stations of the Cross. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, split, shuttered, disfigured and profaned by ancient schisms and rivalries, the Latins process each evening: cultured voices and Gregorian chants, a visiting English priest, a stream of pilgrims carryinglighted tapers. A few moments later come the Greeks, their music harsh and discordant, their aged bishop so enshrouded in his vestments that only his spectacles and a few white hairs can be glimpsed beneath his hood in the half-light. An old woman lays down her stick and raises her hands in worship in the subterranean chapel of the Armenians; a tall Abyssinian monk stands, lost in meditation, silent among the pillars; in the little Coptic chapel behind the Sepulchre a moon-faced kitchen clock ticks tinnily upon the altar.
*
So the piety of Old Jerusalem survives, and countless sects of Islam and Christendom still thrive among its walls. But this city is never at ease, and in its southern section, inside the Dung Gate, there is a wide expanse of ruin, flattened houses and crumbling courtyards, inhabited only by unhappy scabrous refugees begging bakitesh . The Jews have left their quarter of Jerusalem, and their houses are laid waste. The Wailing Wall is deserted, with never a crumpled paper inserted between Herod’s gigantic stones, and cabbages grow in the Jewish cemetery above the Vale of Kedron.
In 1967 the Israelis were to seize the whole of Jerusalem, and since then – well, you know the rest.
Iran
Persia, as Iran was generally called then, was still governed by the Shah-in- Shah, King of Kings, successor to the dynasties of the Qajars, the Afsharids, the Safayids and the Ilkhans. The Times was chiefly interested in the affairs of the huge Anglo-Iranian oil refinery at Abadan, in the south, but I preferred to potter around the Shah’s cities of the interior, because I greatly relished the peculiar tang of their ancient civilization, not yet coarsened in the world’s reputation by Iranian fanaticisms to come.
Persia makes its own rules. There never was such a tortuous, inside-out, back-to-front way of thinking as the Persian way; never such a fascinating, will-o’-the-wisp, unpredictable community of people; nowhere buildings so inexpressibly lovely, nowhere a landscape more peculiar than the wide Iranian plain, sometimes bleak beyond description, sometimes warm and multi-coloured, often queerly criss-crossed with the big round craters thatmark the passage of underground water channels. Ask a Persian which is his right ear, and he will put his left hand behind his head and point it out
It is another world across that frontier, bland and barred, as if some totally foreign and aloof civilization has implanted itself there. The Arabs can only look across and wonder, but they live in the second holiest city of Islam, and their own world survives. The glorious Dome of the Rock was damaged in the fighting, but surrounded by its wide courtyards, its arches and stairways and old walls, it is still of a shimmering splendour, and the peasants still stand reverent and awestruck before it.
Christians too, as they wander the sacred sites, may feel their philosophies secure. The Franciscan pilgrims make their way as always along the Via Dolorosa, the brown-robed monks, the American women in their cotton frocks, the family of Italians kneeling on the hard cobblestones beside the Stations of the Cross. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, split, shuttered, disfigured and profaned by ancient schisms and rivalries, the Latins process each evening: cultured voices and Gregorian chants, a visiting English priest, a stream of pilgrims carryinglighted tapers. A few moments later come the Greeks, their music harsh and discordant, their aged bishop so enshrouded in his vestments that only his spectacles and a few white hairs can be glimpsed beneath his hood in the half-light. An old woman lays down her stick and raises her hands in worship in the subterranean chapel of the Armenians; a tall Abyssinian monk stands, lost in meditation, silent among the pillars; in the little Coptic chapel behind the Sepulchre a moon-faced kitchen clock ticks tinnily upon the altar.
*
So the piety of Old Jerusalem survives, and countless sects of Islam and Christendom still thrive among its walls. But this city is never at ease, and in its southern section, inside the Dung Gate, there is a wide expanse of ruin, flattened houses and crumbling courtyards, inhabited only by unhappy scabrous refugees begging bakitesh . The Jews have left their quarter of Jerusalem, and their houses are laid waste. The Wailing Wall is deserted, with never a crumpled paper inserted between Herod’s gigantic stones, and cabbages grow in the Jewish cemetery above the Vale of Kedron.
In 1967 the Israelis were to seize the whole of Jerusalem, and since then – well, you know the rest.
Iran
Persia, as Iran was generally called then, was still governed by the Shah-in- Shah, King of Kings, successor to the dynasties of the Qajars, the Afsharids, the Safayids and the Ilkhans. The Times was chiefly interested in the affairs of the huge Anglo-Iranian oil refinery at Abadan, in the south, but I preferred to potter around the Shah’s cities of the interior, because I greatly relished the peculiar tang of their ancient civilization, not yet coarsened in the world’s reputation by Iranian fanaticisms to come.
Persia makes its own rules. There never was such a tortuous, inside-out, back-to-front way of thinking as the Persian way; never such a fascinating, will-o’-the-wisp, unpredictable community of people; nowhere buildings so inexpressibly lovely, nowhere a landscape more peculiar than the wide Iranian plain, sometimes bleak beyond description, sometimes warm and multi-coloured, often queerly criss-crossed with the big round craters thatmark the passage of underground water channels. Ask a Persian which is his right ear, and he will put his left hand behind his head and point it out
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