Postcards from the past: Umayyad Mosque, Damascus

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Damascus, Umayyad Mosque

Sunday, December 30 2000

It’s afternoon now. I’ve spent the morning in the National Museum amongst carved statuary and screens, glass, pottery, inlaid swords, suits of chain mail and a room which was panelled, painted, carved, domed and richly dim. 

I enter the  mosque tentatively, not quite sure of protocols, and find myself in an area of space and shade, where I’m offered a long brown robe with a hood and watch a gardener sweep up leaves, and knock a huge rough-skinned lemon off one of the courtyard trees close to the mausoleum of Saladin. I move into the main area, the area shown in the postcard and I’m overwhelmed by detail: minarets, marble inlay, wooden screens, lapis lazuli and gold. Above it all swirls of pigeons.

Inside the mosque is vast. Children race up and down the centre part, skidding on rugs and falling flat on their backsides. Groups of women sit in groups off to the side chatting. Men, shoes lined up neatly behind them, prostrate themselves in prayer. An old man sits talking to earnest groups and blessing children. I too sit at the foot of a pillar, taking it all in.

As I put my shoes back on, a small boy wearing a Pooh Bear jacket takes up his position in front of me and looks with huge brown eyes at this strange woman, who smiles back without breaking his concentrated stare.

The day hasn’t ended yet. I move into the calligraphy museum next door. There is a woman caretaker and I feel more at ease. I’m in a square space with an octagonal fountain in the centre, which suddenly comes to life. The ceiling is gold and blue-corniced and richly painted with vases  and spirals of flowers; the back wall opens into a casement with heavy, brass-barred doors; behind an arch a stained glass window. I sit down, sketching and describing. What began by looking like relatively simple patterning proves to be intricacy within intricacy: pink, gold, green, white, black, grey, red. This focused frenzy of description comes to an end when my fingers begin to freeze: a functioning fountain is best on a hot day.

I walk the length of the street called Straight: the churches of Ananias and St Paul; keffiyehs, iqals, sacks of pulses and grain; a small foundry with two young men cross legged rhythmically banging something glowing and metallic; another young man sitting on the kerb demonstrating a kind of kitchen whizz, chopping parsley and making a lattice of potatoes.

 

A short slideshow in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque

 

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That was my experience of Damascus seventeen years ago. For Damascus now, read this.

Backpacking in Syria and Jordan, 2000: background

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Jordan, Syria

What am I, a woman in my mid-fifties, doing, lugging a backpack around Syria and Jordan on my own in 2000?

I’ll tell you. I’m trying to keep up with my family. 

J is walking the scenic rim, guided by a mud map and a snake, and sailing a boat across Moreton Bay – he’s never sailed before.

H and his mate (and dogs) are exploring the tip of Cape York.

S has just embarked on fatherhood.

F and her then partner are packing their pushbikes for a ride through Borneo, Sarawak, Bangladesh and India.

R is picking tomatoes manically to top up the budget so she can cycle alone through Laos, southern China, across the Sinai, through Jerusalem, to Sardinia, via Paris.

And me? I’m living a banal, routine life, going to work and coming home (mind you, sometimes that’s three days later.) I settle down with the Saturday paper, and suddenly I’m on full alert. Sydney University is looking for paying volunteers to go on a dig at Pella in Jordan. That’s me. Always interested in archeology since reading my uncle’s books as a child. In funds, because that same uncle has just left me money. Familiar (sort of) with travel in the middle east after three weeks in Egypt a few years before.

So I apply, face the interview, get my teeth and appendix checked, and feel secure in the thought of travelling with the group.

Until I settle down again with the Saturday paper. This time I open the travel section, and I’m confronted by a full page colour photo of the Treasury at Petra viewed through the slit at the end of the siq. That photo! Well, I think. Nothing daring about hopping on a plane with a group. What if …? And before I know it, I’ve booked flight to Syria and extended my stay in Jordan.

That’s how I end up in Damascus, backpacked and travel weary, muttering the mantra against my terror: “Other people do it: why not me?” There’s my hotel, the Al Haramein, just up that alley. A man accosts me offering to carry my bag. I say “No thanks”. He lunges and tweaks my nipple. I say “Get out of it.” He disappears. I feel my self-confidence expand: if I can deal with that, jet lagged and in a strange place, I can deal with anything.

On my first morning alone in the Middle East I make my way to the ancient covered market and walk under ruined Roman arches to the Umayyad mosque with its striped walls and unreadable Arabic calligraphy. I sit on the cold marble of a decayed fountain and watch the orange juice man throw water over his uncut oranges; boys playing shuttlecock, old men drinking tea, boys cantering on horses decked in bells, cars moving through impossibly narrow spaces. Then the haunting call to prayer.

That night I ditch my go-go-go itinerary, because I’ve discovered the pleasures of following my nose and of pausing. 

Such is the personal background to my next series of Postcards from the Past. The other unspeakably awful background is the destruction and death taking place in Syria now, which make my blithe reminiscences seem almost indecent.

Postcards from the past: Siwa, Egypt

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Siwa Oasis

Tuesday, January 13th, 1998

We travel to the Siwa oasis, first in a service taxi from Cairo to Alexandria – an hour’s wait till it was full – and then in a rattletrap of a bus along the Mediterranean coast. We drive through rain and desolation: thorn trees, desert and half-started, half-finished, half-ruined houses. We are the only foreigners. 

Our balcony looks down over the village square towards Shali. I watch little kids rolling tyres along like hoops: endless donkey carts piled high with long greens or tied-up palm leaves, a tented woman getting off the afternoon bus accompanied by a shawled man. Soldiers carry plastic bags full of oranges. Three men discuss a wad of money at length. A crowd gathers around a truck, buying goats and sheep: a reluctant horned one is being pushed and shoved along by its new owners. An old man sits cross-legged in the sun sorting dates, nudging them with a dusty toe. I can see down into rooftops too: women, uncovered, pegging out the washing; dates drying; quirls of bicycle tyres; a shelf with cages for ducks. Wide cracks snake down some of the mud brick walls.

I wake to the call to prayer, a hoarse amplified chant in the morning silence. Then the roosters, a truck starting up, the peaceful cooing of pigeons. My daughter rolls over and the bed squeaks and crashes metalically. Then a choking gasping for breath: the laughing braying of a donkey.

I walk out into the crisp morning: the sound of the wind against my ears, a ute driving beside the palm grove, the creak of a cart, voices. A couple of birds wade in the lake. Children are heading off to school and I follow them: two little boys say eagerly “Gotta ben?” (pen). Women in black cluster, chatting as women do everywhere as they see their kids off. Fences beside the path are interwoven palm fronds; the water in the ditches is very clear with little fish swimming around;  the donkey shit a rich iridescent purple. I encounter placid donkeys tied to poles, and an aggressive turkey. A lad setting up a stall of pickled  olives says “Welcome to Siwa” with a big smile. Young men on bikes wheel past on the way to work, carrying thick sticks and machetes.

 I plod off towards the temple of Amun, in the steps of Alexander, who came here seeking an oracle. It isn’t far, but it’s hot. Scaling the hill looks impossible, but I circumambulate it and find the desired track – and an undesired guide whom I finally pay not to guide me. The building is partly huge blocks of stone, partly mud brick, a lot of it tumbledown or propped up with scaffolding. The view from any high place in this desert is spectacular. I’m looking down on the top of palm trees across a lake and out to a tabletop hill. In another direction the view is interrupted by the blocky minaret, no longer safe to climb, and slabs of wall. As I return I run into a heap of tourists heading where once was solitude. 

That night we eat out and watch Siwa by night. Donkey carts creak past, on one a shrouded woman: a huge green truck rumbles by: kids gather round a communal TV or play table tennis or queue at a stall where a man is stuffing torpedo shaped rolls with something from a pan balanced on a gas burner. A tall good-looking man approaches us with an album of photos from a desert safari, hoping we’ll be tempted. Another man, this one wearing a tattered grimy robe, begins ceremonially shaking hands with everyone till he is hustled away by the owner. After we’ve eaten we walk along a dark puddly lane through an arched door into a cavernous room to buy breakfast bread , which is counted out and handed over in a speckled pile.

It is full moon, and my daughter and I walk into the ancient mud brick town of Shali, along narrow streets with towering ruins above them. As we sit and talk at the foot of crumbling walls, a flock of birds flies over, catching the white light of the moon and blessing our time in Siwa.

Postcards from the past: Dahab

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Dahab (Egypt)

January 1998

We (my daughter and I) arrive at Dahab after a crazy taxi ride through the night across the Sinai under a bright moon. The road is pitted with potholes and the driver turns off his lights as he careens around corners on the wrong side of the road. There is a vociferous argument somewhere in the middle of nowhere and a passenger is unceremoniously dumped.

We survive, and set off to walk to Abu Gelum: we collect a lift from a man R knows, lonely after the departure of his Swedish wife (but not for long: that night we see him entwined with a leggy blond.) Walking, we don’t notice great rocks, deep sand, or very narrow gaps between boulders: in the truck, they are the stuff of nightmares.

At the Blue Hole, we set off on foot again into parched hills, up a rock slide and finally round a bluff looking down to the sea. Now we’re confined between bare mountains and coral reef, trudging over pink rocks with black seams, towards a Bedouin camp. The rocky outcrops could almost be the worn statues of Egyptian god-kings. 

We finally reach a cove with a rocky beach. The sea is lapis lazuli ripples reflecting the gold of the sunshined rocks – the blue and gold of Tutankhamen. A man on a camel sways past, the music of his transistor the only sound, a tall silhouette against the sky as he disappears around the corner.

The way back seems shorter, but even so I slowly collapse into the semi-foetal walk of total fatigue. We sit cross- legged on a carpet and eat Berber potatoes: my daughter indulges in a session of fruitless bargaining for a scarf: and finally I haul myself up and  stagger to bed.

Postcards from the past: Cairo

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Cairo

January 1998

It’s my first foray overseas. I’m visiting my daughter, who’s living in Cairo in an apartment with a broken floor, which you enter via a grand marble staircase. We breakfast at a kosherie on a bowl of lentils, rice and noodles which we can flavour from two jugs, one chilli sauce, one garlic sauce – definitely not to be mistaken for jugs of water.

Then we enter the markets. People often murmur “Welcome” to us, and there are gentle comments “You are beautiful” directed at my daughter – although they may well be lascivious comments. I’m not a good judge. The markets are thick with people, horses, mules, trolleys, bikes and even cars. The road is deep in rubbish: there’s small fire burning some of it. Men dump plastic tarps on the ground and open them to reveal trousers, towels, underclothes, sox. Women walk past with impossible bundles on their heads. We dodge and bump and forge ahead, tunnelling a path through the crowd. Stalls cluster by categories – hair products, cushions, jewellery, mandarins and dates, round flatbread puffed into fragile domes. Men skin and fillet chickens, a bucket at their feet to catch gizzards and blood. Soldiers with guns sit on wooden chairs at the edge of the path. Sometimes my world is simplified to the strap of my daughter’s backpack which I grip to make sure I don’t lose her. 

We come to a less busy street and are waylaid by a man in a brown robe who ushers us through scaffolding into the Mausoleum of Qalaun. He draws us closer with a beckoning finger as he points out the octagonal dome with stained glass windows: the screens made of cedars of Lebanon; carved stucco; the name of the prophet in mother of pearl inlaid in marble in exquisite panels.

We pay him – my daughter haggles – and begin to climb the semi-ruined and propped up minaret to a rubbly rooftop. The spiral staircase, winds tightly around itself, my fear of heights wobbling into my legs and fighting with my desire to look out over Cairo. I complete the climb on all fours, emerging onto the minaret balcony contained by a rickety wooden fence, a drop directly down into the market.

I look out: minarets, domes, the citadel, the chunky square houses of ordinary Cairo. The city reverberates to the three o’clock call to prayer.