***

At his birth, the angels were heard singing, “Holy God, We Praise Thy Game” until interrupted by Bob Sheppard intoning from on high “Now batting, Number 2: Derek Jeter. Jeter, marana tha!”

Around the manger were Ozzie Smith, Slats Marion and Honus Wagner wearing an ox suit.

Derek when asked about the story of his answering the rabbis at age twelve: “My dad took me out in the yard and threw everything he had at me. I was ready”

Derek emerging from the Jordan at his baptism hears a voice from on high, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” He replies: “Thank you, Mr. Torre. I’ll try my best.”

The temptation in the desert (condensed): Satan: “Damn Yankees!” Derek: “I want to wear that jersey forever.” Satan slinks off to his cubicle in the Commissioner’s office.

Derek at the marriage feast of Cana: “I have no plans myself. And as for the wine, if my mom wants a drink once in a while, that’s OK with me.”

Derek to the paralytic: “Rehab is difficult. You’ve just got to stay with it.”

Derek’s Sermon on the Mount (excerpts): “Am I better than Ripkin? I leave that up to the fans to decide…Yes, like the Father, I have many mansions, including a knockout in Miami, but there’s nothing wrong with being poor, God bless ‘em.”

Derek to the woman with the flux of blood: “There are good days and bad days. You just have to play through them.

Derek at the woman taken in adultery: “You can hurt your arm if you throw off your back foot like that.”

Derek seated between Moses and Elias at his Transfiguration: “I played with a lot of great guys.”

Derek at the triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: “It’s not about me. It’s all about the Twelve and winning.”

Derek at the Last Supper: “It been a great season. This one’s on me guys.”

Judas (Matsui?) kisses Derek in Gethemane: “I try to avoid this kind of thing and stay focused on the game.

Derek to Pilate: “I don’t think this is a good time to talk contract renewal. Next question.”

Derek to the Good Thief (Robinson Cano) on the cross: “Listen, everybody has slumps. I found that extra batting practice helps.”

The women who go to anoint the body of Derek discover to their dismay that he’s already checked out.

Derek ascending into heaven as the team watches from the pitcher’s mound on the Mount of Olives: “Don’t worry. I’ll be there on Opening Day.”

I presently live in the World, an enormously attractive place from which there is no return. There are still some of Ours about, not nearly so many as there used to be, and presumably the assault goes on as planned, though with what success I do not know. We chat about other things, I and Ours, we we chance to meet, without acrimony and often in that winning worldly style that the Jesuits cultivate to charm the hell out of Externs and win their Immortal souls. They are ambivalent but satisfying conversations, those random moments here and there, because I was schooled in the same discourse, and the rich ambiguity of encounter between the Worldly Jesuit and the Jesuit Worldling gives pleasure to both.

When I first offered myself to the Jesuits I was assured that yes, of course I could join their illustrious Company. First, however, there would be a modest orientation: it went under the innocent name of the Novitiate. The Novitiate was modest only by paleontological standards: that orientation went on during every waking minute of every day for two long years. Its object was quite simply to strip off my worldly body-work right down to the chassis, replace the motor, and then reconstruct a new Jesuit model on the original specifications drawn up by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Basque fundador of that enterprise.

It must have worked for at least some of my contemporaries; they are still Jesuits. It obviously didn’t work on me. I think they may have missed the motor, or so I suspect since I could still hear the same old piston-rattling gas-guzzler knocking away under my shiny new black hood. Which is not to say I didn’t try. For nine years I gave the Jesuits what I could, which was probably not a great deal, and they gave me as much as I was willing to take, which was not nearly enough. On balance the debt is mine, not theirs. They taught me languages, logical and rhetorical analysis, a degree of self-discipline and, in the end, my own spiritual limits, which turned out to be astonishingly narrow. I discovered I could adjust to almost anything and refrain from almost anything, if the motive was strong enough and the temperature low enough. With the cool Jesuits I adjusted and refrained for nine years; thrown into the World, my record is not nearly so good.

Ours love to be Ours. Their rules refer to the Jesuits as “this least Society,” an expression almost paralyzed with irony. If there is a “least Society” in the bosom of the Catholic Church, it is assuredly not, on the Jesuits’ own reckoning, the Society of Jesus. It must be some other confraternity pursuing its own imperfect vision of the religious life. Some religious orders were fitfully admired by Ours in the manner of a connoisseur smiling upon a picturesque ruin, once glorious things like the Benedictines or Dominicans that had fallen into decay. The more remote the ruin, the greater the pretended respect: the Carthusians, whom no one had ever encountered, were thought to be obscurely worthwhile, but the Franciscans, whatever their imagined service to the Church in the past, were by now innocuous poseurs. Others were mere cartoons: the dimly single-minded like the Passionists, shamelessly self-promoting entrepreneurs like the Maryknollers; the unnumbered hordes of helot bruits posing as Brothers, Christian, Irish Christian, Marist or whatever; and your parish priest, who at least owned up to his inferior status and so won from Ours the same grudging respect that the physician grants to the dentist but withholds from the insolent chiropractor.

Whoever they were, they were not to be compared to Ours. Jesuits were the Major Leagues, and the unanimously shared opinion was that everyone recognized it, even the Pope and, more importantly, even the World. Even now, long after turning in my pinstriped uniform with Ours emblazoned across the chest, the most modest and casual allusion to a Jesuit past still brings the shamelessly satisfying acknowledgment that this guy had once carried a bat to the plate in the Bigs.

I too loved being a Jesuit, being reckoned “one of Ours,” just as I would have loved being a Marine, I suspect, or a New York Yankee or a Supreme Court justice, and precisely, and not coincidentally, the way I loved being a student at Regis High School. And they didn’t fool me with their two years of Novitiate and the barrage of self-abnegating thorns they pumped like automatic weapon fire into the Novices’ willing flesh. No more than five minutes after the completion of the Novitiate the familiar Jesuit carrots began coming out of the bag. It was the anticipation of the taste of those carrots, I think, and not the fear of the stick that sustained me through those first two years.

As the Novitiate wore off, my twenty year old’s tongues and head, if not my heart, had slowly returned to life. The Society of Jesus was, as I correctly guessed, a kind of Regis writ large. People stayed or left the Jesuits of their own accord, but of those who stayed, no one was ever dismissed into lesser orders of being like the Franciscans or Dominicans; the sluggish of wit were compassionately allowed to sink down to the natural level of their specific gravity within the Society and to rest there on the graceful premise that God’s work takes many forms, even hearing the confessions of nuns and doing marriage counseling. Maybe, but I didn’t join the Church’s Marines to serve out my time as a lance corporal or doing KP. The Jesuits opened their competitive Pandora’s box to me in high school and I was disinclined to allow them to slam it closed on my fingers at this point. Just start the music and let’s get on with the dancing, I silently begged.

And I did. I danced for years with poets, with essayists, historians or philosophers in the language of their choice: with Catullus and the somewhat heavier-footed Thomas in Latin; with Demosthenes and Aristotle in Greek; with Cicero, that show-off, in Latin or Greek, whatever was his mood; with Macaulay, Milton and Tennyson in the vernacular and Racine in fancy French Alexandrines. They led and I kept up, with ever increasing agility and even, after a while, with a degree of grace. Others wearied of the parsing, the composing and decomposing; I did not. I was ready for this part of the Jesuit life. I always had been, from those first Saturday mornings when Sister Gabriel pressed a bit and I began to respond. I had the skills, and the ease and confidence followed in the Jesuit years. I ate up the two years reading the Classics at St. Andrew’s. I loved the three years of philosophy at St. Louis. I couldn’t wait to begin teaching Greek and Latin and English in high school, even though it was in Buffalo.

The Jesuits were fine. Not so bright as I and others might have expected, or as the Jesuits sometimes appear, or as they always think. No wonder perhaps. The nine of us who stood on the Jesuits’ doorstep that late July afternoon in 1945 were not untypical recruits, every last one of us from a Jesuit high school and a more or less lower middle-class Catholic family, most of them Irish-Catholic. There were no geniuses among us, just some fairly bright young men and a few just barely bright enough. When I emerged nine years later I was much the same, a fairly bright young adult, with some new skills but with most of my middle-class values, spiritual and intellectual, relentlessly intact.

And so I danced my little dance, not in the hesitant, still alien style I had just begun to learn at Regis, but now fully extended. It was a little difficult getting some open space in the Novitiate, those first two years of manual labor and meditative silence; the daily order imposed on the Novices was as dense as the text of Leviticus, and who could not dance to that music? Immured in a cell, I would surely have perished; let loose in the Talmud, I began to rhumba.

Later I stood in college classrooms and looked benignly on Yeshiva boys translated by whim or design into my secular university. They all wanted a little scuffle with me, those serious skull-capped youths, because I was, well maybe, a Christian and because I sometimes said unacceptable things about the date of the Torah. I don’t really care about the date of the Torah, but I did care about them because I was once one of them, and perhaps still am. You shake the Jesuit life with only somewhat less difficulty than you can shake a cycle in the Talmud. They wanted to fight with me and I want to waltz with them; by the end of the semester we were usually doing both.

Some of the habits and tastes I acquired in the Jesuits were permanent, like a mania for distinctions—datur tertium, frater, datur tertium!– and a disposition toward mid-afternoon naps; others were transient, like my flirtation with prayer and my easy mastery of life in an all-male society. I enjoyed the company of my fellow-warriors against the World, the Flesh and the Devil. The relationship was not very close, though the life was, since there was a strenuous taboo against any discussion of the personal. We never revealed ourselves to one another, and if there was pleasure in our consorting, it was the pleasure of shared experience, shared language, shared public joys and pains, in sheer survival in our slow progress through the long Jesuit training.

Nine years in the company only of men. In its intensity it was almost a lifetime of precious experience, and yet I now know as little about them as when I began the experiment. I had no curiosity about my fellow Jesuits either as individuals or as a group. Whatever the pleasure I took from our association, its ease and smoothness, they did not challenge or engage me. We played together, but only at sports. There was no intensity in it, no shared ambitions or hopes or sorrows, no desire to love or to wound. However difficult it is for me to love a woman, how many false starts and bad finishes there have been to that, I still do not know how even to begin to love a man.

The Jesuits encouraged charity, not love, and it may have been a better balm at such close quarters. Charity reduced the friction in our tightly geared machine; love might have blown it to God’s own heaven. But there was no great warmth in that charity, and at its imperfect edges it might even have passed for indifference. Indifference was in fact a highly regarded virtue, not merely of the Jesuits but of the religious life. It was frequently glossed as detachment, detachment from place, from things, from the cravings of self. When applied to persons, charity was supposed to intervene at some point before the indifferent psyche blacked out just this side of absolute zero. If you were lucky.

Whatever effort there was on my part, it was all wasted. Saint Ignatius, that genius of the spiritual life, had made a fatal miscalculation. He assumed a worldly engagement in his recruits, a Spanish lust as fiery as his own for the goods and pleasures and rewards of This Life, and he contrived an elaborate system to purge and cool that ardor. The Novices’ desks, sinks, beds, even companions and assignments were regularly and randomly shuffled to forestall a future love affair with the World’s greater temptations. Mutual and self-admonition were administered in calculated doses every hour of the day and night. Father Ignatius wanted to make spiritual Stoics; he just didn’t know what to do with an eighteen year old who presented himself at the front door of the Novitiate in the grip of an already perfect apatheia.

The Ignatian purge went right through me, who early on had decided I could play any hand dealt to me. I coolly finessed the shuffled sinks and beds and other lower cards, and when at length the crafty Iñigo was constrained to throw down his last ace, the temptation of going all in and actually becoming a Jesuit priest, I trumped it with indifferent ease, picked up my chips and left the game. I was far more detached than even Ignatius of Loyola could have contemplated or imagined.

It was certainly not from any lack of self-esteem that I had mastered detachment to such a heroic degree. Rather, my careful cultivation of that virtue of the spiritual life permitted my self-esteem to grow to almost pathological, almost Jesuitical grandeur. Shielded from all disappointment, all possibility of any but spiritual failure, and endlessly stroked by the hands of relatives, teachers and friends who thought they were picking the lock to my psyche but were simply giving it a massage, my ego scintillated in the darkness of the cloister. In the Jesuits’ spiritual laboratory dedicated to the eradication of that pernicious parasite, my already inflated Self was inspected on an almost hourly schedule. The Ego was usually given a sound thrashing in those prescribed bouts of self-analysis, but mine certainly derived some nourishment as well from all the attention, as did our collective psyches from the mere fact that we were all Jesuits.

The Jesuits were shut down once, the entire Order suppressed by the Pope because its power was becoming a little too much to handle for the rulers of Europe. The Suppression, which in Jesuit historiography was inevitably capitalized, like the Holocaust or the Black Death, was a thoroughly shameful act, all the latter-day Jesuits agreed; but if, on some highly unlikely, almost ludicrous supposition that there was some exceedingly trivial moral flaw that might conceivably have brought about such an unanticipated turn in Divine Providence, then one might possibly conjecture—the language became downright opaque at this sticky and embarrassing point—-that it was a lack of humility in that Least Society.

Indeed. The Jesuits found humility as improbable as a hedge fund manager might a vow of poverty. The Society of Jesus came into existence as an elite, and its members inculcated elitism in their students and their own recruits. They made me and my fellow Novices scrub latrines for two years –”Sure,” I said in my indifferent way, “Why not?”– but once that unpleasant exercise was completed, I at last settled down to the attractive task of preparing to be the Brightest and the Best, or what passed for such in that Company.

It was a superb life, a full scholarship whose only conditions were that you said your prayers and practiced poverty, chastity and obedience. I filled all the conditions, but only, I later suspected, because they were conditions, the price for being a Jesuit instead of the heart of the Jesuit life. It was not a dissimulation –that would have been dreadfully difficult under the circumstances– but a kind of carelessness which allowed me to slip, without a great deal of deliberation, from the high ground of the spirit to the meaner terrain of the letter.

And I loved the life too much to admit to myself that I was not living all of it. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked that nasty old spoilsport of a Church Father Tertullian. Well, to tell the truth, exactly nothing, except that I preferred to live in Greece than in the Holy Land, and the Jesuits’ brave attempt at dual citizenship was beyond my spiritual powers.
In the end I renounced Jerusalem; it was a place where I had no home nor ever would. And I renounced my Jesuit scholarship as well, as I must, just as it was beginning to swell with attractive vistas abroad at Oxford or Paris or Rome. The gesture was neither noble nor defiant. It had rather the prosaic quality of a student raising his hand to leave the room and never returning. No goodbyes. No regrets. No tears. Just in and out, with a nine year lifetime in between.

I asked and they granted me the Demissory Letters, a release from my canonical vows. The documents were validated by the American Assistant, the Rev. John R. Sanderson, S.J., on July 13, 1954, and a copy certified by the New York Provincial at Kohlmann Hall, Fordham University, Bronx, New York, was sent to the petitioner, me.

What we were all counting off by toll or tinkle or tick was the passage of two years of a Jesuit Novitiate. Afterward I would have a wristwatch and keep my own private accounts, but for those 24 months we all swam together in time’s river. The landmarks floated by on the shore: my first Christmas, first Lent, first Easter, easier days of the first summer, and then the reassuring but dispiriting spectacle of the second-year Novices making their Jesuit vows and taking their leave of the Novitiate, group by group, in July, August and September, whence they ascended majestically to the Juniorate.

Each group of blessed emigrants to the Holy Land was followed by the entry of new immigrants from the Old World. And when the newcomers were all settled in, we began all over again, now with the added burden of setting good example for the new Novices. Novices didn’t evolve into Juniors; like nature-manacled caterpillars, we all remained Novices for precisely 750 days, the span that the inexorable code of the Society of Jesus had ordained should be the gestation period of its butterflies. We all knew that the Novitiate lasted two years – such monumental figures are easy to handle and mean nothing – but sometime in my second year, someone came up beside my ear–it may have been another Novice or the Evil Spirit himself–and whispered, “Do you know, there’s only one hundred days left?” One hundred days? How long is one hundred days? But ten days later I was murmuring to myself that there were now three months left to go and everyone knew how short a time that was. I had, alas, started Counting.

Counting was a not uncommon disease that infected Novices of the second-year. It was only rarely fatal, but it was nonetheless an extremely painful affliction. Tradition reported that it had been first explored by one James DiGiorgio, S. J., whose desire to escape the First Probation was so urgent that he had calculated down to days, hours and minutes the time remaining to Vow Day and his release. He was capable, so it was fabled, of rattling off that magic differential in any currency you chose: sheet changes, cornbread mornings or flagellation evenings; how many rosaries, softball games, even genuflections or bowel movements stood between him and Zion. Even now DiGiorgio lounged, filled with calm and remote from the slightest taint of Counting, on the sunny Juniorate side of the refectory, a black biretta resting rakishly upon his head like a triumphal crown of laurel.

There is even now no comprehending the enormous gulf that separated Novice from Junior in that odd world. It was not simply existential, like the difference between the Fathers and the Lay Brothers. That we understood and accepted. This was mockingly artificial, based on the calculated privation and bestowal of privilege, all under the roof of the same house. It had not so much to be accepted as gotten through, and like Zeno’s arrow heading toward an impossible target, I suspected I would never arrive. What Zeno’s arrow did not have to contend with, however, was the sight of all those flashily feathered darts already adhering to the opposite wall. There in front of me in the dining room before each meal were ranks of Juniors who only yesterday had themselves been Novices. They permitted themselves faint smiles as they faced us during grace, the knowing looks of superior beings who had met Novitiate Regular Order and triumphed over it.

It was the Regular Order’s final torture, this granting me by its terrible predictability an easy way of calculating exactly how many painful things I had to endure before the pain went away. My day of deliverance was July 31, the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Father of Us All, but more appositely it was exactly two calendar years after I had first knocked on that oaken door. And I could smell it, feel it approaching, see it coming, the morning when the messenger crept into my hovel, shook me awake and said, “There Is been some terrible mistake. You were not really a harijan; you’re a Brahmin and here’s your birthright. Sorry, sir.” Peripateia. Deliverance.

The vows that the occasion marked were overwhelmed by the occasion itself. Poverty, celibacy and obedience I had embraced from the first moment of the Candidacy. Their formalization now meant no extension of my commitment. Rather, it was the Society of Jesus reaching out to receive me. The Jesuits had tried me in the First Probation, and I had tried myself against their standards. The engagement was over and I was invited to enter into a contract whereby I would except to live in poverty, celibacy and obedience in the Society of Jesus and they accepted to receive me for another thirteen year probation. Until that other remote day I could still request a release, which was invariably given, and return, with my honorable discharge in the pocket of my rust-colored lounge suit, to the World.

At first light on July 31, right on schedule, the Blessed Seven arose from their tombs and put on not their filthy winding sheets of yore but the raiment of immortality, a new and startling black cassock tailored and sewn to the wearer’s own body I picked up the biretta, the peculiarly Jesuit clerical hat that even Saint Ignatius war in his portraits, carried it casually, almost jauntily in my hand out of the dormitory, out of the ascetory, out of the accursed Novitiate, and ascended, as lightly as a liberated butterfly, to the chapel.

The vow ceremony occurred in the middle of Mass when each of us would rise in turn from the front pew on the Novices’ side of the chapel and approach the sanctuary. The moment was now at hand. I too struggled to my feet, surprised that my knees were consenting to support me. I mounted the steps to the high altar and knelt before the Rector. With bowed head I recited the formula I’d surreptitiously begun memorizing a year before: Die tricesimo primo, mensis Julii…ego voveo paupertatem, castitatem et oboedienjtiam perpetuam in Societate Jesu… I rose again, steadier now, turned and went to my new place, front row, Juniors’ side. The arrow had hit the wall, gone straight in and stood there quivering. Viva DiGiorgio! A bas Zeno!

The day was a delirium. The extraordinary privilege of talking at breakfast, there amidst my lost and suddenly regained companions of last year. Smiling glances, already tinged with condescension for the wretched Novices on the other side of the dining room. A day of visiting with excited guests, impatient almost that it end so that I could enjoy being a Junior, a blissful state that existed inside the community and not in the visitors’ parlor. I wanted a Jesuit, any Jesuit, to call me “Mister” instead of the suddenly déclassé “Brother.”

In the evening there was an immense feast at dinner, and the cathartic din of it shook the refectory walls, I sat there with my biretta posed quite in the DiGiorgio manner on my newly sophisticated brow and loved every single, self-indulgent minute of it. Vow Day was the purest, most perfect pleasure I have ever experienced in my life.

The Juniors lived in the western wing of the house in quarters that superficially resembled the Novices’. The dormitories with their curtained alcoves were in fact identical. There were ascetories too with the familiar table desks. These were no longer the bear deserts of the ascetic Novice, however, but lush mountain estates covered with verdant blooms bearing the exotic names of Liddell-Scott’s Unabridged Greek Lexicon, Horace: The Complete Odes, Epodes and Satires and a fat volume from whose ancient spine blow the golden letters that both promised and delivered my reward, Gradus ad Parnassum, “A Stairway to Heaven,” a very secular heaven of Muses and poetry, of richly resonant words and new and dazzling thoughts.

Sometime shortly after vows I and the other newly minted Juniors began our first class, a course, somewhat inexplicably, in calculus. In my last year in high school I flunked the only course ever in my academic life, trigonometry. I had developed a splendid little block on mathematics, or so I thought. That summer I received an A in calculus, or the calculus, as I had very knowingly begun to call it. I had in fact homered at my first at-bat. Two years of silence had cleared my head. Two years of scrubbing pots and latrines had sharpened my eye and perfected my timing. The new Junior, a first-round draft pick, was, after two years’ seasoning in Triple-A, finally ready. I could feel it: I was in the zone. I was about to begin on a wild, a stunning, winning streak.

The Novitiate valued observance. The Juniorate, and in fact the rest of the Jesuit course, expected some recognizable degree of virtue, but as the Master knew very well, and as I and others suspected and hoped, it rewarded brains. The pious, it seems, often had trouble with irregular verbs, with metonymy and synecdoche, with making any sense of Demosthenes, to say nothing of Plato. In a rapidly fading Buffalo sunset, the hand of God had suddenly turned to justice. For me, it was just in time.

In the fall, after a triumphal summer of three successive Vow Days, we all assembled on the lower slopes of Parnassus and settled into what laughingly passed as the Juniorate version of Regular Order. There was no posting of schedules under pale ascetory lights here. Regular Order was still meditation and Mass in the morning and recreation after lunch and dinner. But all the time between, those arid stretches of the Novices’ day given over to manualia and mandata, was diverted entirely and deliciously to going to class and studying. Laborandum all but vanished from our vocabulary like some rare Sanskrit phoneme, and on Thursdays and Sundays we unselfconsciously played softball and basketball or, could one believe it, just sat around and relaxed.

The first year Juniors were called Poets and we read Virgil and Horace, Sophocles and Euripides, Keats and Milton. The second year class was called Rhetoricians and studied Cicero and Demosthenes and Burke and Newman. It was a marvelous 19th-century English university education of the type that Arnold Toynbee believed he was among the last generation to receive. At its heart it was untroubled by any science, hard or soft, and though we read some medieval and early modern history in our second summer, that was really a kind of dessert to match the amusingly imaginative calculus appetizer. Greek and Latin were the main course, and I feasted upon them. With all the fervor of a new lover I memorized Greek lyrics and assigned myself the task of translating Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon into Greek verse, the dialogues into Attic iambs, the choruses into Doric measures of huge complexity.

I passed across a bewildering landscape. We studied the ancients in English-University editions, and so the Greeks and the Romans came to us through a late-Victorian haze with the sensibilities of Jebb and Jowett and Mahaffy guided our own. It was as if we had been transported in spirit to the Oxford or Cambridge of 75 years ago, when gentlemen “read Classics” in an atmosphere immune to the blight of German scholarship or the pricks of social anxiety. Inside our classroom the sense of lawn and flannel was almost palpable, but outside where the sights and sounds and feel not of the Cam or the Isis but of the Hudson Valley in the first splendor of spring or the heavy glory of fall.

I had never truly experienced nature or the seasons before coming to St. Andrew; they lay somewhere beyond the urban horizon in a place where I never went. Here the liturgical and calendar year conspired in close harmony with the environment to thrust me, indoors and out, into the path of new experiences of the senses. Day after day the Palisades across the Hudson folded into new and unexpected colors. The river was as white and enormous in winter as the chapel was dark and closed in upon itself at 6 AM. As Easter approached, both liturgy and land thawed, and within a month I could lie out of doors and read Sappho framed upward out of the flowers against a pale-blue sky. Sometimes I catch the lush smell again and suddenly I can see Pindar with his maroon binding and ragged University Press edges lying next to me in the grass.

I have never quite recovered from that extraordinary education. I learned Latin and Greek in a way most undergraduates never could. For all of us, Latin was to some degree a genuinely spoken language. It was not very elegant perhaps and not always correct, but it was the classical tongue nonetheless, and it added an unusual dimension to the study of the texts; Latin became familiar. And both Latin and Greek studies were dominated by an elaborate and revealing rhetorical analysis.

I have learned only a few really useful things in my life. One was how to diagram sentences, the almost offhand gift of a nun in grade school, which in high school I discovered it could be applied, and even more convincingly, to Latin as well as English sentences. It was a revelation to see the structure of language exposed to my understanding in such a transparent and comprehensible way. Now in the Juniorate the complementary parts would deftly fitted into place. With Greek, words themselves yielded up their inner constitution, and with rhetorical analysis, paragraphs and entire bodies of composition. I was astonished. I had penetrated a mystery more profound than anything I later discovered in philosophy: I had found out how language and thought worked.

The price was literary. Jesuit education at almost any stage of the course came to a almost audibly grinding halt somewhere just short of the modern experience, not because the latter was thought to be morally threatening, but because that is where our textbooks stopped, in that literary twilight zone where the Great Tradition show disturbing signs of trailing off into some dubious and inscrutable minor key. In the Juniorate my initiation into English poetry ended somewhere in the neighborhood of Tennyson, and though there was a kind of underground attachment to Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., there was no real exposure to or understanding of modern poetry. I read some novels in a private, desultory and not very enlightening way, but we never studied the genre. Our English prose fodder was 18th-century essayists and 19th-century orators. American literature did not seem to exist.

While my contemporaries in the World where at least dabbling in sociology, anthropology and psychology, I and most of the rest of the Society of Jesus ignored the social sciences, which had barely forced themselves into the curricula of Jesuit colleges and not at all into the far more conservative pedagogy that prevailed inside the Jesuits’ own houses of study. My education at this stage was not intended to prepare me for any future work as a minister of the Word or a healer of souls but simply to educate me. And that still meant, as it had for so many previous generations, a literary education in the classics, and later in the classics of philosophy. Only far down the long course, when the survivors finally addressed themselves to moral and pastoral theology, would a carefully wrought training program turn its concern toward any souls other than the Jesuits’ own.

It was not only the moderns I neglected. I lived in ignorance of contemporary literary developments or even of thence pure and simple. I had had no real contact with the World for four years. Neither the atom bomb nor Norman Mailer had fallen upon me. Art was merely a word, and my only unwitting exposure to its exemplars was in the portraits of Jesuit founding fathers hung in halls so dark as to be inscrutable or in some Vatican Museum reproductions of Greek and Roman sculpture that showed up in our textbooks; some actually had brown paper pasted over the obligatory Vatican fig leaf, presumably for those easily inflamed by fig leaves. Pablo Picasso was rumored to be a Cuban second baseman whom the athletic grapevine assured me had been traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Novitiate was filled with a bewildering variety of devices for self-abnegation, one more ingenious than the next. The Juniorate had equally improbable ways of putting the pieces back together again. When Jesuits sat down to eat, their attention was diverted from the pure bestiality of the act by someone reading to them from a pulpit in the dining room. That task was shared by selected Novices and Juniors in alternating months, and the matter was usually an unbeat version of Jesuit history or biography. But at one dinner each week a Junior took to the refectory rostrum to make essay of delivering a sermon to his captive, pruriently interested and utterly cynical audience of masticating superiors, inferiors and peers. The sermons were intended, one supposed, to provide us with some pulpit practice for that day in the millennial future when we took our spiritual wares into the World. The results were not encouraging, to put the best face upon it, and under ordinary circumstances those tyro preachers would likely have converted the most pious congregation of Irish nuns back to paganism before the final amen.
On occasion, however, the refectory sermon was the vehicle not for some dubious edification but for the straightforward glorification of the sermonizer. On the eve of the Feast of St. Peter Canisius, S. J., for example, who beat back the Lutherans in Bavaria, the best Juniorate student of German delivered a sermon in that language; the long-suffering Blessed Claude de la Colombière, S. J., was dubiously honored with a French sermon whose grammar was always letter perfect but which was invariably delivered in an accent so atrocious that it would have scarcely passed muster in even a Belgian Juniorate. St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J., our man at the Council of Trent, provoked a Latin sermon of considerable elegance from the current Mr. Latinitas. The Novices loved the Latin sermon because they fancied they spoke the language, and they could be observed listening and nodding thoughtfully between swallows.

Kid stuff. Lay Brother stuff. Hors d’oeuvres. The entrée was served on the feast of the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom in the form of a Greek sermon. It was an improbable tour de force, those thirty-five minutes of glorious and impeccable Attic prose delivered from memory with absolute aplomb to a dumbfounded and uncomprehending audience. It was a heady moment for a 21-year-old, and as I descended from the pulpit, I understood that now at last I had purged and forgiven all, the Master, the Manuductor, the manualia, the cold water sinks, even laborandum. It was easy to be generous when the mattock in your hand was no longer iron but forged of glittering gold.

To all appearances I was now on my own. There was little individual guidance of any sort, event or later, but I was still a member of a community and moved in the community rhythms of eating, sleeping, praying, recreating and going to class. But I now took my own spiritual temperature and shared it with no one. The initiative was now individual, and the vastness of that new situation vis-à-vis the Master’s earlier role in my life seemed more like a release than a promotion to a new responsibility.

My progress was not going on observed, however, in somewhat more remote quarters of the Society of Jesus. The Novitiate universe revolved so remarkably around the Master of Novices that we were generally unaware that each of us belonged as well to another, greater system – the New York Province and the Society of Jesus as a whole. I was too miniscule a particle to make any impression on that latter world as yet, but when I and the others passed out of the Master’s orbit we entered in some perceptible way into the workings of the provincial system and its still-mysterious agents who would steer our future course through the Jesuits. Somewhere on the campus of Fordham University sat the Father Provincial, the Superior of the 1500 Jesuits who composed the New York Province and he, or someone at his side, was observing this Junior Scholastic.

With the end of the Juniorate we would receive our first real assignments. We would all go on to the next stage of the Jesuit course of study, Philosophy, Most would be sent to the Jesuit house of studies at Woodstock, Maryland, where the Scholastics of the New York and Maryland Provinces worked over Aristotle and St. Thomas under the same roof. But not all. Some at least might be sent elsewhere, and that decision rested with someone in the Provincial’s office at Fordham, on the advice of someone at St. Andrew. We were being reported upon, though no one knew how or by whom, and the material on each of us was accumulating and would continue to accumulate, in Provincial dossiers in New York and eventually in Rome as well, where the Father General observed and ruled his 32,000 troops all over the world, from New York, the most populous of all his domains, to the twenty-two Jesuits of the Iron Curtain Roumanian Vice-Province and the eight mysterious figures who still toiled Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam in remote Soviet Lithuania-Estonia.

Something was stirring in my head. The World, which knows better about such things, would probably call it ambition, but that was not an acknowledged virtue of the religious life and so what was registering in me was not that taboo notion but something more seemingly described as the widening of horizons, the recognition of possibilities. My future was gliding almost imperceptibly toward my hands, and I reached out and attempted to take hold of it. I suggested – I did not yet request; human that was to bolt – that I might be sent not to Woodstock but rather to St. Louis University, with the Scholastics of the Missouri Province study philosophy and where I could also do additional work in Latin and Greek. In my rapidly opening eyes the university looked like a plum. I asked for it and I got it.

My first four years as a Jesuit were over. In that time I had been visited by parents and relatives six or seven times and by other vagrant, unannounced but welcome friends on two or three other occasions. I slept under that one roof. I had not seen a newspaper or listened to the radio or watched a movie in all that time. Four years of the life of the World had fallen out of my life, with no great consequence, I imagine. I was informed and entertained in other ways and on other matters; I had adapted to another culture as exotic and remote from my own as that of an Ainu or a Trobiand Islander. I was stuffed full of meditation, cornbread, softball and Sophocles. I was girt with cincture and chain. I had survived the Long Retreat and a twice-daily examination of conscience. I was pronounced ready to move on to the next stage of what was nicely described as my “formation.”

Well, I had already signed up as a miles Christi and the Long Retreat had been a way of nailing that decision to the floor, so to speak. But that was by no means the end of the matter. Although I was on the Right Way, there kept appearing, on this side or that, secondary paths and shortcuts that represented not Moral Choice but distinctly lower case moral choices, like those faced by a dieter who has already ordered the broiled halibut instead of the spaghetti carbonara and must now choose between whole or skim milk in his coffee. The spiritual life is filled with those devilish little volitional asides—What harm in taking a pass on litanies just this once?—and particularly so in that swarming petrie dish that was the Novitiate where the choices were microscopic but subjected to constant reexamination. And in this instance, Jesus and Satan were standing beneath their recruiting posters not in a plain outside of Jerusalem but on a softball field just south of Hyde Park, New York.

At the front of the Jesuit house was a neatly trimmed lawn that sloped gracefully toward the Hudson River. Calm and tranquility reigned over this manicured sward, the silence broken only by the soft and sweet chatter of family visitors who could come to visit on three or four Sundays each year and sit and chat a spell with their Novice son or brother. Behind the house, however, other sounds and other moods prevailed. There were our playgrounds: handball, tennis and basketball courts and a softball field.
The Novitiate experience was unabashedly constructed upon calculated privations. If there had been, for example, a special Jesuit language with a vocabulary of only ten words, the Novices would have been constrained to conduct their business in five of these vocables chosen randomly out of the entire set. There was, in fact, a special Jesuit language. It was called sports, and the Novices were inevitably forbidden to play with a full deck. The Juniors might engage in whatever sport they would; the Novices were confined, without rhyme or any visible reason, to softball and handball. In the Novitiate, as in Heaven, one didn’t have to supply reasons to us young aspirants to a perfect obedience.

The naïve Extern might cluck approvingly over our little sportive exercises and pronounce it a capital idea that the youngsters should have lots of fresh air and exercise. And I suppose it was. But to confuse what we did out there on our playing fields with exercise would be tantamount to thinking that the Pittsburgh Steelers were putting on their pads to go out and have some fun with a pigskin. No, we had something else in mind besides exercise. For some sports was a grueling ordeal; for others, a veritable debauch.

Novitiate life had its terrors, numbered and unnumbered, but one of the most terrible must’ve been the fatal choices forced upon the uncoordinated, the uncompetitive and the just plain uninterested, those high school kids who for one reason or another did not care about sports. But the explicit tradition of The Life was that you had, at one time or another, to do everything prescribed, and an even larger part of the unspoken ethos was that sports were as good a way as any to relieve adolescent males of their physical – read libidinal – energies.

To fulfill the letter of the law, the athletically inept generally chose to play handball, where they would be safely out of the way of the vicious samurai who were bloodying talon and claw on each other’s person on a softball field. Many of them descended, even within the modest handball galaxy, to the feeble asteroid called paddleball, which, by enlargeing both the ball and hand, increased the odds of making some kind of contact and so constituting a game. The paddleball players didn’t really care whether they made contact or even generated a score. They were “playing,” as was prescribed for that time and not place, and that was enough. Nemo dat quod non habet, “Nobody gives what he does not possess,” was a favorite Novitiate aphorism, and its truth was illustrated every Thursday afternoon between two and four on the handball courts of St. Andrew on Hudson.

Thursdays and Sundays were our holidays, when the ordinary work assignments were suspended and other, more tantalizing dishes were put before the Novices. Sundays were generally peaceful affairs, and the common form of Sunday afternoon recreation was the walk, in the inevitable bands of three, around the hundreds of wooded acres within our Jesuit reservation. But Thursday was different. The daily order posted for that day put it to us direct: ludi vel laborandum, sports or work. The choice was ours, the dulcet ludi or the ominously gerundive laborandum.

Let’s see, what do I feel like doing this Thursday? That innocuous thought never, I am sure, entered a single Novice head. Choices were not offered to Jesuits to cater to their whims or fancies. Rather, they were proffered like a little whetstone upon which one could hone one’s self-denial to such a fine edge that it could cut the World in half. If there was any exercise in our Thursday sports, it lay in the choice of whether one would go out and frolic self-indulgently under the sun or would choose to give the Self a good thrashing in the form of laborandum. There it was, another Thursday, another crossroads, another chance to graze in the woods with the sanctified sheep or gambol in the outfield with the smelly goats.

The sheep didn’t exactly graze; laborandum was more like a season in Hell. On went the heavy boots, the Army surplus pants and jacket. You shouldered something called a mattock and headed, together with the others who had chosen well, into the Ardennes of the soul. I had never even heard of a mattock before I went through those sacred portals. It had an ax handle, but the head was on one side a blunt pick and on the other an unsharpened blade. It was an instrument for inhuman activity, for hacking, hacking at stone, if you were fatally deranged, or, as often there, at fallen trees and brush. It was not effective, it was not satisfying, and it certainly was not fun. It was perfect laborandum.

The Master believed in the hearty outdoor life that seems to characterize most of downtown Buffalo. He also believed in underlining choices for the dim-witted. So every Thursday afternoon he stood outside the back door in his boots, pants and jacket and awaited those Novices who had made the virtuous sheep-like choice of clearing the woods for two hours. He held no mattock in his hand, however; he had a sharp and shiny axe, something even more remote and forbidden to the Novices than basketball. The Master was known to hand that bright and dangerous blade on occasion to a very experienced (and solid) Novice to take a few whacks at the timber. As in all such cases, it was assumed that he had his reasons and no one, not even the prayer-addled, dared aspire to the high favor of wielding Excalibur, the Master’s own axe.

Or so I speculated. In the hundred-odd Thursdays I spent as a Novice, I here now confess, I never once chose laborandum. That was not perhaps, playing the game; or, rather, it was playing quite another game. The sportive goats no more gamboled on the softball field than did their sheepish brethren graze in those terrible, brush-filled woods. Ours were not lazy, summer afternoon outings redolent of root beer and the quiet thud of bat upon ball. Waterloo may indeed have been won years earlier on the playing fields of Eton. The more economical Novices simply fought their Waterloo at Eton. Every ounce of suppressed adolescent hostility, every homicidal design and Hunnish impulse to rapine and destruction was released on that softball field and later, when we were Juniors on the basketball court. We were turned out of our cages and for two hours we could commit sublimated rape, murder and mayhem. For those who chose ludi, Thursday afternoons were like Mardi Gras.

After lunch and an ambulatory rosary said in bands of three, the ludi types collected at the softball field. By a secret but swift process – time was at a premium here – two were made captains and chose their teams by alternating selections from the pool of available players, just as they had in the World. And the World’s rules prevailed: the strong, the skilled and the competitive were chosen first; the others, those slumming a little in their search for perfect self-denial, followed in descending order of desirability and were assigned to innocuous positions like right-field where they were permitted to play but were expected to have the good sense not to interfere with the point of the game, which was to win at all costs.
Good spirits prevailed for an inning or two until we reached the nether part of the batting order when, by the inflexible rules of our National Pastime, the inept had to be allowed a turn at bat. Balls whizzed close to clueless heads. There were near-fatal collisions at all bases – the wisdom of not permitting football to the Novices was patent – and the desire to win slowly came to a boil, painfully unvented by even the slightest obscenity. Softball may have been invented as a sport, but the Novices played it like Miltonic warfare on a darkling plain.

No one of our company understood that better than Brother Charles Gilligan, no one perhaps in the entire history of the Society of Jesus. Chuck played everything in high school. He was smallish then and not very skillful, but he was totally committed to playing and winning. At sixteen he had the perfectly formed psyche of a jock; at nineteen Jesuit food and Jesuit sleep had given him a body which, if it was not the graceful instrument of the true athlete, was large enough and powerful enough to give a bloody conviction to his playing. Playing? Chuck did not play, of course; he was in this war for keeps. He kept personal statistics of everything he ever played. He wore his sneakers to lunch on Thursdays, his fatigues the under his cassock.

Brother Gilligan never missed a game. He suffered no groin pulls, no torn ACLs or other newfangled injuries. On Thursday afternoons he stood impatiently outside the back door swinging a few bats and waiting for those who improvidently had to change their clothes. When he said a rosary before softball game, he defied, even by the somewhat lax Jesuit standards, every liturgical canon known to Christendom. “Yeah,” said Chuck after a particularly satisfying rosary “broke seven minutes today.” It was well known that he led his band around the infield during his speed-rosary so he could inspect the playing surface, and that by the time the last Hail Mary had flown from his lips, he had already checked out that day’s player personnel for draft choices.

The Chucker and other fanciers of the sport were already assembled and choosing sides when the Master and his dour band of hackers rosaried past on their way to the woods. We started at 2 PM and we were expected to be re-collected and recollected at the back door when the chapel bell sounded 4 PM and the end of Thursday recreation, The Master sometimes brought his sheep home early, however, to give them a head start on the showers and unwittingly teach them the timeless lesson that virtue is not entirely its own reward. The shower edge tempted no one from ludi to laborandum, of course, and certainly not Chuck, who thought the constant references to showers had to do with the weather.

On occasion the Master showed his own superb self-denial by releasing his troop of virtuous hackers early to the showers and requesting a turn in the despised and self-indulgent softball game. He was an indifferent player: no power, mediocre hands. Chuck had scouted him early on and pronounced the Rev. Grissom incapable of handling the curve tight inside on the hands. Maybe so. But I doubt if he had factored in the all-important “attitude.” The Master did not care about winning. He too did not regard softball as a game. For him it was an opportunity to work up a sweat, to exert oneself; it was not playing through pain but paining through play. It was enough to make Chuck retch.

“Who’s the captain here, Brother?”

“Brother Gilligan, Father.”

Slight frown, slight controlled smile. The Master is forced to advert to the fact that Chuck had chosen ludi once again. I try to disappear in the outfield grass.

“Do you have a place for me, Brother Gilligan?” The Master asks ever so quietly.

“Sure, Father.” The Chucker is already revising his batting order for the next inning. “Why don’t you play shortstop.”

Craven Chuck. The Master loved to play shortstop, where he could pepper the action and keep the game “moving,” as he understood that term. He trots briskly out of his position, which Brother Navins quietly vacates for short-center-left field.

“Let’s play some ball here,” quoth the Master from the Book of Life. Chuck obliges in the only way he knows how, by sending the next batter sprawling into the dirt. There is another magisterial frown.

On the way back to the house I told Chuck he was a coward for yielding the Master shortstop.

“Oh yeah?” he retorted in his usual sophisticated way.

I have my own shot at Father Big soon enough. Another Thursday, another game.

“Do have a place for me, Brother?”

Let him give me that look. Ludi really is a choice, isn’t it? Isn’t that what vel means? And do I have a place for you, Father!

“Let’s see.” A dramatic pause to suggest reflection. “Why don’t you play right field, Father?”

Silence under the sun. The Master of Novices is sent to right-field, the graveyard, the haunt of the athletically pathetic and the incompetent ninth-place batters. There is now a different kind of frown and a different smile: he knows he’s been had. A triumph becomes a rout: the Master discards his glove and heads for the showers right after the third out of the inning. Not even a time at bat. He can be had, and not only by an inside curve! As the Master disappears toward the house, no word is spoken. The game proceeds silently, even solemnly. Not even Chuck wants to dilute the immense satisfaction of one of our own striking out the Master of Novices.

His actual silhouette was a novice called the Manuductor who operated the Novitiate by adhering literally and eternally to a mysterious manual referred to as “the Diary.” The Diary presumably recorded– no one of us had ever seen it – every Jesuit daily order back to the days of St. Ignatius and so, like the Talmud, was tradition grown sacred in the use. And like a good Talmudist, the Manuductor had the Regular Order in his bones.

The Latin title “Manuductor” meant either “leader of the band,” or “leader by the hand,” and it was acceptable conversation to meditate these two meanings, though without lapsing into either cynicism or irony, a most improbable task in that environment. He was appointed by the Master from among the second year Novices. The choice of Manuductor was simply announced, usually at one of the Master’s conferences. There was no encomium of the departing Paladin, no underlining of the virtues of the new Elect. No need; his virtues were usually transparent enough. First, he was almost always from Buffalo. The Master knew intuitively that the 80% of the Novitiate population from New York City were by and large untrustworthy. The Buffalonians, on the other hand were the Caliph’s Turks, observant, loyal and pious, qualities that only rarely emerged from the halls of Xavier High School or Brooklyn prep and never in human memory from Regis.

It was probably his prolonged and intimate contact with the Master of Novices that rendered the Manuductor an object of constant Novice contemplation and speculation. Most Novices entered the private presence of the Master only when summoned to the sacred precinct, and that was never for a benign purpose. The Manuductor, on the other hand, like some High Priest of Election, parted the curtains and entered the Holy of Holies as part of his regular duties. One could only imagine what that was like, what relaxed and pleasant little chit-chat—“Care for a cigar, Brother?”–went on in Room 202 on those occasions. It was a transparent fallacy, of course, as transparent and as fallacious as most of what went on in Novices’ minds: the Master was Master and the Manuductor was Manuductor precisely because they did not indulge in idle chitchat.

Most of the Manuductor’s duties were perfectly visible. He sat in the rear of the ascetory near the door, from which post he was readily available both to the Master across the hall outside (the Master only very rarely came into the ascetory himself) and to the bulletin board behind him on which the daily order was posted. He made all the work assignments on the basis of what seemed to be a satisfactorily rotating order. He kept the Diary. He led common prayers, and he set good example everywhere and all times. It must have been an exhausting job.

The Manuductor posted the next day’s order of activities in the ascetory on the way to bed. It glowed there under a single bold in the darkened room like a theatrically illuminated Dead Sea Scroll. It was tomorrow, our tomorrow, and whatever happened then would occur around and between its terse lines. When a new group of Novices arrived, the daily order was spelled out in some detail for their benefit:

1:00 –1:45: Recreatio vel Mandata [the latter, the post-meal cleanup]
2:00-2:15: Preces [Common prayers]
2:30-2:45: Lectio spiritualis [etc.]

The detail was misleading. The daily order was in fact extremely detailed, but there was no need of spelling it out. Every one of us soon had it by heart, and eventually the lectio plenior was replaced by the single grim line:

Feria tertia: Ordo regularis

That was it and all of it. “Tuesday: Regular Order,” the Novices’ routine that stretched back to the Age of the Patriarchs and would presumably continue even unto those Novices will entered the Jesuits just this side of the Crack of Doom.

The order was indeed regular, but it was also regularis, prescribed by the Rule. Devotion to the Sacra Regula was a very old tradition in the religious life, and the rules of some monastic orders spell things out in elaborate detail. The Jesuit Rules were in fact very few and ranged from the very general (avoid worldliness) to an elegant Latin imprecation that all, etiam si sacerdotes sint – even if they be priests – should make their beds in the morning.

The written Regular Order was not, then, Rule, but Tradition, some of it a century old and some a hoary week and a half, for all we knew. In their folly the first year Novices prayed that tomorrow perhaps tradition would dictate an entire morning of sports followed by a long nap, a table staggering feast at dinner and a movie to top off the evening. Their seniors knew better: one had simply to look down the calendar of the ecclesiastical year, identify every single holy day, measure its specific liturgical gravity and draw the appropriate conclusions as to the likelihood of a softball game after lunch or a fruit cocktail before dinner.

In deep, rock-bottom, bone-crushing Regular Order we rose at 5:30 AM, got our bodies, if not always our minds, to the chapel by six for silent prayer together. At the stroke of six – at St. Andrew chapel bells tolled every 15 minutes – we went to the ascetory for an hour’s meditation. Mass was at seven, breakfast at eight. As each finished breakfast he went back to the dormitory, made his bed (and removed the chain from his thigh if that seemed like a good idea) and put on work clothes. Then began the morning’s work: cleaning up after breakfast and setting up for lunch; or helping prepare lunch and dinner in the kitchen be the refectory; or general cleaning around the huge house. All in complete silence.

Each morning at 11 there was a conference by the Master of Novices in which he laid out for us the ideals and practices of a Jesuit life. This was followed by some free time, a fifteen minute examination of conscience, and lunch. After lunch some had cleanup and the rest had a common recreation period for about forty-five minutes, outdoors in tolerable weather, indoors in foul. Then came “Prayers” in chapel, spiritual reading, more work, the afternoon’s half hour meditation, dinner, an hour recreation period, more spiritual reading, a sliver of free time, preparation for tomorrow’s meditation, community litanies, another examination of conscience, a final visit to the chapel, and lights out at 10 PM.

Almost everything the Novices did, we did in concert. The work duties were spread around and changed every week or so, but for the rest we moved like a large black centipede between dormitory, ascetory, refectory and chapel, always in single file along the wall at the right hand. The system delivered bodies in an efficient and quiet manner, but also focused an inordinate amount of attention on the gait and carriage of the person immediately ahead. Long before John Cleese, I had matriculated in the College of Funny Walks. All these activities were carried out in silence: the only time conversation was permitted was at dinner on Thursday and Sunday and during the daily recreation periods after lunch and dinner.

As the Long Retreat had taught me, recreation was an event of great magnitude. Nothing could be performed in absolute silence of course. Brief talk was permitted when absolutely necessary, and the fertile Novice mind discovered more necessity in the world than a deranged Stoic in a lifetime. But these were not real conversations, and they had, moreover, to be conducted in Latin, which was inhibiting, to say the least. We had all studied Latin for four years in the Jesuit high schools we had attended, but no one imagined you could actually speak it. But eventually we did, after a fashion. Cucina Latina the cynics called it, but it for all its barbarisms, it worked, and some even scaled the dizzying heights of a conversational subjunctive or two. But genuine social communication, the analysis of the day’s events, the evaluation of motives, simple gossip, and the all-important prognosis of what tomorrow might bring, all had to await recreation. We had to make some sense of what was happening to us, to sort the sense from nonsense in a world that now appeared to be completely sensible and now the very attar of nonsense, and for this we all needed counsel, another perspective, an audience for large pinch of soul saving humor and a metaphorical shoulder for our equally metaphorical tears.

That is what recreation was about; what it was for, the Master explained, was to provide us an opportunity to practice charity. So the Manuductor’s first move at recreation was to dispatch some willy-nilly “bands,” groups of three, a second year and two first-year Novices to recreate together. As these disconsolate trios disappeared into the gloaming, the Manuductor and the survivors of this terrible triage moved slowly and noisily down the paths and lawns of St. Andrew toward the river. There in a large rustic gazebo overlooking the Hudson we all learned to talk very rapidly indeed because sooner or later the Manuductor’s finely attuned biological clock would go off and he and his cortège would ascend the same paths to arrive at the back door precisely as the chapel bell tolled 8 PM and the end of recreation. The assigned bands were frequently there before the Manuductor, bloodily battered by their encounter with charity.

Recreation was a tricky business in the Novitiate. It could be depressing, particularly in the company of abrasive cretins in the assigned bands lurching eyelessly through a dark winter night toward the frozen Hudson. This was one of my two daily opportunities to say something coherent, and to spend it listening to Brother Looney dither on about the beauties of the liturgy or Brother Zweifel explain how the rain we were tramping through was part of God’s providential care of vegetables required patience and the firm conviction that I would live to see recreation on the morrow. In his conferences the Master tried desperately to lay out some of the acceptable topics of Novice conversation, like “the virtues of Ours, particularly the dead,” but was quite obviously a lost cause. Cut off from books, news and ideas, we had only ourselves and our microscopic range of activities to pick over. How to praise the Holy Father when we were not even sure who was the current Holy Father, much less when he was presently up to? We had only the most slender idea of even Jesuit history, and so we wallowed in contemporary biography, our own. Or we explored, for our own amusement and instruction, the intricacies of “The Life,” or at least that tiny fragment of it exposed to our view.

The Regular Order prevailed every day except Thursdays and Sundays and on special feast days of the Church and the Society of Jesus. Every Thursday was a holiday and a minor revelation in that it was really a much better place than Saturday to break up a week. On Thursdays we burst out of doors, and there were marvelous new opportunities for charity on the softball field and in the woods. Sunday afternoon too was a relaxed, out of doors time, and the ordinary work assignments were left untouched on Sunday mornings. It was almost as if the Church had created a vacuum into which some later genius had dropped The New York Times. But not on us novices. We had long since forgotten there even existed such things as newspapers, radio or movies.

Novices did two kinds of work. Mandata, “assignments,” were the cleanup details that worked in the dining room and the scullery after the noon and evening meals. Manualia, the more straightforward “handwork,” took place after breakfast when we were sorted out around the great house to dust, scrub and polish for two hours in the name of Holy Obedience and a more perfect self-denial. We rotated through these tasks without demur, though each assignment doubtless had its own place in the forbidden but inevitable order of preferences tattooed onto the mind of everyone who had not perfectly adapted himself to the will of God.

The work we were assigned to do was not particularly strenuous, nor was it very interesting: it was housekeeping and housecleaning. The least interesting and probably the only terrible task we were set to was gathering in the basement laundry room on Saturday mornings and sorting out the Novices’ dirty laundry for shipment to what was thought to be a convent of the Good Shepherd, the haunt of nuns who reputedly rehabilitated wayward girls by making them do the laundry of sanctified but very dirty Jesuit Novices.

We were always filthy, some by inclination, but often out of sheer circumstance. We each wore the same cassock, winter and summer, day in and day out. Summer in the Hudson Valley is not a kindly season, and a sweat dripping cassock hung up by the bed at night was still damp in the morning. Meals dribbled down our chests despite the best of intentions, and attempts at cleaning the front of the cassock, which already had previous owners when it was handed to us, inevitably turned the black serge to a vile color somewhere between green and gray. Arms and elbows became frayed and discolored from constant rubbing on desktops. We were issued four pairs of shorts, T-shirts and socks each week, all of them Army surplus, which some Jesuit had obviously bought for a chant. Everything came in one size, and though the shorts could theoretically be adjusted by little tie strings on the side, the immense or dwarfed GI who first tied them on Okinawa in 1944 had tied them forever.

Cleanliness, it was understood, was a virtue in some remote sense that didn’t really count, and it was not much pushed at St. Andrew except that you were expected to shave daily. The Master was always clean, though not to noticeably so. Some of the other Fathers clearly indulged in such worldly affectations as Mennen Aftershave, but not Robert Grissom, S.J. He preached, in the subtle gnostic fashion in which such things were done, some undefined but perfectly clear code of “manly virtue.” It was not machismo – the sexual corollaries of that rendered it useless in the circumstances – but a striving to be a “real man,” and whatever that meant, it did not include foppishness or even a remarkable care of your fleshly envelope.

If we avoided foppishness by a margin that would have put a Pharisee to shame, hypochondria was a more subtle temptation of the flesh. In that life of intense self-inspection and constant striving for an extraordinary variety of goals, the spiritual athlete might easily find an astonishing range of aches and pains that carried with them the not inconsiderable bonus of providing acceptable grounds for dropping out of the Daily Order for a few hours or a few days. But no one got to the infirmary and its blessed beds without first passing the terrible scrutiny of the Master of Novices, who was notoriously unsympathetic to anything short of a ruptured spleen and who enjoyed, in the divine order of things, a quite perfect health himself. Headaches and colds went absolutely unrewarded at his stern tribunal. We all prayed for a ruptured spleen.

I and the other proto-Jesuits arrived at the Novitiate had seen the Regular Order before. It coursed through the arteries of every Jesuit high school, though in that setting it had no particular religious significance. There it was “The Game,” rules to be evaded or outwitted in the most elegant way possible, where one could produce the desired effect with only lip service to the means. The Jesuit educational system rewarded verbal and literary precocity and the power of quick absorption and recognition; it taught us to distinguish with brilliance and rationalize with aplomb. It liked its young academic scholars slick and sassy.

It was many of the same achievers who reported to St. Andrew on Hudson to discover that The Game was now The Life, a system as richly and invitingly complex as the one they had just left. For me the issue of the Novitiate life was not the classic struggle that was fought on the ground of the vows, but the contest between the mordant and mocking spirit of the Jesuit-trained and the officially simple-minded acceptance of the Jesuit trainee, between high religious seriousness and amused detachment. Rich veins of irony grew even richer within those grave halls, but there was an interior point at which the publicly expressed cynicism had to end and acceptance prevail. Regular order could be and was treated as an adversary by many Novices in an easy, familiar and even affectionate fashion. But if The Life was only an adversary, then one’s Jesuit days worked really self-numbered.

It’s one thing to be rejected for another woman, but quite another to be deserted by a beau who had gone off to fling himself forever at the feet of the Blessed Virgin. The announcement of this unlikely turn of events triggered a whole series of tearful farewells as the hunter made his final rounds and kissed all the game goodbye, that untouched tiger named Maloney, who seemed quite unmoved by the news, and the smaller, shyer creatures who never even got a decent shot in their direction. The pathos was almost unbearable since I perversely insisted on wearing my new black and starkly clerical suit on my last dates. Miss Maloney shed a single chaste tear, Sister Gabriel’s dabbed at her moistening eyes, possibly masking a small sigh of relief, and my mother wept outright, though in her case the sigh, and the relief, were as audible as a hurricane.

There were other, wordless farewells. The Regis Jesuits and my father merely shook hands with me, the former with knowing smiles, my father in perfect astonishment. He knew even less about the Jesuits, or his son, than I did.

I had gotten to know many Jesuits during four years of high school and so I thought I knew what Jesuits were like, though I had little idea how they got to be that way. But on July 31, 1945, I and a number of others were willing to find out. There were nine of us who rendezvoused that late July afternoon in Grand Central Station. We were not exactly a catholic representation of the Universal Church, but a pretty fair replica of Irish American Catholicism and its clergy. We were all moderately bright, tolerably virtuous and now visibly nervous, though obviously eager for what then seemed more like an adventure rather than a change of life so absolute as to be unimaginable.

We established ourselves in the New York Central club car as if we had never known any other abode and bravely attempted to contrive a debauch out of loud laughter, a few Tom Collinses and a great many Lucky Strike cigarettes. We argued the merits of – what else? – Regis and Fordham prep and Xavier High School, already our past, and yet we showed only minimal curiosity about each other, oblivious of the strong possibility that we might be spending the next 60 years of our lives in each other’s company. And some in their haste to embrace the clerical style already wore black suits and fedoras.

The clothes were not impromptu. Like feckless campers heading into a summer that might last a day or a lifetime, we had been provided with a list of clothes to bring with us, and on it was the black suit and the black hat now being flashed so self-consciously by some. The entire enterprise of my going off from home, family and familiar ways had taken on its first, and perhaps only note of reality a few weeks earlier when my mother and I made our cautious way into Rogers Peet men’s store and bought a black suit, black shoes and socks, and a strange token of elegance, a collarless white shirt with French cuffs, possibly against the day when I might be named Father General of the Jesuits. There were other things too, underwear and such, none of which I ever thought about – or saw – again. It was the full extent of my trousseau; nothing further was ever assessed or asked in specie or kind for my upkeep for as long as I was a Jesuit. I was giving myself, and I suppose that was enough.

We shared a couple of cabs from the Poughkeepsie train station to the Novitiate near Hyde Park and pressed an extravagant tip and all our remaining cigarettes on the drivers. They deposited us directly in front of the towering Georgian façade of our new home and disappeared back down the curving driveway toward US 1. Before us was the large oaken front door of St. Andrew on Hudson, and directly behind us a statue of the Sacred Heart looked dubiously at His new recruits. Behind Him were lawns, paths and woods that slipped down to the Hudson, which glided silently back to New York City in the July sunlight.

The nine of us were not even Novices. We were the lowest of the low, Candidates for the Novitiate, and so we were briefly greeted by the Master of Novices, an encounter that meant nothing at the time, and committed directly to the care of five real Novices, our “Angels,” who introduced themselves as “Brother,” a new Jesuit term to all of us. Brother David Crowe was in charge – someone was always in charge – and he was assisted by Brothers Crowley, Carmody, Colombo and Scally, all of them Novices entering their second year. Their task was to walk us through the Novices’ life and an easy and reassuring pace, to break us into the tougher but panted-after reality that lay within the cloister of that Jesuit house.

We took our little dance lessons at the “Front Door,” the public rooms across the front of the building where Externs might resort. Two of these rooms were converted into a miniature Novitiate, one into a kind of study hall and the other a small dormitory. We ate in the guests’ dining room, though well sequestered from the real guests, whom I already regarded with a kind of condescension as mere Externs. We kept our worldly trousers and shirts but now wore vaguely clerical black jackets of the type once worn in the gray version by some grocery clerks.

It was a skillful performance all round. The Angels were affable and relaxed, as well they might have been since I later discovered that “angeling” was one of the cushier assignments in the Novitiate. They were nicely chosen. David Crowe was superior stuff, noticeably pious without being overwhelming; very calm and very reassuring. Crowley and Scally were our delegates from the “OK guy” category, marvelous companions who convinced us by his simple existence in this place that the familiar classes of being had not been annihilated. Colombo was sober and circumspect; steady or, better – the word was already emerging in Angel conversation as the ultimate compliment –solid. There was a hidden social message concealed there as well, but it was too early for me to detect it. Carmody was our first eccentric, a flake in the grand tradition, and I later surmised that the Master of Novices had chosen him to be an Angel as part of some personal reclamation project. A year later I found myself hoping, in vain, that even if I couldn’t play the Frank Crowley part, I might still slip into next summer’s angelic cast as that season’s Thomas Carmody.

We prayed a little in the morning, went to Mass, cleaned our quarters in silence, and afterwards David Crowe gave us a brief and exceedingly unrevealing conference on the Rules, whatever they might be. After lunch we went on walks together or played whatever sports our numbers permitted. All the Angels were passably athletic, but brother Colombo was just inept enough to convince Candidate LaBella that he could get through this. And perhaps it was then that Candidate Toland, who abhorred sports, decided that he could not get through this. Jocks can smell jocks of course, even in our mild cavorting. Crowley and Scally, jocks to the core, mentally embraced Candidate Gorman and myself, and made an urgent private note to keep an eye on Candidate Gilligan, who had World Class Competitor written all over him.

It was a pleasant, almost jolly life and it lasted two weeks. By then I had gotten over smoking. There were simply no cigarettes available. We were informed the Jesuits could and did smoke, which I knew, but only with the permission of their Superior. I presumed that at some point, but not for four or maybe seven years, the permission would be automatic. The silence while working did not seem very difficult, and there were few other real privations. It was a little like going to camp, we all said. I had never been to camp and I’m not sure any of the others had, either.

It was not exactly like camp, however, even our imagined version. We were introduced enigmatically to the “Rule of Touch” – Don’t. None of us particularly wanted to touch the other, but it never occurred to us that we shouldn’t. No one dared ask why, but minds were doubtless turning. In my first year in high school, a very small Jesuit priest, who was for his sins assigned to teach a state-mandated hygiene course to us on hygienic savages, one day enter the classroom, deliberately folded his hands on the desk before him, cleared his throat and shouted in a whisper, “Boys, if there are any problems about taking a bath see me in private.” Problems about taking a bath? That single sentence was our entire sex education, and the effect was electric. Forty adolescent minds promptly descended into the bathtub and found there in the tepid water the problem that Father Zema had so thoughtfully pointed out. The Candidates too knew with the same adolescent instinct that there would be a lot more to this. The Rule of Touch was filed for future reference.

If the full import of the Rule of Touch was a present mystery, two other revelations had more substance. Brother Crowe must have rehearsed this one a thousand times. “Many religious orders have penitential practices… of the flesh… [Oh?]. Nevertheless… [It was coming, whatever it was] obedience is really the highest and most rewarding of the virtues… [Will he make it?]…” Suddenly they were out on the desk before him, a foot-long whip of braided white cords and some sort of contrivance of thin chains. My spirit screamed inwardly with delight. Now this was more like it!

What Brother David Crowe was attempting to and finally did explain was that Jesuit Novices flagellated themselves every Monday and Wednesday night, holidays accepted. After the lights went out in the dormitory, each Novice knelt, stripped to the waist, at the side of his bed and at the sound of a small bell flogged himself on the back for the space of an Our Father. It was, in my experience at least, difficult to flog yourself, to inflict pain willingly in this fashion. The chain was another matter entirely. It was kept, like the flagellum, rolled in a ball, beneath the pillow. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings its inch and a half width was wrapped around the thigh (my left-handed instinct told me it should be the right thigh) with its tiny wire prongs pressed inward against the flesh. Once you fixed it around your leg, there it remained until you next returned to the dormitory after breakfast, three hours hence.

The chain required considerable experimentation. If worn too loose it would simply slip down the leg like an ungartered stocking, and the loss of face was incalculable. If bound too tightly, you saved face but possibly lost a leg. The somewhat blunted prongs were supposed to press into the flesh just enough to hurt but not to pierce. It was obviously impossible to compare tensions, torques and pain thresholds; I was reduced to checking out, as inconspicuously as I could, the red tracks on the others’ thighs when next we went swimming. The really tricky part was moving. The chain was put on while standing still, but once you started walking the thigh muscles came into play and it was an entirely new deal. And in spades for genuflection. And double, redoubled and vulnerable when sitting down, since you sat right down on the goddam chain.

We adapted. I learned to walk in a different but not a very noticeably different way that had a lot to do with pivoting on the ball of the foot. We had to sit during sections of the daily Mass and then all of breakfast. And in that part lay the beauty. On those same Tuesday and Thursday mornings we were served not breakfast but a glimpse of the Beatific Vision in the form of cornbread and maples syrup. For New Yorkers who thought that God had invented breakfast simply to finish up the Wheaties, hot cornbread slathered with butter and maple syrup was like a foretaste of Paradise, the righteous’ reward for celibacy. It was our sex and our drugs, and of course it was put before us on the two mornings when we had to eat it sitting on steel prongs. It was the chain that yielded however. Cornbread taught me that any pain could be borne if only the motive was strong enough.

I doubt if any Candidate ever made for the door at the stunning revelation that he would be expected to afflict himself in this manner. Like the proto-Jesuits we already were, we smiled the flagellum and the chain back into perspective. “Just what I’ve been looking for, a religious order that prescribes self-abuse twice a week.” What was infinitely more difficult about the Candidacy was being on the outside looking in, sealed off from the real Jesuits. We could see the Novices on other parts of the grounds playing their own games, and from the visitors’ gallery in the upper rear of the chapel we could look down during Mass and see the entire 200 man Jesuit community spread out below us. We come to join them, and here we knelt in funny little black jackets.

In the inscrutable Jesuit way we were not told how long the Candidacy would last. When Habit Day finally came we did not know it until after breakfast, when we returned to our dormitory to make our beds. There they were, a newly dry cleaned black soutane, with a black cloth cincture to hold the buttonless front together, a celluloid clerical collar to be worn under the cassock, our black trousers and shoes carried with us from the World. Now dressed like Jesuits and not Externs, we were led in silence inside the cloister, down a dark hall we had never seen and into the basement where in a large unadorned room the Novices were waiting to greet us.

The Novices, it turned out, had been inspecting us even more closely than we had been marking them. We were, after all, their entertainment and fodder for the entire next year and, as they realized better than we, their companions and friends for the rest of their lives. Silent judgments had already been made, some of them based on tales carried between the two groups by the Angels, others on appearances alone. We had invested each other with an entire personal history before a single word was spoken.
We were now part of a larger Jesuit community, Fathers and Lay Brothers, who lived in rooms across the front of the large, U-shaped building, the Junior Scholastics in the west wing and Novices in the east. The entire kingdom was ruled, as was every Jesuit house, by a Father Rector. The Rector governed the community, but the Novices were governed – how wretchedly inadequate the word – by the Master of Novices. The Novitiate was sacred, extraterritorial turf – “Let no one,” quoth the Rule, “speak to those in their First Probation” – and the Grand Seigneur of this haram was the man we called, then and forever after, whatever he or we might be doing down that dim road, the Master.

The Master was the Rev. Robert Grissom, S. J. He was from Buffalo, and though at first I did not know what moral landscape lay behind that geography, it became clearer with the passing months. He was a rather short, wiry man of forty, with an outdoor complexion and a quick but somewhat forced smile that suggested that he could be amused, but neither as often nor as deeply as might first appear. His frown came almost as quickly but lasted longer, was somewhat more convincing and was frequently punctuated by a vein that throbbed in quite spectacular fashion from the top of his rimless glasses to his hairline. He was not a man to be trifled with, ever.

The Master lived, like all the Fathers, in a combined office and bedroom across the second floor hallway from the large room where the Novices pondered their spiritual progress. The Novices lived quite otherwise. We did not have rooms; we had two very public perches on which our lives unfolded in full view of our fellows. One was in the ominously named “ascetory,” which would have been a study hall had we anything to study, and which was in fact two large connected rooms that ran the length of the second floor of the Novices’ wing of that large building. Each Novice had a desk there, or rather a wooden table, with a straight-backed wooden chair and, at the right of the chair, a two inch high wooden kneeler. There was a shelf on one side of the table to hold our meager reading, and the table drawer contained all our earthly goods, a few pencils, a notebook or two to write down one’s thoughts—“lights” they were called, mostly of a very low wattage–and an eraser to erase them. Each of us also had the missile or prayer book that he had brought with him and so was not standard issue. On almost the very first family visit each of us contrived to exchange the déclassé English-language missile of our entry for the elegantly Latin Missale Romanum.

On the fourth floor of our wing were two identical rooms, now divided into sleeping alcoves by suspended metal piping from which hung thin curtains. These were drawn closed only when changing or sleeping. At the far end of this floor was a washroom with rows of sinks, each with a very bad mirror and a shelf for toiletries. Sinks, beds and ascetory desks were reassigned every couple of months, and though the object of the exercise was to train us in the fine art of detachment, the effect of even that simple change in the immovable Novice universe was as stimulating as the arrival of a shipment of prostitutes.

It would have been difficult becoming attached to the sinks in any event, since they produced nothing but cold water, very cold water, and for four years I began each day by shaving in that frigid stream. The bathrooms were in a room off the main hallway on the fourth floor. There were toilets in the basement as well, along with showers. The true Athlete of God took a morning shower, which demanded the preternatural effort of bolting from bed, seizing your clothes, dashing down four flights of stairs with all due modesty, and plunging your body under a stream of tepid water. Within a half hour of our 5:30 AM rising we were expected to be present in chapel, shower or no.

The reverse trek upward at 10 PM unfolded with far less élan. Every day was bone-wearying in the Novitiate and a four-flight climb at its end was tolerable, as were most things in the Novitiate, only by its absolute lack of an alternative. The Novice dug into his laundry box in the hall for his next day’s change of shorts, socks and T-shirts, if there was such, and deposited them on a wooden chair next to his bed. There was a reluctant nod in the direction of the cold water sink, then the silence was shattered by curtains being drawn around each bed, enclosing chair, bed and rapidly expiring Novice. The cassock was hung from the piping on a too frail wire hanger and the Novice changed from underwear to pajamas. Twice a week he awaited the sound of the bell to signal flagellatio, but otherwise he uttered some private prayer, carefully took the chain from under his pillow and placed it on the chair and sank onto his cot, a steel frame with metal straps instead of springs. The mattress was straw-filled. None of it mattered a jot or a tittle. There were no insomniacs in the Novices’ dormitory.

Novitiate life was just becoming familiar when I was overwhelmed by a new reality, one that still towers over anything I experienced before or since. The new Novices of the first year were suddenly separated from those of the second and plunged into something that had been darkly alluded to but never really explained– the Long Retreat. Every Jesuit of whatever grade or category had to make an annual retreat, an eight-day period of total silence and withdrawal from one’s normal occupations and preoccupations. But twice in his training, at the very beginning and the very end, he was required to spend an entire month in such an exercise.

Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th-century Spanish founder of the Jesuits had himself devised the Spiritual Exercises whose full form we were about to experience, and he left elaborate instructions on how they were to be carried out. On the first day of October the first year Novices were moved into one ascetory and one dormitory, and we began. At the end of the second day at the very latest it was already apparent to me that this was going to be a very long haul. Two essential changes took place: recreation disappeared and we were to meditate on our knees four times a day. It does not seem like a very radical change, given the basic premises of Novitiate life, but in fact it was.

Jesuit silence was never total; if you had enough Latin, you could always ask someone to pass the salt or inquire where the dust mops were. But the twice daily recreation periods that broke the habitual silence were actual communication, the only exits out of your own mind. We were now in effect being held incommunicado, sealed within ourselves and set down on our knees to think about it. Work went on as before. We sat and ate in the refectory with the same people, but all the lines were down; we were neither sending nor receiving. No hermit was ever more solitary.

Four times a day the Master presented, straight out of St. Ignatius, the matter for meditation, and we trudged back to the ascetory, sank to our knees on those unyielding wood kneelers and reflected upon it. I’m not sure I had spent four consecutive minutes of my life reflecting about anything, and now I was being asked to spend four hours every day for a month braiding the life of Jesus and that of His newest recruit into a seamless skein of thought. From the outset I could not believe it was possible. It probably wasn’t, but we all attempted it.

I fared poorly. I grew more restless and distracted with each passing day. I could not bear the empty solitude with myself. I counted minutes and hours and days. I thought a great deal – how could I not – about what I cannot even recall. But I felt nothing but the desire to end a dreadful suspended animation and throw myself once again into the comforting arms of process, of life. Then as abruptly as it had begun, the Long retreat was over. “The Life,” which was now my life, was about to begin.

“I hear you are going to Puerto Rico.”

Someone has been leaking information.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve been there…”

Of course she’s been there and for ten Thanksgivings, that wonderful feast of family, I have sat through endless narratives of her global travels, loaded with mind-melting cultural markers—“The Chinese are very industrious but they smell of garlic”—while confirming photos—“Turkey, wonderful place. Istanbul used to be called Constantinople, you know”—are passed from leaden hand to leaden hand. Elder Hostels, you’re going to have to answer to your Maker.

“…and I have a few places you really must visit. First, there’s a wonderful nineteenth century house in Ponce—I don’t know how those people managed to preserve it. Just ask the family next door for the key. But don’t give them anything.”

“Listen, I know you mean well”—How do I do it?—“but I’m not leaving the hotel. The only excursions I have planned are between the buffet and pool.”

“That’s no way to travel.”

“It is now the only way to travel. My sightseeing days are over.”

“You mean you’re too old for a little adventure?”

“No, it means I’ve already seen every castle, tomb, cathedral, ruin, garden, waterfall, museum, palace and factory in the world, listened to endless evening ragas in India and endlessly depressing fados in Portugal, smelled the roses in Shiraz and Picardy, admired every known species of spoon dance, faux flamenco and amateur opera, watched Chinese acrobats perform in the Roman theater in Busra eski Sham, attended a performance of the ta’ziyeh in Tehran and of the Christian Passion Play in Union City, New Jersey. I have ascended the High Atlas, descended into Ngorongoro Crater, sped across Venafran fields to Lacedaemonian Tarentum, flown over the Matterhorn, dived the Blue Grotto, swam in the Euphrates, run down the Odessa Steps, swanned about the hot springs at Pamukkale, was soaped, scrubbed and pounded in a thirteenth century hammam in Damascus, crossed both the Hellespont and the Equator many times and watched the sun rise and set everywhere from Greenland to Antarctica…”

She hung up.

“…eaten sheep’s eyes with the badu, kibbe in the Lebanon, ful mudammas in Cairo, borscht in Moscow, tartuffo at the Tre Scalini in the Piazza Navona, melons on the shores of the Caspian and by a stream outside the Salang Tunnel in Afghanistan, steak in Florence and Buenos Aires, breakfast fries and mayonnaise in Louvain, bangers and mash in London, mussels in Brussels, hummus bi lakhm in Damascus, fondue in Zurich, Sacher Torte in Vienna, wurst in Munich and dangerous looking fish everywhere from Iceland to a riverboat restaurant in the Nile. I’ve drunk vodka in St. Petersburg, a Singapore Sling in Singapore, Stella Artois at the 1958 Belgian World’s Fair and ice-cold Stella in Palmyra, karkadé in Aswan and had a mystical experience after my second melon softie in Isfahan. I’ve sung “Santa Lucia” in Santa Lucia, recited Hafiz’s Bukhara ghazal in Bukhara and spent April in Portugal…”

Yes, she had bailed out, in the manner of first wives, before I had fairly gotten up to speed. So allow me to explain a little further here.

Getting Around

As must be clear, I’ve gotten around, in steerage as a pauperized graduate student, in business class as a well-heeled professor laden with frequent flyer miles, rich heaps of Delta indulgences that would put a Dominican friar to shame. The big leaps were by plane of course, sometimes in the form of those sixteen-or-more-hour, change-at-Frankfurt killer flights to Jerusalem or Dubai or Delhi that break both body and spirit. But one does what one must. Far more interesting was travel by car. Sometimes it was driven by me, notably over the Alps during a thunderstorm in a tiny rental Fiat when I was young and stupid and later, when I was older but no wiser, in a Volkswagen bug all the way from Beirut to Rotterdam with a ten month old infant in the back seat who was, at each stop, passed from hand to unwashed hand by toothless beldames in every village in the Balkans.

Sometimes there was, more wisely, a hired local driver. These chauffeurs ranged from the dignified and sober Sikh who got me from Delhi to Mumbai in one piece and the garrulous comedian who sped, demon-like, along the splendid paved ribbons of Saudi Arabia to the surly brute who scowled and muttered dark imprecations at me and the world from Rabat to Saharan Ourzazata. And once in a while I went by taxi. On one occasion I stepped into the street in Amman, flagged a cab and, though trained in the humble New York bleat, “Will you go to Brooklyn?,” I boldly announced, “Baghdad…and step on it.” He did, pausing only to pick up another Amman passenger heading in the same direction, an exotic dancer named Venus. She got the front seat; I admired her from behind, her hair, that is.

There were a few formal stops across the featureless steppe. We paused of course at the Syrian customs station in the middle of nowhere—a long stop here; how often did these numbed officials get to host, and inspect, a belly dancer?—and again, a hundred miles or so farther on, at Iraqi customs in another nowhere. Each was a solitary one-story beige building flying a limp, sun-bleached flag, but the Iraqi station also boasted the second filthiest bathroom I have ever encountered, a staggeringly fetid hole in the floor and the home nest to every noxious bottle fly between the Euphrates and the Orontes. Venus, who knew better, disappeared demurely and briefly behind the building. A close second to this Iraqi disgrace are the French-installed toilets in the medieval castle at Busra eski Sham. The colonizers installed them in the Thirties but they neglected to tell the colonized that there’s plumbing that must go along with the porcelain. Never been flushed since 1934. Yow!

The International Airwick Trophy goes, however, to the National Hotel in Suwayda, Syria. It was used as an R&R facility for the Syrian officers fighting on the Golan Heights. The Israelis thought they beat the crap out of the Syrians on the Heights in 1973. Apparently not, or else the Syrian officers held it in until they got back to the National, where they relieved themselves on the floor and walls of the toilets there, and then, when those filled up—that plumbing problem again!—they used the walls and floors of their rooms. Good help must be hard to find in the Syrian Arab Republic. By 1979 they still hadn’t cleaned up the soul-gagging mess.

If the taxi ride across the Syrian steppe was brilliant in the conception (and long and hot in the doing), for sheer danger on the road nothing beat the run from Damascus to Aleppo in the yellow Dodge Charger shared taxis that the Syrians called “Service.” You bought one (or two if you wanted the space) of the five available seats, though prospective passengers were best aware that #5 makes the journey in the front seat straddling the gear box. It’s a trip of four hours or more on a busy, two lane, shoulderless highway with a driver who may already have made that trip once this day. It must be relaxing work in any event since invariably, three hours or so in, in the vicinity of Ma’arrat al-Numan, the driver’s head begins first to wobble and then to nod. Someone shouts Wallahi! Na’im!, “Holy Christ! He’s falling asleep!” Our pilot is poked, jabbed, pummeled, shouted at and sung to in an effort to prevent his driving off the road or, worse, into the grill of an onrushing Turkish truck with its disquieting bumper epigraph, Mashallah, “Whatever!” and whose own driver may himself be cat-napping. Hair-raising!

Driving is dangerous, especially on the wrong side of the road in the British fashion—the best place to practice that madness is on the back roads of Ireland–or anger making, or both in most of the places I’ve traveled, but for sheer romance, I thought, with maybe some discomfort, one must take to the rails. The Chunnel train, Dover to Paris, was in fact exciting and fun, and the TGV plunging down into the warm heart of Provence zippy and astonishing and shows what the French can do when they put their minds to it. And in Italy, Mussolini is said to have made the trains there run on time. And how not since the time it takes a rapidissimo from, say, Florence to Venice, compares favorably with what it would take one to walk there.
Less dangerous by far is travel in the wet. I’ve made long trips by sea (transatlantic crossings, the Pacific to Hawaii, Athens to Singapore) and very short trips, most memorably from the mainland to Capri, when I got violently seasick while still moored to the dock in Sorrento. None of them involved a shipwreck. But then again, most of the ships I‘ve travelled on have been seagoing hotels with hydroplanes so broad and so wide that you think you’re sailing on a Posturepedic. I will skip the details of those voyages since they were mostly cruises that hove to in every touristic purgatory in and around the European continent, and I have dealt with that matter elsewhere.

Transatlantic crossings are generally empty of visuals, though the captain of one liner did slow down his ship and announce, there in the open North Atlantic, that this was the very place where the Titanic had gone down. There followed an iconic instance of folie de mer: the passengers rushed to the railings and took pictures of the water! There was a similar but quite unexpected emptiness on the Amazon, which I sailed for a thousand miles, from its fresh blue-green mouth to its muddy upper reaches. We traveled for hours on end along (apparently) uninhabited banks with flat forests stretching to the horizon on either side of the river like a green desert. Our destination was Manaos, a large modern Amazonian city with a carefully preserved colonial veneer that was chiefly visible in its jewel-like opera house: “Shoes off, please. That’s valuable parquet under your feet.” The place turned my mind immediately, of course, to Klaus Kinski, that wonderful, terrifying German nut case, playing Fitzcarraldo, another nut case who tried to build his own opera house in Izquito in the Peruvian rain forest. But when the Werner Herzog fantasy faded from mind, it was replaced by the more personal memory of a similar gem of an opera house in Cairo. It has since burned to the ground, but once, in another kind of play acting, I stood in its lobby between acts in my white colonial suit and smoked Egyptian cigarettes.

There have been many vessels under my feet. The largest was certainly the gigantic Voyager of the Seas, a maritime embarrassment that looks like a monstrous Trump apartment house perched atop a rowboat. It carries a mere 3,000 passengers; the newer Oasis of the Seas has doubled that. I’ve done lifeboat drills on passenger ship oldies like the United States in 1954 and the spanking new Queen Mary 2, which is now the only example of what used to be called “ocean liners” left on the Atlantic run (she also cruises on the sly). I’ve passed in and out of harbors on lifeboats and/or tenders from liner to shore and back; sailed on a yacht along the Turkish coast and on ferries across the Bosporus and the Victoria Nile in Uganda; on a hydrofoil four hours down Lake Nasr to Abu Simbel and (oh, God!) back; a gondola and vaporetto in Venice; sleek tourist barges on the Seine in Paris and the Liffey in Dublin, and through the canals of Bruges and Amsterdam, where the highlights are a view of the Pink Memorial to homosexuals wherever they are and the house of Anne Frank, though whenever I pass the latter, all I can think of is the stage performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” that was so bad that when the onstage Nazis approached her house, someone in the audience shouted “She’s in the attic!”.

It’s not my only inappropriate reaction. Sailing out through the Straits of Gibraltar in the dark, Tangier all mysterious on my left, the enormous but cheerfully lit hulk of Gibraltar on my right—Is there any more British place in the world?—I wondered if the anti-U-boat nets were still below…or was that in “Destination Tokyo”? Narrows always seem interesting, but there is something quite special about a canal, like the view of the gentle country landscape, and the occasional oompah band, that glides by at eye level on a passage through the Kiel Canal; or my astonishment at the engineering marvels displayed in the complex locks of its sister in Panama. The journey up the Rhine and the down the Danube, from Rotterdam to the Iron Gates, river and locks combined, is a panorama of Europe, not of its cities and monumental achievements and sufferings, but of its quiet countryside and tranquil river towns. The Suez Canal offers a quite different resonance. It is a gliding voyage through an empty and silent landscape whose history can still be read off its sandy banks.

Necessity or curiosity puts me on boats, but romance is my chief and maybe only reason for travelling by rail, some hangover, I suppose, from a much earlier emotional investment in Lionel model trains. There was a kind of understated romance in going by rail, and on what were very close to Lionel standard gauge tracks, into the Amazonian rainforest; or riding the Railway at the End of the World from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all in Patagonia; or up the Klondike on a single track in Alaska. These were empty expeditions, however. I had already lost it, not at the movies but on the Hejaz Railway, the narrow gauge line the Ottoman Turks built on the eve of the First World War and the object of T. E. Lawrence’s explosive intentions during that same conflict. It was intended, as a boon to pilgrims, to extend from Damascus to Mecca, but in fact it reached only a far as Medina, 275 miles short of the Holy City since the Bedouin lobby, which lived off the pilgrim camel transport between Medina and Mecca, said “Yok!”

Though there has been the occasional rumor that the Saudis might be fixing up their section of the line, today the only functioning section of the main line of the Hejaz Railway runs from Damascus to Amman. In the quaintly splendid half-Ottoman, half Victorian terminal in Damascus I booked passage on it, first class, Damascus to Dera‘a. I spent most of the slow trip south, borne on the wings of steam, on the rear car platform watching for surviving way stations along the line. At Dera‘a I switched to one of the trunk lines, this one to Busra Sham (another such peeled off farther south to Haifa). Here the pace was even more leisurely and the landscape through which we chugged was golden with the wheat of the Hawran. Here and there we passed a solemn stone house built, how painfully, from the black basalt once thrown up as lava from the Jebel Druze to the north. It was a lovely and lonely trip—I may have been the only passenger on board—and authentic enough to raise the occasional frisson that a blue-eyed, white-clad Irish actor might blow us up at any moment.

When I recall the overnight train from Cairo to Luxor, it’s not romance that springs to mind but a great deal of tossing and turning in a suffocating upper berth. It was wartime in Egypt—the 1973 dust-up with Israel in the Sinai was winding down—and so there were blackout precautions. Most of Egypt is pretty dark at night to begin with, but in Cairo car headlights were partially blued, though not, of course, the blazing windows of the Nile Hilton. Sandbags were piled high around the Egyptian Museum, and its most famous resident, King Tut, had his own sandy bulwark to protect him. It had worked in the 18th dynasty; why not in the twentieth century?

The railroad did its part. My sleeper was the Night Misr—visitors to Egypt (Misr in Arabic) find the assonance between Misr and misery irresistible—and its windows had been painted the same odd-colored blue as the Cairo cabs. Sitting before the standard anonymous “cutlet” in the dining car, the Nile appeared like a black sheet on my right and the Egyptian landscape was reduced to dark shapes on my left. It was like having a very bad seat in Plato’s Cave. I don’t know if the ventilation was another war casualty—I suspect it was never installed in the first place—but the sleeper berth was an overnight inferno, hours of stifling heat punctuated by clanking stops and starts at every village along the Nile. The man who dreamed of the Orient Express ended up on the Luxor local.

A Room at the Inn

At the end of every flight, outside every railway station, in every port, just off every strada and autobahn, there is lodging, a place to stay, a room at the inn. I had a friend who travelled only by rail and ferry, chiefly for effect, I suspect. He claimed that the best (read: cheapest) lodging was to be found simply by entering the first place one encountered on leaving the terminal. It’s hard to imagine worse advice, unless of course you fancy run-down pensions, youth hostels or seamen’s hotels. Better to consult the Michelin or follow the travellers with the expensive luggage, unless they’re being put up by their pal, the prince.

I did my first serious travelling when I was a graduate student with a very limited budget. As I moved around the Middle East—I think it was called the Near East then—and moved from one Michelin tag-end hotel to another, I made careful note of all the pleasure palaces that I could not afford but which, even in my certified feckless state, I recognized as places where I must one day stay. And later, armed with a green Amex credit card, I did just that. I booked myself into the St. George in Beirut (later, alas, destroyed), the New Umayyad in Damascus, the American Colony in Jerusalem and the Cairo Hilton (my first choice there, the Shepheard, was another casualty of violence). They felt good, all of them, and not a single one was anywhere near a terminal.

I have my own piece of travel wisdom. The best place to stay, I discovered, is a palace. Some hotels are former palaces, well and good, but the canny traveller will prefer an actual palace. The Jordanian royal family have a number of them so it was no great inconvenience for them to put me up in one such in Amman since they had, after all, invited me to their conference. This palace was unoccupied by the royals, of course, but I suspect that Prince Phillip, who also attended, may have stayed with the Hashemis, where he could have chatted them up of an evening with stories of how it was the Brits who had created the Hashemite Kingdom and put their father on its somewhat shaky throne. I had no such entertainment; the best I could do was make off with as much of the royal stationery as I could carry.

The Saudis boast even more palaces than the Hashemites, but the Saudis seem not to invite strangers to stay in them. No matter. I account my lodging in Jeddah genuinely palatial. It was a splendid villa, fully staffed, with a pool and air-conditioning the likes of which I had not experienced since I first stepped into Loew’s American in 1940, when electricity was 10 cents the kilowatt-month and the AC, had it escaped, would have frozen the entire Bronx in its tracks. The Mobil Oil Company maintained this little Arabian recóndito for the benefit of very high Mobil brass when and if they chanced to drop into the Kingdom. Since there was none such in sight at that moment, they permitted access to the brazen professor whom they had imported to amuse the Saudis for a spell.

I adjusted almost immediately. I pooled upon rising—they already knew my bathing suit size and color preference in Turkish bathrobes—then refreshed myself with real and very cold orange juice and sat down to breakfast—two eggs over easy, bacon, not too crisp, hash browns and a bagel—alone at a long table where I might have invited a dozen friends, had I any, to join me. There followed the tedious business of deciding whether I should be home for lunch, of ordering dinner and having the car brought round. It was a Buick Park Avenue and it took fifteen minutes in the Saudi sun before the frost disappeared from its windows. God, how I miss that place!

The American Colony in Jerusalem was once the palace of an Ottoman pasha and is now a charming Swiss-run hotel that breathes a quiet and quite genuine charm. It was not my first lodging in Jerusalem, however. On my return to the city after my earlier and hasty graduate student visit, I thought it would be extremely cool to stay at the pilgrim hostel that the Italian Franciscan nuns ran inside the Old City. It was winter—who knew it snowed in Jerusalem?—and Casa Nova was indeed cool, cold actually, and extremely Spartan, though I did fulfill a lifelong ambition of having pasta every night for dinner. What I did not count on was that the Good Sisters would close and bar their door at 10 every evening.

No amount of ringing and pounding at 10:15 brought Sister Janitor to the door and so I got back in my rental car and drove to the nearest familiar name, the King David Hotel. At my knocking, the front door there (also locked!) was opened a crack, just enough for the security guard inside to look me over and send me peremptorily away, grounds unstated. But just before the door slammed close, I thought I heard “The Y, across the street,” perhaps in the hope that I would go over and blow it up. The YMCA was open and apparently gave shelter for the night to terrorists. The polished wooden floors gleamed in the dull hall light as I was led to my room. It had, I noticed, thick iron bars on the windows, even though it was on the third floor. And of course, as soon as I was between the cold Christian sheets, the first thought to take hold in my mind, in 24 pt. Arial Black letters, was “Fire!”, an internal scream that quickly yielded to a vivid vision of myself caught between flaming floors and barred windows, while the blaggard in King David’s place across the street said to the gathering crowd that there was probably no one in the building and in any event it was too late to bother the Jerusalem fire department.

Fie on the King David and yes, eventually on the Sisters of Casa Nova, betrayed, these latter ladies, for the more secular pleasures of the American Colony Hotel. The understated building set back off Salah al-Din Street once housed a high Ottoman dignitary, a bey at least, perhaps a retired binbashi or “Chief of a Thousand.” Now it served as shelter for those well-heeled enough and brave enough to lodge in Arab East Jerusalem, where many Israeli cabbies would very much prefer not to go. And the nicely “Oriental” upstairs terrace was the sacred place where every trench-coated TV anchor back to John Chancellor stood and delivered. “This is Peter Jennings reporting from Jerusalem…” And inside was the bar where Jennings and Rather and Mitchell and Amanpour would later tell war stories and cut the memory of Edward R. Murrow down to size.

I lodged down below, in one of the courtyard rooms where I wrote sections of a book on Jerusalem and watched the 80s arrive. I’m sure that neither Peter nor Dan nor the ladies realized what important things were going on downstairs. Nor much cared.

You don’t get much of a sense that you’re in Switzerland when you’re sitting in the lounge of the American Colony, and even less that you’re in Jerusalem or even Israel. The same is true of the Nile Hilton and its sister in Tehran in whose lobbies more English than Arabic is heard in the first and more French than Farsi in the second. Ditto the International in Kabul and the Hilton in Addis Ababa, where, by the way, you should not attempt to lift the copper-clad menu without assistance from the waiter. The Divan in Istanbul and the Buyuk Efes in Izmir (avoid the fish here!) are both splendid, but no place to practice your Turkish.

Once, however, there were lodgings where you could enjoy or, more accurately, undergo, the experience called in Arabic baladi or “local.” One should probably edge into this gradually, in Israel perhaps, with an overnight at the Ginosor Inn Kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee; the “Inn” tells you all you need to know about what’s in store. More than a few steps down from that would be to cadge a room at something like the kibbutz in Upper Galilee called Ayelet ha-Shahar, a farming complex where the agricultural technology is high but the accommodations low.

Two of my baladi favorites are gone now or transformed into something different, more comfortable, to be sure, but now at a very considerable remove from the echt baladi of the originals. In 1960 you had little choice of lodging in Palmyra: it was all in at the Queen Zenobia, a one story, one corridor hotel of stone the color of the desert. There was an extremely impressionistic portrait of the desert queen (a very late Puvis de Chavannes?) in the lobby where she looked down on the new arrival with quite justified suspicion. My room—I was given a choice since I seem to have been the only guest—looked out upon the desert, as in fact did all of them; there was no other view for about 200 miles.

Once he had registered me, the manager (owner?) gave a sharp kick to the lifeless dog lying upon the bleached and threadbare carpet that was the lobby’s sole claim to elegance and he departed for his own, doubtless more fashionable, housing. He returned near sunset—he knew better than I that later there would be no electricity in his establishment–to lay out a supper of the parts of a very slender and elderly chicken surrounded by some downcast frites. What I had on my plate, I was to discover, was the common fare put before franjis from the Pillars of Hercules to the headwaters on the Indus. I sat in the darkness with my cold coq maison and felt, well, very baladi.

The tiny wooden building called Nazzal’s Rest House was in that era the only lodging inside the deep Jordanian canyon where Petra hides, a hotel braver in its self-presentation, if more rustic, than the Queen Zenobia. My room there, like many another in such places, had two metal beds, with sheets and pillowcases stacked neatly atop the standard striped straw mattress. For my added comfort there was an uncertain wooden chair standing next to an uncertain wooden table. Against one wall and partially blocking the doorway was an armoire—most buildings in the Middle East seem to have been put up before the invention of the closet–whose diminutive size suggested that the guest was expected to arrive without luggage and in fact stark naked. There was a toilet in the hall and chicken for dinner. And here too, when the manager departed for the evening, he took the electricity with him, a light burden indeed since the electricity wired into our famous gulch was an extremely thin and elusive thing. Below that standard of accommodation was only the windy night I spent in a Bedouin tent pinned to the earth by a leaden and foul-smelling carpet and another on the ground in the chilly parking lot at Delphi covered only by a monkey skin throw rug.

A degree of colonial-baladi grandeur was once available in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and there may still be—the times are terrible—at Baron’s in Aleppo, the past haunt of the likes of Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence, whose bar tabs are proudly displayed in the lounge. And since Lawrence’s also included his room number, it seemed like the most errant folly not to take up my own lodging there. The traditions, I am happy to say, were bravely maintained: there was chicken and frites for dinner. A grandeur in sadder and more spectacular decline—Baron’s still has its airs and tattered graces—is on display in the Mark Twain in Granada where I was, once again, the only guest in a hotel that once accommodated many of them, all of them doubtless better togged and better mannered than I. The Mark Twain seems to have been ground down by the competition in a very competitive market in the shadow of the Alhambra. On the other hand, Raffles in Singapore, if it lacks the genuine colonial patina, has at least preserved its original ambience for a new breed of visitors.

Spoiler alert: The loop of the Muzak tape that plays in all the rooms of the down at the heels but extremely baladi Winter Palace in Aswan is precisely four minutes and thirty-five seconds long. You’d better be very fond of “A Summer Place” and the first half of Zamfir’s pan-pipe rendition of the adagio from “Spartacus.”

Winston’s fortunes went up after his Baron’s days—there was the unfortunate matter of Gallipoli—and so did mine as I mounted the academic steps, which meant that he and I could both stay at the sumptuous Mamounia in Marrakesh, where the elderly lion—no, the other one—hunkered down in winter to paint. I just lay by the pool, which tells you something about both me and him. It was not my only palatial stop by any means. The Shah Abbas in Isfahan is a gorgeous pile and, but for the lack of screens on the windows, would be a quite perfect place to take one’s rest. I did, however, leave my personal mark there—check out the commemorative plaque in the dining room–by consuming the largest portion of Spaghetti Bolognese ever served in Imperial Iran. I’m sorry, but when I see something other than chicken, I go for it.

Sometimes it’s the setting that makes the place. Some are just flat out spectacular, like the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur, which is, as the name points out, a former Indian raj’s palace set in the middle of a very large lake, the only hotel perhaps where the bell captain wears both a turban and a Speedo. It made even the Hassler atop the Spanish Steps in Rome and the splendid Ferdinand and Isabella parador on the cathedral square in Santiago de Compostela seem a trifle humble in their setting. The only real rival to the Lake Palace Hotel is Treetops in Kenya, which tops the Udaipur lake setting by being located entirely in the branches of a very large tree. The point of this odd arrangement is that the tree looms over a waterhole where the African wildlife comes to drink every night. “Wake up, sir. It’s the elephants!” And so they were, knee deep in the pool, slurping up the muddy water in the moonlight no more than twenty feet beneath my leafy veranda. But life–or is it parenting?–is sometimes cruel. “Where are the lions?” yawned a sleepy and disappointed teenager on the adjoining porch.

There was another kind of authentic baladi experience available to the connoisseur in the Hotel Rossiya in Moscow. It was one of those hotels where the Soviets stored foreign tourists and it was a kind of petri dish of Communism. Nothing worked in the brand new Rossiya, neither the telephones, the elevator, nor the air conditioning (Ha!), not even the room in its very modest role of being a place to live for a brief spell. Mass malfunction was on display at the long desk in the lobby where the distraught attempted to make or, God help us, change transportation arrangements. On one side sat the visitors, caught between derangement and hopelessness, on the other, the apparently deaf, dumb and profoundly uncaring agents of Soviet transport. The eerie sound of despair rose to the heavens like the wailing in Dante’s Inferno.

If the key of despair was dominant at that lobby desk that foreigners were calling “The Wailing Wall,” the sound in the dining room was the drumroll of anger. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that keeps the free market, and the rest of life, moving forward turns out to be tipping. Remove tipping from capitalism and you have the dining room at the Hotel Rossiya: an absent wait staff—at an obligatory Marxism lecture perhaps– and a frothing sea of clients, some fainting from hunger, some raising an apoplectic fist to heaven with a cry for vengeance. The more practical greedily scavenged from neighboring tables a half eaten piece of toast, a cold pot of tea or whatever was still edible from a meal that must once have taken place there. This was almost twenty years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and yet the message was writ large in every room of the Hotel Rossiya: the Soviet system did not work. I didn’t see it, nor, apparently, did the CIA. No, wait; there was one functioning element: the babushka who sat in the hallway of every floor and observed and noted the comings and goings of every guest.

No foreigner traveled in the Soviet Union except by the approval, arrangement and accompaniment of the state-run Intourist Bureau. The guides it provided were usually students practicing their English free of charge. You told them where you wanted to go and they told you that—not why—it was impossible. In Moscow, for example, I was not permitted to visit Moscow University, where the lectures were presumably in cipher. The Intourist preference, whether in Moscow or in distant Soviet Tajikistan, seemed to be factories, dams and monuments to the solidarity of the Soviet peoples. My favorite non-visited place was Ferghana, out where the Soviet Union and Chinese Turkestan touched. When I sprang Ferghana on the young Intourist guide in Tashkent, he was at a loss: he had never heard of the place.

“And why, sir?”

“I’m tracing the footsteps of Alexander the Great and this is about as far as he got.”

The only Alexander the young guide knew about was a czar and he had assuredly never set foot in Ferghana, wherever that was.

“I’ll see.”

The “I” of “I’ll see” was cut from complete Soviet cloth. He would not decide; “they” would. And what they predictably decided was “Nyet.” Since they could not think of any good reason why I should go to Ferghana, there was no good reason.

“I’m sorry, sir. That is not available at present. I have arranged instead to visit a Young Pioneer camp. Very interesting for you.”

And, like the breakfast scavengers back in the Rossiya, I made the best of it: at least it wasn’t a tractor factory. The camp, as it turned out, offered a very nice macaroni and cheese for lunch and all the young Communists in their red neckerchiefs were agog at my stories of Alexander in Ferghana. They had heard far worse, I imagine.

So I’ve had my fill of baladi, some of it enlightening and enlarging, some not. I’ve spent weeks living on the sun-baked and shadeless roof of an Ayyubid fort in Busra Sham, where there was a choice of garbage disposal: you could walk your stuff down three flights of gigantic stairs and deposit them in a bin that was never emptied, or you could toss them over the wall into the surrounding moat, where it was all quickly eaten by a resident goat. The goat waxed fat for a couple of weeks that summer.

More lavish by far was my accommodation in the fully decorated bridal room in a Saudi house in al-Ula where the newlyweds were unceremoniously turned out for the benefit of the guest. All I remember is that the coverlet on the bed was a leopard skin print and that some not entirely fresh fake fur featured prominently on the headboard. There was a tape already loaded in the VCR, but I dared not turn it on. Some experiences are best left local. But it all fades before the nights as the sole occupant of the archeologists’ one-room bungalow, solitary and secure inside the now locked enclosure of temple of Baal at Palmyra. Inside my hut was a bedroll, a hurricane lamp and the promise of breakfast at eight; outside, in the midst of its enormous walled temenos, was the silent temple, all silver in the moonlight. I was all alone with Baal.

A Stone Upon a Stone: The World in Ruins

When people travel in the Western hemisphere they are mostly shown rainforests or national parks or glaciers. In Europe, it’s museums and cathedrals. But from the Mediterranean basin east, it’s ruins, ruins, ruins. Fine by me. I started life as a Classicist and so I loved texts, which I could hold in my hands, and ruins, which I saw only in photographs. Both are capable or raising a sweat on the brow, and each is easier to comprehend on the surface than to penetrate to what lies underneath. I encountered my first real, that is, Roman ruin in 1958 in the arenas, temples, theater and aqueduct at Nimes and Orange in the south of France. Now an instant expert, I headed eagerly south and east to the Italian mother lode.

In Italy there were ruins galore and I saw them all as I made my leisurely, penny-pinching way south from the Roman forum down to Pompeii and Herculaneum, with nostalgic stops at Lake Trasimene and Avernus. There were even more, as I later discovered, and sometimes more spectacular, remains of the Greco-Roman past in Sicily. These were all places long familiar from study, but they now seemed astonishingly new in their concrete reality. Or almost concrete. I was looking at the past rather than touching it: tourists, and that’s what I was, are not encouraged to muck about among the stones. That would come later.

From Brindisi I took ship to Athens and it was in the Bay of Salamis from a deck of the MS Agamemnon that I caught my first sight of the Acropolis, another pictorial cliché come to sudden life. The others staples of my classroom, locales that existed only on slides, sped almost too quickly by to leave an impression: Olympia, Delphi (a dark and dreary place for the sunny Apollo), a pause en route “where three roads meet,” then on to Corinth (I should have read Paul first), Epidauros in Argos, and finally, a startlingly small Mycenae. My first thought was, could all of that mayhem have happened in this tiny place?

Across to Asia, forward in space but backward in time. At Troy I had a sense of the place but none of the city. The remains there were beyond my powers of reimagination, and so the ancient city stayed where I first discovered it, in Homer’s poem. Southward down the western coast of Anatolia: Pergamum, Ephesus, glorious in marble, Halicarnassus, Aphrodisias, Perge, Antalya, through the Cilician Gates to Antioch, now Antakiya, with the sadly scant remains of what was one of the greatest of ancient metropolises, destroyed in a later era not by hostile armies but by the encroachment of the undrained delta of the Orontes.

Syria was one of the garden spots of the Roman East and a plum assignment for a bureaucrat or a soldier. Today it is a veritable treasure house of remains that made it clear that Rome was as brilliant in the provinces as it was at home. Often I looked at the ancient stones with only a book to guide me, but in Syria I had the extraordinary good fortune to wander the country in the company of a generous and remarkable German archeologist. Our focus was on the agricultural south, the villages of the Hawran amidst the red-soiled fields with their still standing and still inhabited Roman private houses. The crown jewel of the Hawran is the exquisite theater in a Biblical town the Romans called Bostra, a building that was designed for entertainment but was later surrounded, and preserved, by the thick walls of a 12th century Ayyubid fortress-castle.

Farther south, at the very edge of the Syrian Lava Lands, is the stark black jumble of Umm al-Jimal, the now deserted “Mother of Camels.” Finally, in the deep south of Jordan, I followed the narrow winding passage into Petra, a city hidden but profoundly exhibitionistic in its deep canyon; and at a later time and from a different direction, I encountered its sister settlement across the Saudi frontier, Mada’in Salih, the “Cities of Salih,” a name that no longer speaks of Greece or Rome but rather of the Qur’an and Islam.

Petra and Mada’in are Greco-Roman only by courtesy or influence: the Nabateans who lived there were Aramaic-speaking Arabs drawn, like many others, into the powerful Roman sunlight and softer Hellenic moonlight that shone all over the Middle East. West of the Jordan there are more authentically Classical remains all the way from Tyre and Sidon to Caesarea-by-the-Sea, some of them from the hand and purse of another Roman by courtesy, Herod the Great. Most of his prodigious building projects have disappeared, but the enormous and still standing platform that supported his wondrous rebuilding of the now destroyed Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, as well as his Sanctuary of Abraham at Hebron, now a very dangerous town, show a bold assertion of Roman aesthetics.

The Romans (and the Greeks before and after them) ranged round the entire Mediterranean, thanks in the first instance to the appetite for glory of Alexander the Great, and subsequently to the irresistible force of Roman arms. A search of Alexander’s most public legacy, the port city of Alexandria in Egypt, yielded very little. The traces of the great Greco-Roman metropolis that once stood there now lie under the waves or the pavement of the later city. Outside the Islamic monuments of Cairo, the Pharaonic remains in Egypt have put both Rome and Islam in the shade. The latter is chiefly represented by modest village mosques, the former by what is left of the temple built by the Romans on the isle of Philae at Aswan. The temple was still standing there when I saw it, but it was all but submerged in 1970 by the construction of the Nile High Dam. The temple was later salvaged, however, and rebuilt on a nearby higher island. Farther west, in Libya—once the sonorous Cyrenaica—lay the grandiose ruins of Leptis, barred to me by politics; and farther still, the intact Roman forum of Sufeitla in Tunisia, untouched by the fierce tank battles that swirled around it in WWII; and the superb Roman theater in what is now the valley of al-Djem, each site bearing mute but convincing testimony to the Roman presence and prosperity in North Africa.

I knew, I thought, all about the Greeks and Roman and their various hybrid offspring, but I also knew something of what preceded them. My first college teaching assignment was a course entitled “The Ancient Near East.” This was the heavy burden passed backward to the ever more junior professors in Classics Departments and one I threw off as soon as I had ten minutes seniority. But not before I learned something about the history of the ancient world. So standing before the ruins of Babylon, I had some glimmer of what had gone on there in the Euphrates plain; the same under the shadow of the Pyramids at Giza, another cliché now shimmering in real light, or amidst the columns of Luxor. I could make some sense of the acres of Achaemenid glory at Persepolis in Fars, a site twice famous. It was there that the last shah of modern Iran staged his folie monumentale in 1971, the hyperbolic gala in celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian monarchy. Grace Kelly showed up, as did Imelda Marcos and Mrs. Tito Broz and, inevitably, Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. A good time was had by all, except possibly the Ayatollah Khomeini who followed the sordid goings-on from his Parisian exile.

I first travelled the Middle East as a Classicist, and it was with that mindset that I first encountered Islam in the form of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. It had been built inside a still visible Roman temple courtyard and was adorned with breathtaking panels of Late Antique style mosaics done by Byzantine craftsmen for their new Muslim masters in Damascus. Then, within a few days I was standing on Herod’s Temple platform before another Byzantine creation, the astonishingly beautiful shrine called the Dome of the Rock that Christian craftsmen built and decorated for their sovereign, the Caliph Abd al-Malik, in 691 AD, not quite sixty years after the death of Muhammad.

In those days my eyes were focused on those echoes of the Classical past, but eventually I came back to those same places as an Islamicist and with a somewhat new set of eyes. But the Classical echoes kept sounding. One of my first excursions this time around was out to the Umayyad complex at Qusayr Amra on the fringe of the Syrian steppe east of Amman, once Philadelphia, a city with its own considerable Roman remains. This “chateau”—there were others–was apparently a kind of Camp David for the Damascus caliphs, adorned with panels of frisky frescoes, again in the Late Antique style and with hardly a breath of Islam in them.

There are not a great many Muslim ruins as such. Islam is a living faith and Muslims toil to keep up their holy places. There are some, however, that have fallen on bad times. In Iraq the mosque at Samarra with its surviving ziggurat-like minaret—a dizzying climb around its outside spiral staircase–is a desolate and deserted place, and the beautifully restored Mustansiriyya Madrasa in Baghdad, once a famous school in Islam, had also fallen into ruin, along with much else in that city when the Mongols razed it almost to the ground in 1258. Less tactfully restored—the Soviet restorative hand was invariably a heavy one—are the remains of Timurlane’s Registan, the impressive forum-like complex in the heart of Samarqand. The Qutb Minar in Delhi with its gigantic stone epigraphy is another ruined testament to Islam’s medieval glory.

That glory has not entirely departed of course, though more recently it is buoyed on petrodollars. Dira‘iyya, the mud-brick town that is the Saudi dynastic birthplace, is a carefully maintained nineteenth century ruin, a kind of pre-theme park Williamsburg. “How interesting!” I was forced to exclaim. If the Dira‘iyya project was doubtless prompted by nostalgia and Saudi self-regard, something else was at work in Mecca and Medina, the two chief holy cities of Islam that have been part of the Saudi kingdom since 1926. As the official Guardians of the Holy Places, the Saudis are in a high stakes game of worldwide Muslim respect, and they are playing to win.

The Haram is the Meccan sacred enclosure, in the midst of which sits the Ka‘ba, the stone “House of God” that is a focus of Muslim pilgrimage and towards which every Muslim faces in prayer. It has been consistently enlarged over the centuries as the number of pilgrims making the annual Hajj has increased. But the space had remained relatively fixed since the sixteenth century despite the fact that the stream of pilgrims became a river with the introduction of steamship travel in the nineteenth century and a flood in the mid-twentieth thanks to air transport. As the Saudis might say, there is a God: the new flood of pilgrims was accompanied by new floods of oil gushing up from under the Arabian Peninsula.

The Saudis have plowed many of their petrodollars into the modernization—how many Portosans are too many for more than a million pilgrims, how many cameras to ensure security?– and the enormous, some would say gigantesque, enlargement of both the Prophet’s mosque, which I visited and which houses Muhammad’s tomb, and the Meccan Haram, which I did not. The latter has now grown both out and up and, what has raised alarm in many quarters, is being surrounded by looming high rises, many for the pilgrim carriage trade, that have changed the entire character of the place.

Some ruins are quickly rebuilt: Jerusalem after its destruction in 70 and again in135, Baghdad after 1258, Dresden after 1945. But others are not. The once radiant Madinat al-Zahra near Cordoba in what used to be called al-Andalus and is now Spain is still in ruins, as is Samarra on the Euphrates. Both of them were palatine cites built by caliphs intent on escaping their own capitals, Cordoba in the first instance, Baghdad in the second, and their ruins speak of plans gone badly awry. Both enterprises collapsed, Samarra by gradual disintegration after the caliph moved back to Baghdad in 982, al-Zahra through a spectacular looting by Berber mercenaries in 1010. Both now lie in disconsolate ruin, though the restoration here and there in al-Zahra allows a glimpse of its dazzling heyday.

Both these sites were simply neglected after their destruction, but one ruin at least has been deliberately and carefully preserved, the shambles that was once Qunaytra in Syria. I have twice visited the Golan Heights that rise steeply from the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee and then descend slowly westward into the Syrian Hawran. The Israelis occupied the western sector of those heights in the Yom Kippur war in 1969, and there was more fighting in 1973 that ended in the current armistice. I drove up onto the Israeli Golan from Galilee. The Israelis have settled and armed and farmed it, all the while with a sharp eye on the other side; and Israeli archeologists have of course been digging away.

The Syrian Jawlan, on the other hand, which looks like peaceful enough farmland, is a highly restricted area, and it took considerable rattling of wusla, “connection,” in Damascus to get a permit to look around there. But if you’re a foreign visitor with a bit of profile, the Syrians are more than happy to put you in a bus and take you in to Qunaytra, the chief town of the area which stands just their side of the narrow strip of the Syrian-Israeli no-man’s land. Qunaytra was pretty much blown up by the Israelis just before they left it in the wake of the 1973 armistice. The Syrians have left it in exactly that rubble state, Hebrew graffiti and all, to show visitors the destructiveness of Israel. Qunaytra is now a carefully preserved ruin and a propaganda poster.

Unless you’re an archeologist, most ancient ruins are pretty inscrutable. More often than not they are simply stones on the ground, in the dim outline of a room or building if you’re lucky, with a few courses of stone if you’re really lucky. Intact buildings from before the Renaissance are relatively rare; from before the Middle Ages, rarer still. Wooden roofs collapsed or were destroyed by fire, rain poured in, the unsupported walls collapsed inward. Then, of course all that nice Greco-Roman stonework was as powerful a temptation to the later looters as is copper wire in abandoned buildings to their modern counterparts. Why chisel when you can carry home someone else’s chiseling and polishing which is, in any event, far better than your own? Most of those ancient constructions that have survived have done so because they were converted into something else, very often a church (just as early churches were later preserved by being converted into mosques) or a palace to house a ruler whose subjects were incapable of building so grandly or so finely.

Nature, or history, or chance has, however, left some solace for the traveller along the trail of starred touristic sites. In some instances the skeletons and even some of the internal organs of ancient cities, deserted now but relatively intact, have survived to astonish even the irremediably blasé. Pompeii is, of course, the prime example, a city embalmed by Mount Vesuvius. Petra in Jordan is another, snug and safe inside its lox-colored canyon. There is lovely and lonely Apamea in Syria, where you can have the ancient city all to yourself; the spectacularly photogenic Gerasa, once of the Decapolis and now Jerash in the of Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan; Dura Europos poised on an embankment high above the Euphrates, its treasures removed elsewhere but its city plan intact; and the greatest of them all, Palmyra, sitting, against all intuition, paved and columned streets and all, plumb in the middle of the Syrian steppe.

When it comes to ruins, particularly the stone-upon-a-stone type, one way to avoid that dead and dumbfounded stare known as the Tourist Gaze is to possess yourself of a very good guidebook or a very good guide. There’s no lack of such books (the Michelin Green versus the Rough Guide debate once had all the ferocity of a Microsoft vs. Apple conversation), and guides in abundance haunt all the world’s ruins, though they are not of course always good. The well-oiled pitches of local guides are often richly marbled with legend and/or government propaganda—“This is almost certainly the tomb of Alexander the Great”…” “What Palestinians?”…”Of course the water is safe to drink”…“All peoples are equal here!” And they usually do a quick onceover of the site, the “American tour,” well aware that their auditors have a boat to catch or are already straining toward that all-included lunch at the Meridien.

There are, be aware, exceptions. Once at Dayr al-Bahri, the great field of Pharaonic mortuary remains opposite Luxor, on the other, significantly western, shore of the Nile, I encountered one of those elderly German gentlemen who could still be found close to the ground in Egypt in the 70s. This one was an official guide to the archeology of the site, and he inquired at the outset, with a tight little smile (a Bavarian, I concluded, rather than the standard issue Prussian), if I preferred an American or a German tour of the site. The Teutonic gauntlet had been thrown down before me: was I man enough to handle the real thing? “You’re joking, surely,” I said. “The German, of course.”

And so we began, tomb by tomb, stele by stele, nay, shard by shard; everything sized by meter or, more finely, by centimeter; every place and object carbon-dated and supplied with full historical background—I still cannot hear the name Manetho without becoming a little ill–and accompanied by a solidly based conjecture as to its provenance and its place in the larger picture, social, political and theological. The familiar golden disk rose in the heavens, reached its pitiless zenith and had begun its slow descent—the sun seems loathe to leave the Egyptian landscape—before I finally raised my hands and cried “Kaput!” “Ya,” he grinned, “natürlich,” dropping all pretense of being Dutch or French Alsatian. He didn’t have to say it: “Kein mensch dieser.”

Just as dangerous as that war criminal at Dayr al-Bahri are the actual excavators of a site. They too might rope you into the German tour—this is, after all, their life’s work—or else they are too busy to entertain every visiting fireman who drops into their dusty pit and asks, “What’s this all about?” I understand this latter reluctance to deal with amateurs when there’s serious work to be done, but it can be carried too far. Aphrodisias is a famous archeological site in southwestern Anatolia, notable for the amount and the quality of the statuary that has been found there. Statuary and inscriptions are the gold of archeological miners, most of whom spend their entire careers sorting out unremarkable bits of broken pots. The quickest and cruelest way to destroy an archeologist’s reputation is to say, “He’s just a treasure hunter.”

Early on in the archeological era, in the late nineteenth century, there was lots of such treasure to be found, even some actual gold, which the archeologists simply carried back to their home institutions. London, Paris and the Vatican Museum between them house half of Classical Greece, and Berlin has a large chunk of the ancient Middle East in its museums. And the Germans didn’t always have to go and get the archeological treasure: the Sultan often sent it to them as a gift. No more: the archeologists may take home pictures; the treasures are the property of the locals.

Aphrodisias was a somewhat special case however. The excavator, though a professor at an American university, was a Turkish national and he himself, not his university, had title to, and total control of, the lovely, tree-shaded site with the inviting name. Visitors there were not many, however. The place was off the beaten tourist track and there was no “Welcome” sign in either English or Turkish over the lintel. I arrived in mid-afternoon, and after some fluttering of wings—it was not thought wise to disturb the director during his siesta—news came down from that drowsy Olympus that he was, in any event, far too occupied to show the newcomer around in person. He did, however, delegate one of his lesser minions, an MA candidate at a Midwestern evangelical school, to show the inopportune visitor about and out.

OK, I’d been blown off before, but I also happened to be the chairman of the university department where this foolish fellow was employed, and when he returned, late as usual, for that Fall semester, I had him beaten with rods with his baggy Ottoman trousers lowered to his knees and imposed on him the poena ultima of the academic life, a Friday class. Lèse majesté demanded no less.

Walking Through the Air Conditioned Past

Ruins are dusty and hot or cold and damp and I can pretty much take them or leave them. But I’ve developed a positive distaste for museums, with pictures on the walls and statues behind railings, even though the premises are usually air conditioned and there is a nice gift shop that sells expensive Abrams art books and cheap fridge magnets. There are exceptions of course. I do have the occasional hankering to go back to the Vatican, not for the forest of fig-leafed statuary, most of it mediocre Roman copies, but for the manuscripts and books in the library. There is still the breath of life in them, unlike the statuary that now appears cold stone dead after my visits to the sites from which they were wrenched. The Brits have lately recognized the difference. They have now separated the quick from the dead: the stone things like the Elgin Marbles are in the British Museum, the books and manuscripts in the British Library, where I actually put my profane hands on the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus, and I can attest: that Greek Bible is still breathing.

It’s not that I’ve ignored the main museums along the way; it’s just that I’m tapped out. I’ve “done”—contemplated and meditated upon– the Moab and the Rosetta Stone (the Blarney Stone, that good natured piece of Irish tomfoolery, was more fun); admired the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, Winged Victory, Michelangelo’s David, original and copies, the Pieta and Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer both at home and on their trips abroad, the Sistine ceiling, which never travels, the Impressionists in the Hermitage and the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum, the British and Ottoman crown jewels, Scythian gold and Incan silver, and Fabergé eggs beyond the counting. No mas.

Some of the very best “museums” are now locked, or at least not advertised to the public. Blame Vatican II, which cast a jaundiced, almost Protestant, eye on the cult of saints generally and more particularly on relics—the ruins of holiness. Europe is filled with many Catholic sanctity museums with their collections of Jesus’ foreskin (I saw the claimant in Santiago; there as many as 18 in European churches), vials of Mary’s milk (multiple encounters) and splinters from Jesus’ cross. If I recall correctly, I may have had one of these latter in my own childhood home, the handout from some Bronx novena. More impressive to me was the arm that was wrenched, like many another body part, off the corpse of St. Francis Xavier in Goa, India, and borne on tour in a golden, torpedo-shaped reliquary by a Jesuit priest who was as smooth as his tailoring. I was privileged to kiss it—the reliquary not the arm—near Poughkeepsie in the Spring of 1946, before the embarrassment set in.

St. Mark’s in Venice stands in the forefront of such collections of saintly memorabilia, which the Church has arranged in a hierarchy of holiness. There is a gradation of origin, of course, a kind of degree of difficulty scale, with Jesus at the very top and any one of John Paul II’s All Hands of Deck Saints at the bottom. A First Class Relic is, as one might imagine, a body part, the bigger the better since there has been a strong tendency to dismemberment. A Second Class Relic was something in habitual contact with the saint, a piece of clothing for example. And a Relic of the Third Class is an object in occasional or accidental contact, like a prayer book, a rosary or, say, a set of skis if John Paul himself ever makes it. St. Mark’s had them all, the nails from Jesus’ cross, the bridle of the centurion’s horse, Jesus’ cradle, Mary’s hair, John the Baptist’s staff.

The richness of the St. Mark’s collection was due in large part to the fact that the gentlemen of the Fourth Crusade carried back to Venice most of the spectacular assortment of relics they had looted from the churches of Constantinople—yes, I know it’s now called Istanbul. Modern skepticism has a cast a pall upon them—the Shroud of Turin controversy rumbles on, however–but no such cloud hovers over the later collection of Muslim relics in that city. There in the Topkapi Museum are a couple of rooms filled with every piece of kitsch lavished on the late Ottoman sultans—mother of pearl golf clubs!—by European rulers vying for the padishah’s favor. But in a room beyond is the real thing. There I had the opportunity to gaze upon Muhammad’s cloak, his sword, his sandals and a hair of the Prophet’s beard. But stay! There is also on display there Moses’ staff and Abraham’s own cooking pot. Keep your Rembrandts and your Picassos; there’s a real museum.

My favorite museum artifacts, I think because of both their immediacy and their backstory, are the frescoes removed from Dura Europos, a place on the far eastern side of Syria that I had also visited. The site was excavated by the French and Americans in the 20s and later. A siege there in 256 AD had caused the frescoes on the interior walls of the local synagogue to be buried, and preserved, shortly after they had been completed. In those days, in the era before the We’ll Take Everything Home and the current Don’t You Dare Touch Anything period, foreign excavators had to share their treasure with the local government. The good Presbyterians from Yale naturally opted to carry off the somewhat sketchy but interesting remains of a Christian house-church, while the Syrians got to keep the synagogue frescoes. They are now installed in the National Museum in Damascus, the two synagogue sidewalls and the front wall with its Torah niche intact. It’s a dark room, but the frescoes shine forth, still bright and fresh and defiantly iconic, a panorama of cartoon like panels of Biblical scenes.

I’ve visited, and that’s precisely the word, two rather remarkable outdoor sites that are, after a fashion, museums. The first is the Sacro Monte at Varallo in northern Italy where a life-size Stations of the Cross, a presentation that once graced the side-aisle walls of every Catholic Church in creation, meanders down the side of the mountain. Each “station” is a partially enclosed, full-scale recreation of a scene from Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, his Last Supper, for example. But what was later reduced to reliefs on wall plaques in churches is here portrayed with as much realism as the makers could manage. The figures are lifelike, the clothes are real, the hair convincing. But it is, for all that, theater, and the inclination is, I think, to marvel at—or deplore–the mis en scène rather than to experience a pulsing in the piety gland. Something similar occurs at another kind of museum, the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland. For me at least, it had too much the appearance of a movie set—perhaps I’d seen it, real or reconstructed, in too many movies. Yad Vashem, on the other hand, a Jerusalem museum and a memorial to the Holocaust dead, which I had long resisted, was alive and more moving than I could have imagined.

Though I no longer much care for the künstlich museum, I still have a soft spot for its quirkier offspring, like the Chocolate Museum in Brussels and the Sandman Museum of Port in—where else?—Oporto; the Museum of Corpses in the Palermo catacombs with its 8,000 fully dressed deceased; the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, the Museum of Exploration in Belem, the Museum of the Belgian Congo in Tervuren (now the Royal Museum of Central Africa) and, by all means, the Imperial War Museum in London. Where else can you admire a genuine Earl Kitchener of Khartoum WWI doll? And then there is the Railway Museum (you know which railway I’m talking about!) in Amman or, even better, its living counterpart, the train yards in al-Ula in Saudi Arabia where the original Hejaz Railway rolling stock sits exactly where the last Ottoman engineer climbed down from the cab of his steam locomotive (Leipzig 1908) and where I climbed all over that still attractive German lady like a model railroader in heat, which of course I was.

Framing the Holy

The world is filled with wonderful things to see. Some are natural, the mountains, rivers, canyons waterfalls, icebergs and wildlife that draw us to distant places; but many are man-made and wrapped moreover in a thick coat not of geological time but of human history. They are what beguile us out of our comfortable homes and onto the road to foreign lands, dark abodes, uncomfortable and sometimes even dangerous circumstances. I have felt actually threatened only twice, however, in many decades of travel. The first was in driving blindly through ever narrowing streets into a very ominous backstreets neighborhood in Naples. The other was when I was taken into custody by plainclothes Syrian security police in the town of Nawa in a military zone on the Golan Heights. Nothing came of either incident, nor what on reflection appears to me to be far more dangerous pastime, to gambol from stone to stone alone in remote and deserted archeological sites where a slip and a broken limb might have made me a permanent part of the evidence (“middle aged hominid; absence of weapons and unused muscles suggests a member of the Pleistocene leisure class”).

Among the wonders that humans have wrought on the landscape, dams and skyscrapers produce admiration, but it’s the ubiquitous shrines of the world that astonish the eye and draw the mind into the interior of what stands before the viewer. A shrine represents no more than putting an architectural frame, modest or grandiose, elegant or vulgar, around something that is considered notable. It may be to celebrate the possession of power, like a ruler’s palace or the government’s capitol building or parliament. What is often being celebrated is simply money; think banks, bourses or guildhalls. Such shrines can be erected wherever the individual or group with the checkbook chooses to put it. But there is another type of power that is more localized, that is the power of the sacred, the holiness that resides permanently in a place or an individual who is associated with a place. Armed guards protect the other shrines; the religious shrine is shielded by taboo. The Arabs called it haram; the Romans gave us “profane,” an advice to stay “outside the shrine” (pro fano).

My second earliest contact with a religious shrine—the first was that to the pin-striped gods in the outfield of Yankee Stadium–was the Shrine of the North American Martyrs at Auriesville, NY, where I once—don’t ask—spent an instructive week. The martyrs in question were the French Jesuit missionaries who had a few of their fingers bitten off and then killed by the decidedly unconvinced Iroquois. There are no graves in Auriesville–most of the bodies were thrown into the Mohawk River—just memories of where it all happened. The Jesuits now share that place with Kateri Tekakwitha, a pious Mohawk girl converted by them and who seems to have expired, aged 24, in the odor of sanctity, apparently under the weight of the penitential suffering she inflicted on herself, to say nothing of her disfiguring smallpox.

Kateri’s progress toward sainthood through the Roman process was exceedingly slow until Pope John Paul II put her, and everyone else short of Michael Jackson and Porfirio Rubirosa, on the fast track to canonization. She was finally declared St. Kateri in 2012. Just in time, I suspect. The Auriesville Shrine seemed like a failing enterprise during my days there, sad, deserted of visitors and physically run down. It was a shrine without a center or focus, merely the site—one site; the same Jesuits had also worked, and Kateri eventually lived, in Canada, which has its own shrine to both the Jesuits and Kateri.

Auriesville is decidedly minor leagues, even by American standards; far more impressive is the Phillip Johnson Crystal Cathedral in Garden City, CA., which is, I suppose, a kind of shrine to the Rev. Robert Schuller who raised the money for it. I thought it quite spectacular, but a colleague who also visited it came back with a more terse and pointed report, “God is not there.” The major shrines are, of course, all overseas, and I confess to having missed some of the really big ones there, Lourdes, for example—I turned left to Italy instead of right to Spain–and that of the Black Madonna in Czesthochowa, Poland, which just never came up on my radar; likewise Medugorjes in Bosnia-Herzogovina, which I unfortunately passed by twenty years before the Blessed Virgin made her appearance to the peasant children there.

But I have checked in at some notable examples. Never mind the kid stuff at Cooperstown and Akron and that Rock and Roll thing in Cleveland. Much the same for the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scrolls inside are top-drawer stuff, of course, but their enshrinement under an undistinguished aluminum teat, not so much, especially in a city that possesses what is likely the most famous dome in the world. That would be the Dome of the Rock, the seventh century octagonal domed shrine the Muslims had built for them over the rock thought to be the foundation stone of the Temple or, alternatively—one cannot be sure of such things—the rock upon which Abraham was about to sacrifice his son Isaac.

When I first went there in 1960, the Old City of Jerusalem was, silent and sleepy, in the hands of the Jordanians. It was not easy finding the Western Wall, called in those days the Wailing Wall. After many inquiries I finally found the unmarked passage into what was then a fifteen-foot wide alley between the wall of Herod’s Temple platform and the row of somewhat run down houses that faced it. These were the same dwellings that the Israelis bulldozed down when they took the city in 1967 and created the large open plaza that faces the Wall today. But if the Wall was concealed—I was forbidden to take pictures there, “to show to the Zionists in New York!”–access to the Dome of the Rock was easy. All the gates were open on the northern and western sides of the surrounding enclosure, the Haram al-Sharif, or “Noble Sanctuary,” which is in fact the surviving platform of Herod’s Temple. You might then approach the Dome from any direction, remove your shoes and wander about the rotunda at will, with no one paying you much mind.

When the Israelis first occupied and then annexed the Old City in 1967, they left the Haram with its Dome in the possession of “the Muslim people,” actually the Jordanians, an awkward arrangement that persists. But security there, Israeli security, has stiffened dramatically over the years. And with good reason: for Muslims the Dome is a potent symbol of an Islamic restoration in Palestine. For their part, the Grand Rabbinate of Israel discourages, less politely, forbids Jews to enter the Haram out of an abundance of caution regarding ritual purity. And access to the Dome itself is severely limited for everyone and carefully wardened; violence is somehow always in the air in this shrine.

Ritual purity also lies buried within the Muslim prohibition of non-believers from entering the statutory limits of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and, a fortiori, the shrines that lie within them, that of the Ka‘ba or House of God in Mecca and that of the Prophet’s tomb (see below) in Medina. Things can change, however, or at least bend. Mecca and Medina were banned to non-Muslims by shari‘ah or Muslim religious law, and so too were many other Muslims shrines by the principle of extension by analogy so beloved of canon lawyers. And yet in the 70s I and other non-Muslims attending a conference in Baghdad were boldly led into the most sacred shrines of Shi‘ite Islam, those over the tomb of the Imam Ali in Najaf—there’s another such in Mazar-I Sharif in Afghanistan–and of Imam Hussayn at Kerbala, escorted by Saddam Hussayn’s (Sunni) government ministers, while the local Shi‘ite clerics stood silently and stonily by, saving their rage for another day.

If barefaced power politics and/or expediency temporarily pried open the portals of Najaf and Kerbala to kafirs, it was an equally powerful inducement, the tourist dollar, that was the magic key that opened the gates of places like the Moroccan shrine of Moulay Idriss. The gentleman in question was a charismatic eighth century Sufi politico and saint (think Nelson Mandela) who, among other things, founded a long-lived Moroccan dynasty and began the construction of the city of Fez, helping himself, comme d’habitude, to the elegant stonework of the ruined Roman city of Volubilis nearby.

Moulay Idriss, the shrine town named after the saint, was, like many other religious sites in North Africa, which follows a particularly strict version of Islamic law, declared off-limits to non-Muslims. By the nineteenth century, however, when tourism began to assert itself, that prohibition had been eroded down in Moulay Idriss to the demand that the Ingliz be out of town by 3 PM (tea time?). Now, however Moulay Idriss advertises itself as a major Moroccan tourist destination, complete with expensive restaurants and even a disco or two. I had once gone from Fez to inspect what was left of Volubilis. The green tiled roofs of Moulay Idriss’ shrine beckoned attractively from its hilltop in the distance and so later that day I visited the shrine and afterwards sat down in a sidewalk café to a fine tajine and a glass of an excellent Moroccan Merlot. The British may now take their tea in Moulay Idriss.

Pilgrimage is the lifeblood of shrines, but the shrine tourism reflected at Moulay Idriss is a relatively new phenomenon in Islam. Fundamentalist Islam does not take readily to shrines, certainly not pagan shrines. Witness what the Taliban did to the gigantic Buddha in his mountain niche at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. It was there when I visited the site; it ain’t there now. Gone. Rubble. Nor do they much care for Muslim ones. When the puritan Saudis entered Mecca and Medina in 1926, they razed all the tomb shrines, including, sadly, the football field-sized grave of Eve—yes, that Eve—at Jeddah, as well as the enshrined homes of the Prophet’s relatives and early Muslim heroes that had sprouted up in the Holy Cities over the centuries. All that now remains of the famous al-Baqi cemetery at Medina is a walled dirt enclosure with simple stone markers, a reduction to orthodox anonymity that went unappreciated by many Muslims.

But the game is not nearly over. Popular Muslim devotion to Muslim saints goes on unabated. And if the Saudis were to allow tourists into their Kingdom, which seems eventually inevitable, would the visitors be satisfied with the baked-brick attractions of Dira‘iyya? Will they not eventually want to visit Mecca—“Haram view, please and, oh, do you serve kosher meals?” And when the oil dries up, will not the Saudis, or their successors, be inclined to allow them?

Jews and Christians are far less conflicted about access to their shrines. A non-Jew might walk right up to the Western Wall of the Jerusalem Temple, arguably the holiest and certainly the most notable Jewish shrine of all, without let or hindrance, except for the gender segregation there. And Christians never check identity papers at their holy places. The locals, like locals everywhere, are more interested in your credit card than your creed.

Pilgrims and tourists have become almost indistinguishable in the West, something that first becomes noticeable among Western Christian visitors to Jerusalem in the 19th century. The evidence is on every page of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, and the wedding of the tourist and the pilgrim is now consummated in almost every major shrine on the globe. In some instances tourism has overwhelmed and almost obliterated whatever sense of the holy was once in the place, as in Manger Square in Bethleham, a nightmare of neon, rosary stands, pizza joints and artisans of crèche tattoos. But at Fatima in Portugal, a large shrine complex at the site of a reported 1917 apparition of the Blessed Virgin to—Are you listening, you tarted-up parochial school girls?—simple peasant children, commerce is kept pro fano, outside the shrine. Pilgrims may approach the Fatima cathedral, some on their knees up the concrete, humbled-accessible walkways, without interference from hawkers of t-shirts, magnets or plastic peasants who glow in the dark.

Fatima is simply a shrine—cathedral, square, surrounding grounds—impressively large but still somehow modest in its raiment. Santiago de Compostela, on the other hand, is a venerable Spanish city and the site of a very ancient cult of the Apostle Saint James. In Christianity he is called James the Greater, to distinguish him from James the Less, Jesus’ brother who was, in most respects, the greater force in the early Church. The Apostle James died in Judea in 44 AD, but his remains were, according to legend, miraculously returned to Spain where, according to another legend, he had earlier preached the new faith. It’s a complex tale but the tradition of Saint James–Santiago in Spanish–took hold in Iberia, and by the ninth century pilgrims were already coming to the town of Compostela in Galicia to venerate his remains. Santiago ended by becoming the patron saint of all of Christian Spain and the iconic Matamoros, the “Moor-Slayer” who inspired Christian forces to finally cast the Muslims out of Spain in 1492.

A large city has grown up around the saint’s remains, as well as a network of well-trod pilgrims’ paths, a kind of spiritual Appalachian Trail, complete with markers and rest stops, that extend across Spain and southern France and lead to the shrine. The remains themselves now rest in a bejeweled golden casket behind the altar inside the large cathedral dedicated to the saint. The church also features, as a major distraction, an enormous botafumeiro, the mother of all incense burners that is suspended from the ceiling and swings dangerously back and forth through the nave spewing holy smoke. The church itself commands a solemn and somewhat gloomy baroque square. Facing is the more sober palace of the bishop of the city, and on the third side is another palace, this one of Ferdinand and Isabella, now a parador or Spanish luxury inn (reserve early). Though there is plenty in the surrounding streets, there is no commerce in the Santiago square itself, which is St. Mark’s piazza in Venice minus the arcades, the cafes, the musicians, the pigeons and the fun.

Kerbala is a Shi‘ite Muslim shrine-city in Iraq. It is, in the first instance, the site of a famous 980 AD battle, actually an ambush, in which Hussayn, the son of Imam Ali and the spiritual head of the Shi‘at Ali or “Party of Ali,” was killed, along with most of his followers, by Sunni troops. It is sacred soil like Gettysburg or Verdun, but sacred in a more profound sense than either of those places since what was being contested at Kerbala was not merely a political issue but a theological one: Was the leadership of Islam to be political or spiritual? Would a royal Caliph or a papal Imam rule the Muslims? But at Kerbala I was not led to a battlefield but to the tomb of Hussayn, the third Shi‘ite Imam. Hussayn was not merely a general, like Grant with his tomb, or a slain folk-hero, like John Lennon with his Strawberry Fields shrine; he was also, and more importantly, a martyred saint.

Christians and Muslims both call those who have died for their faith “witnesses.” Christian martyrs often die in Roman arenas, condemned to death for refusing to deny their outlawed faith. Muslims are rarely placed in those circumstances; more often they perish, like the Shi‘ite protomartyr Hussayn, in battle against the enemies of Islam. Jihad is the soil from which Muslim martyrs spring. One such was Abu Ayyub (Job) who was said to be Muhammad’s standard-bearer and who died, a very old man indeed, at the first Muslim siege of Constantinople in 670. So the Turks claim, and at the upper end of the Golden Horn they have enshrined what is said to be the grave of the man they call Eyüp. It is a favorite Turkish burial place, but the shrine and mosque are also a popular site to celebrate male circumcisions. In Turkey circumcision occurs at puberty, and though the young men are feted and jollied, visitors should be prepared for some very pained expressions.

The Attractions of the Grave

Like that of Eyüp, most shrines—Mecca is a notable exception–have in fact been generated by reason of their up-scale marking of the last resting place of a dead individual. The deceased in question is not of course reclining under a pile of earth. The resting place, whether a grave beneath the earth or a sarcophagus above it, has already been enshrined, modestly at first, perhaps, but eventually, depending on who lies within, into something more notable. An enshrined grave is soon sheltered in a shrine mosque or shrine church, and as the fame of the saint and the shrine grows, the mosque or church is in turn surrounded by an entire shrine-city like Karbela; or else the shrine swallows up the city, as in Santiago de Compostela. In some instances it is only the size or importance of the city (Rome, Constantinople), or the presence of multiple shrines there (Jerusalem), that prevents a single shrine from overwhelming the place where it is found. Compostela yielded easily to St. James, but Venice fought back against St. Mark.

There is no doubt what tomb-shrines are about: their function is to house and commemorate the hero with appropriate architectural and artistic embellishment—mosaics, frescoes, statuary or, for the iconophobic, elaborate calligraphy. Heroes come, of course, in all sizes, shapes and function, though it is invariably some form of power that is being recognized; think Napoleon under the dome in Les Invalides in Paris, or Ataturk lying in his coldly austere mausoleum in Ankara or, for that matter Mausolus, who started it all, in his mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, though not entirely wonderful today. Or if you’re both powerful and wealthy, like a Pharaoh, for example, you can tell your people to build you something truly wonderful to rest in out a Giza.

Power works best in this area of enshrinement, but holiness or wisdom or wit, or just plain celebrity (think Graceland) can bring down enshrinement on the head of the deceased. Strolling through the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris I could reflect on the enshrined remains not only of Eloise and Abelard (together at last), but those of the regretted Borrah Minnevitch, founder and guiding genius of the Harmonica Rascals. Moses Maimonides, the Jewish sage and physician who made house calls on the Sultans of Egypt, didn’t play a musical instrument but he was pretty good on the Torah and has himself a nice little tomb in Tiberias. Poetry is not neglected. The famous Persian poet Sa‘di is honored with a quite modern, and un-Islamic, twentieth century tomb shrine in Shiraz which is, however, appropriately surrounded by gracious gardens. And yes, there is love, especially if you’re married to Shah Jahan, the rich romantic who built the breathtaking Taj at Agra to shelter the remains of wife #3, Mumtazz Mahal.

Forget Grant’s tomb and those of the various Unknown Soldiers. Think big. Think the (presumably empty) tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem and the (presumably occupied) tomb of Muhammad in Medina. The first is ensconced inside a tiny—Watch your head!—house within the much travailed and dispirited Church of the Holy Sepulcher; Muhammad’s sarcophagus lies concealed, along with those of a few of his associates, and an empty one reserved for Jesus upon his return—it’s a long story!—, all of them behind the gilt grills of a sumptuous house inside the bloated and ever expanding Mosque of the Prophet in Medina. Though he is not in quite the same league as the other two gentlemen, the tomb of the Baha’i Bab in Haifa is, all ideology aside, in many respects more impressive,

If these are the heavy hitters, there are myriads of lesser saints whose holiness in life has survived their physical death and lingers almost palpably at their tombs, where the faithful resort not only to pay respects but to ask for favors or render thanks for favors granted. Both Judaism and Islam officially disapprove of this cultus of saints, but it goes on nonetheless. In Galilee I have wandered among many such tombs of saintly Jewish rabbis, miracle-makers many of them, and the qubbas or domed shrines of Sufi saints, some tiny, some grandiose, dot every corner of the Islamic landscape from Morocco to India. Most are of local fame, but all Muslims have heard of Jalal al-Din Rumi, and the complex at Konya in Turkey is as much a shrine to the poet-mystic, who is buried there, as it is to his Sufi order of whirling Mevlana dervishes. Farther east, one of the main Sufi orders of India is the Chisti (from the Afghanistan town of Chist where it originated) whose annual forty day retreat in the corner of a small cell makes Ignatius of Loyola’s thirty day Spiritual Exercises look like a casual stroll in the park. The large Chisti dargah or headquarters is in Ajmer, but its most impressive monument may be the delicate tomb of one of its saints, Selim Chisti (d. 1572) at Fatephur Sikri.

Christianity has had no such qualms about saints, their tombs, their relics or their miracles. St. Peter apparently rests quite comfortably beneath the altar of the basilica named after him in Rome, or so the sign says. He is overshadowed perhaps by his staggeringly impressive architectural setting, to say nothing of the spectacularly overstated papal tombs that line the basilica upstairs. Ignatius Loyola has somewhat better luck. The Church of the Gesù in Rome, where the founder of the Jesuits lies, is shout-out-loud baroque, but so too is the saint’s own sarcophagus, fashioned out of what is said to be the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world. The state of Mr. Lenin’s preservation in his mausoleum in Moscow (long wait; bring reading matter) is due to human skill, but apparently not so that of the impeccably intact St. Rita (d. 1457) in her glass sarcophagus at Cascia in Umbria. Rita reportedly smelled badly in life—not that there’s anything wrong with that–but now, in glorious compensation, she smells like Issey Miyake in death, and she is said to quite alarmingly open and close her eyes on occasion.

There were some who thought her a saint, but saint or not, Eva Peron’s family tomb in the Recoleta Cemetery of Buenos Aires, where Eva’s much travelled body finally rests, is a major tourist destination in Argentina and Eva is now apparently the country’s patron saint and/or chief attraction. Almost in the same league is the tomb of Columbus in the Seville Cathedral. The star of that place is, however, at least for me, the tomb in the Capella Real of King Ferdinand (he of Ferdinand and Isabella fame) who biffed the Muslims out of Spain. He was no saint—a royal predecessor, Ferdinand III (d. 1252), was actually canonized—but a very rare trilingual inscription in Castilian, Hebrew and Arabic on his tomb shines like a bright light in the dark cathedral.

Another pious soul edging toward the outskirts of canonization is the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (d. 1926, struck by a tram on the way to confession). He lies buried in the church of his own making in Barcelona (see below), but his shrines lay scattered all across Barcelona, from the Parc Guell to his two jaw-dropping apartment buildings on the Passeig de Gràcia, La Pedrera (don’t miss the roof!) and Casa Batlló, though, since Gaudi also designed the furniture—architects should not be allowed to design furniture–I’m not sure I’d want to live there.

You Say Synagogue, I Say Jami‘

It’s really all the same. What the Jews and Muslims call their places of worship, and the Christians in between them with their ekklesia, all amount to the same “place of assembly.” The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and of Jesus and Muhammad–deserves only the best and His worshippers have done their uttermost to comply. The Jewish best, the Temple in Jerusalem, which got fantastic contemporary reviews, is gone, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and never replaced. For a very long time afterwards Jews had to content themselves with more modest houses of worship—their Christian and Muslim sovereigns did not much encourage Jewish ostentation—and so it’s only relatively recently that Jews have gotten back into the basilica business, with a distinct nod to their Christian competitors (Temple Emanu-El on New York’s Park Avenue) as well as their Muslim ones (New York’s Central Synagogue).

The basilica business was begun by Constantine, the first Roman emperor to become a Christian. He put the funds and the power of the empire at the disposal of Christianity. Christian services that had previously been conducted in homes were now held in their own proper buildings, adapted from the basilica, the long rectangular structure that the Romans used as imperial audience halls and/or law courts and had no religious associations. Constantine had constructed a number of such, notably an imposing basilica next to the domed shrine he had erected over Jesus’ excavated tomb in Jerusalem and another dome-and-basilica complex in Bethlehem at the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. Both still stand.

The Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher is now only a shadow of its Constantinian original, however. The Muslim Sultan of Egypt destroyed most of it in 1009 AD, a mad act that helped bring on the Crusades, and it was later rebuilt on a much smaller scale. It is not now an imposing building, inside or out—the scale invariably surprises the first time visitor–and the tiny structure that houses the very plain stone sarcophagus that marks Jesus’ final resting place, is so grotesquely ornate that it would be perfectly at home in an Italian cemetery in Queens.

The Holy Sepulcher—a Western name; the Eastern Christians call it the Anastasis, Resurrection–is the most famous church in Christendom, of course, but it also bears the scars of the scandalous sectarian turf-wars that are fought there among the Catholics, Greeks and Armenians, with the Copts, Jacobites and Nestorians huddled in the corners and the Abyssinians clinging to their spot on the roof. The Muslims traditionally possess the key to the church, a privilege they no longer flaunt, and the Israelis of course have the final say, a sovereign privilege they sometimes do very cautiously invoke.

The Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem is in better shape. There the Greeks hold the church and share the Grotto of the Nativity below with the Armenians. The Latin (Roman) Catholics have their own church, St. Catherine’s, cheek by jowl next door. And all around there is a cloud of centuries-old hostility that flows not only between Christians but envelopes Muslims, Christians and Jews in a narrow space. Christmas Midnight Mass, a Western custom, is celebrated in St. Catherine’s—the candle- and incense-averse Protestants are sent to some remote place called “Shepherds’ Field.”

Midnight Mass in Bethlehem is a hot ticket but I once managed to score one from the Franciscans who run the Bethlehem StubHub. Getting the ticket was not easy, but getting inside was even tougher since it involved an extended encounter with Israeli security who police the event and who seem not to be entirely into the Christmas spirit. I heard Mass—I certainly didn’t see any of it–from my place in a confessional booth of a side aisle, while outside, in Bethlehem’s Manger Square, the rollicking Feast of Bad Taste, which begins with the annual migration of the Scandinavian Hippy, rocked on, fueled by pizza and copious arak.

Jerusalem was just the beginning of church building on the grand scale. Churches sprouted everywhere in the Christian Roman Empire, modest to grandiose, suburban to city center. And no longer merely in the shape of the flat-roofed basilica. At the burial sites of Christian martyrs altars were placed atop their sanctified graves and enshrined in circular domed churches. It is the same configuration the Muslims used in their Jerusalem Dome of the Rock shrine, which looks in disdain—Muslims are instructed in the Quran that Jesus did not really die on the cross–and unmistakable emulation toward the rotunda of the Holy Sepulcher across Jerusalem’s Tyropean Valley. The glorious culmination of the domed church, one that raised the architectural stakes by posing a dizzyingly lofty circular dome atop a square building, is Justinian’s sixth century Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia) in Constantinople. Later, when the city was called Istanbul, the Muslims whitewashed over the offensive mosaic representations and converted the church into a mosque. Now, the original mosaics cleansed and gloriously intact, Holy Wisdom is a secular museum in republican Turkey.

The transformation of one house of worship into another, of a pagan temple into Christian church, of Christian church or Jewish synagogue into Muslim mosque and then, on occasion, back, was not unusual. There are still traces of the Damascus temple that the Christians turned into the Church of St. John the Baptist, and the relics of the Baptist are still preserved in the Umayyad mosque that replaced the church. The Muslims did the same with the Christian church in Cordoba, though the mosque there, the Mezquita, an acre of slender columns and striped arches, far outshone its antecedent in size and décor. When, after seven centuries, the Christians eventually regained the city, they simply opened the flat roof of the sprawling mosque and dropped a miniature Gothic cathedral into the space.

Such transformations are commonplace in Spain, where Christians and Muslims surged back and forth over the centuries, with the Iberian Jews caught in the undertow. In Seville the Christians took down the congregational mosque but left standing its impressive minaret, now called the Giralda or Herald, to serve as the bell tower of their cathedral. In Toledo two buildings, the luminous Maria la Blanca and the sumptuously decorated Il Transito, were originally synagogues built for the Jews of the city by Muslim architects in the Muslim style, complete with Arabic inscriptions! With the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews, they were converted into churches and now, in a different age, they are houses of touristic worship. And the diminutive and perfectly preserved Cristo de la Luz on the northern margin of Toledo was originally a mosque built on the site of a Visigothic church and then, after the reconquest, turned into a church.

Muslims’ collective worship is different from the Jews’ and very different from the Christians’. Though they have their own tradition of virtuoso cantorial recitation of the Qur’an, it is never part of the Friday noon service when Muslims worship in common. Their worship is prayer, silent, focused and demotic, without benefit of rabbi, priest or altar. The worshippers assemble in silence and arrange themselves in rows, generally through the length of the building rather than across its width, as the Jews and Christians do. There are no chairs, pews or kneelers. They stand, sit and bow, heads to the ground as each silently utters the brief prayers of praise and petition that constitute the service. There are no statues or shrines to distract, no incense to enhance the mood, no music to underline or prompt an affect.

Mosques come in all sizes, from tiny village halls, where most of the congregation for convenience prays in the outside courtyard, to enormous structures that testify to the piety but more often to the wealth and power of the men who had them built. Most do not tower like the Gothic cathedrals of the West: there are no soaring facades or heaven-seeking spires, merely a minaret from which the call to prayer is sounded five times daily. At first the minarets were square and squat like the Christian bell towers that inspired them, and the type is still visible in the Umayyad mosques in Damascus and Aleppo, many of the mosques of Morocco and the just mentioned Giralda in Seville.

The minaret evolved, however, just as Islam did, and eventually grew round and then slimmer. It reached its evolutionary term during the Ottoman period in pencil-thin towers balancing gracefully against the sky, like that of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (Adrianople), the last great Muslim city of Europe, and in the enormous Ottoman mosques whose elegant minarets feather the skyline of Istanbul: the “Blue” Sultan Ahmet, the Suleymaniye, the Yeni Cami or “New Mosque” and the Fateh Cami of Mehmet the Conqueror’s—it was Constantinople itself that he conquered in 1453–atop its crowning hill. They are Islam’s true cathedrals, light on the ground and domed, like Hagia Sophia sitting unperturbed in their midst, the proud assertions of empire.
Standing in Istanbul in the sea of oriental carpetry under the dome of the imperial Suleymaniye Cami, it is difficult to imagine that the first Muslim mosque was nothing more than the courtyard of Muhammad’s mud-brick house in Medina. It is equally difficult, when contemplating the superdome-like dimensions of its modern version in Medina, to imagine the size of Muhammad’s original prayer hall. Unlike the Ottoman mosques of Istanbul, which are graceful in their grandiosity, the Prophet’s mosque in Medina has undergone explosive growth by accretion. Its present sprawling and somewhat garish hall was enlarged to contain—how could it?—the masses of pilgrims who came from Mecca after the Hajj to pay their respects at the tomb of Muhammad which is now under its roof. The mosque is in effect a shrine to the dead Prophet.

The sarcophagus that holds the remains of the Prophet now rests hidden from sight within a grilled cottage-size aedicule located to the left of the front-wall niche that in every mosque that marks the direction of Mecca. The visitor to the tomb stands, closely observed by nearby religious police officers, before three gilt portholes in the aedicule’s back wall. Muhammad lies behind the largest, while behind the other two are Abu Bakr and Umar, the Prophet’s first two successors as the caliph or head of the Muslim community. And, as already noted, there is reportedly a fourth sarcophagus there. It awaits the return of Jesus from the Beyond. Why the police, I asked afterwards. To discourage prayer to the Prophet, I was told, and to prevent Shi‘ite violation of the tombs of Abu Bakr and Umar whom they execrate as usurpers.

The community mosque is the Muslim signature on every town and village in the Middle East, while the Grand Mosques in the cities are the preeminent monuments to Muslim piety, culture, power and wealth. That is the message not only of the mosques of Mecca, Medina and Istanbul but also of the venerable mosques of Amr ibn al-As and Ibn Tulun in Cairo, as well as the stately Sultan Hassan and that powerful engine for the spread of Islam, the mosque and madrasa of al-Azhar in the same city. The Great Mosque of Qayrawan, the fortress-like mosque in Sousse, the Qayrawiyin in Fez and late lamented Mezquita in Cordoba; and eastward, the Shah Abbas and Lutfullah on the Midan in Isfahan, the Red Mosque in Rawalpindi, the Grand Mosques of Delhi and Lahore all deliver the same message. It is the Muslim’s version of Christ Pantocrator rendered in architectural terms. Sometimes there is overreach, however. The enormous King Hassan II in Casablanca may have been intended as a mosque, but given the scarcity of interesting things to see in that city—visitors soon learn that Rick’s Place was actually on a back lot in Hollywood—that impressive edifice, albeit cold and generally empty, is simply a ceremonial venue and a tourist attraction. God, it seems, is not there either.

The Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a monument in a special sense. It sits at the far southern end of Herod’s platform, now the Haram al-Sharif, and it was the first mosque the Muslims put up after they took the city from the Byzantine Christians in 638 AD. Originally it was built out of debris from the destroyed Jerusalem Temple, but those traces are long gone since the building, unlike the Dome of the Rock, has been many times expanded to reflect the growth of Islam and the growing importance of Jerusalem in Muslim eyes.

During the Crusades, when the Western Christians held the city (1099-1187 AD), they converted the shrine of the Dome into a Latin church (Templum Domini) and the Aqsa Mosque into a residence (Templum Solomonis) for the new king of this Frankish overseas colony; and then, when the royal palace was relocated to the Jaffa Gate, into a headquarters and armory for the Knights Templars, the Waffen SS of the Crusades. Today the Aqsa is a large but rather unprepossessing building, unremarkable in all save its location and its associations.

With the disappearance of the greater part of the Jewish population, many of the surviving synagogues of Europe and the Middle East are simply rather lachrymose monuments. The cathedrals too seem, in many instances, to be yielding their sacred functions to touristic ones. It’s chiefly the Liturgy of Saint Peregrinus that is now celebrated in them. Mosques, however, have been more successful in maintaining their primary status as houses of worship, perhaps because few tourists get beyond Istanbul and perhaps too because there is a Western uneasiness about mosques, particularly functioning ones. Middle Eastern mosques seem always to have worshippers in them—Muslims are required to pray five times daily, though not necessarily in a mosque—and so appear to be quieter and more meditative places than churches, certainly than the European cathedrals with streams of tourists constantly eddying through them.

There’s no shortage of churches in Europe, of all sizes, shapes and vintages. It’s hard to miss the cathedral, however, the soaring Gothic “seat” (cathedra) of the local bishop that still dominates so many urban skylines: Westminster in London, St. Peter’s in Cologne, Rheims and Chartres with their famous rose windows. The Toledo cathedral has its own extraordinary illumination, Il Transparente, the ingenious skylight that focuses the sun on the tabernacle of the high altar. Spanish cathedrals are filled with narrative. The great retablo mayor, the towering backdrop to the main altar in Toledo and Seville is filled to overflowing with richly gilded panels depicting the sacred history of the Old and New Testaments, the continuation of the story begun at Dura Europos and recapitulated on Monte Varallo. And in the choir reserved for the canons of the cathedral, the wooden stall seats are intricately and delicately carved with other scenes from the contemporary history of Catholic Spain.

Italy has its soaring Duomo in Milan, St. Peter’s in Rome with its extraordinary Bernini altar, and my own quirky favorites in Orvieto and Siena. And then, to cleanse the palate, the ecclesiastical guide recommends a visit to the austerely Cistercian monastery church at Batalha in Portugal. Quirky is scarcely the word to describe the Sagra Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s eerily fantastic church in Barcelona, which is still growing mysteriously and organically out of the Catalan soil many years after the architect’s death. I am also partial to Sant’Ignazio in Rome, not only for its off the charts baroque frescoes but because upstairs, in the old Jesuit residence, you can visit the cell of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga—yes, those Gonzagas–who was so highly sexed, or just so weird, that he chose not to look at his mother. Or maybe she was the problem.

The cathedrals are the flashy neon, but there are plenty of other bright lights, with churches in every village, town and city across the continent, many of them now more often used as concert halls than as houses of worship. In Prague, for instance, there is far more Mozart than masses being heard in its glorious baroque churches. And there are dimmer lights too, like the stone hut churches of Ireland, where one local tour guide proudly informed me, “My ancestors constructed these in the sixth century.” I forbore to remind him that somebody else’s somewhat more skilled ancestors were putting up Hagia Sophia at the same time. But tours are always a little disappointing, I suppose. I once took the “Homes of the Stars” tour in Hollywood and was shown the pleasant houses where Harvey Korman and Tim Conway lived. Où sont les etoiles d’antan?

If it’s stone churches you fancy, I recommend those at Göreme Turkey. These odd sanctuaries were not built of piled up rocks but carved out of the soft and strange fairy chimneys of Cappadocia. They are a kind of Christian Petra and the haunt of those Near Eastern ascetics who seem always to have been looking for ever odder ways to assault their flesh. More recently, however, Göreme has begun to advertise “Cappadocian Cave Suites” for those inclined to check out ancient asceticism on high-count sheets. Not too far away, across the Syrian borders and north of Aleppo, one can inspect at Qala‘at Sem‘an the base of the lofty pillar on top of which Simon Stylites (the “Pillar Man”), the gold medal winner among those ancient “athletes of God,” lived on a platform for forty years. He had many admirers and they built around his pillar, which poked skywards in its center, a very large church and a hostel-monastery, thread-counts unrecorded, for the many pilgrims who were drawn to the site.

Simon wanted to escape vertically from the world and its blandishments, but in the end the world came to him to stare, admire and petition. The same occurred in Egypt when a high liver like Antony in Alexandria got religion (the new Christian variety) and fled horizontally to the solitude of the desert to amend his ways and teach his wayward body some rather severe lessons. Soon he had lots of company, and the wilderness began to resemble a commune of emaciated bearded body-afflicters engaged in a penance race. It is still possible to follow in their tracks out into the desert west of Alexandria to the formidable Wadi Natrun—the ancients called it Scetis—and see where they lived, though not exactly how since spiritual descendants of the Desert Fathers have somewhat tempered the fiery asceticism of the pioneers. The present Coptic monastery at the Wadi Natrun is hardly the Scetis Sheraton, but is considerably more than a cave with lizards running through it.

A somewhat different descendant of that early urge to beat up on the flesh and the devil is the monastic complex of Mar Saba in the rocky Judean wilderness southeast of Jerusalem. It is a fifth-century complex of small mud-brick and stone buildings, walled like most against the predatory Bedouin who surround it and clinging to the precipitous side of a wadi. The solitary has always been an eastern ascetic paradigm, but Mar Saba is one of the avatars of eastern cenobitic or community monasticism, remote and inner-directed, just as the Benedictines at Monte Cassino represent the western, more outer-directed and activist type.

Western monasteries reflected in their size and expensive artistic elegance the wealth of the Church that founded them and of the nobles who endowed them. Many were swept away by the twin purge of the Reformation and the French Revolution with its Napoleonic aftermath, but some idea of the power and scope of Catholic monasticism can still experienced in Portugal in the large and imposing Hieronymite monastery at Belém, Alfonso Henriques’ Cistercian foundation at Alcobaça and the complex built by João I at Batalha for the Dominicans to commemorate his 1385 victory over Spain. Spain has its own monasteries, none quite so spectacular as their Portuguese neighbors, but even I might be able to handle a week—let’s say a weekend–at the lovely Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo at Silos near Burgos.

Simon Stylites and Mar Saba point forward to the Greek monks isolated atop their craggy mesa at Meteora in Greece; the Benedictines in quite another direction, to their ever more aggressive offspring, like the militant but still monastic Franciscans, with their gigantic founder-shrine at Assisi; to the Dominicans, who didn’t invent the Inquisition but certainly rode it into the ground; and to the scarcely monastic and only fleetingly ascetic Jesuits, whose world headquarters you may, if you wish, visit at #4 Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome; just don’t say I sent you.

Beyond the Jesuits lay only the military orders, like the Knights Templars and Hospitalers, chivalrous monks in arms, called into existence by the Crusades and vowed to the repossession and protection of the Christian Holy Land in Palestine. That didn’t work out so well, and the Templars ended up in very hot water and very sad straits, the grist for bad novels and innumerable conspiracy theories. The more cautious Hospitalers moved to Rhodes, which they took from the Turks and kept as their own. They left their mark there: the palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, as they were then called, still stands—Mussolini occasionally spent his vacations there—as do their impressive fortifications. They have also left their stamp on Malta where the knights, now the Knights of Malta, took up residence—the island was a gift to the order from Charles V—after the Turks drove them off Rhodes in 1522. The intimidating fortress-works that still stand guard over the entry to the Grand Harbor are their work. Napoleon swept them off Malta and pretty much out of the fighting business. The headquarters of the Order is now in on the fashionable Via Condotti in Rome and no new forts are envisioned by the Knights, who have long since turned in their arms—well, maybe not all the gilt swords–and do chiefly works of Roman Catholic philanthropy.

It was another November, I think, perhaps ten years ago, when I was sitting in the lounge of a Viking riverboat on the Lower Danube with a copy of Leigh-Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water open on my lap. It was raining outside and the Bulgarian shore was gliding by coated in a dark mist.

“We’re coming to the Cherpish Monastery,” a voice said. “Built 1370. A real gem of medieval Bulgarian architecture. You coming?”

I looked down at my book. Cherpish Monastery. It didn’t sound familiar. Leigh-Fermor, who had gone full baladi across Europe in 1933, foot and hoof all the way, must have passed it by. No Viking River Queen or Amex plastic for our Paddy. But he may have had something better. Sure, there was the occasional night in a sheep fold, but the dashing young man played the English gentleman card at every castle keep he came to, and he spent a fair number of nights not with the livestock but drinking brandy and smoking Egyptian cigarettes with the local not-quite-ruined Balkan nobility and, intertextually, sleeping with not a few of their daughters and wives.

“It’s raining out.”

“Oh, come on! How many monasteries do you get to see?”

Not that many, actually, but I did get to spend nine years in one of them. St. Andrew on Hudson was neither Mt. Athos nor the Wadi Natrun, it is true, but it was authentic enough that I got the idea. Maybe Cherpish was very different. I really didn’t care.

“I think I’ll give it a pass.”

“Are You Sure You’re Asking Enough?”

Monks are exhorted and trained to despise the material goods of this world, the trinkets and doodads that turn the eyes away from eternity That’s fine for them, but if we all scorn essential consumer goods like Hummel figurines and Swarovski crystal, the world economic order would surely crash, would it not? Can you imagine a world without Turkish kilims, Irish fisherman sweaters or duty-free perfume? No need. We’re covered. For every trinket-despising Carthusian there are roughly 50,000 tourists who are committed to snatching up each and every Mexican beaded purse ever made, no matter how fast the Vietnamese turn them out. Nobody wants to come right out with it, but the dirty secret of the tourist industry is that for the last twenty-odd years shopping has replaced sightseeing as the most popular tourist activity worldwide. Visitors to the museum now skip the Van Goghs and Picassos and head straight for the gift shop for those really neat Van Gogh magnets and the Picasso cocktail napkins.

The local entrepreneurs have finally caught on. After the millionth American arrived in Naples and demanded real pizza, the locals decided they’d better forget their lame Neapolitan pie and learn how to make authentic pizza the American way. Cruise ships used to stock only toothpaste and Dramamine for their passengers; now you can buy the Thai crown jewels or a Chagall print on board. And to take care of any leftover savings, there’s a casino right next to the boutiques where the odds on winning are roughly those that the Chagall is real. Where once eastern markets had dried apricots and pistachios up front, they now flash NYPD caps and “I Survived Ramadan!” T-shirts.

I am not assuming a holier than thou attitude here. OK, I never actually wear the “College of Cardinals Athletics Department” sweatshirt I picked up in Rome or the pair of red cardinal’s socks I bought in the ecclesiastical outfitter on the Piazza Minerva, but they’re still in my drawer. The mosque lamp I bought in the Damascus suq in 1959 still hangs, undusted, over the TV set, though the yurt straps that I had to have in Tashkent have long since disappeared from my walls; ditto the sheepskin coat from Kabul—who knew that it had to be cured?–that smelled up my closets for years. So I have not been immune. Duty free items no longer much attract me, however; manufactured items seem to be pretty much the same price everywhere, and the VAT has screwed up my calculations, always approximate to begin with, of the price of everything.

I have so far avoided the LLadro obsession and I have passed on the pearls in Majorca, but I confess to having succumbed to the Delftware in Delft, Quimperware in Quimper, Waterford in Waterford, port in Oporto, a loden coat at Loden-Plankl in Vienna, an orange Hermès duffel coat at Hermès in Paris and Jimmy of Maui sunglasses in, where else?–Maui. I’ve laid down good plastic for chocolate in the Lindt factory in Kilchberg, for Matryoshka dolls in Moscow, an antique and very dangerous looking pistol in Kabul, a Solomon and Sheba wall-hanging in Addis Ababa, a Katz safari jacket and a seven foot Masai spear in Nairobi, an overnight custom made suit in Singapore, ceramics in Izniq, tent hangings in Cairo and rugs from the hard sell Turks in Kušadasi and soft-sell Moroccans in Marrakesh, “You will hand it down to your children, sir.” There was no handing down. When he got old enough my son just took it.

In Europe (and Israel) there are now pedestrian only shopping streets in every major city. They were built for the natives, but the Faubourg St. Honoré, the Copenhagen Strøget and Ben Yehuda Streets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are convenient places for the tourist to lighten his wallet. The Ramblas in Barcelona belongs here too, if it’s flowers or birds you crave or–are you ready for the big move?—bringing home a mime for the living room. There are dedicated markets as well—I’m not talking leeks here—like the Burlington Arcade in London, the Gallerias in Milan and Naples and that very expensive bridge across the Arno, if full bankruptcy is the goal.

The best markets are, however, in the Middle East, the suqs and fabled bazaars of the Orient. Some of the suqs, like those in Istanbul and Marrakesh, are wise in the ways of tourism, but others, like the covered suqs in Damascus and particularly Aleppo, albeit a bit close on a warm day, are still traditional to the degree possible in a global economy and a wired-in world. The more remote, the better. The suq in Bukhara is a gem, and the outdoor market under my hotel window in Moroccan Zagora was also exceedingly baladi but very specialized: it traded only in camels. The market in Muscat is untouched by global commercialism, while Dubai, up the Persian Gulf a bit, has a shopping mall and an air-conditioned gold suq for the benefit of the Indian ladies who fly in on Emirate Air from Mumbai to load up on saris and the yellow stuff.

The Middle Eastern suqs sell everyday basics like pots and pans, transistor radios and cheap suits, as well as a cornucopia of useful junk from China and Taiwan, but they also have the items guaranteed to bring little bits of saliva to the corners of the touristic mouth. They will send your purchases by mail—none, even carpets in pillowcases, has ever failed to arrive—and you can pay then, or later, or whenever you get around to it; homo peregrinus is apparently a very honest species. The suq in Istanbul is filled with such items—I have a soft spot for the Grand Bazaar there since that’s where I bought my eye-popping kilim-covered roll on—but the mother of them all must be the famous Khan al-Khalili in Cairo. There are attention-grabbing attractions at every mysterious turn, like golden ankhs with your name in hieroglyphics, or gorgeously decorated galabiyyas, the long gowns worn by Egyptian peasants and grandes dames alike. It is the brass, however, that sounds the loudest of all: lamps, pots, planters, platters, coffee tables and coffee pots, trays, braziers: you name it, they’ll hammer it up for you. I bought enough brass in the Khan al-Khalili—Yes, and how much would that be?–to brazen the testicles of a barrel and a half of monkeys.

The Khan al-Khalili was also the scene of a rare social triumph, like getting a Middle Easterner to go through a door ahead of you. In this instance it was the electrification of an old saw. Visitors are always advised not to admire anything in an Arab host’s house since he is then obliged by the laws of hospitality to give it to you. No living person has ever seen this actually occur. But once in the Khan, a shop owner quite casually commented on my nifty tie, a gold filament-brocaded item from Damascus, which I immediately removed from my neck and forced upon him. His loss of face was immense, and news of his disgrace spread like wildfire through the bazaar. Some say it led directly to the fall of the government and a higher than usual inundation of the Nile.

A temporary triumph, very temporary. Like every American, I think everything has a fixed price, which is usually displayed on the object in question. In the suq, and most everywhere else on the globe, I imagine, the price of anything is what you’re willing to pay for it, and that price is arrived at by that foreign blood sport called “bargaining,” whose rules are as opaque to me as cricket. I am as incapable of bargaining as I am of breakdancing or watching a Robin Williams movie.

I fear I am a grave disappointment to those professional bazaar bandits who have been sitting in their cramped shops for generations and awaiting my arrival. The goods are set before me. I finger them in the prescribed fashion, showing no apparent interest in any item in particular. The vendor is patient but ready to play, and I open with the Fool’s Gambit.

“How much is this?” I try, very casually.

His smile sags, his head sinks into his shoulders. An American.

“Whatever you wish to pay, sir.”

That not really true, but it’s closer to the truth than my stone-blind “How much is that?” I have no clue what price to suggest. None. I insist and he finally comes up with a figure, outlandish in his eyes, I’m sure, perhaps something he saw in the newspaper about the sovereign debt of Greece. And I cough it up.

Sometimes I am not alone in these embarrassing encounters. Once, in Beirut, a shop owner, his eyes near tears at the anticipated windfall that would put his children through college, suggested a price for some “Bedouin” embroidery—“Bedouin” must be the name of a new handicrafts manufactory outside of Shanghai. My companion, who was unversed in both Bedouin embroidery and the rapacious ways of the bazaar, said, “That’s very nice work. Are you sure you’re asking enough?” The merchant’s breath grew shallow, his face turned a deathly pale, the same expression you see portrayed on the face of a saint when he has had a presentiment of the Beatific Vision. He had died, the rascal, and gone to Grifters’ Heaven.

But the slickers of the suq do occasionally, very occasionally, meet their match. The match in one instance I witnessed was in the person of a stunning black beauty with a two-foot Afro, a miniskirt of roughly the same dimension and sporting the precise kind of tank top that touristas are warned against wearing in countries where there are men. We were in the jewelry suq in Meknes, where the cards are shuffled by some of the fastest hands in the Maghrib. I stood, but the lady in question squatted down, butt on heels, directly in front of her victim and picked up one of his baubles. The game was already over; he just didn’t quite realize it yet.

“How much?”

Centuries of training held firm, but there was an odd new quaver in his voice.

“Seventy-five dollars American.”

She bent over to inspect the piece. Yikes!

“Fifty,” he corrected. The rout was on.

“I’ll give you a dollar. American.”

Now I almost fainted. This was Sudden Death Bargaining. The Ultimate Game.

“Five dollars,” he managed to choke out. He was turning purple.

She paused. Kill him and eat him there or just throw him back in the pond?

“OK,” she said. “A dollar and a half. Do you make change?”

I’m not sure she actually paid him. Without removing his eyes from her, he wrapped up the doodad in a page of Meknès Aujourdhui and delicately handed it over.

“Merci, mademoiselle. Shukran ktir.”

“Thanks, guy,” she said and gave him one last quick peek as baksheesh.

One can only imagine what ensued in his home later that evening.

Arrivederci

I think I may just be getting tired, tired of looking and listening with increasingly unattending eyes and ears, tired of tramping through endless corridors in Versailles and the Winter Palace in Petersburg. I pass under Evita’s balcony in the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires and Mussolini’s in the Palazzo Venezia without looking up, and I no longer even glance at Hitler’s rostrum at Nuremberg. I am weary of wandering the mazes of the Topkapi Serai in Istanbul and the windy open courts of Akbar’s deserted palace at Fathepur Sikri in Uttar Pradesh, in and out of the lovely but foolish Alhambra in Granada and the Haven’t-I-Done-This-Before Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna.

And I am disappointed. The much-abused Little Mermaid in the Copenhagen harbor is somehow off scale and besides, she simpers. The much-ballyhooed Minneken Pis is not only ridiculously small in his Brussels street corner niche; he is gewoon belachelijk, straight out ridiculous. But I am a student of compensatory consolation, particularly the self-administered type, and in Copenhagen a turn round the Tivoli Gardens will soon drown all memories of the girl on the rock, while in Brussels tucking into a heaping plate of scungilli fra diavolo (frites on the side) on the Rue des Bouchers, which is as clogged with restaurants as the arteries of its diners with plaque, should obliterate all images of the little guy and his little schwanz.

Maybe I’m looking in the wrong direction. Maybe I should give up on the castles and the cathedrals and raise my eyes to the natural wonders like Drake’s Passage, the Grand Tetons, the Murchison Falls in Uganda and the Gullfoss of Iceland, the Chilean fjords. Yes! Patagonia! Serengeti! The Empty Quarter! But then I stand before Mt. Etna or Kilimanjaro and I am caught between “What a wonderful world!” and “What the hell am I doing out here in this heat?” The cataracts of the Nile belong there, the Zeeland of Holland and the Falkland Islands. And how can I forget the Geysir, the Iceland thermal spring that has given its name to water spouts all over the world but now apparently suffers from performance anxiety—Are you listening, Old Faithful?—and no longer spouts a lick.

There is no trace of such existential angst poolside at the Ritz-Carlton. The younger kiddies are priced out of this kind of venue and the older kiddies are, I assume, in school. It is an all-adult cast slowly browning in the sun. The more adventuresome are down at the beach tempting the jellyfish, leaving the pool to the stolid and the silent, staring at the calm chlorinated water through half-closed eyes and thinking of the possibility of maybe another mojito before lunch. I have “Bring Up the Bodies” on my Kindle and all of the Swedish “Wallander” on my iPad. I am content.

Where did she say that nineteenth century house was in Ponce?

Why then do I continue to undertake this laborious way of getting from here to there? For one thing, it’s not really a journey from here to there like an airplane flight, another activity I’m not so keen on. A cruise is more of a circle or a half circle or just an arc, and the point is not getting there, especially when the “there” is as uninteresting as Southampton or Fort Lauderdale or Port Los Angeles. It’s the stops along the way that are the bait, les escalles or ports of call with their promised adventure-filled “excursions”: “Helicopter into the Jungle” ($200), “Walk on a Glacier” ($150) or “Watch the Native Hemp Weavers Turn Weeds into Cloths of Gold” ($12.50). No thanks.

There’s no problem signing up for a cruise. Like all entrepreneurs, the cruise line makes it easy for you to buy in. A few clicks online and you’re a couple of thousand down, even with the deep discounts (from astronomical highs) the lines now offer. There’s nothing like an outburst of terrorism on Madagascar (“Jewels of Costa Africa.”) [NB. All cruises have assigned names, the further from the truth, the better.] to drive prices down. Ditto a collision with an iceberg (“Magical Greenland and Once Magical Iceland”), an overboard drowning (“The Fabulous Caribbean”) or, better still, a financial bottoming out (“The Mystery of Wall Street”) or an outburst of “Captain Bligh’s Revenge,” a bout of fever and gut-bustin’ diarrhea that runs through a ship as quickly as a Preferred Suite Owner passes through the cruise check-in.

Well, the prudent you, now long deceased, alas, thinks: Hey, everything is included, all the plenteous meals and snacks, for example, and your room services. But stay! There’s the airfare—you might be flying back from Christchurch or Dubai—and the transport from airport to the ship and vice versa. If you’re a teetotaler, your drinks will cost you nothing, which is good, but you’ll have no place to drown your considerable sorrows, which is bad. And the shore excursions: prepare for a very big hit to the pocketbook. Tipping? No problem. Well, sort of no problem. The line will deduct all the tips for you. No need to reach for your wallet, they already have it: you surrendered your credit card on arrival. On the other hand, the TV in your room is free, and so is the fresh ice.

I would advise putting a few, well, actually, more than a few, bucks aside for the shipboard laundry. The line provides a single washer-dryer in a soundproof room on one of the decks for those naïfs who think it’s easier—it’s certainly cheaper—to do your own laundry rather than handing it over to ship to do it for you. As a matter of fact, it is not easier. The laundry room is sound proofed so that the other passengers might not think that the Somali pirates have clambered aboard and are slaughtering the passengers one by one, all save the Owners Suites crowd who were provident enough to buy, and not cheaply, Anti-Pirate Insurance from the Somali consul in Washington. The source of the clamor is actually the Ladies Who Launder scratching, clawing, pummeling, tearing and gouging one another for possession of the dryer or the last of the detergent. Cameras pipe these 24/7 bloodbaths in the laundry room up to the bridge (and into the Owners Suites: “complimentary Laundry Room TV”) for the entertainment of the navigation officers—“Nothing ever happens in these waters”–after the lovely Lithuanians from the restaurant staff have picked up their clothes and gone giggling off to bed. So a couple of hundred to have your tee-shirt (“I Got Through Heathrow”), washed, shrunk and pressed is not all that bad an investment if you don’t fancy blood sports.

It is a good idea, then, to know what you’re doing before you do it. There are, of course, cruises and cruises. At one end of the spectrum, the heavy money end, there are the boutique adventure cruises where you are assigned a personal bosun’s mate to help you scamper up the rigging–Of course it’s a sailing ship, you dolt!–for the full shipboard experience (flogging is an expensive extra) and are issued a pistol to help fight off the Somali pirates or the Zanzibar cannibals, whoever appears first. At the other end, let’s call it Cheapside for the romance of it all, are those ships with “Disney” on the side where there are five children under 11 for every adult and the meals are served either on the merry-go round or the waterslide. Then you can choose to sail, if that’s the right word, on one of the towering infernos, the maritime monsters that look like an apartment house perched uneasily atop a canoe. They too offer adventure, but in this case it’s real, not staged. There’s a real chance that you’ll be thrown overboard into the turquoise sea (“The Romantic Caribbean”) by your new disenchanted wife–”He took me on the Princess Line, the cheapskate!”–or by a drunken fellow passenger whom you’ve just met and whom you were showing some karate moves at midnight on the Sports Deck.

Me, I dwell in the reasonably priced middle ranks–”Maiden Again” was my mother’s Greek motto, “Nothing in excess.” She had, it seems, picked up a little, a very little, Greek, from an Episcopal bishop who had been defrocked for excessive orthodoxy and was then peddling Bibles door to door–where ships still look like ships and not Trump Towers, where the passengers number about 800 and there are no children or honeymooners on board; in fact, no one younger than 50 and none, guaranteed, older than 100, though I have my doubts about that last.

I made my first cruise–it must be everyone’s starter cruise, cheap, short and brutal–to Alaska, and my first impression was one of astonishment. I had never seen so many really old people collected in one place: the lame and the halt, the blear-eyed, arthritically bent and stroke-addled; geezers with walkers and in wheelchairs or attached to their own oxygen tank. Under every “Honolulu” (“Pacific Paradise”) or “I Sailed the Yangtze” (“Hidden China”) tee-shirt beat, I was sure, a high-end Pacemaker; behind every wizened ear, a hearing aid the size of a New York strip steak. My perspectives have changed somewhat over fifteen years. There seem fewer of the elderly on board, and I no longer mind the occasional dodderer blocking my way into the dining room. My tolerance may be born of the fact that I am now among the oldest on board. But clean, agile and completely free of prosthetic devices.

Once you’ve selected your cabin from a wide range of possibilities, from an inside stateroom (I think not), through bewildering varieties of portholes and verandas, up to the Owner’s Suite (Yeah, right! Who needs a butler?), and signed up, there is still a steep hill to climb, the getting there. True, some cruise ships leave from Fort Lauderdale (for the Caribbean) or Los Angeles (for Hawaii and the Far East), but more commonly they sail from Barcelona or Venice (for the Mediterranean cruises), from Athens (Indian Ocean and Far East) and Dover and Southampton (the Baltic and North Sea cruises). Here’s my advice. Skip the cruise and buy a business class air ticket to London or Barcelona; or fly Air Cathay to Singapore or Hong Kong and get yourself a custom-tailored suit and a massage you’ll never forget instead of playing shuffleboard with very old guys who cheat, not on their wives, who are almost dead, but at shuffleboard.

And if you happen to have that one gold-plated best-seller under your belt (with the screen rights and some points from the gate), then I recommend Upper Class (are you hearing this?) on Virgin Atlantic to anywhere. These gracious lads actually pick you up at your residence and take care of the check-in formalities in the limo on the way to the airport.
“And, sir, would you like to dine at our club at JFK–excellent sushi chef there, sir, just in from Tokyo–or aboard, at your accommodation? Or perhaps both? No shame in being a bit peckish, is there, sir?”

Not that I could think of. The sushi at the club was excellent, as my forelock-tugging chauffeur had promised, and so too was the very rare roast beef on board. But both were eclipsed by my “accommodation,” once known merely as a “seat” but now morphed into a cubicle of considerable dimension with a plasma TV and a sound system that made me believe that I had Placido Domingo lodged somewhere in my ear. And, oh yes, a full sized bed.
“And when would you like your massage, sir?”

It was the stewardess, who looked and smelled like one of those edible, early Beatles girlfriends and was of course wearing those smashing black stockings that the Brits apparently issue at puberty to every stewardess, nurse and schoolgirl in the land. No wonder they once ruled the globe. As an aficionado of Chinese massage, I fully expected that the shades of my “accommodation”–I was already beginning to think of it that way–would be discreetly drawn, and Jenny Agutter, or whatever her name was, would enter and together we’d go up to 80,000 feet. No such. I was taken to a massage cubicle and given a fully clothed, very economy class backrub. Still worth the trip.

But this was not Virgin Air, and one of the most distasteful of cruise experiences may be those called Embarkation and Disembarkation at the beginning and end of the venture. The first chiefly occurs when there is a too brief turn-around time for the ship. The last crusaders are scratching and clawing to get off the vessel and the new recruits eager to get on. But the ship must first be cleaned and primped. A new stock of haricots verts, pistachio nuts, orecchiette and overpriced wine must be taken on board, the toilets flushed, the urine drained from the pool, the drunken comedian put ashore and the captain warned once more, “Stay away from the friggin’ Italian shore!”

“There may be a brief delay, ladies and gentlemen. Please be patient.” The ladies and gentlemen, prostrate from jet-lag, slump back on their waiting room benches.

Same at the other end. Everyone is eager to get off: collectively and individually they have had enough. But no so fast, Everyone must be dispatched according to flight time and destination; each reconnected with his own luggage and loaded into a van, bus, taxi or train and pointed in the right direction.

“Please be patient, ladies and gentlemen.” The ladies and gentlemen, now seated disconsolately in the same shipboard auditorium where they had recently cheered and laughed, have very few options.

So I’m aboard. The landscape is familiar since I’ve been on this line, this very ship, before. I’m an old hand and so I know that my luggage will eventually show up outside my stateroom, perhaps just after we pass the Maldives (“The Mysterious Spice Islands”).
Barely settled, the mandatory lifeboat drill falls like a body blow upon the still frazzled passengers. It is a tiresome exercise but a little more pointed than the airline fairy tale that begins, “If we are forced to land in the water…” since ships are already in that dangerous water and have been known to go further down in it. So every passenger is made to force his grizzled pate or her blue-rinsed head into a bulky life jacket that comes in one size, “Unfit,” and which, despite the cute little attached whistle–”Cabin 314, stop blowing your whistle!”–does not seem capable of actually saving lives. The whistle blowing was from the inside stateroom riff-raff from Deck 3 of course. Only the crew lives on the completely windowless Deck 2, and down below, on lightless and airless Deck 1, are Italian former sea captains, sex offenders, former passengers now too crazed to be removed and the usual assigned, and expensive, places for Pakistani stowaways.

The passengers, just recently arrived and tired beyond the telling of it, are led out on deck, trussed in orange straitjackets like unwilling sacrifices to Neptune, and made to stand beneath their assigned lifeboats. They quietly eye one another to determine the dangerously strong who might deny them a place and the weak sisters they’ll have to push aside to get into the lifeboat. We are read a long list of eventualities, none of them pleasant, that might occur in this type of craft on the open sea–”Not to worry. Each of our lifeboats has a three-day supply of Campbell soup and synthetic protein bars”–and we are dismissed.

Please, Lord, let me not perish at sea. Or on land. Or at all.
Never mind the Campbell soup. There’s good eatin’ on hand, lots of it. There’s a formal dining room for all three meals, ditto a big buffet on an upper deck, where the food is not as fancily tricked out but more varied and you can can mix and match to your heart’s content. The plebs seem to prefer the buffet; the white tablecloths and wine stewards in the main dining room seem to frighten them. There are also niche restaurants, invariably a steak house and a fancy Italian and perhaps, if you’re lucky, an Asian fusion restaurant: the decor and etiquette are vaguely Japanese, the food mostly Chinese and the help unmistakably Thai, and probably the chef as well. And finally, there is the snackin’: coffee with Danish and muffins in the AM, tea with pastries and little sandwiches in the afternoon, and pizza and ice cream AM, PM and in between. There’s no shame in being a little peckish, is there? Of course there is! Everyone leaves a cruise covered, smeared, smothered with the shame of overindulgence.

The old liners weren’t really cruise ships. They were real transportation and they carried passengers to and from specific destinations in the US, Europe and the Far East: Robert Donat and his young bride, Celia Johnson, to his new post as station chief in Simla, or Freddie Bartholomew, full of Anglo-Indian spunk, heading in the other direction to adventures at Eton and Oxford (“Tutor will be ever so angry if I don’t enjoy the birching!”). And they always dressed for dinner. That was because they were all traveling First Class, as were Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, who were both ticketed only for mischief. “Shanghai, ma’am? Dangerous place. I’d take care.” “Don’t worry, Captain Steele,” eyes narrowing, smoke curling up the nostrils, “I can take care of myself.”

Class distinctions prevailed on the old liners: First Class, Cabin and what we euphemistically call “Economy” but they more forthrightly dubbed “Steerage.” And lest there be any untoward mingling, the classes were physically separated by rather forbidding locked gates. Each class had its own facilities for dining, dancing or, in steerage, manning the pumps or catching influenza. The barriers are all gone today, except for vestigial remains on the great British liners. Now all are thrown together. Lowly Rotarians and Full Professors, suddenly impoverished hedge fund managers and perennially rich plumbers all mingle cheerfully everywhere, from the dining rooms to the bathrooms. And the old dining custom of two seatings, 6:30 or 9 PM (your choice), with assigned seating (no choice) at tables for six has also mercifully disappeared. Now you dine when you wish between 6:30 and 9:30 PM, with an increasing demand for “a table for two.” There are not a lot of those private perches, though the number is steadily growing. The maitre d’s are not pleased with such requests and greet them with an insolent smile that says, “Do you think you’re so much better than everybody else?” (Right) or “Do you think I have nothing better to do than find you a table for two?” (Right again) or “Are you fuckin’ anti-social or something?” (Bingo!). What he actually says, this rather nasty young man late of a Bosnian chicken farm, is, “That will be a twenty minute wait, I fear. What’s your cabin number?” The cabin number is the clue: if it starts with a magic upper deck 9, my wait will be twenty seconds; if with a lowerdeck 3, more like twenty years.

The Crusaders kept their edge with jousts and swordplay on the way to the Holy Land. Their modern descendants plunge right into the more dangerous game of shipboard conversation. “Where you from?” is the traditional opening move, but it’s the notorious Fool’s Gambit since it leads directly into the deadly counter-move called, a little bit laboriously, “You’ll never believe the trouble I had getting here” and featuring such predictable side play as “six hours at JFK,” “DeGaulle, please!” and “the luggage of course was lost.” Check. Mate. “Sorry, I’m a bit tired. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.”

They won’t get me tomorrow. Tonight I’m reading up on responses to what many consider indefensible, the Grandchildren Gambit. Kasparov recommends, but only under the most extreme circumstances, the chilling counter of “I’m sorry. I lost my manhood in the war. I couldn’t have children.” Few can recover from that killer, but bear in mind, the folks across the table, even the ones with hearing aids, are not listening. They’re just waiting for their cue to start talking. The cues for tedious narrative are many and varied, so great social caution must be observed. One must never say “retirement,” “Florida” or “California,” “surgery,” “Carnival,” “China” (replacing the once deadly “Russia”), “arthritis,” and “Australia” (an occasional “New Zealand” can get by). There must be no mention of taxes, health care, a sitting president or any relatives, especially dead spouses or grandchildren, the latter of which is, as indicated, the third rail not only of cruising but of Geezerdom generally. Oddly, children no long provoke an endless series of anecdotes. They have grown up and moved away and their aged parents no longer seem to care.

Somewhere mid-voyage the two conversational opening serves of “Where are you from?” and Where have you been?” have lost their topspin and the converse grows slack. All on board now do nothing else but cruise, and so the half-hearted openings slip back into the past tense: “What did you do in Kansas City before you retired?” The only answer to that question should be “I tried to shoot myself,” but I rather fancied the query–I had a strong second act–because it gave me a rare shot at regaining control of the conversation. My answer “I was a teacher” kills the beast before it can do any further damage; nobody is interested in teachers, although on occasion a nimble and clever tactician might come up with, “That reminds me. I remember back in the sixth grade in Keokuk, let’s see, that would be about ’53 or ’54. Edna, you must remember this…”

“I was a professor,” on the the other hand, invariably provokes a frisson from across the table. The listener–I wish!– is pondering. Do I want to go there, he thinks, get entangled with some wiseass know it all? What the hell, let’s give it a shot. “What do you teach, professor?” The last word doesn’t sound exactly like a compliment; he’s bracing for the worst. Another fork in the road. If I give him “Classics,” he panics and bolts and we’re back with the grandchildren. “History” is a dangerous invitation to “I’m sort of a Civil War buff myself. Ever been to Vicksburg?” “Religion” provokes either a sullen and hostile silence or some quite unpredictable diatribe, against the Mormons, for example, or Jehovah’s Witnesses or the personal practices of the Reverend Bob in the local church.

Then there’s my killer app: “I teach Islam.” No one can stay away from that. Everyone wants simultaneously to say something and to ask something; to vent anger or get to the bottom of something, and invariably to express that rarest of cruiser sentiments, admiration: “That must be interesting.” But in the end I fear I disappoint them; I’ve lured them here, but I can’t deliver. I’m a historian of Islamic origins, not of Muslims in America or Middle Eastern politics–”What’s going to happen to Israel, professor?” My fellow crusaders want dogma on these issues; instead, I’m giving them what I read in the NYTimes (though generally with the Times’ slant–Who? Us?–reversed).

Typically a cruise ship arrives at its daily destination early in the morning and departs about 6 PM so that most of the actual sailing is at night. There are, however, “days at sea” to bridge widely separated ports. It’s then that the well-oiled cruise entertainment apparatus springs into action. I’ve already described the most dangerous of the shipboard games, “Laundry Room.” Bridge is a close second on the danger scale. It is pervasive on board and is played with that jaw-clenched seriousness that characterizes all true games. For those less accustomed to full-contact sports, there are the old staples that go all the way back to Babylonian cruises on the Euphrates (“Jewels of Mesopotamia”): shuffleboard, quoits and “Putting for Dollars” (actually, shipboard credits), as well as their more intellectual descendants–the Babylonians had little time to think; they were managing the Jewish Exile, and you can imagine what a headache that was–to wit, team trivia and, yes, bingo, though some maintain that bingo is even older than shuffleboard, that God taught bingo to Adam and Eve in Eden and told them it was called “Sex.” Unconfirmed, that.

For those who prefer to mock rather than compete, there is the very popular photo-guffawing. A ship’s photographer is constantly photographing the cruisers, at arrival and departure, at meals, at play or just dozing, mouth agape, in the Horizons Lounge. The hideously unattractive results are all posted, ostensibly for purchase by their subjects, though few buy. What the photos are instead is the source of enormous amusement and scurrilous comment from the other passengers. Close to it in value for the more practiced masochists is sitting poolside on the upper deck, astonished and appalled that the elderly should dare display in public their scrawny or bloated bodies, marvelously veined things in vivid blue or purple.

These are all pedestrian, if sometimes fatal, pursuits. The entertainment cream rises to the top in the evening, when the lower orders of the entertainment industry put on a brave front in the ship’s large auditorium–large enough in one of the Monsters of the Sea to stage an Ice Capades–and with very comfortable seating so that the ancient guests may doze during the longeurs. There’s always a ship’s band, the “Sea Laddies,” and a resident string ensemble, “the Vlad Quartet, straight from Bratislava, folks.” The latter voice is that of the Cruise Director, smarmy, belligerently optimistic–”Another great day in lovely, fogged-in Foolshaven, Greenland, folks!”–and sadistically informative: “On the starboard side, folks”–wherever that is–”a stunning view of the mouth of the Orinoco, the seventeenth most polluted river in the world.”

The entertainment stars wear makeup, the musicians not. There are choristers, the “boys” and “girls” down on their Broadway luck who pluckily sing and dance their way through devastatingly abbreviated versions of “Mame” and “The Music Man” and, mercy, Lord!, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Andrew Lloyd Webber, the greatest musical nuisance since the invention of the accordion, is built, like a bad chromosome, into the DNA of cruise ships. He is splattered across the playbooks of The Sea Laddies and the Vlad Quartet. He is in the elevators, the staterooms, the bathrooms, public and private, the dining rooms and, if I guess right, he will be piped into those lifeboats that will carry all of us to our watery doom. But don’t get your hopes up; if interest in Baron Lloyd-Webber flags, there is Andrea Bocelli right behind him.

Then there are the soloists. I generally skip the tenors and sopranos–”And now, from Cats…”–but give me a comedian, a ventriloquist, juggler or a magician, and I’m there, early and often. “Right from Broadway,” our Cruise Director trumpets, not mentioning that it’s the Broadway Danny Rose Talent Agency this comic with the hairpiece is from. But I love him, for his ego-crushing optimism, his grasp of the fundamentals of his art–”Anybody here from Florida?”–and his grim willingness to accept a cruise ship booking. “My wife likes me to get out of the house more. Way out. Anybody here married?”

More sober and serious is the lecturer, the full-bore retired professor, an amateur geographer, a Vikings or Maori buff, former Peace Corps volunteers in Rajasthan, Kazakhstan or Baluchistan or, please God!, a sportscaster who had late night drinks with Howard Cosell or Arnie Palmer or Chris Evert.

“Is it true, Jimmy, Chrisie’s thing with Navratilova?”

“Was Dick Buttons on steroids, Jimmy? I always wondered.”

“That diver, Jimmy, Greg something, do you know how I can get in touch with him?”
Whoa, Nellie!

The lecturers all bring their Powerpoints, their laser pointers, their point of view and their carefully collected but not always smoothly delivered information cache. It doth pass the time, however, this chatter about icebergs and earthquakes, about the Black Death, Polish foreign policy, about Ainu and Inouits and bilingualism in Belgium, especially on 21 day cruises from Athens to Singapore (“East of Suez”) when all the grandchildren have all been named and numbered and their virtues and accomplishments commemorated in paralyzing detail.

In the name of full transparency (a newly devised formula to introduce a stunning series of lies), I once did stand upon that stage myself. “And now, folks, straight from a major university, put your hands together for the very distinguished…” Grabbing that golden mike with both hands, “Thanks, Leslie. Good evening, folks. Anyone here married?” It was sort of a boutique cruise, no more than a hundred or so passengers, from Port Said, down the Gulf of Suez, around Sinai, up to Aqaba (and Petra) and back (“Gateways to Araby”). There was a modest stipend but with all expenses paid for two and a bar tab longer and denser than a tractate of the Talmud.

I lectured on board about every third day, unsupported by either jugglers or a string quartet. There was no auditorium. Like some third-rate lounge act, I delivered my material in the Dean Martin manner, leaning on a piano, mike in one hand, a Ginger Ale in the other, It was easy, talking about stuff I knew inside out to an audience that was interested–audience interest varies in direct proportion to the price of the cruise–instead of to a brigade of undergraduates who don’t know where Suez is and have never heard of Aqaba. “Aqaba,” Peter O’Toole whispered, his blue eyes gleaming under the kohl, “We must take Aqaba.”

What was even more fun was working the bus. We landed at Qusayr on the Egyptian coast where three large Mercedes busses had been engaged to carry the cruisers three hours eastward to Luxor for a day amidst the Pharaonic ruins before returning to the ship in the evening. I sat next to the driver, the talking seat, in one of them, live mike in magisterial hand, and spun tales, free associated and answered questions for three hours.

Tourists’ questions, whether on land or sea, are either witless or unanswerable. “What’s a two family house go for here in Muscat?” “Will there be restrooms in Spain?” “Did the Jewish Israelites build the pyramids? My rabbi says they did.” “Your rabbi, madame, is a fool and a knave and probably a Unitarian so I’d beware.” It didn’t much matter what you answered. The questioner didn’t care in the first place and had long since ceased listening in the second.

“On the left, folks, a camel and, if I remember my Bedouin lore, she’s in foal.”

Yes, in foal, at stud. Get it right.

“So what’s the gestation period of a camel, professor?”

“Three years, madame. Quite remarkable. I remember once in the camel market just outside of Marrakesh…”

Am I being too harsh on my fellow passengers? Ab uno disce omnes, as Vergil put it so neatly, “Try this on for size.” It was evening. We were in the plaza before the great cathedral of Majorca. The local guide, a man of great and serene dignity, looked about him and slowly and solemnly addressed his group. “In this very plaza, on February 2nd, 1513, the Holy Inquisition ordered seven Marranos convicted of Crypto-Judaism be burned at the stake.” There was an equally solemn pause. Then suddenly a light went on in the head of a lady in a sun visor and orange capri pants. “February 2nd,” she squealed, “that’s my granddaughter’s birthday!” If reports can be trusted, that very night the guide, a man respected by his peers and the community at large–he had once been mentioned in the Governor’s Annual Report to the Throne–went down to the port, carefully removed his “Official Guide” badge with the coat of arms of Aragon upon it, and threw himself into the dark Mediterranean waters. Had I been made of braver stuff, I should have followed him into the deep.

But nobody books a cruise to watch a ventriloquist move his lips or even to listen to a distinguished professor making it up as he goes along, but chiefly to inspect the sites threaded like pearls along the itinerary (“Pearls of the Itinerary”): cities, towns, cathedrals (“In Italy be prepared for closings”), stone huts, botanical gardens, caves, gorges, waterfalls, museums (“In Russia be prepared for closings”), monasteries, monuments to the Great Patriotic War. There will of course be visits to countless workrooms and factories where there are made and, more to the point, sold a staggering variety ski sweaters, pearls, olive wood creches, Delft, Wedgwood and Waterford ware, lacquered and enameled screens, Lladro and Hummel collectibles and enough magnets to take down a sub-zero refrigerator door in about 30 seconds. Our forefathers bought cute tee-shirts abroad; their descendants buy up: manuscripts, ikons, in Cairo gold amulets with your name upon them in hieroglyphics, smoked salmon in Shannon and Bergen, mosque lamps in Istanbul and carpets in Kushadasi, fake antiquities in Israel (“Yes, of course it’s a piece of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My father, may God bless him, a professor at the Hebrew University, tore it off 4Q personally. You can’t get this in New York for $300.”), false Ming scroll paintings in China and, once upon a time, when the going was good, false Alexander drachmas in Kabul, a gallon of real caviar in Tehran and whatever entered your head in Bangkok.

Cruisers, it turns out, at least the American variety, want above all to shop. They’ll happily pass up a day in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for a half hour in the Khan al-Khalili suq, take a pass on the Louvre for the Rue St. Honoré and the Uffizi for the shops on the Arno. The cruise lines have been a little slow on the uptake. There have always been shops on board, one where you could buy cruise line polo shirts and windbreakers (also Rollaids, then batteries and now finally flash memory sticks); and another that sells expensive watches, jewelry and perfumes. But les dames en bateau go through that kid stuff pretty fast during those listless days at sea, and the cruise lines are expanding their shops into larger and larger emporia. Soon there’ll soon be an Arby’s and a Starbucks, I’m sure, and the transformation from ship to mall will be complete.

While the fittest survive and expand in the Darwinian microcosm of the cruise ship, the dodo and the .400 hitter are fading into extinction. That seems to be the fate of onboard photography and perhaps even the casino that can be found aboard every large ship. News of the bad odds on board is spreading in the cruiser breeding farms in California, Florida and Arizona, and fewer gamers seem to be showing up at the tables and slots.
And also fading is that former staple of the cruise, the art auction. The goods are displayed around the ship from the outset of the cruise, mostly modern decorative painting–”That would look nice over our sofa, Earl”–with an occasional classic Dogs at Poker thrown in to pique the interest of whatever Australians might be on board. But there are some Old Masters as well, some clearly marked as copies and others reputed to be Rembrandt drawings or Picasso sketches–”Pablo, for Chrissakes, stop with the doodling on the tablecloth. You’re killing your own market!”

Toward the end the cruise, when everyone has had a chance to imagine owning such lovely things, the whole batch is sold at auction, each piece lubricated, fore and aft, by free champagne. I never really got the art auction thing, but the NYTimes did and published a long article on the slick practices and outright fraud in the onboard art game, and that may have driven a palette knife through the heart of the enterprise. I keep looking under my stateroom bed, however; they must have stashed that stuff somewhere to get it out of the way. “Hey, look, Harry. There’s a Rembrandt under the lifejackets!”

The cruise provides more than entertainment and vulgar commerce, however; there is also on those highly polished decks and in those plushly furnished lounges much matter for philosophical contemplation. It is enough to cite but one example. The place was somewhere in the North Atlantic. The public address system crackled into life. The airwaves are usually the preserve of the Cruise Director, that shameless purveyor of puffery—“Enjoy another great day in the English Channel, folks; the rain should be tapering off in a few days”—and of useless and sometimes frightening information: “Please be careful getting into the tenders, folks. The sea is a little rough here in the Sea of Japan and you don’t want to be swimming in these waters! Just kidding! But seriously, folks, be careful.”

The Cruise Director also serves as translator for the Captain. Cruise ship captains are not cut from the same cloth as airline pilots, with their slow and confident Texas drawl punctuated with reassuring little chuckles that make you think, “Former astronaut. I’m gonna be OK.” The pilot of the sea favors a Serbo-Croatian marbled English with long pauses while, I think, he casts panicked glances at the radar. His daily noontime communique is a useless assemblage of nautical miles covered and still to be covered, speed in knots and the height of the swells, that latter obviously a wild guess. The Cruise Director then translates that information into a cheery account of fair skies and smooth sailing, “but be careful on the deck, folks; it been raining pretty hard and there’s s bit of a wind up.”

But on this particular day it was the Captain, and not with his usual prattle of knots and nautical miles but with a heads up—“Hid oop”—that shortly we would be passing the mid-ocean place where the Titanic went down. Yikes! The frisson that ran through the ship was palpable; even the usually insensate bingo-players in the Great Lounge felt it. Nobody on an ocean liner wants to be reminded that this damn thing, whatever else it may be, was a boat and that boats sink, carrying the passengers, their Turkish carpets, Papuan necklaces and Irish sweaters to a watery grave.

But the frisson, with a quick glance at the life-jacket closet, is only momentary. It is quickly replaced by something more profound, more human. There is a rush out onto the decks. The lame run, the halt scurry and the portly puff themselves to the portside railings—“Elton, are you sure this is port?” “Midge, shut up for a change!”—and gaze at the dark sea. It is the Captain again. “Dragi passagieri, this is the exact place, 1235 nautical miles…” No one is listening. The deck is ablaze with camera flashes and one and all do their best to capture the exact spot on the expressionless face of the sea where the Titanic went down.

The ship moves on and there is a great silence, not out of reverence for the tragedy that had occurred there but out of a dawning realization of the enormous stupidity, and perfect intelligibility, of what had just occurred. They had attempted to take a picture of an idea, of an invisible event. The happy domestic scene that would inevitably follow back in Sun City could already be imagined: “Florence, what the fuck is this? A picture of the ocean? For Chrissakes, were you drinking again in the afternoon?”

These are all mere distractions; the shore excursions are the meat and the potatoes of the cruise experience. You are urged to sign up for these expensive jaunts before embarking, and that on the basis of the sometimes steamy and sometimes creamy prose descriptions in a brochure and the equally mendacious photos that accompany them. Will I really see children playing on the streets of “Tampico Graciosa” (Two hours. Come armed). So the cruiser, still innocently and ignorantly seated in his own living room, makes his choices: “The Craters of Iceland,” “Costa Hibernica”–tourist enterprises have invented as many bogus “Coast” names for dreary stretches of seaside as Arabs have for camels–”Unknown Naples” (“No thanks”), “Walks in the Gardens of Antwerp,” “Phuket at Night” (“Two, please”), “Upland Belgium” (4 hours, some walking; bring rain gear) or “A Day and a Night in Perth” (includes complimentary beer). When the actual day arrives for “The Dream Landscape of Angkor Wat (3 hr. flight) or “Hidden Turkey” (some animal transport; bring nibbles) and you wish you hadn’t signed up for a very expensive stroll through the slums of Bombay (“The Real Mumbai”: There may be some tourist abuse. most of it verbal. Not suitable for children), the groups are assembled, sorted into busses and carted off to the reality of their choice.

Like life itself, the shore excursions are sometimes fun and sometimes not, interesting or boring, worth it or not. A lot depends on the weather and the guide, his or her language skills, information, presentation and group management. It’s fairly rare to hit that combination in toto. Human nature and Original Sin intervene on a regular basis and “Barry Fitzgerald’s Connemara” turns out to be a fruitless trudge in the rain–”Ah,” says the guide for the eighth time, “another soft Irish day”–since the Barry Fitzgerald Museum is closed for repairs, as it has been since 1987. “Well, my good American friends, how about a visit instead to my brother’s pub just down the way?” He didn’t have to tell us: we already knew, with that touristic sixth sense, that its name would be “Going My Way.”

On one of my earliest excursions, I mistakenly thought that the truth was somehow at stake in these presentations, and out of the depths of my naïveté I corrected the guide on a small point: “Excuse me, commendatore”–I was so smooth in those days!–”but Jesus was not Italian on his father’s side. ‘Giuseppe’ is just an Italian translation of Joseph’s Hebrew name.” This well-meant correction was met with an exceedingly threatening scowl from the guide. Had he a pistol in his belt, he would surely have gone for it, but he settled for spitting at my feet–apparently a gesture of extreme contempt in Calabria (“Italy: The Charming South”) and continued, undeterred and defiant, with his description of the miracles performed by Jesus of Palermo. The saddest part was that his hostility was echoed in the baleful glances that my fellow cruisers shot in my direction. They did not want to hear that their guide was telling them falsehoods for their money. “Can’t you just hold your tongue, old man?” the crone next to me whispered loud enough for everyone to hear. I did, and I continue to hold it, no matter what travesties come forth from the mouths of these local rogues with tourist badges. But I know in my heart that Machu Picchu is not the Inca corruption of Macho Pedro, a nineteenth century Peruvian man about town.

I’ve come a long way since then. It’s in part resignation–If you can’t beat ‘em, forget about it–and in part my fading hearing which now reduces cruise babble to actual babble, which is much easier to assimilate. And I have in truth seen some marvelous sights on cruises–I particularly recommend the Antarctica and Amazon cruises–and have met some interesting and enjoyable people on board: a noble sportscaster and that knockout he claims is his wife; a real deal Arkansas mailman who also lucked out in the wife department, bigtime; a retired Episcopal bishop; two engaging jolies filles de Perth who put the lie to every Aussie stereotype; a grizzled blond veteran of British music halls who could levitate a lifeboat with her profanities; some very glamorous sommelières from the ends of the earth; and a stateroom steward who is the Picasso of towel sculpture. And more.
But don’t take my word for any of this. Go and take a look for yourself. Just don’t mention my name.

But it’s a harmless boast, akin to saying that one of your grandfathers was at the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thompson hit his home run or that your mother was at Woodstock and, well, you know… Most Syrians now live in cities and good sized towns and so their actual contact with Bedouin is likely to be more fanciful than real. The Bedouin themselves, whatever they once were, are now a pretty shabby lot, except maybe the Saudi Arabian variety who are loftily subsidized as a Saudi monument to themselves, a Mount Rushmore of the steppe, or in the Negev where the Israelis maintain them as a kind of tented theme park for tourists.

The badu have fallen upon hard times or, perhaps better, remained in hard times while their more sedentary brethren moved from villages to towns and cities, trading in their camels for donkeys and then for cars as they slowly climbed upward from the ranks of porters and taxi drivers to the government job they all aspired to. It certainly beat chasing sheep (les petits Bedouin) or camels (les grands Bedouin) hundreds of miles back and forth across the steppe. Once the great tribes swept across the steppe, minding the large herds with which and on which they lived, making off in season with the chattel, beasts and women of their sedentary neighbors, and then returning home to sing of their little skirmishes in the wilderness—male life on the steppe was far too fragile and precious to risk losing it in anything much more serious than a shouting match—as if they were cuirassed warriors before windy Troy. As a matter of cold fact, T.E. Lawrence’s little Arabian adventure WWI may have been the last discernible Bedouin thumbprint on the page of history.

Most Bedouin have had the sense to move, or been driven, off the steppe into towns either by necessity or by the government, which has never taken kindly to armed men wandering unsupervised across the landscape, even if they spoke a very pure Arabic and the guns they bore were far more likely to explode in the hands of owner than to do any damage to the putative target. And the few nomads left in the great Syro-Arabian wilderness are not the determined defenders of a noble tradition but simply those without the wit to kill and eat the last goat, cut the horsehair tent into placemats and head for the nearest electric light.

My own encounters with those once proud people were in odd circumstances and places in the shallow steppe just beyond the sown lands and 250 ml. annual rainfall line which marks the limit of “the sown,” where agriculture is possible and outside of which the steppe begins; or in the towns along its edge where once the Bedouin raided and traded and where their now humbled descendants come to bargain for tobacco and coffee. Deep within the steppe, beyond the 100ml. isohyet lies the true desert, where little life beyond lizards and National Geographic photographers survives. Bedouin do not live in the desert, where there is no vegetation; they and their animals inhabit the steppe whose expanding (winter) and contracting (summer) grassland they chase back and forth across its wide breadth. It is that contracting summer pasturage that drew the badu into the farms, backyards and eventually the bedrooms of the terrified agriculturalists. Well stocked with tobacco, pistols and fresh wives, the Bedouin wave eventually receded, though all concerned understood they would be back the following June.

Those days are long over. There are no great herds or great tribes moving across the steppe; their humbled successors now eke out a marginal existence in or near the towns they once terrified. No one claims to be their descendants; when my Syrian friends boast their Bedouin ancestry, they are dreaming of some pre-Islamic paladin or, for the more romantically inclined, of Omar Sharif riding in toward that waterhole on his gaudily caparisoned camel. It was one of those dreamers who told me, with great excitement, that there was to be a “Bedouin wedding” in the steppe-edge town east of Homs where we were spending the night. “We must go,” he insisted. “I am, as you know, from badu.” Excellent. And I am, don’t you know, a direct descendant of Francis of Assisi.

We arrived at the wedding about eight in the evening, at what point in the proceedings it was difficult to tell in this rambling liturgy. My knowing guide headed directly to the major attraction, the bride. She looked about fifteen as she sat rigid upon her throne in the glaringly lit, suffocating room, her hands fiercely gripping the arms. The beldames of the village crowded around her, fixing and fussing, clucking, singing, scolding. Her heavily kohled eyes were half-closed, head tilted back. She was, I thought, drugged, or at least heavily sedated, wrapped like a not terribly expensive doll, head to toe, in polyester swathing every unpleasant color of the acrylic spectrum. It was terrible to behold, more terrible to think what the rest of the night held in store for her.

The groom was outside in the courtyard, gotten up in a suit an odd color black, white shirt and tie to which he was clearly unaccustomed and which was equally clearly unaccustomed to him. He and his bravo pals were exchanging ribaldries and swilling arak as fast as they could refill their glasses. It was not going to be a pleasant evening for either bride or groom, that is, unless Allah in his well-known mercy caused them both to pass out, he from drunkenness, she from terror, even as they were crossing the lintel into the marriage bower.
All this grew thin rather quickly, and we withdrew to an alley at the side of the house to sit in the darkness, smoke and contemplate the folly of human affairs. After a while a small boy appeared—most of the ordinary tasks in Middle Eastern societies, from hauling water to watch repair, are performed by boys between 9 and 14—carrying a tin dish with a napkin draped over it.

“The father of the house sends this to his honored guests.”
Anywhere and everywhere among the Arabs, anyone who wanders into a house, invited or uninvited, is an honored guest.

My friend took the dish in his hands and instructed the boy to carry our most effusive thanks back to the father of the house.

“A Bedouin delicacy, I’m sure,” he murmured in a tone I could not quite identify, and he settled down on the ground, his back ever so symbolically against the house wall.

It sure was: a sheep’s head.

I knew about this, my knowledge deriving as usual from movie depictions of Bedouin feasts in tents the size of velodromes, on carpets so thick you needed to be winched out of their depths with block and tackle, and surrounded by vigorous, battle scarred badu shouting “I am a river to my people.” If my friend fantasized Omar Sharif, I preferred Anthony Quinn.

My fantasies were highly detailed, the result of many profitable hours spent sitting in dark movie houses. I had always imagined the sheep’s head centerpiece, the host’s token of esteem for his most estimable guests, as a white and curly woolly thing, its soulful Disney eyes turned heavenward like those of a Christian martyr, resting on a large silver salver and surrounded by mountains of the fluffiest white rice in the entire shaykhdom.

How life refuses to imitate art! Here the scrawny naked sheep’s skull lay dark brown and desolate in the tin plate. My friend, dripping courtesy, and with perhaps the slightest undertaste of nausea, passed the dish to me.

“Please! First my honored guest.”

The game was already over, of course, but I was not above scoring a few points in overtime. My fantasies provided no sure guidance on how to eat a sheep’s head. I made a quick decision on where there might be some actual meat on that withered skull and pinched a bit of leathery flesh from the poor beast’s cheek. My friend watched closely as I put it carefully into my mouth and started to chew. It not only looked like leather; it tasted like leather. But I got it down.

“Delicious,” I said as I handed the dish back to him. “An eye perhaps for my esteemed host?”

A momentary pause. Then, hand to heart, his head tilted back in the unmistakable Arab gesture suggesting everything from “No, thanks” to “You’ve got to be out of your friggin’ head!” I think it was the latter he was trying to convey.

“Not tonight, my friend. I think I may have had some bad fish for lunch.”

Maybe, but what I had for dinner was a very bad badu pretender. In a single instant he had tumbled from prince of the desert to village knave; worse, a soft apartment dweller who got his knowledge of the Bedouin from the same tainted Hollywood springs as myself, where no one ever served up a sheep‘s head without at least a dollop of mayonnaise and a sprig of parsley.

Well, not entirely from movies perhaps. True Bedouin survived in some places well into the nineteenth century, when Englishmen and other Europeans began roving the steppe in search of exotic adventure. Before the more flamboyant T. E. Lawrence had his Arabian adventure, there was, for example, Charles Doughty, a rather tight-buttoned Englishman—no barracks canings for him—who wandered Western Arabia and left an account, Travels in Arabia Deserta, that makes Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom sound like a rather pedestrian tale.

One place of Bedouin resort for which we have detailed accounts is Ha’il, an oasis in the midst of the North Arabian steppe where the canny shaykhs of the Banu Rashid had discovered, like others before them, that trade and tribute—the Bedouin had a lock on the camel, the chief means of Middle Eastern overland transport and a formidable weapon of rapid deployment—were more profitable than animal husbandry, and in the nineteenth century they were living in some degree of mud-brick splendor, while the occasional European came and went through their low doorways and tent flaps.

That Ha’il is no more, and the Saudis, who succeeded the Rashidis and had both an ideology—they were fundamentalist Wahhabis–and, as it turned out, oil, live in real palaces in Riyadh and Jidda. But vestiges of their style survive. Once, while visiting Dayr al-Zuhr on the Middle Euphrates, I was invited to join a municipal official who had some business to conduct with the local shaykh, “a real Bedouin prince,” I was assured. He was the head of the tribe of the Banu Halima who lived scattered across the steppe along the south bank of the Euphrates.

Dayr al-Zur is not a terribly imposing place to begin with—zur are the brush that grow along the Euphrates—though there’s no reason it should have been; the only really imposing elements in Syria are what the Greeks and Romans built there in antiquity, the Christians in late antiquity and the Muslims in the Middle Ages. Modern times have been pretty much of a washout, imposing wise. The Syrians have electricity and paved roads and indoor toilets; they even fly MIGs. But a glance up at almost any Syrian office building reveals that they have no idea of how Venetian blinds work. My hotel room in Dayr had a flush toilet; the flush chain was not attached to a tank, however, but firmly to the concrete ceiling. Videtur, ergo est.

Anthropologists who use the paper clip scale to divide developed societies into those that have eliminated paperwork entirely (“utopian”), those that keep their paperwork together with staples (“advanced”), with paper clips (“developing”), and with straight pins (“primitive”). Syria is currently somewhere between the new-fangled paper clip and the beloved straight pin, which is tenaciously hanging on in banks, whence the inevitably tattered Syrian currency is dispensed to the public. Happily, none of this depresses the Syrian who was, until recently, a good natured fellow, affable, hospitable and generous in the best Arab fashion; and I suppose, after all, there are more important things in life than leveling the Venetian blinds.

Early Dayr al-Zur was one of those target and/or market villages on the south bank of the Euphrates that the Bedouin simultaneously supported and looted. The modern town is the product of the Ottoman Turks’ nineteenth century attempt to turn Syria into a real country. The Bedouin were advised to stop the raiding and settle down; Dayr was made the capital of a large but sparsely populated prefecture and given the rudiments of a municipal government. Between the wars the French tried to turn Syria into a French-speaking country, but their efforts never quite reached Dayr. It was now an actual town, however, with a straight main street that runs parallel to the river, a few shabby office buildings faced in gray concrete, with off-kilter blinds and an army of pin-pushers within.

My Michelin guide to Syria lieth not about Dayr al-Zur. It is dubious about consuming the local fish. It regretfully confesses that there are no acceptable hotels in town, no grande mosquée, no fortresses, lighthouses or hippodromes; not even a decent set of ruins to entertain and enlighten the traveler. There was, however, a vue, in this case of the Euphrates, which might be had from Dayr’s one and only landmark, an extremely modest suspension footbridge across the Euphrates. But I was not in Dayr for the vue or even out of a more general curiosité, but for more sober business that now included, inshallah, a visit to “a real Bedouin prince” of the Banu Halima.

The shaykh visited the black tents of his people from time to time but his actual residence was a rather grand house standing solitary at the very margin of the steppe about ten miles south of Dayr. It was a two-storey affair and, though there were no neighbors for miles around, was surrounded with a high enclosing wall. Arabs have little care or thought for public space. The French made little squares in the towns and plunked down an elegant clock tower in the midst of it in the vain hope that the Syrians might make note of the time and get on with it; the more practical modern regimes prefer to use these places for monuments to themselves. But even now, public spaces like sidewalks, parks and plazas are somewhat alien notions in an urban Arab society, and the principal monuments of an Arab city are likely either portraits of contemporary rulers or a splendid mosque funded out of private piety in the thirteenth century.

Private space is another matter entirely. A man’s home is his castle resonates nowhere more loudly than in the Arab world. Utter privacy begins at the gate and is guaranteed by a high surrounding wall. And it is more than the ladies of the house that are being shielded; behind the blank face of that wall lies concealed whatever prosperity the owner possesses, protected from the envious gaze of others, the greedy hand of the tax collector and government’s rapacious tendency to confiscate what it cannot collect. Our shaykh may have never paid a tax in his life on the dues he collects from his tribal brethren just over the horizon. Some of that income is doubtless invested in commercial properties in Dayr al-Zur, but a goodly portion rests, in one form or another of splendor, in his mansion sitting unassumingly behind its wall near the Euphrates.

Splendor is a relative thing, and modern Syrian splendor is a far cry from its Damascene counterpart of centuries past with its precious inlays and hammered gold and silver, its imported Persian miniatures, gloriously illuminated manuscripts and glowing Central Asian carpets. The urban bourgeoisie now flutter their wealth before public eyes in the form of American cigarettes, Scotch whiskey and the glint of car keys thrown carelessly on café tables next to the Marlboros and the Dewars.

The shaykh was immune to such conspicuous galanteries. His riches, if not spiritual, were interior. His house was furnished in the finest Italian Overstuffed style, with sparkling near-crystal chandeliers from the ateliers of China, pristine carpets from the mechanical looms of Turkey and a coffee table that would have been comfortably at home in the three bedroom ranch of a contractor in East Meadow, Long Island.

On arrival we had been told that the shaykh was not at home. My companion went off to deal with the shaykh’s bailiff, but, I was informed, the lady of the house would be most honored to receive the distinguished visitor from abroad, which was apparently me. “Lady of the house,” sitt al-bayt, seemed a little grandiose for a badu, but I suppose proximity to the urban sophistication might soften even the toughest old nomad. But the house too did not fit into my idea of how a shaykh might live, so I had no idea what to expect. Some kohl-eyed exotic, veiled to the eyeballs but whose sinuous body somehow managed to signal unspeakable pleasures from beneath her concealing robes?

But whatever the splendors of the house, and even my gaudy imaginings of its mistress, they were quickly eclipsed by the rising of a bright new star in the heavens. Or I should say descent, since this particular luminous presence was even then descending the broad carpeted stairway from the private quarters on the second floor. It was the shaykh’s wife. She came down slowly, step by delicate step, the hem of her gauzy white robe daintily raised to reveal two red velvet slippers. She paused at the bottom, as if to allow me to absorb the tableau.

What stood before me was a doll-like woman of perhaps forty, her lightly powdered face the whitest of whites, lightly kohled hazel eyes, gentle red lipstick, with jet black hair that descended to her shoulders in delicate curls from beneath her gauzy head cloth. A red sash the color of her slippers circled a waist that whispered, ever so quietly, that she had borne the shaykh some children.

Her voice was of her essence. Ahlan wasahlan, “Welcome,” she said in a musical whisper. She extended a tiny hand, as white and delicate as porcelain. I had a sudden urge to seize her hand and graze it with my lips in a gesture that was probably invented on an MGM back lot. But no. Even I realized that would be somewhat less than appropriate, especially since there was standing in the doorway a large male person swathed in a bandolier and with what may or may not have been a ceremonial dagger tucked into his waistband. I merely touched the end of her fingers. It was enough.

Asseyez-vous, je vous prie, ”Please be seated.”

The lady spoke no English, and at that stage my Arabic would not have carried me much beyond asking for a glass of cold water or coolly inquiring “What is the exact extent of the circuit wall of this interesting ancient site?” So we labored along in French. It soon became clear why I was honored with an audience. The lady of the house rattled around in her mansion alone, except for a cook, a chambermaid and a couple of guys in bandoliers. There were no shopping excursions to Aleppo, no taste of the much-vaunted nightlife of Dayr al-Zur. (Ca n’existe pas, I assured her.) So an exotically garbed guest—in the clueless 70s I often took the field in blue trousers with vertical yellow stripes—from abroad was a rare treat indeed. If the shaykh had been at home, she would have witnessed the proceedings from the top of the staircase, but here we were, seated almost knee to knee—actually about eight feet apart—chatting on and on, lubricated with plentiful tea and I at least filled with peanuts and pistachios and stoked with numerous Marlboros offered from the ultimate sign of Syrian gentility, a freshly opened pack.

She, Umm al-Tarifa—“Please, je m’appele Jamila,” she said about twenty minutes in—was a Circassian, a descendant of the North Caucasus people, the fierce warriors whom the Ottoman Turks transplanted into villages around the perimeters of their empire in the nineteenth century. Every Arab with red hair and/or blue eyes, a type that pops up with some regularity in the Middle East, now claims that he is a descendant of the Frankish Crusaders. He is in fact invariably a closet Circassian. But here the lady freely admitted her origins since her husband had paid dearly for them. The white-skinned Circassian was a high priced commodity on the Arab bridal market and, like most trophy wives, more valued for the show than for the performance. No matter. The shaykh had other outlets for his needs. There were three more wives, Bedouin mortar, so to speak, spread with care among the black tents out on the nearby steppe and, it was admiringly whispered in town, a comely concubine in Dayr al-Zuhr.

Jamila was the crown, however, of his taste and opulence, framed in this lavish setting of a house for all to see and admire when the shaykh held his levées there and the sitt al-bayt glided silently and gracefully from upstage left to upstage right, untouchable but highly visible. No veils for Umm al-Tarifa. Veils were for townspeople; the Bedouin disdained such. Besides, if you own a Bentley, you don’t want to hide it in the garage.

The shaykh’s tribe, what was left of it, did not wander far from the Euphrates these days. It was now semi-nomadic at best. They shifted their encampments from time to time, now no longer to follow the great herds across the steppe in search of pasturage but simply to remove themselves from their own garbage. Their “herds” were now in fact a dispirited passel of goats who, themselves in the grip of modernity, would much rather munch than trek in any event. The entire enterprise floated on a government subsidy, issued to and distributed by the shaykh. He was indeed a river to his people, but the water came from farther upstream. The old Bedouin ways were maintained, but they were now on life support, a shadow hybrid somewhere between Colonial Williamsburg and the real thing.

I never did get to see the shaykh, but my visit was anything but a disappointment. Already on the trip back to Dayr al-Zur I realized that my unexpected peek into his “harem”—it is difficult to imagine anything more remote from a “harem” than that lonely lady in that house—was likely to have been a far more rewarding experience than an hour of peanuts and patter with her husband.
My actual encounter with the elusive badu occurred, like much else in the Syrian Arab Republic, by the sheerest chance. A friend and colleague at the Syrian Department of Antiquities was commissioned to inspect the site called Nemara, a small collection of tombs famous as the locus of the earliest example of written Arabic. It occurred on a funerary inscription memorializing an Arab shaykh named Imr al-Qays and, happily, dating itself to 328 A.D. The inscription itself, carved on the lintel of a tomb, had long since been removed to the Louvre by the acquisitive French archeologists who discovered it, and so this was simply a routine site inspection, to check up on the condition of the place.

There are two ways of getting to Nemara, 60 miles southeast from Damascus or 30-odd miles due east of Suwayda on the Jebel Druze, both of them bad. French ordinance maps of Syria are crisscrossed with thin broken threads described as mauvais pistes, “nasty tracks.” But, as it turns out, there is mauvais and mauvais, and some of the nastiest of all lie in southeastern Syria, the lava lands where volcanic eruptions have covered the landscape with their by-products, from the rich red soil of the Hawran to the boulder-strewn impassable triangle called the Leja, the “Rough Place” (Trachonitis) of the ancients, that has harbored ruffians of all types. I have enjoyed the fruits of the first—the Hawran is the breadbasket of Syria—and, like everyone else, avoided the second. This trek was, however, to be my introduction to the unpleasant middle ground, the harra, the steppe blanketed with black basalt rocks ranging in size from golf balls to basketballs.

We set out from Damascus in the inevitable Toyota pickup truck, a driver, my friend Kassem in the middle, and I at the window. A little tight perhaps on the spring-sprung bench, but we were among friends, were we not, and it was only sixty miles. We began with the falsest of false starts, a concrete paved highway leading south from Damascus. Then we turn east onto a nice asphalted road. Easy going. Windows open, billows of Marlboro smoke spewing over the countryside. Then onto a dirt road. No big deal in Syria where the surfaces are hard and generally clean. Some dust now, so the windows go up.

Part of the nastiness of the piste is that it creeps up on you and doesn’t show itself until after you’ve gone too far to think of turning back. How much farther can it be, you think in your folly. Might as well keep going. At first there are some basalt grapes on the road; ping-ping, you can hear the crunching down below. Now walnuts—pong-pong—then handballs, tennis balls, baseballs, softballs-bing, bang, boom. Full stop.

We are twenty miles short of Nemara, twenty miles of undulating, sun bleached harra, all glaring yellow above, all menacing black underfoot. The driver pretends insouciance, an affect well beyond the range of any Syrian, living or dead. He shifts into a low gear unmentioned in the manual and which I imagine as “LL/Barely Moving.” The speedometer does not feel it worthwhile to record our forward progress. I do the math in my head: twenty miles at .01 mph: we should reach Nemara in the middle of next week. We creep on, literally feeling our way, man and Toyota.

It was late afternoon when we stumbled upon a solitary black tent pitched in a wadi, one of the dry arroyos that snaked across this blasted black landscape. We stopped. If we were surprised, the inhabitants of this homestead, a man, a woman, two small children, a goat and what appeared to be a pack of wild dogs, were dumbfounded. Well, the dogs were not exactly dumbfounded: they rushed out and surrounded the truck, barking and baring their yellow teeth until the woman drove them off with a hail of stones and curses.

It was decided that crawling over basalt beach balls in the dark was even worse than doing it at high noon: we would spend the night with the badu. The decision seemed not in the least to discomfort out putative host, or rather our hostess, since the man of the tent stood rooted and slack-jawed while his wife welcomed us with a thousand welcomes. And of course we would stay with them a week, or perhaps a month, this all the while with one slack eye upon the ajami, the foreigner in the chinos and the polo shirt. Shu hadha? I could almost read her mind: What’s up with this one? The meditation was brief. She fell to lighting a fire, grinding the coffee, rinsing out some cups in some liquid I could only hope was water; Mr. Badu dithered about with the goat, apparently still collecting his very random thoughts.

We had our coffee, very black and very bitter—no sugar in this household—seated on carpets in the tent. Kassem spun out some unlikely tale of why we were there—Why would anyone want to visit rock ruins?—and the lady listened intently, still doing her own mental calculus about the three precipitous hombes who sat before her. Her husband sat silently beside her and the children just stared, already thinking that when they grew up they too would have a lavender Lacoste polo shirt.

Their own sad tale unfolded over coffee and cigarettes—the lady smoked, greedily. This couple had once been part of a “tribe,” in reality a group of five related families. They shared a herd, of goats, to be sure; a herd of camels had not been seen in these parts for a very long time. One by one the other families drifted off, inevitably into some town, where the men found menial but salaried jobs, but the children went to school and, it was thought, eventually to something better than their late life. Abu and Umm Rashad never had the courage, however, or perhaps the wit, to pack up the tent and the tin pots and move to Shobha or Salkhad.

The wind shifted slightly and the tent pole creaked. Even I, whose cache of lore derived in its entirety from the Bronx, heard it and looked up. We sat and smoked in silence. Suddenly Umm Rashad stood up and bolted out of the tent. “Yalla! Yalla!,” she shouted, not to her husband but to her children. “Let’s go!” The tent was now shaking from top to bottom, not merely because the wind was rising but also because the lady was dismantling her house. We were on our feet, snatching up whatever lay about us, pots, pans, bedrolls, carpets. The children were chasing the goat, the dogs were now barking, now whining with fear, and Abu Rashad stood rooted, caught somewhere between panic and paralysis. “Yalla!” once again as the tent came down with a thud behind us as we barely scrambled out. The wind was howling now and the rain had begun.

I was city born and bred and, with any luck, I’ll get to stay there. But even I knew that you don’t pitch your tent at the bottom of a wadi, which is, if you’re paying attention, a watercourse! Water put it there and water was now beginning to fill it up. It doesn’t rain often out on the steppe, but when it does, it is quick and it is fierce. And since there is little topsoil to absorb it and even less vegetation to impede it, the water runs off and into and down its natural channels with great speed and incredible power.

By the time we were all in the truck, host and hostess, children, goat and all, the water of the flash flood was beginning to lap at our tires. Allah, invoked many times and in many registers, caused the engine to turn over—Ya latif! O Gracious One!—and we slowly edged down the wadi, then turned ever so gently right and began to edge up out of the water onto higher ground. The dogs, with more sense and better traction, were there ahead of us, marking the new campsite with growls and urine.

Since there were no options whatsoever, we decided that we would spend the night “chez les badu,” as Kassem put it or, more realistically, the last struggling descendants of a once noble tradition. Umm Rashad put up the tent with some fumbling help from her guests; the children—young Rashad seems to have picked up some remarkable swear words from his mother in the course of the evening—unrolled the carpets and the bedding; Abu Rashad was apparently comforting the goat, who in fact took the whole thing with remarkable equanimity.

We sat down in our new home and returned to the familiar rituals: tea, stale bread, a bit of cheese, and a special treat from our own larder, jam and canned corn beef, the field traveler’s staff of life. Clothes maketh the man perhaps, but settings maketh the food: it was as delicious a meal as I’ve hand in my life. And so, exhausted, to bed, whatever was the hour. Bed was a carpet laid down on the hard earth, where we three guests reclined, stiffly supine, like sardines in a can, while another carpet was dragged over us. The children were plumped into bedrolls, Umm and Abu Rashad repaired to the tappeto matrimoniale—Nothing going on there, I thought—and the Coleman lamp was extinguished.

I lay there rigid—I had little experience of sharing a bed, or a carpet, with two other men, even fully clothed—while I considered the possibilities. Never mind fire or snakes or the traditional scorpion in the shoe. My mind fastened on a far more likely event: after all that coffee and tea I would almost certainly have to urinate sometime during the night. How would I ever extricate myself, the middle kipper in that sardine sandwich, from the leaden carpet atop me and from the two gentlemen already snoring peacefully on each side of me? And that accomplished, how in that darkness should I ever find my way across the connubial pair and out the tent flap. In an instant my sweaty anxiety turned to ice. The dogs! How would I ever deal with those semi-feral beasts who even then I could hear prowling outside, excited no doubt by the smell of—Sacre chien! Is that corned beef?—the remains of our supper? Was I really going out there amidst those yellow-toothed killers and mark out a little territory of my own?

Allah must have validated my altar boy credits because the next thing I remember was waking up in a gray dawn, possibly by the clatter of Umm Rashad at the coffee grinder but more likely by the throbbing of my very full bladder. Slowly I slid up and out from between my still sleeping bedmates, pretended to stretch so that the lady would know that I meant her no harm, stepped over Abu Rashad and headed leisurely toward the tent flap as if I had no other intent than a morning stroll over the basalt. Outside the dogs lay crouched in a semi-circle around the tent opening. Marhaba, “Hi,” I said to them and then, as the dogs watched motionless, I delivered myself of the longest, most diffuse and quietist pee of my entire life. Marratayn inshallah, I bade my canine friends, “Another time perhaps,” and went inside and had breakfast.

The problem may be primordial. Unless there’s skiing involved, and real skiing, downhill, not trudging cross-country over the tundra, no one much likes cold weather. AC, yes; cold weather, no. Maybe the occasional frozen margarita; never frozen toes. So nobody but the really foolhardy wants to go near an iceberg or live on sardine sandwiches. Explorers go north to die on the ice, but the wise and well-heeled glide southward, wo die Zitronen blühn.

There is, to be sure, the occasional romantic who heads in the other direction, but they are not made of stern stuff, and the fainthearted among them, like Boswell and Johnson (likely up to no good) or Mendelssohn (and who would trust him after what he did!), rarely get past the Hebrides. The Vikings, as bold as they were brutish, did push on into the islands of the North Atlantic, but they really didn’t want to talk about it afterwards for reasons that will unfold in due course. And so places like the Faroes, and even Iceland and Greenland, rarely get their due. But they are all rich in tradition, if not in weather or wit, and so I thought it might be a good idea to go and take a look-see.

The Faroes

We are docked in Slipshod, capital of the Faroes, summer population 15,000, winter pop. 15. A ten minute drive takes the adventurer to the other side of the island and the “Old Capital” of Gottforsaekken, which was destroyed in 935 not by the Vikings but by an infestation of herring. It was rebuilt in 1982 as an exact replica of Pearl Harbor for a Japanese remake of “Mrs. Miniver” in which Mrs. Miniver, played by Bethanny Fraenkel, is raped and murdered by the Japanese pilot who lands in her garden. The screen rights didn’t clear and so the project was abandoned, but Japanese visitors are still invited to be burned alive in the Faroes’ only full-scale replica of the U.S. Arizona. The site is today mostly used for women’s softball and pick-up jai-alai contests.

But enough of the hearsay. In this land of legends there are some hard facts. Unlike the other islands of the northern latitudes which claim fishing or herding as their principal source of income– It is in fact enormous subsidies from their unfortunate European patrons (see under “Greenland”)–the Faroes subsist on agriculture, they say, though they too survive by subsidy. This latter is paid by a European state that wishes to remain anonymous–it’s France—because it is too embarrassed to acknowledge that it is saddled with the Faroes as a colonie (“Departėment des Faroës. Capitale: Glace d’Or; Pop. 7” There is of course no “Glace d’Or; it’s an ill-tempered reference to the Foroese custom of peeing out their windows in winter). The annexation, if that is the word, came about because a drunken Viking chieftain, Normandy branch, had thrown his navigator overboard after losing at bones, later called craps, and attempted to steer his longboat himself. Which he did, right into the Faroes, and the rest is, as their patrons like to say, la grande méchanceté.

The agriculture, it turns out, is mostly the thatch that the Faroese grow on their roofs–nothing grows under their windows, naturally–which, to be kept green for the tourists, must be watered constantly. The watering, which is good for the thatch, is very bad for the roofs of the Faroes which collapse after about three years of normal sheltering, and that explains why the backbone of the “black” economy of the Faroes is roof repair. It is, however conducted in barter, two wagonloads of live thatch for a week of craftsman-level work “upstairs,” as the Faroese call their roofs.

To be fair, there is some agriculture on the Faroes besides thatch husbandry. Large parts of the population that are not engaged in roof repair are bracken and gorse farmers. One or the other–botanists continue to argue whether one is in fact the other–grows all over the island. The crop is harvested and the premium growths–the Faroese eat the rest–are packed and exported worldwide in the familiar yellow Faroese packaging. But economists are doubtful about the effect on the GNP since the plants are now selling at ha’penny a tonne on the International Bracken and Gorse Exchange at Dumfuckin, Scotland.

A few brief language notes: The Faroese try, naturally enough, to speak Faroese, an unintellible form of Cornish, itself near its expiration date. It is not a rich tongue. The Faroese word for “winter” is “sommer,” probably because of the bitterly cold summers. They had no word for summer itself because it pretty much didn’t exist, but in 1985 a public relations firm they hired–it was only later that it was explained to Terce and Crood of Aberdeen, Ltd. that payment would be in gorse and bracken–suggested that they call it either La Saison en Enfer, with a sly wink at the–shhhh–mother country—or, more soberly, the Tourist Season.

The Faroese had no idea what a tourist was but they did know which side of the sardine sandwich their subsidy was buttered on, and so they wisely chose “Tourist Season. Terce and Crood are still trying to collect their gorse but the Faroese seem quite happy with their new “Tourist Season.” To make it more inviting, they invented a folk festival, “Faroes Fantasy,” boldly stolen from the spelunking festival, “Fingal’s Cave-In,” that the Hebridese folk had made up in 1978. The Faroese sent out invitations to all their good neighbors in the northern isles from Skye to Greenland. The Hebrideans snidely responded–they too had hired Terce and Crood–”Been There. Done That.” The rest simply thought they had their own winter misery and threw away the very elegant bracket-woven invitations after discovering the value of the weed on the exchange at Dumfuckin.

The last actual tourist to arrive in the Faroes was a not terribly bright surfer named Spinelli who showed up there in the endless summer of ’68 in search of the ultimate wave. After only three hours on the island he had to be medevac’d off for treatment of a gunshot wound he had received, he said, in a hunting accident [NB: The only wild life on the Faroes is the gorse weevil.]. Later, when it was discovered that the gunshot wound was self-inflicted–”I hadda get outta there, dude. You can’t ‘board on ice (little did he know!), and besides, they don’t deliver pizza.”–the Gunshot Trauma Unit in Oslo, known throughout Scandinavia for its severe triage policy, treated him for frostbite and discharged him to recover from the gun wound on his own. And they billed him for costs plus VAT, $650,000.

Despite calling themselves the Faroes, only one Faroe has so far been discovered. The grandiose plural is a shallow trick, borrowed like much else on the Faroe [sic!], from someone or somewhere else, in this instance from Trinidad and Tobago (has anyone ever visited Tobago?) which gets a UN subvention for two out of the transparent misrepresentation.

The Faroes claim that “euro” is derived from “Faroe,” citing the principle of “the Old Norse Disappearing F,” still visible in “Oslo” which appears in one extremely deteriorated Icelandic inscription as “Foslo,” and even more obviously in the universal expression “Yuck, that tastes bad,” where the “y” phoneme is a later mischievous intrusion from the Finnish. I leave it to the reader to judge.

Iceland

By the time we enter Icelandic waters, which the Icelanders claim extend, along with their fishing rights, from three miles off Cape Hatteras to halfway into downtown Belfast, we are all up to speed on the colorful, if mostly invented, past of this fraught island. All aboard were treated to a lengthy shipboard lecture that featured not only a lot of magma talk, which is to be expected, but an impenetrably close reading of the Icelandic saga, the Eddas. Ed, it turns out, was once chief god of East Prussia, but then was reassigned to Iceland, a slight he never quite got over, and the Eddas (pronounced “Edds”) were his embittered reminiscences. Ed had gotten his East Prussian plum because he had invented the Norse gods’ favorite game, Cannery, in which the deities worked out their coarse sexual frustrations–Hey, no judgments! It’s cold up there!– in a quite remarkable fashion.

One who refused to drop her squirrel fur jeans–the goddesses wore no underwear, which is why they were regarded as divine–and play Cannery was Frigga (pronounced “Frigger”), the goddess of First Dates, even after Ed declared Cannery the National Patriotic Pastime. As a result she was smirkingly referred to by the male gods as the “Ice Queen” (pronounced, according to the usual Consonantal Drift, as “Ice Cream”). The saga comes to its traditional (short form) ending after 6,000 stanzas with the death of Ed in the Great War with Wotan (pronounced “Woody”) and the echt Germanic gods. The foul blow that laid Ed low was delivered by Thug, an NBA god (pronounced “guard”) drafted by Germany. Sorry. Bad joke. Thug was actually the Athletic Director at Ohio State where he had trained under Woody Hayes and was on loan to the Germans when he sent Ed to his geothermally heated grave.

The Vikings, who were responsible for most of the nastiness in Europe before the invention of Scholasticism and marmite, didn’t discover Iceland, but once there, they gave it a sound pillaging nonetheless. Iceland doesn’t rank very high in Viking lore, however; it stands well below Ireland, where the Vikings shagged a couple of hundred Irish nuns, and the good sisters, to show their gratitude, taught their crude visitors how to go to confession and diagram sentences in Old Norse. And their Iceland venture could never be compared with the Vikings’ falling upon Sicily, which the Italians had already discovered and hurriedly left–the Pope later made them go back, but they’re still itching to clear out once and for all. The Norsemen have very fond memories of Sicily, however, since it was there that the Viking men became much smitten with the Sicilian women who taught them how to grow a really bushy mustache and that there was really no need to go to confession..

So low was the Icelandic landfall in Viking regard that they celebrated it annually by putting their chief navigator in a kayak with three years supplies and pushing it out into Bergen bay. The overloaded kayak inevitably sank about 40 yards from shore, with it the navigator shouting nasty things in Old Norse. The always parsimonious Vikings usually managed to retrieve some of the supplies, which weren’t real in any event, for reuse in the next year’s Sinking, as it was called.

The Icelanders are far more savvy regarding visitors than the Faroe naifs. We were met on the dock by a band of the traditional kilted mortgage jugglers and no less than the mayor of Reykjavik, the Hon. Lars Bankrooptson. He said not to miss the Viking sites at Plunderqvik and Rapinesgood and, oh yeah, a little crestfallen, not to eat the local food since it was still mostly covered with ash. Then, brightening a bit, he remarked that the ash was digestible but that for many folks, gray was an acquired taste.

There was also an amusing little bit when Lars–he insisted on first names: “We Icelanders don’t stand on ceremony, or anything”–tried to teach us some Icelandic. “Hello” is “U fisk?” to which the reply (colloquial) is “Ja, ik fiskalot” or, on more formal occasions, “Ja, ik fiskanawfulot.” What a difficult language! It puts Hungarian in the shade.

There wasn’t much to see at Plunderqvik which was in any event wrapped in impenetrable fog, like every other place we visited. But Rapinesgood is where some of the exteriors of “The Vikings” were shot and there has sprung up among the locals a kind of cargo-cult of Ernie Borgnine. We missed the midsummer festival of Frigginkold when, fog permitting, they put an annually selected “Ernie”–usually a tourist, preferably a Belgian–in a dingy and attempt to ignite him with flaming arrows from the shore. There are also tidy little peat huts where sort of meat-stuffed calzone called “Saxon Bits” are sold. It’s on my calendar for next year, weather permitting.

Greenland

Just to give you an idea of the size of this useless piece of real estate, Greenland, which the locals pronounce Groinland, is exactly the size of 16 Moldavias arranged in a hexagonal pattern or seven New Jerseys laid side by side, only nicer. Its average temperature is unknown. “All our thermometers are rectal,” the locals chuckle with typical Greenland humor. The place chiefly survives on its import trade, which consists chiefly in an enormous subsidy from Denmark, which hates the place. The last Dane to actually visit Greenland landed there in 1795, and it was he who memorably said, “This hellhole is the groin of the universe,” and, well, there you are.

The Danish parliament opens every day at noon with a prayer that the Canadians be seized by an epic misprision–the Danes have been spreading rumors for years that there is oil under that ice–and invade and occupy Greenland. The Danes would express outrage, a curse or two perhaps at the UN, but nothing to scare the fragile Canadians off their new territory. The annual ritual cursing of Greenland in the Danish parliament is also worth witnessing.

In addition to their quick wit, the Greenlanders are both canny and industrious. Fully aware of global warming, they are busily engaged in hand-chipping the principal glaciers into ice-cubes for the tourist trade. They are practically giving away iced-tea at the docks. They also have some marvelous sawdust recipes, even though there is no wood on the island. The chief tourist attractions, apart from the dirt cheap iced tea, are the many Viking stone huts, most built in the Late Viking Style, the kind that collapses in the wind. Unfortunately many of the best sites are now closed to tourists because of the flying rocks in what they call the Helluva Wind that blows from January to November.

The capital, Nothappening, since it was built on the moving edge of an active glacier–those crazy Greenlanders!–has no fixed population. The aborigines of Greenland, known as the Hellisch People, have completely disappeared, eaten, it is thought, by the Vikings, who in their usual sour fashion called the place Wrongturn. And, once fed, the Vikings quickly cleared out and settled in Normandy. Nothing happened subsequently until the first Dane arrived in 1790 and–Curse the day!–mistakenly planted the Danish flag.

Though nominally Danish, Greenland today is giddily autonomous, though the United Nations denied it membership in 1949, after a member of the Security Council happened to visit there. The country is run by a bicameral parliament, The Thing, composed of an upper house, The Big Thing, and a lower house, The Weird, which the locals call The Totally Useless Thing. It is the oldest parliament in the world where fish are represented (though without voting rights, a source of some contention), and it is housed in a large but cozy ice sculpture affectionately called The Halibut. The president, who lives just outside Ravenna, Italy, can literally dissolve parliament simply by turning on the heat in the Halibut. He then announces an election date for The Next Big Thing.

Greenland’s single paved road is located 15 miles west of Nothappening. It is an attractive gorse-lined single-lane boulevard, a concrete circle 8 miles in diameter. Cars are towed there on sleds by sturdy Greenland terriers (which are also eaten, preferably stewed with seaweed, the runts of the sardine catch and a sprig of rosemary) for the annual Summer Drive Around (Sommerlicken Goot Rundfahrt) which takes place, weather permitting, each June 23rd.Three Icelandic tourists attended last year and one Faroese who thought he had landed in Newfoundland. “You wish,” the Greenland immigration officer (and mayor of Nothappening), said to the new arrival.

The Greenland issue, or “that frozen pile of whale excrement,” as the Danes call it, may soon disappear, however. A large chunk of the place recently fell into the ocean, neither the first nor the last to do so. Some say it was out of despair, a kind of geological suicide; some say it’s because the Danes are secretly heating the ocean around Greenland; others again maintain that the locals who lived on that chunk of ice, a people known as the Nouits, thought the Gulf Stream might carry them to the Caribbean. When last sighted they were headed toward Murmansk, where a severe thrashing is being prepared for them.

Iceland Again

We were returning to Iceland. The captain of our ship, a fastidious man, has to use the bathroom and he prefers the Iceland toilets, which were geothermally heated, to the ones aboard ship which take only liquids and make a loud and provocative sucking sound when flushed. Underground hot water abounds in Iceland and is used to heat everyone and everything from cold shoulders to steamy sex. The mythically inclined, which is just about everyone on the Island, say that it’s a gift of Lupe, the goddess of fire and pole dancing, but the fact of the matter is it’s because Iceland–and the Icelanders prefer to look away from this and bury their heads in Lupe’s hot lap–sits right atop the dividing line between two massive tectonic plates whence escape the really dangerous crap beneath, molten lava, large boulders, tons of ash and, yes, hot water. The Norwegians aren’t buying either explanation, the mythical or the geological: they think the Icelanders are somehow stealing their oil.

The current Icelanders are a rather somber lot, as indeed we might all be, buried under eight feet of volcanic ash and a ton and a half of defaulted loans. All the bright guys in Europe thought that they could launder their dirty cash there, failing to take into account that the Icelanders hadn’t washed anything in centuries. No great harm done. The Icelanders never had much of a head for money to begin with; they rarely used it until 2008 when the Brits began dumping it on their shores at night. They much preferred barter: Per Halversonsdotter’s daughter to Lief Halversonsdotter’s son for a pound of premium elk horn, the kind with the elk still attached, and a left snowshoe. Iceland has, by the way, the tiniest genetic pool on the entire planet, and grandmother-son marriages, unwitting of course, like everything else on the island, are not uncommon, nor entirely unhappy.

So the Rotten Sardines, the name of a local punk rock band now fondly applied to all Icelanders, soldier on, killing seals and whales as skillfully as their ancestors and selling them to the Japanese, though the more thoughtful among them, the Ditka Halversonsdotter family, to be precise, are occasionally given to wondering why the Norwegians got all the good oil and they were left with the cod liver variety. Early on they tried to light this latter, which produced neither heat nor light but a God awful stink that can still be detected all over the island when the wind calms, as it did for three hours in 1995.

Reykjavik is not an unattractive town. It has a number of interesting sights for the visitor, particularly the large ice sculpture of Jan Sibelius, whom the natives like to pretend was Icelandic: “Yah, the Siberliussonsanddotter family used to run the sweets shop up country till they got entirely married into one of the Halversonsdotter families.” The Finns protested this transparently false claim and withdrew their consul from Akureyri. The Icelanders ignored it. “Who gives a fikk [the family connection between Old Norse and Low German is particularly obvious here] about the Finns!” Another place of interest is the Bait and Tackle Museum, with its curious specimens of semi-frozen chum and its unrivaled collection of fish hooks, many of them still embedded in body parts. Downtown has many unfinished office buildings with a very modern if melancholy air. They are a legacy of the 2010 Frikkenekobust, as it is called here in private, though in public the empty buildings are always referred to as “our treasured architectural monuments.”

The more adventurous visitor may wish to take an exciting swim in the Fisktank, a large geothermally heated pool featuring thirteen varieties of local fish, from the tiny leech-guppy to the really intimidating Giant Arctic Sting Ray. A placard at the tank assures the bathers, in Icelandic and Finnish (the latter, with its many misspellings, a sly jab at that troublesome folk!), that the Giant Arctic is relatively harmless, but I’d still want to stay well clear of its harpoon-like tail. After all. the blood in the tank–it is cleaned once a month and the dead fish (boiled to death) and dead bathers (cause of death unknown) are removed–has to have come from somewhere.
“Maybe it ain’t Fiji,” the Icelanders like to say of their island. “But it sure as hell ain’t Greenland.”

The Isle of Skye

As everyone knows, the Vikings originated on the fjord-ridden coast of the land they called Ourway, variously identified as Norway, the Azores or the former Straits Settlement. Sometime about 800 AD, a community of gay Vikings, who preferred bright colored dresses to the traditional bloodstained fur knickers, was banished to the south. “We stay Ourway, you go Yourway,” the straight Vikings chanted as they drove their mini-skirted brethren out of the fjords into the open sea. The exiles made their first landfall fifteen years later on an island they later called Skye. That was after they adopted the language of the aboriginal people, the Gibbers, called, not entirely surprisingly, Gibberish. In that exotic tongue the word for “land” was “skye” and that for “gay Vikings” was “Sods” (pronounced “Scots”; linguists will recognize the Intervocalic C or “C otiosa”).

Skye is now an attractive but thinly populated island entirely covered with rain. The Scots (still pronounced “Sods” by the traditionalists) have carefully deforested the entire island to make more space for clan wars and windswept moors. The national flower–what were the options? It is the only flora on the island–which the Scots call the thistle but which is in fact the stinging nettle, grows everywhere in rich, if painful, profusion.

The first of the clan wars was fought shortly after the arrival of the original gay Vikings at what they had imagined as Yourway. The casus belli, which arose in the longboats as they approached the shore, was the color of the dresses the newcomers should wear at the formal Landing: green, red, yellow or blue. The Gibbers, who were drawn to the shore by the gaily decorated boats but had no idea how to dress, awaited them naked by the sea’s edge. After extended and bloody fighting on the beach and inland–the Gibbers took off for the hills–a Viking clansman named Teddy Tartan cried out, “This is just total madness, laddies (pronounced “ladies”). Why don’t we just combine them into an attractive mélange and stop this horrible carnage?”

So it came about. The newcomers stopped fighting and started sewing–one understands perhaps a little better why they were chased out of Ourway–and the curiously unattractive result was called–you guessed it–”tartan”. But the serenity was soon shattered by the first Scots execution, when Bruno McRavish was submerged in a vat of haggis. Bruno’s offense was saying, just loud enough to be overheard, “Those colors clash, Teddy.”

The violence of Skye has not abated, and visitors are instructed to be careful of the always slippery ground underfoot and the possibility of being struck from behind with a battle-ax should they be wearing the wrong color combination. Plus ça change, as Heraclitus said. Dress has changed, however. The original Viking minis, which barely covered the male privates (which the Scots now refer to as their “English”), now descend to near the knee. The cause was not modesty–there are no Gibberish words for modesty or its synonyms, nor even for clothing) but rather the painful chaffing brought on by exposed thighs and the constant rain.

The newcomers, who, with the flight of the Gibbers, had the island pretty much to themselves, soon sorted themselves out over their new possession. The rich Sods settled around the port where they were engaged in the knitting industry (see below) and became proficient in figure skating and platform diving. The poor Sods were driven into the hills where they raised sheep as companion animals.

The harbor of Loch Dunvegan, the chief port of Skye, which has the world’s largest seaweed outlet store, is snug and rock-filled, these latter the remains of an ill-considered attempt to construct a breakwater from large boulders carried to sea in kayaks. The visitors, who must be rowed into port one by one, are greeted by a large dockside billboard emblazoned, In Gibberish and English, with “Skye’s The Limit (Get It?),” a sly reference to the constant rainfall, the highest suicide rate in Europe after Sweden and the fact that Skye is 300 miles from Gottforsaekken, 450 from Slipshod and 890 from the nearest functioning toilet. “Och, that’s why we’re wearing dresses, lassie,” the locals whisper with typical Sodding humor, if not with complete accuracy.

The local industries are the knitting of kilts [NB. Visitors should insist on lined kilts. Loosely knitted kilts have been the source of much mischief, from "sodding" (attempting to unravel the kilt of another) to pneumonia], the dry cleaning of sporrans (Bruce Martin, the inventor of “Martinizing” was a native of Skye) which become fouled with all sorts of unpleasant substances, and the manufacture of bagpipe mutes which are made locally in great quantities and exported directly to all parts of the UK. Which also explains why the Skye national anthem, “We Did It Yourway,” is always hummed and never played.

The local tourist sites are few but exciting. They are “The Cauldrons,” enormous craters where deep pools of haggis, the national dish, though it is never consumed and which is amusingly referred to by the locals as “Bruno sweetbreads,” is kept at a constant boil by underground thermal springs. The Scots claim the Gibbers invented haggis; the Gibbers vehemently deny it: “You think we’d have anything to do with that miserable pigshit. It has ‘Viking’ written all over it!.” Another site that will interest some is the facility that produces the Sodding or Scots terrier by cutting off the legs of black Schnauzers. The procedure, though somewhat radical, achieves the desired size and the characteristic dour look of the Scotty. The severed legs go, of course, into the haggis. “A wee bit of garnish, lassie. Tasty in the bargain. Bobby Burns, that twee man, used to toss away the haggis and just eat the dogslegs.”

There is one special treat for the visitor if the timing is right. Mid-winter, when the rain turns to sleet and the fog freezes over, is the time of the annual Penny Pinching Contest, a very old gay Viking tradition which, as they say, “We did it on Ourway.” A Sodding penny, the national coin and the only currency in use or accepted on this frugal isle, is embedded in the sporran of some poor Sod chosen by lot, and the contestants, all blindfolded, attempt to find it by touch alone. There is much good-natured groping, much Sodding ribaldry. And the local saying, much reproduced on postcards, “You can chase the Viking out of Ourway, but you can’t chase the gay out of Viking,” is on everyone’s lips. Again, visitors are advised to exercise caution.

Between the Vikings’ mistaking Greenland for Martha’s Vineyard and Mendelssohn’s setting the Hebrides to music, a lot of very cold water has passed under the Arctic Circle. The history of the northern isles is a cautionary one, with a moral: yes, wear warm clothing, but, more importantly, colonize carefully, particularly when it comes to islands. The British, in their hunger to rule everything that moves, made some very bad decisions in that regard. They stumbled upon the Falklands in the South Atlantic, and instead of off-loading trash and taking on water, they annexed the damn place. But then again, they snatched up the Bahamas which 1) is a very lovely place and 2) gave them a spot to park the Windsors during WWII. Ditto the French. St. Pierre and Michelon, despite their vaguely tropic sound, are broken off crumbs of Newfoundland, itself no picnic, while St. Bart’s, on the other hand—warm weather again!–has turned out to be the Hamptons of the Caribbean, only easier to get to.

It was the Scandinavians, however, who had no experience of warm weather, who jumped into the North Atlantic with both feet, and particularly the Danes and the Norwegians. The results of their careless colonization are drifting in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, somewhere between the coast of Unenviable and that of Unviable: cold, windswept, ice-encumbered chunks of real estate whose art is in ruins and whose history is in runes: the Islands That Nobody Wants.