The Songlines

  After Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 1, iv

  Without Compulsion no settlement could be founded. The workers would have no supervisor. The rivers would not bring the overflow.

  Sumerian text

  To the Babylonian ‘bab-il’ meant ‘Gate of God’. To the Hebrews the same word meant ‘confusion’, perhaps ‘cacophonous confusion’. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia were ‘Gates of God’, painted the seven colours of the rainbow and dedicated to Anu and Enlil, divinities representing Order and Compulsion.

  It was surely a marvellous intuition on the part of the ancient Jews – sandwiched as they were between bullying empires – to have conceived the State as Behemoth or Leviathan, as a monster which threatened human life. They were, perhaps, the first people to understand that the Tower was chaos, that order was chaos, and that language – the gift of tongues which Jahweh breathed into the mouth of Adam – has a rebellious and wayward vitality compared to which the foundations of the Pyramid are as dust.

  On the train, Frankfurt–Vienna

  He was on his way to see his old father, who was a rabbi in Vienna. He was short and fat. He had pallid white skin and ginger ringlets, and wore a long serge greatcoat and beaver hat. He was very shy. He was so shy he found it impossible to undress with anyone else in the compartment. The sleeping-car attendant had assured him he would be alone.

  I offered to go into the corridor. The train was passing through a forest. I opened the window and breathed in the smell of pines. When I came back, ten minutes later, he was lying on the upper bunk, relaxed and eager to talk.

  For sixteen years he had been studying at a Talmudic Academy in Brooklyn: he had not seen his father since. The morning would reunite them.

  Before the war his family had lived at Sibiu in Romania and, when the war came, they hoped they were safe. Then, in 1942, Nazis painted a star on their house.

  The rabbi shaved his beard and cut his ringlets. His Gentile servant fetched him a peasant costume: a felt hat, a belted tunic, a sheepskin jacket and boots. He embraced his wife, his two daughters and the baby boy: all four of them would die in Birkenau. He took his first-born son in his arms, and dashed for the woods.

  The rabbi walked through the Carpathian beech forests with his son. Shepherds sheltered them and gave them meat: the way the shepherds slaughtered sheep did not offend his principles. Eventually, they crossed the Turkish frontier and made their way to America.

  The rabbi never felt at ease in America. He could sympathise with Zionism, but never bring himself to join. Israel was an idea, not a country. Wherever was the Torah, there was the Kingdom also. He had left, in despair, for Europe.

  Now father and son were returning to Romania, since, only a few weeks earlier, the rabbi had received a sign. Late one night, in his apartment in Vienna, he reluctantly answered the doorbell. On the landing stood an old woman with a shopping basket. She had bluish lips and wispy white hair. Dimly, he recognised his Gentile servant.

  ‘I have found you,’ she said. ‘Your house is safe. Your books are safe, your clothes even. For years I pretended it was now a Gentile house. I am dying. Here is the key.’

  Shahrak, Afghanistan

  The Tajiks say they are the oldest people in the land. They plant wheat, flax and melons. They have long, resigned faces, and exhaust themselves in tending irrigation ditches. They keep fighting partridges, and do not know how to look after horses.

  In the valley above the Tajik village, we came to a camp of Firuzkuhi Aimaqs. Their yurts had domed white roofs, and the sides were painted with lozenges, scrolls and chequers in every conceivable colour, like a field of chivalry. Horses were grazing in a meadow of cornflowers, and there were white-leaved willows along the stream. We saw a fat-tailed sheep with a tail so big it had to be strapped to a cart. Outside the yurts, some women in purple were carding wool.

  This is the time of year when the farmers and nomads, after a season of acrimony, are suddenly the best of friends. The harvest is in. The nomads buy grain for the winter. The villagers buy cheese and hides and meat. They welcome the sheep on to their fields: to break up the stubble and manure it for autumn planting.

  Nomad and planter are the twin arms of the so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution,’ which, in its classic form, took place around 8,500 BC on the slopes of the Fertile Crescent, the well-watered ‘land of hills and valleys’ that stretches in an arc from Palestine to south-western Iran. Here, at altitudes of 3,000 feet or so, the wild ancestors of our sheep and goats would browse over stands of wild wheat and barley.

  Gradually, as each of these four species was domesticated, the farmers spread downhill on to the alluvial floodplains, from which the first cities would arise. The herdsmen, for their part, took to the summer uplands and founded a rival order of their own.

  The Amorite who knows not grain . . . A people whose onslaught is like a hurricane . . . A people who have never known a city . . .

  Sumerian text

  Ouissa, Mountains of Air, Niger

  The garden was circular. Its soil was black. Around the perimeter ran a palisade of thorn bush, to keep away the camels and goats. At the centre stood two ancient date palms, flanking the well-shaft and a tank.

  Four irrigation ditches divided the garden into quarters. The quarters were further divided into a maze of vegetable beds and planted with peas, beans, onions, carrots, greens, squashes and tomatoes.

  The gardener was a negro slave, naked but for a breechclout. He was lost in concentration on his work. He would heave the leather bucket up the shaft and watch the water threading round the labyrinth. When one crop had had its fill, he would dam up the channel with his hoe, and divert the current on to the next patch.

  A short way up the valley, there were other circular palisades of thorn, into which the Tuareg drove their goats at night.

  The Negro in command of his seedlings shares a common destiny with the first dictators. Sumerian and Egyptian archives tell us that the earliest rulers of civilisation saw themselves as ‘Lords of the Fertilising Waters’ – who would either bring life to their wilting subjects or turn the taps off.

  Abel, in whose death the Church Fathers saw the martyrdom of Christ prefigured, was a keeper of sheep. Cain was a settled farmer. Abel was the favourite of God, because Jahweh himself was a ‘God of the Way’ whose restlessness precluded other gods. Yet Cain, who would build the first city, was promised dominion over him.

  A verse of the Midrash, commenting on the quarrel, says that the sons of Adam inherited an equal division of the world: Cain the ownership of all land, Abel of all living creatures – whereupon Cain accused Abel of trespass.

  The names of the brothers are a matched pair of opposites. Abel comes from the Hebrew ‘hebel’, meaning ‘breath’ or ‘vapour’: anything that lives and moves and is transient, including his own life. The root of ‘Cain’ appears to be the verb ‘kanah’: to ‘acquire’, ‘get’, ‘own property’, and so ‘rule’ or ‘subjugate’.

  ‘Cain’ also means ‘metal-smith’. And since, in several languages – even Chinese – the words for ‘violence’ and ‘subjugation’ are linked to the discovery of metal, it is perhaps the destiny of Cain and his descendants to practise the black arts of technology.

  A possible synopsis for the Murder:

  Cain is a painstaking fellow, bent double from constant digging. The day is hot and cloudless. Eagles are floating high above in the blue. The last of the snowmelt still cascades down the valley, but the hillsides are already brown and parched. Flies cluster at the corners of his eyes. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, and resumes his work. His hoe has a wooden handle, with a stone blade hafted on to it.

  Somewhere, higher up the slope, Abel is resting in the cool of a rock. He trills at his flute: again and again, the same insistent trills. Cain pauses to listen. Stiffly, he straightens his back. Then, raising his hand against the glare, he peers at his fields along the stream. The sheep have trampled his morning’s work. Without having time to think, he
breaks into a run . . .

  A less excusable version of the story says that Cain lay in ambush for Abel and heaved a rock on to his head – in which case the killing was the fruit of brewed-up bitterness and envy: the envy of the prisoner for the freedom of open spaces.

  Jahweh allows Cain to make atonement, only if he pays the price. He denies him the ‘fruits of the earth’ and forces him to wander ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’ in the Land of Nod: ‘Nod’ meaning ‘wilderness’ or ‘desert’, where Abel once wandered before him.

  ‘Travel’: same word as ‘travail’ – ‘bodily or mental labour’, ‘toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature’, ‘exertion’, ‘hardship’, ‘suffering’. A ‘journey’.

  Cain’s City built with Human Blood, not Blood of Bulls and Goats.

  William Blake, ‘The Ghost of Abel’

  ‘Alone and amid the nations’, masters of the raid, avid for increase yet disgusted by possessions, driven by the fantasy of all travellers to pine for a stable home – no people but the Jews have ever felt more keenly the moral ambiguities of settlement. Their God is a projection of their perplexity. Their Book – the Old Testament and the New – may be read, on one level at least, as a monumental dialogue between Him and His People in the rights and wrongs of living in the Land.

  Was it to be a land for fields and houses? A land of corn and wine? Of cities which they had not built and vineyards which they did not plant? Or was it to be a country of black tent and goat path? A nomad’s country of milk and wild honey? A Kingdom where the people ‘may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more?’ (II Samuel 7:10) Or was it, as Heine surmised, ‘a portable kingdom’ which could only exist in men’s hearts?

  Jahweh, in origin, is a God of the Way. His sanctuary is the Mobile Ark, His House a tent, His Altar a cairn of rough stones. And though He may promise His Children a well-watered land – as blue and green are a bedouin’s favourite colours – He secretly desires for them the Desert.

  He leads them out of Egypt, away from the fleshpots and the overseer’s lash, a journey of three days into the harsh clean air of Sinai. There He gives them their Solemn Feast, the Passover: a feast of roasted lamb and bitter herbs, of bread baked not in an oven but on a hot stone. And He commands them to eat it ‘in haste’, with shodden feet and sticks in hand, to remind them, for ever, that their vitality lies in movement.

  He gives them their ‘ring dance’, the hag: dance that mimes the antics of goats on their spring migration ‘as when one goeth with a pipe into the mountains of the Lord’. He appears in the Burning Bush and in the Pillar of Fire. He is everything that Egypt is not. Yet He will allow himself the doubtful honour of a Temple – and regret it: ‘They have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it.’ (Jeremiah 7:30)

  The ghettos of Eastern Europe were each a little patch of desert ‘where no green thing would grow’. Jews were forbidden by their Christian masters to own land or houses; to grow their own vegetables, or practise any trade but usury. And though they were allowed to gather sticks for firewood, they might not saw a plank, in case this led to building.

  The Gentiles, who imposed these restrictions, believed they were punishing the Jews for the crime of killing Christ – as Jahweh had punished Cain. Orthodox Jews believed that, by accepting them, they were re-living the journey through Sinai, when the People had found favour with their Lord.

  The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea were nomadic revivalists who howled abuse at the decadence of civilisation. By sinking roots in the land, by ‘laying house to house and field to field’, by turning the Temple into a sculpture gallery, the people had turned from their God.

  How long, O Lord, how long? . . . ‘Until the cities be wasted . . .’ The prophets looked to a Day of Restoration when the Jews would return to the frugal asceticism of nomadic life. In the Vision of Isaiah they are promised a Saviour, whose name would be Emmanuel, and who would be a herdsman.

  When Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, had the Jews penned up behind the walls of Jerusalem, Jeremiah reminded them of the Rechabites, the only tribe to have resisted the blandishments of settled life:

  We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab our father commanded us, saying, Ye shall drink no wine, neither ye nor your sons for ever: Neither shall ye build house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any: but all your days ye shall dwell in tents; that ye may live many days in the land where ye be strangers.

  Jeremiah 35:6–7

  The Rechabites alone, by preserving tactical mobility, would escape the horrors of siege warfare.

  In the Muqaddimah or ‘Universal History’, of Ib’n Khaldūn, a philosopher who surveyed the human condition from a nomadic viewpoint, we read:

  The Desert People are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers.

  By ‘desert people’, Ib’n Khaldun means the bedouin such as those he once recruited, as mercenaries from the heart of the Sahara, in the days of his warlike youth.

  Years later, when he had gazed into the slanting eyes of Tamerlane and witnessed the piles of skulls and smouldering cities, he, too, like the Old Testament prophets, felt the fearful anxiety of civilisation, and looked back with longing to life in the tents.

  Ib’n Khaldūn based his system on the intuition that men decline, morally and physically, as they drift towards cities.

  The rigours of the desert, he suggested, had preceded the softness of cities. The desert was thus a reservoir of civilisation, and desert peoples had the advantage over settlers because they were more abstemious, freer, braver, healthier, less bloated, less craven, less liable to submit to rotten laws, and altogether easier to cure.

  Monastery of Simonaspetras, Mount Athos

  A young Hungarian, exhausted after climbing the Holy Mountain, came and sat on the balcony and stared at the stormy sea below. He had trained as an epidemiologist but had given up this work in order to climb the sacred mountains of the world. He hoped to climb Mount Ararat and to circumambulate Mount Kailash in Tibet.

  ‘Man’, he said suddenly, without warning, ‘was not meant to settle down.’

  This was something he had learnt from his study of epidemics. The story of infectious disease was a story of men brewing in their own filth. He also made the observation that Pandora’s Box of Ills had been a Neolithic pottery urn.

  ‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘Epidemics are going to make nuclear weapons seem like useless toys.’

  Hong Kong

  Paddy Booz tells of meeting a Taoist Grand Master on the streets of a provincial Chinese city. The man was wearing his Grand Master’s blue robes and high hat. He and his young disciple had walked the length and breadth of China.

  ‘But what’, Paddy asked him, ‘did you do during the Cultural Revolution?’

  ‘I went for a walk in the Kun L’ung Mountains.’

  Driving with Arkady I remembered a passage in Vernadsky’s Early Russia, which describes how Slav peasants would submerge themselves in a marsh, breathing through hollow reeds until the sound of the horsemen died away.

  ‘Come home and meet my Dad,’ he said. ‘He and his mates did that when the Panzers came through the village.’

  Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum. Virgil’s exemplary hexameter, to describe the thud of horse hooves over a plain, has its Persian equivalent in the utterance of a survivor from the Mongol sack of Bokhara, Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand. ‘They came and they sapped and they burned and they slew and they trussed up their loot and were gone.’

  In his History of the World Conqueror Juvaini says that all his writing, and all the horror of those times, is contained in this one line.

  From Henry Yule’s Marco Polo 1, 233

  On the cruelty of Nomads:

  I do not have a mill with willow trees

  I have a horse
and a whip

  I will kill you and go.

  Yomut Turkoman

  In 1223 the Novgorod Chronicle recorded the arrival from Tartary of a sorceress and two men with her, who demanded one-tenth of everything: ‘of men, princes, horses, treasure, of everything one-tenth’.

  The Russian princes said no. The Mongol invasion was on.

  Leningrad

  A picnic in the office of a Professor of Archaeology: caviar, black bread, slabs of smoked sturgeon, onions, radishes and a bottle of Stolichnaya – for two.

  For most of the morning, I had been canvassing his views on the mechanics of nomad invasions. Toynbee held to the theory that a phase of drought, somewhere on the Central Asian steppe, would dislodge a tribe from its grazing grounds and cause a ‘house of cards’ effect, with ripples from Europe to China.

  It had struck me, however, that nomads were at their most invasive, not in times of want but abundance; in times of maximum growth, when the grass was greenest and the herdsmen allowed their stock to increase beyond the point of stability.

  As for the Professor, his nomads seemed to have moved in nice, tight, obedient circles, without troubling their neighbours or trespassing on what are now the boundaries of the Socialist Republics.

  Later, after a few more shots of vodka, he enfolded me in a fraternal, pan-European embrace, and, pushing the corners of his eyes into a pair of slits, said, ‘What we hate is this, isn’t it?’