Alexander's Path by Freya Stark

Author:Freya Stark [STARK, FREYA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV015000
ISBN: 9781590209189
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

11

THE EASTERN WALL OF XANTHUS

Envoys from Phaselis came to offer friendly relations and to crown Alexander with a golden crown.

ARRIAN I, 24, 5.

A NATURAL DOCILITY IS SHOWN BY TURKISH CLIENTS IN provincial hotels, where the light, switched on or off outside your bedroom door, is only remotely in the power of those who use it. In Iskenderun, in a new varnished bedroom with a telephone, I was startled at 2 a.m. by a voice that asked what I was doing and seemed scarcely mollified by the news that I was reading. At Finike, the landlord surprised me, when I had parted from Durmush and the horses and was setting off with Mehmet in the jeep, by inverting the usual order, and telling me that he was pleased with me, in a kindly voice of power.

Usually, however, landlords either were not interested, or had doubts of their own already, and sympathized with my feelings. ‘Fleas as big as frogs’ Alexander seems to have written to his mother.1 In Finike the hotel was particularly clean, and a woman came every day to search the quilt when a guest had gone; but bugs ensconced in the woodwork usually belonged to the inevitable.

The inevitable loomed large, and people were fatalistic more by necessity than choice. Having run out of small presents, I went into a shop stocked with teacups and watches, on the chance that it might contain pocket-knives. It was the wrong place, and the shopkeeper had never had them, but he merely said, “There are no more,” and sent me along the street to an equally unlikely place where they existed, not to be opened by any but a young Goliath. I decided on pens instead. Helped by a schoolboy who took the matter in hand, we filled four or five with ink and found them unworkable, while the owner watched with no trace of anything but a sincere acceptance of their badness. We picked on one at last, for four Turkish liras.

“Cheap,” said a bystander, anxious to help.

“If it works,’ said I.

“Yes, only if it works,” the owner repeated, with heartfelt agreement, and detachment from things could go no further. But this was not usually compensated by any great interest in ideas, either.

A remarkable optimism, on the other hand, exists here and there, and on that, I suppose, the strength to wrestle with life is supported. Two middle-aged women were in the hotel, brought by a Bey from Antalya who left them there like packages and vanished. They took sad little walks looking neither to the right nor left, not free enough in their thoughts even to realize that they thought a holiday much less pleasant than their home. But one thing they were definite about—and that was the danger of sitting in a car through the defiles of Termessus (which are in fact singularly mild and propped up by hills on either hand). They were not going back that way; and as there was no other short of the fortnightly

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