The Hills of Adonis by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446483664
Publisher: Random House

9. Cold Flowing Waters

Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon which cometh from the rock of the field? Or shall the cold flowing waters be forsaken?

Jeremiah xviii. 14

Spring had passed into summer. The heat rebounded from the rocks, leaving the country dazzled and spent. On the lower mountains the snow died and the peasants who still worked on the terraces seemed to be dreaming, their minds stunned in the forge of the sun.

Towards noon I would find an orchard and lapse into sleep, until the sun shone under the fruit trees. But the nights were cold and I was afraid to leave my fire bright, but nestled among the rocks and doubled the sleeping-bag around me. Viewed from the hills the sun’s rise was purposeful in the pure sky, and each evening its fall brought sudden winds as it was lost behind the sea.

In the identification of light with life, which belongs to all religions, the Phoenicians linked Adonis with the sun. Each dusk he went to his death at the rim of the world and at dawn ascended to Astarte. But the diffusion and complexity of their belief lent it many variants. Studying the skies as the Babylonians had, they saw that in summer the sun passed through the upper hemisphere in the sign of the Bull, where the moon finds her zenith and the planet Venus shines, worshipped by ancient Semites as Astarte. But in winter the sun descended to the lower world and entered Scorpio, the sign of Mars, who killed him, and perhaps it was from this that the Phoenicians saw Mars as a destroyer.

The concept of redemption remained linked with the sun. The first Christians faced the east to pray, and called their Redeemer the ‘Sun of Righteousness’, and Sunday became the Lord’s day as heir to a long Mithraic cult. When Christ died the sun was extinguished, as it had been for Buddha and for Caesar, and as it would be again for Charlemagne; and although it is not written in the Gospels that Christ descended into darkness before his resurrection, this soon became a dogma.

So the older customs lingered, as they had done in all preceding changes. But Christians refused to see man any more as a toy of the elements, and gave him rebirth in God, a new spirit. For the Phoenicians there was no such renewal. God was not so much a judge and saviour as an explanation. He did not die for men’s sins, but died in the very order of things, because destruction was a part of nature, and for the same reason was reborn.

Spring, which signalled this rebirth, faded from the hills. Suddenly the nights were warm and pale with a scimitar moon, and many hamlets, almost invisible by day, sprinkled lights along the Dog valley. The whole flow of life changed with the season and was slack and aimless. I spent three days indolently with a village barber and his family near where the river, in its childhood, runs down from Sannin.

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