Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Well, apparently, she didn’t. She invited me in with a graceful movement of her hand, didn’t say another word, and continued to smile.

  The place is called the Garden Tomb. Charles Gordon, a British general, discovered it in 1883. He had come to Jerusalem with some doubts about the true location of the religious sites. Golgotha, in ancient Hebrew, means “place of the skull,” and Gordon couldn’t help but notice a strange rock formation outside the old walls several hundred metres from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And here, in the Garden Tomb, I saw it, too. On a little rise there is a tumble of rocks and a crevice that looks like the eye sockets and jawbone of a skull. At the bottom there is, indeed, another small tomb carved out of the rock. There is no church here, only a garden, but of all my time in Jerusalem, this was the first occasion I actually felt something click. That was what I’d been waiting for. Not enough to make me become celibate perhaps. Not enough to inspire me to wander into the desert for forty days and forty nights. But there it was.

  Something, finally, had touched me. For all the anger and turmoil of this holy city, for all its guns and wars and violence, for all its crowded, desperate clawing for territory, there is something grand here. Something like the sense of wonder a child feels gazing into a starry sky for the first time. Jerusalem really is like no other place on the planet. Elie Wiesel, the writer, survivor of the Holocaust, and Nobel Prize laureate, said: “You don’t go to Jerusalem. You return to it.”

  That means, I guess, a part of us has always been there. Metaphorically, at least, our hearts are all in the same place, and though we’ve been “scattered across the face of the Earth,” though our languages have been “confused” so that we can no longer understand one another, we need to find our way back. We need to understand one another again. We need to start building a new Tower of Babel.

  2

  At the Gates of the Western World

  I got on the wrong bus. All the signs were in Greek, and the lettering was indecipherable to me. Ironic, considering that the Greek letters alpha and beta make up the English word alphabet. In Hebrew they are aleph and bet; in Arabic alif and ba. It didn’t make any difference, though. I couldn’t read any of it.

  When I bought a ticket to Athens, the man in the booth waved me generally in the direction of a row of buses behind him. I hoisted my backpack and trudged toward them, squinting at the cardboard signs displayed on their windshields. Finally, after a little deliberation, I got on the bus whose sign read: . As it turned out, I should have gotten on the one that read: .

  I tried to check that I had the right bus, but when I asked the driver, I got completely confused. To say yes in Greek, one says né, which to me sounded a lot like no. And to further complicate matters, no in Greek is okhi, which sounds suspiciously like okay. So when I asked the driver if his bus was going to Athens, he said, “Okay,” and waved his head at me.

  After I climbed on, we took off in approximately the right direction. It wasn’t until we’d been travelling for an hour that I knew something was wrong. We came to a broad stretch of water, and I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be crossing anything like that. With a sinking heart I glanced around the bus for someone who might speak English. I found a middle-aged woman from France. “But, of course, we’re not going to Athens,” she said. “Unless you want to go the long way.” She laughed cruelly. “Mais oui … a very, very long way.”

  I sat with her, anyway. For an hour or two she lectured me on the geometric period in ancient Greek pottery shards, often breaking into French when her English wouldn’t do. It turned out she was a professor in Paris and looked down on the world over a long, aquiline nose. I tried to keep up, but mostly it was beyond me. Our bus puttered into the green mountains past almond trees and olive groves until we stopped at a little town on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth. We had arrived at Itea, just down from , or what turned out to be the legendary ruins of Delphi.

  Back behind the town a huge mountain, Parnassus, reared up, and we waited a while for the connecting bus that would carry us to a natural amphitheatre in the rock that held Delphi, home of the legendary Oracle.

  Delphi is where the human world touches the divine. Zeus, it is said, released two golden eagles. One flew west and the other soared eastward. They circled the globe, and where they met again was Delphi, the centre of the world, the navel of the universe.

  I had come to Greece to search for beginnings, so perhaps I hadn’t made a mistake getting on that bus, after all. Maybe it was fate, since there was little doubt that I had come to the right place.

  No one really knows how languages began. Somewhere in the primordial jungle a system of sounds developed. A particular shout, “yeeee,” for example, might have alerted our ancestors to a predator that was on its way, while another, “yaaaa,” might have told them that a snake was coiled in a tree. And that, in a nutshell, is what language is: a random set of sounds to which we’ve affixed meanings. Simple as pie.

  Languages developed almost organically, so much so that we can talk about them in terms of families. We can build the lineages for most of them, tracing their relationships and their roots farther back than one might think. Joseph Greenberg, one of the grand old masters of linguistics, hypothesized a proto-language for the Earth’s tongues. By reverse engineering from a mountain of data, he and his colleagues came up with a list of twenty-seven words from this presumed initial language.

  The sniffing out of bloodlines, a favourite pastime of linguists, is usually based on the study of cognates, which are similar-sounding root words in different languages. Salam in Arabic and shalom in Hebrew are good examples and clearly demonstrate a common ancestry. Cognates, typically, tend to show up in the roots of the most basic concepts: kin relationships such as mother, brother, sister, father; and words for the most fundamental descriptions of nature — hand, bird, cat, tree.

  Greenberg’s team hunted for cognates that would pertain to every language on the planet. Tik, for example, is what Greenberg claims is the first word for finger. It’s daktulos in Greek and digitus in Latin. These come to us in the English form digit (and from that, digital), and that’s how cognates tend to work. Languages tumble around, swapping, quite predictably, a t for a d, or a b for the pop of a p. Phonetic changes over time, in fact, are so predictable that they provide a sort of carbon-dating for languages.

  We can tell fairly accurately when Old English split from High German. We can surmise when Norwegian diverged from Icelandic and when Portuguese hived off from Spanish. Greenberg simply pushed this research as far as he could. Some say he shoved it too far. While claiming that he had found cognates for the word finger across all of the language families, he also posited as many related concepts as he could imagine. For example, if he didn’t find the word for finger, he would look at the words for hand or thumb, or in quite a lot of cases, the number one, which according to him is described in most languages by holding up a single finger.

  Greenberg’s theories are highly controversial, and talk of a single proto-language is largely downplayed in academic circles today. In fact, most linguists find it a load of bunk. It was a brave idea and obviously a hell of a lot of work, but unfortunately the truth probably leans more toward the opposite dynamic. Whereas there are now some six thousand languages spoken on Earth, chances are there were as many as fifteen thousand before written language appeared. So the languages we speak today aren’t the result of a Tower of Babel phenomenon. They probably didn’t all come from a single source. More likely, a multitude of languages sprang up around the same time independent of one another, and today, sadly, most of them have already disappeared.

  The French professor and I strolled to a little hostel that had staggering views over the Gulf of Corinth. She was put into a room with Chantal and Valérie, two young women who also spoke French. As it turned out, they were from Quebec, my country … more or less. I was in the next room, and the girls soon escaped the professor’s dry lectures and found their way over to my
balcony. A couple of cheap bottles of Greek wine appeared, and far from home we talked about Canada.

  Chantal and Valérie were from Quebec City, though Chantal had born in the Province of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She was from the little town of Notre-Dame-du-Portage, which has, she insisted, one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world. The sun dips into the wide St. Lawrence River, and the colours, she told me, are magnifique.

  Valérie pursed her lips in agreement, and I couldn’t help but remember a woman I once worked with. This woman always claimed that before she spoke French she had to make her face “go French.” It sounds ridiculous, but there’s actually something to her contention. Speaking a language is a whole way of being. You can feel it in the very sounds of the words (French, phonetically, tends to be a bit more forward in the mouth than English). And that’s even before you get to the meanings, the ways languages describe the world. Languages are direct reflections of ourselves. We think in them. We dream in them. We exist in them.

  I could come at language from a linguistic point of view. I could describe noun clauses and verb stems, but I didn’t live the language the way Chantal and Valérie did. Chantal shook her head at me. “You don’t understand. You see French on your cornflakes.”

  “My cornflakes?”

  “Yes. You see the French. On the box. The translation. But you don’t really understand.”

  “That’s true,” I said, sloshing some wine onto the floor of the balcony.

  Chantal tugged at her floppy woollen hat and smiled. She saw that I at least understood that, even if I could speak a few words of a language, I didn’t know what it was like to be “in” that language … to live it. And that, for Chantal and Valérie, was a start.

  I spent the next few days with Chantal and Valérie, traipsing around the ruins of Delphi. The most famous one is the Temple of Apollo. It lies halfway up a cliff, and in a little grotto at its foot there once sat the famous Oracle. The Oracle was always a woman, and it’s generally agreed that there must have been some fissure in the rock that leaked a kind of gas that put the Oracle into her trance. An earthquake closed up the whole thing a thousand years ago, but scientists now say it was methane gas with traces of ethylene. Essentially, the poor woman was sniffing a hallucinogen.

  In ancient times the Oracle’s ruminations were considered the height of wisdom. Pilgrims came from distant lands to ask questions. The Oracle’s answers, of course, were enigmatic, but there were legions of priests on hand to interpret them. Monarchs and emperors frequently sought advice, and one of the many famous tales is that of King Croesus of Asia Minor. He was set to attack Persia and asked the Oracle if he would be victorious.

  In her gas-induced trance the Oracle answered that once Croesus crossed the river a great empire would fall. The king understood this to mean that once his troops crossed the Euphrates River into what was then Persia, victory would indeed be his. Unfortunately, the reverse was true, and he suffered a devastating defeat. Years later the broken king returned to Delphi to pose a second question. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” he cried.

  “I did,” the Oracle said. “The great empire that fell was your own.”

  When we approached the Temple of Apollo, we looked around, but I couldn’t see either a grotto or a fissure. They had long ago disappeared. As we wandered around, we were caught in a sudden cloudburst and got soaked to the skin. The temple is only one of many on the hill, and we still had a long way to walk. Chantal glanced at her watch. “The time is short.”

  “Sounds like something the Oracle might say,” I ventured.

  “Are you having fun with my English?” Chantal looked at me sternly from beneath her floppy hat.

  “No, no … your English is a hell of a lot better than my French.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “A hell.”

  Later, ploughing wetly back to our hostel, we spotted something bizarre. A single black cloud clung to the top of the cliff. It broiled darkly and was lit up repeatedly by small explosions of sheet lightning.

  “Look,” Valérie said, “do you think we’ve angered the Oracle?”

  I snickered. “Do you think she’s mad about the ‘time is short’ thing?”

  “Don’t laugh about these things.” Chantal was serious. Time wasn’t something to be messed with.

  The family groupings of European languages are well understood. That’s no surprise. Until recently, most linguists have been English, American, German, or French, and they’ve been more interested, of course, in how their own languages evolved. Still, over the years, Western linguists have discovered a lot more than they bargained for.

  In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar working in India, noticed strange resemblances between Latin and ancient Sanskrit. Like Greenberg, Jones began matching up cognates. Some were fairly obvious like the Sanskrit word for king — raj. In English we have the cognates regent and royal, both deriving from the Latin regina. There’s also the Latin diva, meaning “god,” from which we get the word divine.

  However, my all-time favourite cognate is Buddha. It stems from Pali, a dialect of ancient Sanskrit, and literally means “to awake.” But the only tattered remnant we have of this particular cognate, in English at least, is the word bed. It’s amazing how a concept can take different directions. I’m even tempted to say that a culture gets what it deserves. While the ancient wise men of India and the Far East became enlightened, well, we were … sleeping.

  Sanskrit was the language of the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts and spread its wings across most of Asia. It spawned languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, the Urdu of Pakistan, Bengali, Kurdish, and Persian … and the list goes on and on. All of these languages seemed to have a common ancestor, the same as European tongues. The evidence this time was simply overwhelming. We now believe that this ancestor language, what today is unimaginatively called Proto Indo-European, was spoken about five thousand years ago by a small band of hunter-gatherers. By an incredible fluke of history, it survived, prospered, and spread even as countless languages around it died out.

  More recently the search for this ancient and unwritten Proto Indo-European language has become even more focused. Among the cognates for animals and trees there are only a few that run through all of the hundreds of languages descended from Proto Indo-European. Salmon is one. The cognate here is actually lok. The Old English is leax from which we derive just lake. German has lachs and Yiddish, of course, has lox. The Greek is or solomos where you can find both the English Salmon and an appendage of the old root word in the middle syllable: lo.

  The only other cognate that features in all Indo-European languages is the word for beech tree. With a little insight it was realized that Proto Indo-European must have arisen among a people who lived on the banks of a Salmon-spawning river in an area where beeches grew. This observation narrowed the search to the plains of what is now eastern Germany and Poland. There a small tribe of wanderers spoke a tongue that forms the basis for the languages of more than two billion people today, about one-third of the Earth’s population.

  Have I mentioned hell journeys? Have I referred to marathons in cramped buses sitting squeezed and stiff for ten or twelve long, impossible hours? Sometimes there’s no other way to get where you’re going. In this case I was headed into the northern reaches of Greece. I’d already veered off track, and there was one thing up there that I thought I might as well see.

  I’d been on the road for a full day already when I tucked into the city of Thessaloniki. From there I should have had a short jaunt over the border and into Turkey, but it wasn’t that easy.

  Greeks and Turks hate each other passionately. The Greeks on their side of the border warn travellers not to venture into Turkey. “They eat babies over there,” they say. “Don’t go.

  It’s terrible.” On the Turkish side, meanwhile, they say much the same thing. “What do you want to go there for? They’re monsters … horrible, horrible.”

  Such antipathy no
doubt dates back to the Turkish occupation of Greece for hundreds of years, but the discord really heated up in the 1920s when the present borders between the countries were set. Vast numbers of both populations were forced to relocate, sometimes leaving the places their families had lived in for centuries. There were tens of thousands of deaths, and what happened then hasn’t been forgotten by either side.

  I arrived in Thessaloniki in time to learn that I had missed the sole train across the border. There was only one other option — a bus that departed from the train station at three in the morning. This seemed to be typical: you could travel from one country to the other, but it would be as inconvenient as possible.

  After idling away the rest of the day, I tried to sleep, and when I finally got to the bus at the ungodly hour of a quarter to three in the morning, I discovered it was pretty much full. There were no tourists here. Most of the people appeared to be local. This was a chicken-on-your-lap bus. Everyone glanced at me as I got on, wielding my backpack as I buffaloed down the aisle. Their eyes followed me to see what I would do, since it was apparent there was only one place free. A small space was vacant on a bench near the back, but the other person sitting there was one of the largest human beings I’d ever seen, and I don’t mean he was fat. This guy was African, well over two metres tall, at least one hundred and forty kilograms of muscle, and was draped in gold chains. I shuffled in beside him, and every head in the bus swivelled to see what would happen next.

  “How do you do?” the huge man asked. His hand enveloped mine, and I shook it.

  “Uh … I’m okay. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. My name’s Cole.”

  Cole was from Nigeria and turned out to be exceptionally polite. He was soft-spoken and remarkably thoughtful. In fact, he had just finished his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Athens. He talked a lot about his own country. Nigeria had a lot of oil, he said, but nasty things were occurring there, and he fervently hoped he could put his education to use to help the nation extricate itself from corruption and dictatorship. “Two hundred languages are spoken in Nigeria,” he told me. “Did you know that?”