Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  He laughed and so did I. We hooted until the other people in the line regarded us strangely.

  “They had to get it tested, they told me,” Carlos said between wheezes. “I tried to explain things to them, but —” He exploded in laughter again. “Dumb fucks! They really pissed me off.” Old Carlos had learned his English well.

  He told me, too, that he was cutting his trip short. The new government in Colombia had called for an all-out war against the guerrillas. The last government had promoted a policy of appeasement, a leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone sort of thinking. That didn’t work. Carlos told me he felt he should be home when things started happening.

  “It’s sad,” he said. “Colombia really is a beautiful country. For example, have you ever heard of the pink dolphins?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they live in the tributaries of the Amazon. They’re the only freshwater dolphins in the world. They’re pink and quite rare. In Colombia we have a legend about them. The male of the species can change into a human form at will. Often they’ll come into the towns when they know there’s going to be a big party. They’re very handsome, it’s said, and so they seduce young girls and sleep with them. Always, though, they wear hats to hide the blowholes high on their foreheads. It’s the only way to know they’re not human.”

  It was then that I realized Carlos was wearing a ball cap. I pointed at it. “So what’s under your hat, Carlos?”

  When I got as far south in Spain as I could go, I signed up for a sailing course. Although I was still in Europe, I was no longer in Spain. I was in Gibraltar, a very odd place and the remnant of yet another great empire.

  Like Spain before it, Britain cast its net over the world, and Gibraltar was one of its catches. The colony is as English as Trafalgar Square. You can buy fish and chips there and pay for it in British pounds. If you walk a thousand steps to your right, however, you find yourself back in Spain.

  Very odd. And, of course, rearing above everything is the Rock. It’s quite a slab of stone, knifing out of the dark ocean. Across the straits a similar mountain looms out of the water near Africa. Together they’re called the Pillars of Hercules, the doorway to the Mediterranean.

  If you control this point, you dominate the Mediterranean. And that’s why Gibraltar is still British. Up on the Rock, kilometres and kilometres of secret tunnels bore into the cliffs. No one knows quite what’s in there, but I walked up and discovered razor wire marked with forbidding signs from the Ministry of Defence.

  I had come here for sailing lessons. During the first days, we went into the harbour to sail. I learned to tie the required knots and crank on the necessary winches. Phil was the skipper of our ship. He had lived in Gibraltar all his life and was quite certain the tunnels above us were filled with British military surveillance technology — stuff beyond the wildest dreams of the civilian world. He spoke in hushed tones with, oddly, a bit of a lisp, as well. Perhaps it was something in the air.

  Anyway, Gibraltar remains resolutely British. Unlike Hong Kong, the United Kingdom will never let it go. It won it fair and square, and anyone who says otherwise can step right up for a very proper thrashing.

  The end of the sailing lesson was to be a crossing from Gibraltar to Africa. We would sail under our own power, but what I didn’t realize is that we would be heading into a war zone. Just as I got there, a small war broke out. The previous week Morocco had invaded tiny Isla del Perejil, quite literally Parsley Island.

  It was the first invasion of European soil since the Second World War — a turf battle, to be sure. Territory was being marked again. I admit, though, I’m using the words war and battle pretty loosely. About a dozen poorly armed Moroccan frontier guards landed on the island, equipped with a radio, two flags, and a couple of tents. No one was there to see them raise the flag except some lizards, bugs, and possibly a very confused goat.

  Spain, however, was incensed. The island historically belonged to it. It was protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so the Spanish immediately sent a warship to straighten things out.

  Phil, our sailing instructor, laughed off the danger. Despite the fact that we would be sailing right by Isla del Perejil, he insisted the war had nothing to do with us.

  Tell that to a bullet.

  I noticed that Phil had a strange accent. His th sound was always an f. “Fank you,” he’d say politely when I handed him one of the charts. “I fink today I’ll get you to raise the sails by yourself.”

  We spent a few days tacking and gybing in Gibraltar’s harbour beneath the massive Rock. From the top of Gibraltar, on a clear day, Mount Acha on the coast of Africa is visible. Also up on the Rock are the famous Barbary apes, the only primates in Europe. Actually, they were brought over by British soldiers a couple of centuries ago. The troops kept the monkeys as pets not long before the Battle of Trafalgar, and a number of the apes went wild, perhaps when their owners didn’t return from the battle. When I was on Gibraltar, they howled over the mountaintop, snapped at tourists’ fingers, defecated on cars, and stole my goddamn water bottle!

  At the other end of the Rock is St. Michael’s Cave. It was here in 1855 that a strange thick-furrowed skull was unearthed. Two years later a similar skull was uncovered in a place called Neanderthal, Germany. The Neanderthal race was once as common on this planet as we are now. For some reason, though, they all disappeared about thirty thousand years ago.

  Here were a people even older than the Basques, so old they weren’t even quite human. It’s not known, for example, if Neanderthals spoke any language. They had skulls and jaws significantly different from ours, but the existence of vocal cords can neither be proven nor disproven. Neanderthals did have a small hyoid bone, a technical necessity for having a larynx, and they possessed a gene, FOXP2, which is associated with human language. However, this gene is also found in songbirds so that it’s difficult to say what sort of communication systems Neanderthals employed.

  In fact, the lack of language might be one of the central reasons Neanderthals died out and we’re still around. Somehow we found the ability to communicate abstract ideas to one another, to strategize and plan for the future. It is this aptitude that most surely marked the emergence and dominance of Cro-Magnon Man … us. We developed the most complicated and intricate communication system yet seen and soon spread across the Earth, usurping Neanderthals, tackling all environments, and conquering even the vast seas that lay before us.

  On the third day Phil announced we would attempt the crossing to Morocco, especially since a good wind was blowing. I was excited, despite the fact that I barely knew what I was doing. The straits we’d be crossing marked the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. For Phoenicians who sailed through here three thousand years earlier it was the end of the world. For ancient Greeks it was a portal into the great unknown. Columbus tested his ships here, and so did Magellan. All of these explorers sailed through these fabled gates into the great unmapped Atlantic.

  We had just made it out of the harbour when Phil glanced up at the sky. “I fink we better get our harnesses on.”

  I frowned. “Harnesses?”

  “Yeah, you’re going to need them.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Out in the straits the wind whipped up to thirty-eight knots. All of a sudden we were skudding across the waves almost out of control. I pulled on the necessary ropes and winched when I could, though truthfully most of the time I held on to the railing for dear life while the roiling waves crashed over me. Phil stood in front of me, manning the wheel, laughing maniacally into the wind.

  Halfway over to Africa, Phil pointed at the whitecaps as a pair of dolphins shot out of a cresting wave. They were like torpedoes, and soon a pod of them wove in and out of our wake. It was a magical moment.

  “Carlos,” I called, “is that you out there?”

  After a few hours, the waters calmed a bit and the sandy red hills of Morocco appeared in the distance. Phil looked at his watch and began to yip. “We’ve made
a record crossing. That’s the fastest one I’ve ever done.”

  “Great, Phil, that’s just great,” I said.

  Jutting from the shoreline was the little rock tumble of Isla del Perejil. I didn’t see any goats, but the Moroccan flag was gone. The War of Parsley Island was finished, and Europe, apparently, had come through victorious again. The great continent of empires remained unscathed.

  PART TWO

  Into the East

  4

  Genghis Khan Rides Again

  Coming into Istanbul by sea is enchanting. The minarets of the Blue Mosque come into view over crumbling medieval walls, and Topkapi Palace, ancient home of sultans and harems, tips down to the water’s edge. As visitors proceed through the Golden Horn, they spy on a hillside the dusty red dome of Hagia Sophia, the first great basilica of Christendom. Everything is much as it would have been for the Crusaders a thousand years before.

  Istanbul is the crossroads of the world. At its back lies Europe, to the south is Africa, and to the east, across the Bosphorus, is a great slab of land jutting from Asia — Asia Minor in the old books, the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, and now simply Turkey.

  It’s quite fair to say there’s no other country on Earth quite like Turkey: Muslim but not Arabic, an ally of both Europe and its Islamic neighbours, a secular democracy tucked between the flashpoints of the Balkans and the Middle East, unsure which way it should turn.

  The Turkish language, too, is an anomaly. It’s a member of the Altaic family of languages, but like the country itself it snakes its roots through both the West and the East. The written text, for example, is now produced in the Latin alphabet. This momentous change occurred in 1928 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, declared that his country would adopt a Western script. The language had previously been written in Arabic, but many of its written conventions didn’t seem to suit Turkish.

  Atatürk was warned by his advisers that changing the written language would take several years of consultations and at least five more years to implement. But Atatürk declared that the changeover would be done in three months, and such was his leadership that the shift was accomplished in only six weeks. The old writing system was forbidden by law, and it’s said that Atatürk himself appeared in many parks with a slate and chalk to teach the new script to his people.

  That’s the story, and despite the abundance of umlauts and little squiggles over and under letters, I could at least make out the words. Our ship pulled up under the Galata Bridge, and nosing my way through the crowds, I followed the signs to Sultanahmet, the heart of old Istanbul. Istanbul was once known as Byzantium, a Greek city. In the Roman era it became Constantinople — the city of Constantine the Great.

  I eventually found a little hotel not four hundred metres from Hagia Sophia. In 537 A.D. this grand domed church rose above the city, centuries before the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were even contemplated. It remained a Christian church for almost a thousand years and then it was a mosque for a further five hundred. Now it’s a secular museum. Across from Hagia Sophia is the Blue Mosque. Both buildings have minarets, one at each corner, and both are capped with giant domes, but the Blue Mosque isn’t blue at all. Its polished stones are more like silver, glimmering under the great azure sky. The Turks took Constantinople for their own in 1452, and shortly thereafter erected this mighty twin companion of Hagia Sophia.

  Since then the city has been Istanbul, at the edge of two very different worlds. This, I thought, made it the perfect place to see where the strange brushes up against the familiar, to watch what happens when one understanding touches another.

  In Turkey there’s plenty to buy and lots of people willing to sell. Turks haggle most unmercifully. The shopkeepers call out greetings and invite you in for apple tea. If you accept, you’re hooked.

  “I want to buy a carpet” in Turkish is Hali almak istiyorum. The word order is pretty odd. “Carpet to buy I want” would be the literal translation. It’s a sentence I would caution against saying too loudly. You’ll be mobbed and you’ll have enough carpets slapped in front of you to cover a small country.

  Turkish also makes me think about Noam Chomsky again. Here is the sort of grammatical structure he talks about. There are rules to how things move around, Chomsky says. Just as in mathematics where a formula like a2 + 2ab + b2 very neatly transforms itself into (a + b)2, Hali almak istiyorum becomes “Carpet — to buy — I want” and finally “I want to buy a carpet.”

  Yes, the underlying structures are the same. Chomsky is correct, at least about grammar. The thing is, though, a grammar is not a language. It’s the clockwork of a language, the gears and cogs that spin it into being, but it’s not the language itself. What good ol’ Chomsky misses is the most important element of all. He neglects to talk about the words. He forgets to specify exactly what the a2 or the b2 stand for, and that’s where things start to get interesting.

  The word hali, for example, is translated as carpet, but does that mean it corresponds exactly to our word carpet? I’m not sure. What we call a carpet is the thing we order from a store that sells rugs. We choose the colour, say, rose or a simple beige weave, and that’s it. Or we might purchase a throw rug at Ikea because it’s on sale or because it looks as if it might match our wallpaper.

  In Turkey a halim (the full root) is an ancient art form. I saw women working on looms, painstakingly weaving intricate patterns one line at a time so that a single carpet might take months to finish. I’d seen the sheep’s wool and the silk cocoons — little beads, smooth and shiny — that rattled with the remains of the insects still inside. I’d seen the great vats for dying colours: real indigo, saffron and the milk of daisies, chestnuts for brown. I felt the heat beneath the vats, and I’d grown dizzy with their vapours.

  All this magnificent feast of the senses is wrapped up in halim. It’s not there in carpet.

  The same could be said for the verb to buy, which in Turkish, almak, involves much more than the slapping down of a credit card. For any self-respecting Turk there’s the interminable game of haggling to be undertaken — with counter-offer after counteroffer slowly being whittling to a middle ground. After and only after these long negotiations does the shopkeeper pause and slowly nod, graciously accepting a final deal.

  And so, no, the two languages — English and Turkish — aren’t merely reversed grammars of the same thing. The individual words are place holders for our concepts, our whole way of thinking about a thing or an action. It’s quite simple: by words our thoughts are given wings.

  I did, however, want to sample one thing while I was in Istanbul — a Turkish bath. It is, or at least was, something central to the culture. So, just up from Sultanahmet, I found Cağaloğlu Hamami, a three-hundred-year-old bathhouse. From the very beginning I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. Apparently, some pretty famous people had been there in the past — Kaiser Wilhelm II, Franz Liszt, and even Edward VII, king of England. So what were these guys up to exactly?

  I confess I had visions of a harem. I’d seen the one true Harem just that morning over at Topkapi Palace. It was the name of a certain part of the palace where the sultan’s girls actually lived. So at the bathhouse my suspicions were confirmed when I was shown into a little room and told to take off all my clothes. This was going to be good, I thought. I had visions of the dance of the seven veils, ill-begotten dreams of nubile young Turkish maidens feeding me grapes.

  The door opened, and a large hairy man stood there. He looked like Joseph Stalin in a tight white T-shirt. “Çabuk,” he growled. Later I learned that this meant “Quickly.”

  I stood up, radiant in my nakedness. With hairy arms, the man wrapped a towel around my midsection. “Çabuk Çabuk,” he said. That meant “C’mon, you lard-assed white man, get a move on.” In Turkish there isn’t really a word for “very much.” To emphasize something you say it twice. You might call a pretty girl (of which there are a surprising number in Turkey) güzel or
beautiful. Whereas a real humdinger of a supermodel would be “Güzel güzel.”

  My bath attendant, the ever-faithful Stalin look-alike, nodded his swarthy head down the hallway. Suddenly, I felt as if I were in prison. What had I gotten myself into?

  He led me to another door and all but pushed me in. I was alone in an ancient domed room. Water plopped from somewhere. I started sweating profusely, but then realized this huge area was a steam room. High above in the domed ceiling were little holes covered inexplicably with coloured glass so that the place reminded me of a cathedral. The coloured beams of light angled through the steam, and I found a piece of rock to sit on. It wasn’t overly hot, and after ten minutes or so, sitting alone in the dreadful echoing silence, I figured I would at least wash my hair. It needed it, and though I hadn’t brought shampoo, I had smuggled in a bar of soap. There were rock sinks built into the walls and taps above them, so I lathered up my hair. That was a mistake. The sinks had no drains. They were just big bowls really, and surely, I could see now, only meant for splashing cold water onto your face. I left a floating scum of soap bubbles and stray hair, committing a diplomatic gaffe and an insult to all of Turkey.

  What about Stalin? What would he do to me when he saw what I’d done? Carefully, I snuck out through the massive wooden door on the large clackety wooden clogs I had to wear on my feet. So I didn’t even make it halfway down the hallway before Stalin appeared again, tipped off by the footwear. I’d thought about kicking the clogs off, but the floors had several centuries of green mildew on them, and I figured I’d take my chances.