Palmyra: in the Footsteps of Lady Jane by Fiona Dunlop
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To one side of the road stretched a stark escarpment, to the other the march of huge pylons, otherwise the smudgey yellow horizon was empty bar the occasional truck. We passed a daunting highway sign to Baghdad then, minutes later, a more rustic wooden one, hand-carved with the words “Bagdad Café”.
As the haunting music of the eponymous film reverberated in my head, I pleaded with our driver, Fouad, to stop by a cluster of trucks. But no, he sped on. Then more signs with the same café name appeared by two other pit-stops, and at last Fouad stepped on his brakes and swerved off the road.
Thus I found myself, in the arid wastes of Syria’s eastern desert, not far from the Iraqi border, entering a roadside café that turned out to be a tourist trap. These days it is getting harder and harder to escape the route of cultural group tours, however infrequent they may be. After idly turning over a few over-priced trinkets, we drank our tea, photographed the iconic signs then gestured to Fouad. “Yala! – let’s go!”
150 years or so earlier, Lady Jane Digby (1807-81) would have seen nothing of this as she rode through that same desert en route to the far-flung oasis of Palmyra. Few people ventured out to the ruins of this ancient city but Digby, a born romantic as well as unconventional adventuress, was always an exception. Brought up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, married to and soon divorced from Lord Ellenborough, she had led a butterfly life collecting lovers and languages.
Gradually she moved eastwards until, on the rebound from her third marriage to a Greek general and now in her mid-40s, she reached the Levant. Contemporaries lauded her beauty, her quick, cultivated mind, her linguistic ability (she spoke eight languages), her artistic prowess and her great horse-riding skills. In the end they all came together perfectly in the Syrian desert.
When she first set foot in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire, the picturesque ruins of Palmyra came topped Digby’s wish-list ahead of Baalbek and Jerusalem. Only a handful of intrepid Victorians had made it to Palmyra as it was a distinctly edgey route; nine days on camel-back across 220km of desert from Damascus regularly threw up brigands or brushes with tribal warfare. Serendipity led Digby to take on Medjuel El Mezrab, a member of the Bedouin tribe that controlled the Palmyra area, as her guide and protector.
Unusually, he was well educated, multi-lingual and of course cut a dashing figure straight out of an Orientalist painting. Their first journey together did indeed bring a run-in with desert thieves whom he disposed of appropriately but it above all sowed the seeds of an extraordinary East-West love-story.
Though considerably younger than her (allegedly by 20 years), Medjuel soon fell under the glamorous socialite’s spell, as she did his, and a year later they had tied the knot. The rest, as they say, was history. Jane Digby spent the latter part of her life completely acculturated, fluent in a ninth language, Arabic, dressed in flowing djellabas, sporting kohl eye-liner, smoking shisha, devoted to Medjuel and dividing her time between a beautiful house in Damascus and the tougher nomadic existence of Bedouin tents. Here she learnt how to milk sheep and cook lamb with yoghurt and wild honey over an open fire, all the time indulging her riding and veterinary talents to the full by hunting wolves and antelope and tending to sick camels.
Today, getting to Palmyra is a much faster and easier enterprise as from the capital it is under three hours by car. Brigands are no more but Bedouins are still plentiful. Dotted over the scrubby waste (this is no Lawrence of Arabia-type desert of shifting sand-dunes) black dots at closer range turn into open-sided tents of coarsely woven wool, often extensively patched. Though seemingly uninhabited, figures eventually appear leading flocks of sheep. Move in a bit closer and an entire extended family materialises.
Inside the main tent lined in vividly patterned fabric, we sat on rugs sipping the sweet chay that is automatically served to any passing visitor with traditional hospitality and shy smiles. Our impromptu hosts were members of the same Anazeh tribe that Jane Digby married into and that she developed such affection for (which was fully reciprocated). Suddenly I was dragged away by a diminutive matriarch in a long dark kaftan, her lightly tattooed face framed by a tightly wound black scarf. Whispering hoarsely and smiling impishly, she frog-marched me off to admire her sheep grazing on rare tufts of desert grass nearby. Then it was giggles all around as I photographed her with her many ragged children, old and young. This, at last, was genuine.
Palmyra is hauntingly beautiful, overwhelmingly so, blending harmoniously with the surrounding desert. It is no wonder that Jane El Mezrab chose to spend so much of her life there, at a time when there were no tourists, no hotels, no shops, no trinket-sellers. Yet back then, with much of the site still buried in sand, she would not have seen the fabulous tower tombs with their frescoes, painted ceilings and multi-storeyed niches. Many of these were discovered as a result of laying the oil pipeline that runs from Iraq’s oil-fields to Syria’s Mediterranean coast, although serious excavations had started under the French in 1924.
There remains plenty more and archaeological work continues today. Palmyra’s strategic position on the Silk Route between Persia, the Euphrates river and Damascus, meant that from the 3rd century BC the oasis picked the best from what passed through, whether Mesopotamian, Greek or Roman. Under the rebellious Queen Zenobia, in the 3rd century, the Palmyrene empire stretched as far as Egypt but her capture by the Romans spelt its downfall and the desert sands blew in. The resultant juxtaposition of styles is now as visible in the superlative statues, busts and reliefs of the local museum as in the semi-ruined structures themselves.
On the edge of the ruins, a ramshackle little town has taken shape, partly geared to tourists (mansaf, a traditional Bedouin dish of chicken, lamb and rice is consumed beside emails) and partly a marketplace for huge bunches of succulent fresh dates from the adjoining palm grove. Yet in view of Palmyra’s history and splendour, and compared with Petra in neighbouring Jordan, tourism here is decidedly embryonic.
You can wander through the ruins completely alone, at midday or at midnight and only one hotel actually stands within the archaeological park (the 1930s Zenobia Cham Palace – its open-air restaurant has unbeatable close-up views). The magic intensifies at dusk as the sinking sun throws a golden glow over the honey-coloured limestone of the kilometre-long colonnade, the Roman theatre, the temple of Baal Shamin and the magnificent lofty walls of the Temple of Bel.
Visitors flock to an old Arab fortress crowning a hilltop to the north-west, then all look the wrong way, at the setting sun, rather than over the 2000-year old stones of this once omnipotent city, scattered over the dusty plain far below like a miniature tossed by the gods. The sense of scale in time and space is immense and moving.
And Jane Digby? After nearly 30 years of marital bliss, socialising in Damacus with the likes of the great Arabist, Richard Burton, cultivating her garden on the outskirts of the city surrounded by cats, dogs and horses, and sharing the basic lifestyle of the Anazeh out in the desert, she finally died aged 74. Medjuel was heartbroken. It is hard to find her grave in the overgrown Protestant cemetery of Damascus, but somehow, out in the barren expanse and dry air of Palmyra, I imagined I could hear her cantering through the ruins.