Later it used to be said that the whole of the salt-flats, with their mesh of channels, conduits and drying-basins, were originally nothing more than a gigantic maze, fulfilling some obscure ritual purpose, and of course it has been repeatedly suggested that the caves of the Kretevs, which have never been scientifically explored, are not really caves at all, but only the visible entrances of an artificial labyrinth riddling the whole escarpment. How proper it seemed to Russian romantics, that the Hav tunnel should spiral upon itself so mazily within the limestone mass!
There is an innocuous little maze of hedges and love-seats in the Governor’s garden, and one or two are rumoured to be hidden within the courtyard walls of houses in the Medina. Otherwise there are no Hav mazes extant, and for that matter none historically confirmable from the past. Yet the spirit of the maze has always fascinated the people of Hav, and the tokens of the maze-maker, as they have been fancifully transmitted down the ages, are inescapable in the iconography of the city: the mallet, with which Avzar at the beginning of time beat his iron labyrinth into shape, the honeycomb which is seen as a natural type of the maze, the bull-horns which are doubtless a vestige of the supposed Minoan link.
Some scholars go further, and say that the conception of the maze has profoundly affected the very psyche of Hav. It certainly seems true that if there is one constant factor binding the artistic and creative centuries together, it is an idiom of the impenetrable. The writers, artists and musicians of this place, though they have included few native geniuses, have seldom been obvious or conventional. They have loved the opaque more than the specific, the intuitive more than the rational. Pliny said they wrote in riddles, and declared their sculptures to be like nothing so much as lumps of coral. Manet on the other hand, visiting Hav as a young man in 1858, wrote to his mother: ‘I feel so much at home in this city, among these people, whose vision is so much less harsh than that of people in France, and whose art looks as though it has been gently smudged by rain, or blurred by wood-smoke.’
For myself I suspect this lack of edge has nothing to do with mazes, but is a result of Hav’s ceaseless cross-fertilization down the centuries. Hardly has one manner of thought, school of art, been absorbed than it is overlaid by another, and the result, as Manet saw, is a general sense of intellectual and artistic pointillism — nothing exact, nothing absolute, for better or for worse. You can see it at the museum in the folk-art of the peninsula, which is a heady muddle of motifs Eastern and Western, realist and symbolical, practical and mystically unexplained; and you can see it all around you in the architecture.
The Arab buildings of Hav, for instance, were less purely Arab than any others of their age. It was not just a matter of incorporating classical masonries into their buildings, as often happened elsewhere: the Corinthian columns of Hav’s Grand Mosque were made by the Arabs themselves, and on many of the tall merchant houses of the Medina you may see classical pilasters and even architraves, besides innumerable eaves and marble embellishments, derived from the House of the Chinese Master. The one great Chinese building in the peninsula is a mish-mash of architectural allusions. The British built their Residency as if they were in India. And we have seen already with what adaptive flair architects Schröter and Huhn, when the time came, mixed their metaphors of Hav. It is the way of the place — “rivers of history”! You remember the quotation?
Very early in Hav’s history the arts began to show symptoms of cultural confusion. ‘The language of these people,’ Marco Polo wrote, ‘which is generally that of the Turks, contains also words and phrases of unknown origin, peculiar to hear.’ They were, linguists have only recently come to realize, words of the troglodytic language, a fragile offshoot of the Celtic.
The earliest known poet of Hav was the Arab Rahman ibn Muhammed, ‘The Song-Bird’, who lived in the thirteenth century: in his work occur words, inflexions, ideas and even techniques (including the alliterative device called cynghanedd) which seem to show that in those days a Celtic poetic tradition was still very much alive in this peninsula. It has even been lately suggested that Rahman may have been in touch with his contemporary on the far side of Europe, the Welsh lyric bard Dafydd ap Gwilym. Here in Professor Morris David’s translation are some lines from the Song-Bird’s poem ‘The Grotto’:
And here in my own translation is part of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poem ‘Offeren y Llwyn’, ‘The Woodland Mass’:
Coincidence? Or perhaps, more probably than actual communication between the two poets, some empathy of temperament and tradition. Celtic words had disappeared from the Hav poetic vocabulary by the seventeenth century, but still the poet Gamal Misri was writing of the natural world in a way quite unknown among other Muslim poets of the day, and dealing with religious matters in idioms astonishingly close to those of his contemporaries far away on the western Celtic fringe — idioms that would have cost him dear in Egypt, Persia or Iraq. This is his startling evocation of the Attributes of Allah, again in David’s version:
Visual artists, too, even in the great days of Islamic Hav, did not hesitate to risk the disapproval of the faithful by painting living portraits — not simply stylized representations, such as you find in Persian miniatures, but formal portraits of real people, sitting to be painted as they would in the West. The so-called Hav-Venetian school of painting, which flourished throughout the sixteenth century, was unique, producing the only such genre in the Islamic world, and there are no examples of its work outside Hav. Even in the city they are very rare. A few are thought to be in private hands, but the only specimens on public display are five hanging in the former chapel of the Palace, which is open to the public at weekends. They are very strange. Large formal oil-paintings of merchants and their wives, dressed in the Venetian style but looking unmistakably Havian with their rather Mongol cheeks and hard staring eyes, their painters are unknown, and they are signed simply with illegible ciphers and the Islamic date. They are hardly, I think, great works of art. They look as though they have been painted by not terribly gifted oriental pupils at the atelier of Veronese, say, being very rich in colour and detail (pet terriers, mirrors, the House of the Chinese Master in one background, the harbour islands in another) but queerly lifeless in effect. I suspect myself that the artists were Chinese; for they remind me of paintings done for European clients in Canton in the eighteenth century, though their technique is far more sophisticated and their subjects are altogether more sumptuous. The Havians are immensely proud of them, and forbid their copying or reproduction — but that may be only a relic of the days when their very existence was kept a secret, lest Islamic zealots harm them.