Moved by the tragic splendour of this gesture, Saladin ordered that in honour of the minstrel, and of the Christian knights themselves, the lament should be sung each morning, from the same place, immediately after the call to prayer. The Arabs never did master the words of the song, which concerned the immolation of a group of otherwise forgotten Gascon men-at-arms, but the melody they subtly adapted until it sounded almost Muslim itself, and at dawn each day, throughout the long centuries of Islamic rule, it was sung from Katourian’s Place. The British, during their half-century in Hav after the Napoleonic wars, substituted a trumpeter for the muezzin’s voice; the Russians who followed honoured the old tradition, and the governors of the Tripartite Mandate, after them. And so it was that on my first morning I was hastening towards my opening revelation of the city to the echo of a dirge from the European Middle Ages.
I passed through the deserted station (the train still standing there lifeless) and stepped into the yellowish mist of the great square outside. I could hardly see across it — just a suggestion of great buildings opposite, and to my right the mass of the Castle looming in a dim succession of stairs, terraces, curtain walls and gateways, only the very top of the immense central keep, Beynac’s Keep, being touched with the golden sunshine of the morning. Though I could hear not far away a deep muffled rumble, as of an army moving secretly through the dawn, the square itself was utterly empty; but even as I stood there, striding down the last steps from the Castle came the trumpeter himself, down from the heights, his instrument under his arm, huddled in a long brown greatcoat against the misty damp.
‘Merhaba, trumpeter!’ I accosted him. ‘I am Jan Morris from Wales, on my very first morning in Hav!’
He answered in kind. ‘And I am Missakian the trumpeter,’ he laughed. ‘Merhaba, good morning to you!’
‘Missakian! You’re Armenian?’
‘But naturally. The trumpeters of Hav always are. You know the legend of Katourian? Well, then you will understand’ — and after an exchange of pleasantries, expressing the hope that we might meet again, ‘not quite so early in the morning, perhaps’, trumpet under his arm, he resumed his progress across the square.
Which reminded me, as the mist began to lift, of somewhere like Cracow or Kiev, so grey and cobbled did it seem to be, and so immense. It was hardly worth exploring then, so instead I followed that rumble, which seemed to have its focus somewhere away to my left, and found myself in a mesh of sidestreets I knew not where, joining the extraordinary procession of traffic that makes its way each morning to Hav’s ancient market on the waterfront. Pendeh Square, the great central plaza of the city, is closed to all traffic until seven in the morning, but the thoroughfares around it, I discovered, were already clogged with all manner of vehicles. There were pick-up trucks with brightly painted sides. There were motorbikes toppling with the weight of their loaded sidecars. There were private cars with milk-churns on their roofs. Men in wide straw hats and striped cotton gallabiyehs and women in headscarves and long black skirts lolloped along on pony carts, and a string of mules passed by, weighed down with firewood. They moved, for all the noise of their engines and the rattle of their wheels on the cobblestones, in a kind of hush, very deliberately; and I found myself caught up in the steady press of it, stared at curiously but without comment, until we all debouched into the wide market-place at the water’s edge, where fishing-boats were moored bow to stern along the quay, and where as the sun broke through the morning fog all was already bustle and flow.
In every city the morning market, the very first thing to happen every day, offers a register of the public character. Few offer so violent a first impression as the waterside market of Hav. Apparently unregulated, evidently immemorial, it seemed to me that morning partly like a Marseilles fish-wharf, and partly like the old Covent Garden, and partly like a flea-market, for there seemed to be almost nothing, at six in the morning, that was not there on sale. Everything was inextricably confused. One stall might be hung all over with umbrellas and plastic galoshes, the next piled high with celery and boxes of edible grass. There were mounds of apples, artistically arranged, there were stacks of boots and racks of sunglasses and rows of old radios. There were spare parts for cars, suitcases with images of the pyramids embossed upon them, rolls of silk, nylon underwear in yellows and sickly pinks, brass trays, Chinese medicines, hubble-bubbles, coffee beans in vast tin containers, souvenirs of Mecca or Istanbul, second-hand-book stalls with grubby old volumes in many languages — I looked inside a copy of Moby Dick, and stamped within its covers were the words ‘Property of the American University, Beirut’.
In a red-roofed shed near the water, shirtsleeved butchers were at work, chopping bloody limbs and carcasses, skinning sheep and goats before my eyes; and there were living sheep too, of a brownish tight-curled wool, and chickens in crude wicker baskets, and pigeons in coops. Women shawled and bundled against the cold sold cups of steaming soup. On the quay Greek fishermen offered direct from their boats fish still flapping in their boxes, mucous eels, writhing lobsters, prawns, urchins, sponges and buckets of what looked like phosphorescent plankton.
Almost any language, I discovered, would get you by in Hav — not just Turkish, but Italian, French, Arabic, English at a pinch, even Chinese. This was Pero Tafur’s ‘Lesser Babel’! Some people were dressed Turkish-style in sombre dark suits with cloth caps, many wore those wide hats and cotton robes, rather like North Africans, some were dark and gypsy-looking, a few were Indian, some were high-cheeked like Mongols, and some, long-haired and medieval of face, wearing drab mixtures of jeans, raincoats and old bits of khaki uniform, I took to be the Kretevs, the cave-dwellers of the escarpment. Tousled small dogs ran about the place; the Greeks on their boats laughed and shouted badinage to each other. Moving importantly among the stalls, treated with serious respect by the most bawdy of the fishermen, the most brutal of the butchers, I saw a solitary European, in a grey suit and a panama hat, who seemed to go about his business, choosing mutton here, fruit there, in a style that was almost scholarly.
He was followed by a pair of Chinese, who saw to it when their boss had made his decisions that his choice was picked from its tank, cut from its hook or removed unbruised from its counter, and placed in the porter’s trolley behind; and I followed the little cortège through the meat market, along the line of the fishing-boats, to the jetty beyond the market. A spanking new motor-launch was moored there, blue and cream, like an admiral’s barge, with a smart Chinese sailor in a blue jersey waiting at the wheel, and another at the prow with his boathook across his arms. Gently into the well, amidships, went the crates of victuals; the European adeptly stepped aboard; and with a snarl of engines the boat backed from the quay, turned in a wide foamy curve, and sped away down the harbour towards the sea.