Although our business in Ladhiqiyya was finished early in the evening we did not leave until much later; Suwaydiyya was only three or four hours away and Bembel Rudzuk wanted to arrive with the dawn rather than in the middle of the night. ‘Dawn is the best time for coming into port,’ he said, ‘and I always allow myself this pleasure when coming home.’
The feeble lamp-glimmers of the coast shifted subtly in our passing and were swallowed in obscurity. I looked up at the sky but the Virgin and the Lion were not to be seen, there were no stars, the night was opaque; this was already November and the rainy season. ‘Would the Virgin and the Lion be visible if the sky were clear?’ I asked Bembel Rudzuk.
‘No,’ he said, ‘they are below the horizon now.’
Towards morning it began to rain, and it was in the grey rainlight that Suwaydiyya offered to us the shapes of dawn all dark and huddled, the low waterside buildings curtained with rain, the water of the harbour leaping up in points to meet the downpour, the dawn boats rocking to the morning slap of the water on their sides, furled sails wet with dawn and rain and still heavy with night, crews sheltering under awnings, the smoke of their breakfast fires ghostly in the rain. And as always all of it, the whole picture in the eyes, had without seeming to come closer grown smoothly bigger in that particular way in which things reveal themselves when approached by sea, opening to the approacher more and more detail, more and more imminence of what is to come. And always, thus approaching, one feels the new day, the new place, coming forward to read the face of the approacher. Always the held breath, the questioning look of the grey morning, the seclusion of the rain.
On boarding Bembel Rudzuk’s dhow I had noticed the name painted on the bows in Arabic characters but I had not asked what that name was; I didn’t want to know. Having already been transferred from the Balena to Nineveh and having so far proclaimed nothing whatever on behalf of the Lord I preferred not to be aware of any further names of significance for a time; I wished if possible to be reabsorbed into the ordinary. But no sooner had we stepped ashore than I noticed again the Arabic characters painted on the bows, my mouth opened and was already asking Bembel Rudzuk what the name was before I could stop it.
‘Sophia,’ he said.
Horses were brought and we rode to Antioch, a dozen or so miles up the Orontes. The rain lessened into a dull brightness, that particular dull brightness that is always a little frightening in its blank revelation: one perceives that there is nowhere anything ordinary; there is only the extraordinary. It was from miles away that I first saw Mount Silpius and the many-towered walls ascending from the plain where stood the houses, domes, and minarets of Antioch on the River Orontes. Bigger and bigger in my eyes grew the mountain and the towered walls, the tawny towered walls and high up on the mountain the tawny citadel with its green-and-gold banner hanging motionless in the dull brightness. The mountain itself was browny purple, then blue-green tawny. Everything in that land was tawny either over or under whatever colour else it had. A lion-coloured land.
The mountain! Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself. The first sight of any mountain is the actuality of its strangeness. Let Mount Silpius stand for all strange mountains as it manifests itself in the grey light of morning, as it shows its purple shadows and its tawny dust darkened by the rain, as it shows its strangeness and its dread. That Moses was given the Tables of the Law on a mountain is significant: every mountain is the dreadful mountain of the Law, there move over it the thunder and the lightnings, there move on it the smoke and fire, there sounds from it the trumpet of the dreadful summons. The dread is that now is Now, that here is Here, that everything that is actually is, and everything is irrevocably moving.
With the mountain continually in my eyes I entered that city quick with life, with sound and motion and colour; that city quick with wealth, quick with thought. I understood immediately what it was: it was what in one form or another comes between the pilgrim and Jerusalem. One says, ‘“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem!”’ and then one forgets Jerusalem and life for a time is sweet in Antioch. I wanted to embrace everything — domes and minarets and the shadows of awnings, even the cynical camels with their swaying loads of the goods of this world. In my heart I embraced the Mittelteufel, I said, ‘Perhaps there is no Jerusalem, perhaps nothing is required of me. Perhaps there is only Antioch.’
Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘There is Jerusalem, and whatever is required of you is required; but in this present moment is Antioch and you are here to do what will be done by you here.’ The air in the courtyard of Bembel Rudzuk’s house was misted by a fountain, passing, passing, not for ever. ‘We are brothers,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, and embraced me.
‘What am I?’ I said. ‘I am a eunuch, I am cut off from my generations, I am not a man, I am nothing.’ I wept by the silvery plashing of the fountain.
Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘What say your Holy Scriptures? “Let not the eunuch say, I am a dry tree.”’
‘But I am a dry tree,’ I said.
‘Listen!’ said Bembel Rudzuk. He had got a Greek Bible and was reading to me:
‘Thus saith the Lord to the eunuchs,
as many as shall keep my sabbaths,
and choose the things which I take pleasure in,
and take hold of my covenant; I will give to them
in my house and within my walls an honourable place,
better than sons and daughters: I will give them an everlasting
name, and it shall not fail.’
‘In the Hebrew it doesn’t say “fail”,’ I said. ‘In the Hebrew it says “be cut off”:
‘Even unto them will I give in my house
and within my walls a monument and a memorial
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting memorial,
that shall not be cut off.
‘Tell me if you can, what everlasting memorial is there better than sons and daughters? And how shall it not be cut off?’
‘Better than sons and daughters is to be with the stillness that is always becoming motion,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘And in being with this stillness-into-motion there is a continuity that is not cut off.’
The words rattled on my head like pebbles on a roof. ‘Where am I?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘In the dark wood with murderers, with the headless corpse of the tax-collector and the maggots I knew where I was,’ I said. ‘I had a whereness to be in. Now I don’t know where I am, I don’t have where to be.’
‘Let me show you something,’ he said. Taking me into the house he pointed to a geometric pattern of tiles ornamenting the front of a dais. ‘Look,’ he said.
I looked. The pattern went its way as such patterns do.
‘This pattern is contiguous with infinity,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Once the mode of repetition is established the thing goes on for ever. It is apparently stopped by its border but in actuality it never stops.’
I said, ‘You mean in potentiality, don’t you? Potentially it could continue although actually it stops.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘where does one draw the line between potentiality and actuality? It isn’t as if we’re looking at a rain cloud and we say, “Potentially it could rain but actually it isn’t raining.” This is something else: with patterns when you say what can be, you’re describing what already is. Patterns cannot be originated, they can only be taken notice of. When a pattern shows itself in tiles or on paper or in your mind and says, “This is the mode of my repetition; in this manner can I extend myself to infinity,” it has already done so, it has already been infinite from the very first moment of its being; the potentiality and the actuality are one thing. If two and two can be four then they already are four, you can only perceive it, you have no part in making it happen by writing it down in numbers or telling it out in pebbles. When we draw on paper or lay out in tiles a pattern that we have not seen before we are only recording something that has always been happening; the air all around us, the earth we stand on, the very particles of our being are continually active with an unimaginable multiplicity of patterns, all of them contiguous with infinity.’