Crusader by horse to jer.., p.29
Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem, page 29
Our first obstacle, even as we began to climb the foothills, was a gorge where a river had cut through a protective layer of hard rock to gouge a 200-foot-deep gash in the soft earth underneath. Twenty-ton rectangular lumps of rock had broken away from the lid and fallen on to the soft scree slope below, where they lay like stranded toboggans waiting to slide farther. Mystery was sluggish as we descended the slope. She moved awkwardly and the moment we reached the valley floor and found a meadow, she lay down, not to roll, but to curl up looking thoroughly ill at ease. We coaxed her back on her feet, but she did not want to stand. A minute later she buckled at the knees and dropped down again on the ground with an unhappy grunt. Zippy was hardly more enthusiastic. He had flopped down on the grass and was lying flat. We went over to check on him and lifted up his head, but when we let go, he let his head fall back limply like a doll empty of stuffing. We had no idea what the matter was, or what to do. After the recent rest interval in Kayseri, the animals should have been fit and well, and there was no sign of a colic. We began to worry that they had contracted some disease, and so after lunch crept on gingerly. Zippy seemed to be feeling better, but Mystery was too ill to be ridden and for the next few miles I trudged along beside her while the poor little mare plodded miserably, head sagging and distress in every line of her body.
Once again I was painfully aware how little we could do. There was no shelter anywhere, so we could not stop, and veterinary help was unobtainable in such a remote part of the world. As we dragged our way out of the gorge and back on to the level, still heading towards the mountains, a strong wind blew up and whisked fine dust and sand into our faces. By the time we reached Taf, the little town at the foot of the first hills, we were all short-tempered, weary and spitting dust. In the town no one seemed to be able to offer shelter, until a kindly bus driver took us into his home. Nearly two hundred years previously, he told us, an entire caravan had been trapped nearby by a blizzard early in the season. Men, women, children, horses and pack animals, had all perished. Some had been smothered by the snow, others had found refuge in nearby caves only to starve to death. In the spring the local villagers had found not one person alive, only the corpses where they lay. 'There's much gold to be found there, claimed our host, 'but the police and the gendarmes forbid anyone to search and dig.'
This hope of finding gold, either buried treasure or raw nuggets in the mountains, fascinated the country folk everywhere we went in Turkey. Repeatedly we heard rumours of lost gold mines in the hills or hidden caches of bullion. The villagers loved to believe such tales, and there was always a tremor of excitement whenever we produced our copies of the old Ottoman maps. 'Do they show where gold is found?' we were asked again and again, and they would eagerly pore over the maps, confident that in olden days men had marked gold mines on their maps. We had to explain that this was not so, but there was never any real disappointment. The villagers were always happy to discover when their own little hamlet was marked on the map, and doubly thrilled if it was given its original Ottoman name.
In fact there must have been some gold-bearing ore in the mountains because soon after we left Taf and began to penetrate the foothills, we came across four men standing in a river bed, laboriously scraping up the gravel with shovels. Over the rush of water they did not hear the slip and clatter of horses' hooves, as we were riding up the riverbed itself, and they reacted guiltily, wondering who we could be. Their leader, a tall dark-skinned man with a gold tooth and jet black hair, at first pretended not to know any Turkish. He may have been a Kurd or perhaps an Arab-speaker from the south, but we eventually prised out of him the lame excuse that they were 'gathering stones for building material' an obvious fiction as no truck could possibly have penetrated into such a remote spot. Anyway, the men had been working far too delicately, sifting through each shovelful of sediment, obviously looking for grains of alluvial gold.
The river water was beautifully clean and limpid, and at first I thought it owed its clarity to new meltwater draining down from the mountain snows and glaciers, but as we rode around the next corner we came upon the birth of the river itself. By a geological freak it emerged direct from the mountain flank. The opposite bank was a nearly vertical wall of slate, and from fissures in the rock the entire river foamed out, thousands of gallons every second, gushing out and tumbling down the slope in a roaring cascade of suds.
We clattered on up the stream bed which was merely a trickle above the waterfall, then scrambled up the bank and across a long slope through the last of the mountain hamlets, half-abandoned and in ruins. Beyond that point there was no permanent settlement, only the summer huts of shepherds. As we rode along the flank of the mountain, again a chill wind was gusting from the south and driving into our faces. We had to squint to see the way ahead, and the horses snorted to clear the dust from their nostrils. To our left the dry riverbed we had recently followed, had deepened and narrowed into an impressive abyss and, level with us across the open gap about half a mile in a direct line, we could see a single file of cattle being driven diagonally across the opposite valley face on their way to pasture. If we had shouted, we might have been heard by them, yet to walk to that same point, down into the gorge and up the far slope, would have taken two or three hours of toil. Our own path, littered with half-buried rocks, seemed an unlikely place for any road, yet we noted occasionally the grooves of wheel ruts worn in the rock where generations of travellers before us had used this same corridor.
At lunchtime we sheltered in a small, rocky bowl, away from the wind. Sarah was again sickly, with the result that her usually cheerful, if caustic, remarks had turned to plain rudeness, even to strangers, and her temper flared easily. In a black humour she rode along as if the mountains were the last place on earth where she wanted to be, and I wondered whether she would quit the journey when we came to the next town. After less than half a mile we came upon half-a-dozen black and dark brown tents pitched along the edge of a great sweep of mountain pasture. They were the homes of the Hatay nomads, pastoralists from the hot lands near the Syrian border a hundred miles away. Year after year they brought their cattle and sheep to the same grazing grounds that they rented from the villagers living in the foothills. The men all wore baggy trousers, suit jackets and the commonplace cloth flat hat of workaday Turkish male dress, while the women were much more colourful in bright pyjama pantaloons, heavy shirts and turbans. Their children scampered around, some of them clutching, like living soft toys, three-day-old lambs. The ring marks of cooking fires and hearths speckled the turf where the tents had been pitched in the same favoured spots year after year, and for the entire summer they would stay on the yayla, the high pasture, grazing their cattle and sheep, shearing wool, and — at this early part of the season — raising lambs and milking the ewes to make a soft white cheese that would be found on sale in every city in Turkey. The shepherds, armed with shotguns, worked in shifts to watch over the flocks and herds, the women gossiped, gathered brushwood and tended the cooking fires, youths gathered to play football in a dell. The cheesemakers set up their boiling cauldrons, trays and stocks of empty square tins by a stream where they could cool the whey. Very occasionally someone would have to go into town to collect drums of diesel fuel for the small tractors and trailers they used to haul water in tubs to their flocks, but otherwise the nomads were self-sufficient. There was no post, no television, no hospital, no tax collectors, no government officials of any kind.
There was much interest as we unsaddled the horses and began to set up the little lightweight tent in a gap between two of the big tents. 'That won't keep out the rain,' observed one critic as I erected the inner canopy of mosquito netting on its hoops, and the others chuckled. But when I flipped over the waterproof cover, and they realised it had taken no more than three or four minutes to pitch, they clustered round to finger the cloth and see how the tent was constructed. It was an ideal moment to ask for expert advice about Zippy's swollen withers, because the nomads constantly used pack animals and might know what was wrong.
I pointed out Zippy's bloated shoulders which had begun to look really grotesque, and a small, squat man, obviously the head of one of the families, turned over the little pack saddle and felt the edge of one of the cross bars. Clearly he thought it was too close to the saddle pad, and he wanted me to shave away the wood. After I had whittled it down to his satisfaction, he sent his wife to the tent to fetch a strip of felt, a length of string and a six-inch pack needle. Kneeling over the saddle he stitched an extra pad of felt to the suspect cross bar, and assured me that the saddle would now fit Zippy. I was not so confident, the swelling was so bad that the pack saddle was bound to press on the tender flesh. Yet there was no sign of a boil or a centre to the infection that I could lance. The ridge of Zippy's shoulder was ballooning up from what was obviously a deep-seated infection, close to the bone. Gloomily I had checked the veterinary manual which told me that Zippy's problem was 'Fistulous withers: a very serious complaint, and the veterinary surgeon should be called in immediately. He may be able to remove all the diseased tissue by operation. Neglected cases are often impossible to cure. The external application of poultices or blisters is useless.'
When we had picketed the horses, Sarah and I were invited into one of the great black tents. Inside it was as large as a good-sized living room, carpeted and with cushions stacked around the outer wall. A fire burned on a patch of bare earth near the entrance, and since the tent lacked any chimney, the rising smoke oozed out through the coarsely woven fabric giving the eerie impression from the outside that the entire structure was on fire. Two or three new-born lambs nestled in dark corners of the tent, cooking utensils and miscellaneous packages were tidied away in a corner, and we were once again cross-questioned about our journey, our homeland, the reason for our travels. It turned out that the nomads had arrived only ten days earlier, and this was the beginning of the yayla season. Twenty years ago they would have walked with their flocks for two or three weeks, exchanging the stifling heat of the southlands for the cool pastures of the mountains. Now they hired a convoy of trucks and travelled in a day and a half, with all the sheep, goats, cattle and donkeys, tents, and chattels they would need for a five-month stay in the high pasture.
They kept us talking until long after nightfall, and when, finally, we felt we could tactfully return to our own tiny tent, it was impossible to sleep. A brace of half-wild mules resented the intrusion of strange horses. Every twenty minutes they came rushing out of the dark to attack our animals with a great braying and squealing. Attached to picket pins our horses were at a disadvantage, especially Mystery who was puzzled as to what was happening. Zippy could take care of himself despite his small size, but best of all was Szarcsa. In the moonlight I glimpsed the superb sight of his elderly black shadow, head down and lashing out with both heels like a three-year-old. The racket was appalling: eeh-hawing of mules, screaming of horses, a baby woken and crying in the nearby tent, bleating of sheep, donkeys braying in sympathy, and the frenzied barking of the huge guard dogs with their spiked iron collars. There was no peace in the yayla that night.
The nomads had told us that by following the Dry River, their name for the deep valley, we would find a way through the first range of mountains. It was a memorable ride. With mountain crests towering up on each side, the gorge was so narrow that often we were forced to ride in the shallows, splashing in and out of the stream bed. Whenever there was level ground on the banks, we passed small herds of cows, guarded by boys who had so little to do, for the animals could not possibly escape from the narrow valley, that the lads lay on their backs fast asleep or went swimming in the pools. A shepherd crossed the stream ahead of us, using rocks as stepping stones. Draped over his shoulders he was carrying a lamb. He looked as if he had walked straight from a stained glass window depicting the good shepherd and the rescued lamb.
The track was so narrow that it was difficult to believe this had been a Roman road. Legionnaires, Byzantine troops and the Crusaders after them could not have marched more than four abreast through the narrowest defiles, and an army would have been strung over several miles, slipping and stumbling over the boulders. Yet just beside the trail we found a Roman roadmarker, a broken column that had once stood beside the track to advise the passerby that this section of the road had been repaired and improved in the second century AD.
The Dry River carried us through the most difficult range of mountains and we emerged into hill country where isolated valleys were ploughed for crops. Here we passed more Hatay people, some of them with herds of splendid black goats with long glossy hair. At one secluded spot a poacher was washing the markings off a stolen sheep. Each animal was marked on its back with a daub of coloured paint as an owner's brand, and this poor creature had fallen into the wrong hands, for it was being held down in the shallows while its captor briskly tried to scrub off the paint with a handful of gravel. He then rinsed the animal by swishing it back and forth in the water despite its alarmed struggles. When the job was finally done, the poacher released his victim the right way up and it staggered off, weighed down and soggy, on wobbly legs.
We passed through Sar, and as if Roman road markers had not been enough, found the little town had a Roman temple on the outskirts, a Roman theatre by the river, and a Roman forum with tall ornate columns. Leaving the town we startled two peasant women who unexpectedly turned out into the narrow lane from a gate ahead of us. The lane was very deep-set with high banks, and as the two women chatted they did not hear the horses coming up right behind them. At the last moment they sensed our presence and turned to find the alarming sight of two outlandish riders and the three horses looming over them. Where we could have come from must have been a mystery because behind us were only the wild mountains. Alarmed, the two women shrank back against the earth bank, and as we passed I heard one hiss to the other, with awe and horror in her voice, 'Yabangi!' — 'foreigners'. We must have seemed like aliens from the wilderness.
The town of Göksun, the Crusaders' Coxon, was a rough-hewn place which gave the impression that everyone in town was either a hard-boiled local or someone passing through, and no one ever halted for more than a single night. The single main street was lined with the shop fronts of grain stores, dry goods shops, a shabby hotel, the bakery and various groceries and several nondescript eating places. At the main crossroads a cluster of horse-drawn carts waited, their drivers hoping for hire. Zippy's withers were looking ever more gruesome. On previous days the hump over the abscess had reduced in size during each day's walking, only to puff up to its grosser shape during the night. Now, despite his reshaped saddle with the extra padding, the swelling had barely gone down at all during the day, and he winced and squirmed as I probed gently to find the centre of the infection. We had already reduced his load to a minimum, and, when we could, sent his saddle and the packs ahead by road so that he could walk along with a bare back. The shelter in Göksun for the animals was a tiny low stable so hot and stifling that during the night the warmth brought Zippy's boil to breaking point. In the morning we found the abscess had burst. A streak of yellow pus was running down his side from a seeping split in the hump. When I touched the flesh, gobbets of blood and putrefaction gushed out, and poor Zippy went wild with the pain.
Now was the time to try to clean the wound and try to mend him, whatever the veterinary manual warned about the difficulties of curing such a deep-seated and major abscess without expert help. The manual had been written before the days of antibiotics, and if we could find the right drug we might be able to control the infection once the wound was thoroughly clean. The problem, of course, was that Zippy was hard to control. If anyone approached his painful withers, he spun about and lashed out with his heels. If Sarah held his head and picked up a hoof to immobilise him, he thrashed about frantically until he broke free, or circled around and crushed me against a post. But we had to clean out the wound at all costs and so we wrestled with him for half an hour with only partial success. The quantity of pus was appalling, and Sarah did well to prevent herself from throwing up at the sight. However much we worked, there still seemed to be more putrefaction to come out and, as the manual had warned, the position of the abscess made it virtually impossible to bring the poison upwards to the surface.
The logical solution was to turn Zippy upside down, or at least lie him flat, to get the discharge to drain. Tipping up our poor little brat required the help of two burly Turks and the horse-handling techniques of a carter who appeared with a soft, thick cotton rope. They stood Zippy in the yard, tied the rope around one hindfoot, and then led it diagonally forward to loop it around the opposite forefoot. Next they pulled smoothly on the rope until the hind front was drawn forward, and swiftly looped the rope tightly around the second forefoot. Zippy now stood balanced precariously on three legs. Then the horse-handler cast a turn of rope around the remaining free hindfoot and tugged. All four feet came together and Zippy bent at the knees and folded to the ground in much the same motion as a horse would normally lie down. A Turk dropped across him at each end, at head and tail, pinning him to the ground despite his athletic wriggles and heaves, and I was able to remove what seemed like a cupful more of pus from his abscess. When I was satisfied we had done the best we could, we let Zippy scramble back on his feet. He was rumpled, offended, and covered in dust and sported a black eye, but the relief from the constant pain was evident.
