In Xanadu Read Online Free PDF

themselves, preferring to live with a little Italy of their own creation, disdaining the ways and habits of the other Franks. It may just have been my imagination, but I thought that Acre still had a slightly Italian feel to it. Its coarse mediaeval stonework, the peeling stucco, the play of light and shade in the piazzas, the smell of baking bread, the horseshoe are of the sea walls - all this brought back memories of Italian sea potts.
    One hundred yards in from the sea front was the Khan al-Alfranj. The han was a fourteenth-century Mameluke structure, but stands on the site (and incorporates much of the masonry) of the Venetian funduq, the caravanserai where the Polos would almost certainly have lodged during their visits to Ac e. During the months of the passagium, between Easter and late-autumn, the han would have been full of sea captains, merchants and sailors. Here they would wake and sleep, eat and drink, buy and sell, free from the laws and customs of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is a quiet place now. You enter the compound under a narrow arch of red and white polychrome keystones, past a pair of old metal-reinforced gates still hanging from their original rusty hinges. The windows are covered with white-painted shutters, there is washing hung up from the balconies. There is a faint sound of hammering from a coppersmith's shop. Along three sides of the han are lines of blocked-up, eliptical arches, left open on the fourth side to provide shelter for upturned dinghies, tangles of netting, lobster pots, and a single ancient car, now pillaged of its seats, headlights, windshield, and driving wheel.
    When the Polos came here for the last time in November I27|, the months of the passagium were past and the han must have been almost deserted, just as it was now. Sitting down in a last pool of evening light to write up the logbook I wondered what Marco must have felt the night before he was due to set off from the relatively familiar world of the westernized Crusader Kingdom, into the unknown Orient. He was about the same age as I and presumably of similar inclination. Nor was the world we lived in so very different. There was a remarkable similarity, for example, between the Crusader Kingdom and the State of Israel. They had similar boundaries, boih were ruled from Jerusalem, and both were effectively supported by the West. Taking advantage of Arab disunity, they were both established by force and maintained by violence. They faced the same problems: Arab aggression outside, insufficient numbers within. In both, Arab and newcomer tended not to mix or intermarry: religion and culture divide the two now as it did then.
    As we left the Khan al-Afranj we were invited into the shop of an Arab terzi (tailor). There we drank cay and talked about the problems of the Arabs in Acre, then as now, better integrated than most places: Ibn Jubayr remarked on this in the twelfth century while Hamoudi, who exhibited all the vices of the West in one body, is evidence of it today. The terzi was a tall man, unshaven, shambolic and friendly. But when I asked him about his relations with the Jews he was surprisingly eloquent.
    "We live in peace in Acre,' he said. 'Here the Jew and the Arab are friends. On Saturday nights the Jews come here, play cards, smoke and drink coffee. The people want peace. Only the government does not."
'What do you mean?'
    'We live here under an undeclared apartheid. It is just like South Africa. For the Jews there is democracy. They have freedom of speech, they can vote for whichever government they like, can go where they like and talk to whom they like. For us it is different. We are here on sufferance. We are called into police stations if we are heard talking about politics. We are never sure we will get justice in court: if we have a plea against a Jew, then probably we will not. We are not allowed to join the army in case we turn sides. Because of this we cannot get any good jobs; for these you need security