The High Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

Syrians accounted for permission to buy
Kasr-el-Sittat, and their subsequent freedom from any government interference. The inhabitants of the valleys, who were used to naked power and had learned to walk delicately, were well aware that
town officials might with every excuse pretend to be ignorant of what went on in so remote a district, and that the colony, if it wished, could be as arbitrary as their late and not much lamented
God. They did not care to discuss such unbounded possibilities.
    Among my friends was Captain Ashkar of the Syrian Gendarmerie, who was in charge of the mounted patrols along the western section of the Turkish frontier—a tangle of forest and little
precipitous foothills through which none ever passed but the smugglers and Ashkar’s troopers. His headquarters were well back from the frontier, and easily accessible from Djisr-ech-Choghour,
a god-forsaken village where the road from Latakia to the great plain of northern Syria crosses the Orontes.
    I had not seen Ashkar for some months, and on my way home from Aleppo to Tripoli I decided to call on him. Be­tween dusk and midday he might be out with his patrols or inspecting frontier
posts or visiting his agents; but in the after­noon he was always to he found sitting outside the comfortable cottage where he had billeted himself and regarding the hills and his horses with
idle benevolence. He slept when and wherever there was a chance to sleep; and I suppose that in his life of waiting for something to happen on the spot where it was likely to happen, his odd hours
of sleep added up to a sufficient total.
    Ashkar was in his late forties. He had begun his military training under the Turks and completed it, with honour, under the French. He looked like a stocky, greying, French colonial officer,
though he was of the purest mountain blood—Canaanite rather than Arab—and had a fleshy hooked nose that might have come straight off an Assyrian statue. He was a Christian, and held his
post in a country of Mohammedans and Alaouites merely because the government knew he would favour neither of them. So good a soldier should have been at least a colonel, but he had never been
popular with the politicians of his own nation; he had served the French a little too faithfully, and he was renowned for scrupulous honesty. I won’t say that honesty actually told against
him, but it deprived him of the suppleness, the little touches of diplomacy, which were necessary for advancement.
    As I drove cautiously over the bare, water-worn rock into which his village road had degenerated, I looked forward to his solid welcome and to his geniality over a jug of the heavy, dry country
wine. He shared my perverted taste for the stuff, and we would argue fantastically for and against the bouquets of cow-dung, charcoal or tobacco flowers which gave character to the wine according
to the barns where it had been made and stored.
    His reception of me had the warmth that I expected, but as soon as I steered the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, telling him that I had stayed there and been most favourably impressed, he became
polite and ceremonious. To any stranger passing the cobbled forecourt where we sat, especially if the stranger had been a European, we should have appeared the closest of friends; yet the proper
note of intimacy had vanished. When I admired a pure-bred Arab three-year-old which some friendly official in Damascus had just sent him as a remount, he kept on insisting that it was mine to take
away without even the twinkle in his eye which would have told me he knew his offer to be conventional nonsense.
    It was obvious that Ashkar shared the general sense of caution in discussing Kasr-el-Sittat, and this was the more sur­prising since, in the cause of law and order, he feared neither
influence nor superstition nor the complexities of high policy. In the bad old days of Kasr-el-Sittat he himself had upended the bare soles of God’s feet, when no one