Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Instead, he plunged ahead hoping that soon his contingent would break out of the swampy land, and as the trees—those menacing emblems of this strange land—crept down upon him he promised himself one thing: If we conquer this land I shall certainly cut down these trees. A man needs open space. And again he longed for the desert where a man could see ahead of him and behind. “There are only two trees in this world worth keeping,” he muttered to himself. “Olives and date palms.” He was oppressed by the trees, and when birds exploded out of them, frightening his horses and startling his men, he saw yet another reason for getting rid of them. “I want to sleep tonight where there are no trees,” he instructed his lieutenant when they stopped to rest the camels. Those lumbering beasts, having drunk that morning in Tabariyyah, looked upon the swamp water with disdain, but the horses tasted of it, drawing back in fear when frogs jumped past them.

“La ilaha ilia Allah” Abd Umar repeated softly to himself as he resumed his transit of the swamp. “There is no God but Allah.” It was a rubric of Muhammad’s which fascinated men, its poetry matching its philosophy, and it summed up all that Abd Umar now believed. As he wandered along the last portion of the distracting swamp he repeated the formula automatically, “La ilaha ilia Allah,” satisfied that it would protect him from the dangers of the forest, and it was in this kind of hypnosis, thinking of things permanent, that he led his men around a final bend in the path to a spot where the dark waters ended and where there were no more snakes or frogs; and as he saw firm land opening before him, and the approaches to Makor, his mind at last apprehended in solid form the vague intimations that had been formulating in the swamp.

Like most of the early followers of Muhammad, Abd Umar had begun by interpreting the Prophet’s religion as no more than a personal experience undergone by Muhammad—no one could stand near this charismatic general, this servant of God, without acknowledging his leadership—but there had been much speculation as to what would happen when he died; and Abd Umar had been among those who had expected the movement to collapse. He would never forget that mournful day on which the Prophet had actually died: he had wept like a child, for his world had come to an end, but old Abu Bakr had come from the death tent bringing the words that made continued life possible: “Those of you who worshiped Muhammad must know that he is dead like any man, but those of you who worshiped God know that He lives forever.” And it was this continuity of God that had given Arabs like Abd Umar the power to go forward.

“I shall never return to the desert,” he whispered to himself as he left the swamp. “Today we shall conquer Makor and, in a little while, Akka, and there I will take a boat and sail to islands and to kingdoms … I, who have never seen the sea.” And he visualized in general terms the magnitude of the venture upon which he was engaged: the extension of Arabia’s religion throughout the world. If he was saying farewell to the mysterious swamp which terrified his camels and horses, he was likewise saying farewell to the desert, where his camels and horses had roamed hopefully toward endless horizons.

“Those deserts I shall see no more,” he said, accepting the finality of God’s decision. “La ilaha ilia Allah,” he intoned, for if there was but one God, and if He directed all, it was best to accept His dictates. If God led a half-Negro slave through the dangerous swamps and trees, He had the right to say where that slave should go next.

Will I ever see my wives again? Abd Umar wondered, visualizing those women who had always remained with his children in Medina. Like Muhammad he had married a Negro woman from Ethiopia and she was his beloved, but he also protected the daughter of Sulayman and the sister of Khaled Yezd the warrior. Would they, in some mysterious manner, be able to follow him across the seas, running to him in some unknown city, with bare feet and children clinging to their skirts?

The Damascus road lay just ahead and scouts were shouting from their newly mounted camels that all was well. Makor must lie beyond that hill, the one covered with trees. The forced march through the swamp had succeeded, and the battle, if there was to be one, would be engaged in a few minutes. “La ilaha ilia Allah” Abd Umar muttered, climbing aboard his own camel and checking the horses. But as he entered upon that most ancient of roads upon which the invaders of this region had always traveled, he found its solid footing reassuring, and only briefly did he reflect upon his discovery that the years ahead were to be remote and battle-filled and lonely: When we take the town I’d like to find a good slave girl … or perhaps a young widow. He added this afterthought because Muhammad himself had taken eleven wives, and ten of them had been widows, and few men in Arabia had known a happier domestic life than the Prophet.

Within the doomed precincts of Makor the pagans waited, and even the dullest realized that for them the coming of Islam could signify only the end of one world and the beginning of a new. Who were these pagans who had resisted the pressure of Judaism and the proselytizing zed of Christians like Father Eusebius? Some had joined the fire worship of the Persians when the latter swept through Palestine some twenty years before, holding it briefly as part of their empire. Others, slaves imported from the upper reaches of the Nile, remained faithful to their river god Serapis, and a sturdy few, whose ancestors could be traced back to the cave men who had sprung from this rocky mound, remained faithful to Baal.

Incredible as it may seem, these resolute men and women of Baal had withstood the full onslaught of Egyptian, Jewish, Christian and Persian persuasion, plus the temptations of a dozen other religious powers, including Antiochus Epiphanes and Caesar Augustus, remaining loyal to the primitive god of the mountain. On dark nights, at the equinoxes and at the ripening of the olive groves, these determined pagans still climbed the mountain back of town where monoliths remained only in memory, and there they worshiped the permanent god of Makor.

When the Byzantines stationed soldiers on the mountain with orders to kill any pagans coming to worship Baal, the tough old Canaanites stayed inside the town and whispered to each other the oldest and best-kept secret of the village: their fathers had been told by their fathers that directly under the altar in the large basilica, hidden permanently in the bowels of the earth, stood the everlasting altar of Baal, a monolith of black stone which bad existed on that spot from the time when men first knew Makor.

So the pagans cheerfully attended Christian worship in the basilica, listening to the priests and bowing reverently to the altar rather more frequently than Christian ritual demanded. Of course, when the Byzantine guard was withdrawn, the priests having informed Constantinople that all worshipers of Baal were now eliminated, the hard-headed pagans again slipped away at night to climb their sacred mountain.

What had been the secret of their extraordinary longevity? It must have been that any sensible man who lived in close contact with nature, as the people of Makor did, knew in his heart that the forces which guided the rain and the thunderstorm were mysterious, and not mysterious in some subtle way that brings war over the matter of whether Jesus Christ had one body or two, one will or two, or whether a Jew might wear a gold tooth on Shabbat, but in a fundamental, perceptible way. In the spring, when new buds began to unfold at the tips of branches, some to form leaves and others blossoms from which fruit would develop, even the most stupid man in Makor could perceive that something mysterious was afoot, and he required neither priest nor rabbi to initiate him into this basic mystery. It was simplest, perhaps, to allocate the mystery to Baal, who lay hidden in the earth under the Christian altar, for it could not have been by accident that the priests of the basilica had chosen that precise spot for the heart of their structure. Baal, in his ancient wisdom, had directed them there.