Avalon

St Symeon, Syria

The early morning rain had cleared the air from the dust that had been lingering on for a while, leaving behind a cool grey canopy protecting the travelers from the rising sun’s rays, almost horizontal at the time. As far as the eye could see, rocky valleys and rocky hills were forming a white rugged landscape, interrupted only by the grey strip of a road, running up and down rocky slopes. At a distance, a fluffy white cloud was resting inside a valley, or maybe waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting land.

The road turned to reveal more rocky hills. As fascination turned to boredom, the landscape pulled an ace out of its sleeve: a pine forest growing out of the white rock, tree trunks, bird nests and everything. Apparently the rocks there were the soil’s clever camouflage, a cunning way to cover its fertility, its potential, a disguise designed to avert humans from ripping it apart, plowing and sowing and doing whatever it is they do on fertile grounds.

Tiny droplets of water were dangling from the pine needles, transforming the evergreens into christmas trees. Behind the first couple of rows of trees, the soil was soft, rich and moist, muffling the sound of footsteps of visitors and their guides. The later were repeating the same old story in a variety of languages and were getting  the same old “oh!”s and “really?!”s in return. They knew that their tip would be proportional to the amount of such exclamations so they were doing their best, besides the fact that it was still way early and their herds were half asleep.

At the top of the hill stood the reason all of us had forgone decent breakfast and a chance to spend a proper amount of time in the bathroom: the church. Made up of four stone built basilicas, ornate with floral patterns carved on the arches and pediments, the church stood silent, glowing as the leeches on its walls and poles were enjoying the misty morning air.

Visitors, guides, travelers and tourists all entered from the southern basilica, then turned right to the eastern one. It was that precise moment that the cloud that had been laying low for a quite some time, decided to make its move. Suddenly, the church, the chapel, the baptistery, the cemetery, the people and the trees, all became enveloped in a soft wet matter, humid and sweet, out-worldy. And suddenly the church, the chapel, the baptistery, the cemetery, the people and the trees, all seemed to have been transported to another place and another time: it was no longer Syria, the St. Simeon Citadel, 2008, it was clearly the British Isles, Avalon, back in the day when Avalon would appear on an almost daily basis, to hide a king, toss a sword or allow villagers from the area to pick up its delicious apples. Floating in the cloud, the citadel had lost all ties to the nearby villages, the rocky hills and the seemingly barren valleys and was existing in a plane of its own. Mythical, sacred, the citadel appeared as it was, made of dreams, prayers, hopes and fears.

The cardamom coffee warmed the insides of tourists, visitors, travelers and their guides. Blinking one last time to get rid of the last of Sandman’s traces, the crowd found itself once again in the foot of a middle eastern hill, in a middle eastern coffeehouse. Stretching and yawning, some looked a bit puzzled. Attributing the haze in their heads to last night’s arak consumption, tourists, visitors, travelers and their guides soon boarded their buses and took off to visit Aleppo, happy that the sun had already come out.