The Damascus Drum Chapter 3 'Takla and the Angel'

Chapter Three

Taqla and the Angel

The wind from the Syrian Desert entered the hearts of the sleepers, the sleepers in the tents, in the villages, those still blessedly alive and snoring by their flocks in the hills and valleys. It entered too beyond the veils of bodily fatigue of the sleepers in the towns and cities, through keyholes, open windows, and doors left ajar. The wind carried with it scents of love and death, departure and longing. It filled the nostrils of the sleepers and provoked sweet dreams where it found happiness, and grave and disturbing images where it found discontented hearts. The wind came from the south, from beyond Arabia, an awakening wind, and its perfume was a gentle but insistent breath upon the souls of the sleepers. In the soul of every sleeper images took shape, each according to the meanings which were foremost in their mind’s eye at the moment prior to waking. These are the moments of small creations, the daily dawn arrivals from that unfathomable ocean of consciousness which is the destination of our night’s journeying. Here, in the world of visions and dreams, our unconditioned nature and deepest intuitions are enrobed in attributes and intentions which later inform our daily actions within the endless shedding skin of reality we call our world.
Taqla was blessed with sweet dreams as befitted a young woman whose simple life of constant but undemanding labour brought her little pain and much happy recompense for her uncomplaining efforts. Taqla had dreamt of an angel, a tall and beautiful angel with shining golden hair. Really, it was such a handsome young man who came to her in her sleep, offering her a loaf of bread, still warm and smelling of life itself.  She woke with a craving for her breakfast, as well as a wonderful feeling of lightness and well-being as the result of this nocturnal visitation.
Taqla donned a pair of thick woollen socks over her stockinged feet, and then strapped up her tough leather sandals. It was a cold morning and she would be walking far today. Under her heavy, dark wool skirt she still wore the warm cotton shift in which she had been sleeping. She added a blouse and a woollen cardigan, and then a thick, blue shawl which she wrapped around her shoulders and over her head. Taqla did not wear the dark balaclava-like headdress which the nuns wore.  She did not cut her hair either, although that was hidden, tied up in a white scarf, the corners of which were adorned in lacework of dusty blue forget-me-nots. If Taqla had possessed a mirror, she would have beheld a smiling face with huge eyes, full lips and very rosy cheeks. But Taqla did not have a mirror, and the only clue she had to her appearance lay in the response it elicited in those whom she encountered in the course of her day. ‘O Taqla, your lips are so red, your eyes so big, your cheeks so rosy.’ and other words with which her novice friends would greet her, giggling and smiling. The older nuns never made such comments, but even they smiled when they saw Taqla, so that she felt herself inhabiting a climate in which few clouds ever passed to obscure the sun of her happy disposition.
Taqla was going home today. She went home every year at this time, just after Easter, to spend a week or two with her mama and papa, who lived a long day’s walk over the hills to the north. Taqla was not a nun, and so far she had no intention of becoming one. She had been promised to the Convent of Seydnaya as a servant by her parents, in return for the grace which had saved her papa during an illness, grace which had been granted in answer to her mama’s prayers. It was the normal way of things. Her mama needed her papa, and so had offered to give up the thing she loved most in all the world, to save the thing she most needed. Taqla had acquiesced willingly, she loved her parents, and working in the convent was no harder than her life in the village. She had missed her girlfriends at first, but later some of them had joined the convent and were now training to be nuns, and so life continued much as before.
At breakfast she was finally able to satisfy her craving for fresh bread which the sweet  scent of her reverie had provoked. After eating heartily, she packed her bag with a loaf, some cheese, olives and some dates for her journey. Then, filling a water skin from the kitchen, she walked down to the little door at the back of the convent and let herself out. She felt the sun soft and pure as a kiss upon her eyelids as she closed them in enjoyment of its warm embrace. The early morning is the best time of the day, she thought, before it becomes weighed down by too much heat . Looking north over the broken rocky hillside, beyond to where her family’s village lay, she saw the length of the day extend ahead of her, its untrodden path simply waiting for her own steps to fill. The earth did not look so dry in this early light. Long shadows still stretched down from the steep walls of the Convent, perched high above her like a castle. The sandy scrub and rocks of the landscape were clearly outlined against the blue of the sky. The cypress by the back door stood tall and green, so obviously cut from a different material from the earth and sky. Its dark foliage seemed to shiver as she passed.
Taqla began to walk, steadily, slowly, without stopping. Lightly downhill at first and then winding up over the first hill until soon her convent was out of sight and she was alone among the pale rocks. Alone that is but for the occasional bird, a buzzard perhaps, flying high in the blue, some crows passing, black wings across the rock face, or sparrows flitting and fluttering near at hand. Small lizards slithered in the undergrowth as her skirt swished the dry grasses. Insects creaked and croaked as they too awoke under the sun’s warmth. The breeze was still breathing out its cooling scents from the south, and Taqla began to enjoy the delicious freedom of having the whole day to herself.
Taqla walked all morning in this way, without tiring. She paused at one point to drink a few sips from her water skin at the highest point of a pass. She stood and let her eyes go far across the desert below to the distant horizon. She stood there for what seemed ages, full of wonderment at the plasticity of space, amazed that there could be such distance, such vastness, and intrigued that her eye could travel in it so effortlessly. That it could go on almost forever, she thought, and that it must keep on going all the way to the ends of the world. 
This thought, about the bigness and the largeness of it all, preoccupied her as she set off on the downward track. In the narrow confines of the valley, the thought stayed with her. Not in a troubling way. At first it was more of a novelty. Then, as she gave space to the expansiveness of her thought, a change began to take place. It was as if she was expanding too. It wasn’t physical. It wasn’t even mental. Rather, it showed itself more as a deepening sense of connection with her surroundings.
Taqla was blessed with the humility natural in those who keep close to the earth, the easy and unselfconscious humility such as a child might possess. But Taqla was no longer a child, certainly not physically so, and although not possessed of a conventional literacy, she did exhibit a pleasingly mature and discriminating intelligence. She was gifted with sound judgement, and met life with co-operation and open-minded tolerance. In this way she was able to view the world, with its apparent subsequences and consequences, uncluttered by conditions of self-attachment and historical convention, so that she saw things just as they appeared to be. So, this new intimacy with her environment did not seem something foreign. It came simply as an extension of the relationship she had always experienced with the rocks and the trees and birds, the sky and all manner of outward appearances, that inner sanction in which she always felt at home with herself. And this sense of her person, of an ever mysterious yet now awakening identity, had a presence more real for her than simply the tangible evidence of her senses.
Today, as she descended the dusty path of the valley, in the heat of the late morning, she  felt closer than ever to the motivating force of this identity. Just as her outward vision had been enlarged beyond the haze of the desert’s edge to a place where her thoughts and words could not reach, so now she her own being was bursting beyond the confines of her accustomed identity. In its magnification, Taqla’s soul had outflown the limits of her knowledge, and was wandering effortless beyond the edge of its existence, like a fledgling lover lifted higher on the thermals of a new desire, which grows moment by moment within the eaglespan aura of the beloved.
And as Taqla continued down, she experienced an unfamiliar need. It was like a thirst, a hunger, an extreme longing to join and be joined. But joined to what? She found herself without any direction. It was a perplexing state, aimless, in which the very boundaries of her existence had become ambiguous, as if her identity had become nothing and everything at the same time. She felt at a loss for there appeared to be no focus, no object of vision, within or without, in which she could collect herself in this newfound place of unlimit.
At midday, as the rocks bleached shadowless in the sun before her widening eyes, and the snowdrifts in the northern faces of the mountains shrank imperceptibly in the briefly warmed air, she turned from the path to a place where she was accustomed to stop and rest. Passing under a few bushes lodged in a steep rocky crevice, she found herself within a grove of trees, which masked the entrance to a small cave at the base of a cliff. A tiny spring of water issued from the cave, a rivulet which formed a pool from which it then flowed underground, re-appearing somewhere much further down the slope. Neither pool nor cave could be seen from the path, or from the surrounding land, the rocky crevice blending into the general effect of the cliff face.
In the cool shade of the trees, Taqla sat down and there she refound herself. And in so doing she saw before her, also sitting in the shade, a man. In a flash, it was done. Not a blinding flash, not the inadvertent catching of the sun in a mirror, but a flash of recognition as they exchanged glances, the known taking the place of the the unknown.
The flash was in the eyes, but the recognition between souls took place beyond normal sight. Taqla, as if in a mirror, had recognised in the being of the person opposite something very familiar. Her heart opened and her bewilderment changed to ease. And then something lovely happened, he smiled at her and said ‘Hello’. All the rigours of her earlier expansion vanished. She smiled back at him. ‘Hello’ she said.
Then voluntarily, as one to another from the confines of their distinct forms, further glances, cognitive and accepting, were exchanged. Then irresistably, turning in tune to their own planetary motion, they drew close to each other, so that first their hands, and then their breaths mingled. And briefly, as water meets water, again the sense of recognition, of complete closeness but more so, to the point of total extinction in each other.
Taqla’s union was the most natural and delightful event that this young woman had ever experienced. She felt refreshed throughout every atom of her body. Her mind, now no longer bewildered by a seeming disparity between the limits of her known, and the absolutes of her unknown, self, was as calm and reflective as the pool of water in which she now bathed. She took time to look closely at the form of the man lying asleep in the shade a few feet away. He was naked but for an old camel hair blanket wrapped around him. She smiled. He looked so peaceful, like a sleeping boy. He was handsome, she knew that instinctively. A well proportioned face lay beneath the dark stubble of a week’s growth of beard, muscles well-formed but not over-developed sat on wide shoulders, and a certain generousness of girth, albeit a little depleted by recent privations, spoke of wealth and ease, and gave balance to the overall composition. Of course, she did not think all this at the time, only in later months and years, as this moment came back to her as a form of nourishment, giving her a sense of wholeness, a completeness of being, which would remain with her all her life.
For the moment Taqla felt only the pleasure of beholding him, the same pleasure which she had felt when their eyes had met, and the world around her had dissolved. Its subsequent reconstitution, which could have taken place within the blinking of an eye, or after an eternity, took nothing away from the experience. To say that what she felt was profound love would not be true, for she did not yet know what it was she felt. But certainly, it was love indeed which had taken her like a wave, pulling her from the shore of her innocent unknowing into the depth of its original impulse, and bringing her all inside out and back again in its return. She was certainly in love, but did not yet love, and somewhere in this surge she had travelled to the still core of life itself and glimpsed the beauty of its perfection. From this core she now emerged, glistening and glowing anew, with the order of the original metal itself. This being of perfection, this she would learn to yearn for and to love.
Taqla dressed, not waking the man who carried on sleeping peacefully there in the shade. She left beside him her blue woollen shawl and the loaf of bread, and continued her journey to her parents village. Her journey took her far into the night, but in the darkness she walked with a deepened sense of belonging, for in being brought so close to herself, she now felt close to everything. Even the stars no longer seemed distant. Their bright glances reflected familiar presences collected in her own heart, a heart which now she felt could embrace the whole universe. In her mind’s eye she knew she could travel to these heavenly bodies as easily as she had walked to her own village.