Gift of Green Fire and Other Strange Encounters Read online

  He stands by the wide window and, looking at his robe, sees it is covered in stars. Three large discs bearing mystic signs are heavy on a chain round his neck. And as on the previous day, he feels a tiara, streaming with plumes on his head.

  Leaning from the window he smells the city. It is a heady mix of incense and dust. Voices drift from faraway streets. Someone sings on the calm night air. Kudram leaves the palace, hearing small stirrings, as though of vestigial life. He steps into the hanging gardens. Flowers are closed, but faint rustlings are audible and some blooms remain vigilant in the moonlight. Other plants seem unfamiliar and softly murmur.

  Kudram has read The Babylonian Creation - how Tiamat, the formless, had nonetheless spawned monsters; sea serpents with veins of venom, vain dragons, a man scorpion, a howling storm.... And he reads how Marduk challenged and defeated her single handed.

  “When Tiamat heard him her wits scattered, she was possessed and shrieked aloud, her legs shook from the crotch down, she gabbled spells, muttered maledictions, while the gods of war sharpened their weapons.”

  Marduk threw a net over Tiamat and urged the wind Imhulla to blow in her face. She opened her mouth to suck him down, but Marduk drove him in so far, she could not shut her mouth and the wind raged in her belly. She swelled, gaped and Marduk shot an arrow that split her belly, pierced her gut and cut her womb.

  What was Marduk to do with her body? He wrenched it apart and from the upper half created the sky. He skimmed spume from the sea, heaped up clouds, spindrift of wet and wind and cooling rain; the spittle of Tiamat.

  He heaped mountains over the water. The Euphrates and the Tigris rose from her eyes, but he closed her nostrils and held back the springhead. He arched her tail and locked it into heaven.

  Then Marduk built Babylon - the home of the gods. They worshipped him. And so will the people of my Babylon, vows Kudram.

  He completes the final straight streets. He gazes at the rich reflections of stone, lustre, mosaic tiles. He will live in the reconstructed palace of Nebuchadnezzar. He moves from the small room into a large chamber where his talent for invention has run riot. The ceiling is covered with stars cut from abalone shell, the walls boast mythical beasts in relief on lapis lazuli and the floor is thick with Persian carpets whose fine, undying flowers softly succumb to his feet. At one end stands a bed of solid gold with sheets of white silk and a pillow hung with purple tassels.

  Despite the carpets, the room faintly echoes as Kudram walks towards the bed. Voices whisper like ghosts discussing him. The beasts stir on their lapis ground.

  Kudram shrugs. “I’m imagining things because I’m alone,” he tells himself. Ghosts do not haunt new buildings.

  Kudram lies down. But he cannot sleep. He feels a fluttering presence near the bed, then the tentative touch of feminine fingers. He gets up and hurries from the rustling room. He walks into the Hanging Gardens where his flowers float in the moonlight and the pools lie like liquid silver. He breathes the sweetness of jasmine, tobacco plants, night scented stocks. He is soothed, elated. The ghosts retreat.

  He bends to caress a bignonia. And recoils. The leaves have a sticky mucilage and suddenly curl round and trap his finger. He tugs it free with difficulty. Alarmed, he passes on to the purple columbine. Its leaves too have changed. They now end in long pads, the moon revealing glistening hairs. Horrified, Kudram is nonetheless compelled to touch. Tentacles he had not seen swiftly fold over his hand and this time he struggles for several seconds before being able to withdraw it.

  The Chinese lanterns are now jar-shaped and from a flap above their opening floats an alluring fragrance. Again Kudram is compelled to bend and touch. He feels a honey-like juice round the rim. He rapidly withdraws his hand before the plant responds.

  He hears a shuffling, like roots that are stealthily growing beneath the altered leaves. A green tendril, that may be a probing root, squirms at his feet. He jumps aside and hurries to the centre of the garden. Suddenly the pale blue tiles beneath his feet split open and from the middle of the main flower bed he hears a heaving and a deep, inhuman sigh.

  The moon is full and he can see clearly that an enormous plant is striving to resolve its daunting identity. Six great leaves surround a head of black spines, stretching and scraping, as though in sinister communication.

  Then from their midst rises a repulsive eye, its pupil darkly penetrating and focused on Kudram, immobile among the uprooted tiles. The pupil dilates, the spines quiver and the fan of leaves undulates in agitation.

  Tiamat and her horde of horrors, flash through his mind. He senses here the essence of destruction. Marduk overcame Tiamat and wrested order from chaos. But how can Kudram - unarmed and taken unawares - confront this aberration?

  The grotesque growths begin to writhe and the eye of the great plant, squatting like a mockery of maternal power, swivels as though issuing some secret signal to its offspring. Another tendril twists towards Kudrum and he turns to see dozens pushing from under the plants and working with pulsating purpose along the path.

  His vision expands and he sees they have large suckers that hiss as they slide towards the palace. They climb the wall tiles to the roof where they weave a suffocating web. They push inward from the walls and wind in arabesques through the windows, across the echoing chamber to his empty bed.

  With serpentine deliberation, they lay themselves in layers on the silk sheets and twine tightly round the purple tassels. More roots shoot from beneath the hissing tangle and slither out of the palace and along the pristine streets. They reach the computer centre and advance like disciplined troops on the blind computers, systematically crushing each one, their suckers probing and dislodging man’s minor miracle of the micro chip.

  Multiplying, they move out along the wide ways, sprouting tendrils to strangle and unearth. The sharp sound of ceramics splitting and the grate of dislodged bricks shatter the silence of the night.

  In the moonlight Kudram sees the city teeter amid the heaving mass of unruly roots rising and falling like a sullen sea. He turns to the proliferating mother plant. She fixes him with her malignant eye, daring him to oppose her.

  Marduk did it with a bow and arrow. Kudram has only his bare hands and fury at seeing his sublime creation torn apart.

  “WHY?” he shouts at the gloating mother plant. Is she the re-incarnation of Tiamat, come to wreak vengeance?

  Impulsively he lunges into the flapping canopy of leaves. They impede and wrap like hair-lined rags round his feet. He climbs towards the rocking spines, grasping one now grown to three times its original height and starts to climb. It sways, trying to dislodge him but, tenaciously he clings and slowly gains height.

  He halts before the audacity of the great eye, glinting demonically in the moonlight. Slowly the huge lid closes. Like a weathered rock face, its deep creases offer footholds.

  Kudram steps on one and hauls himself onto the next. He is almost at the top, wondering how he can wrench the eye open and inflict a mortal wound, when the lid springs up and, helplessly, he slides to one corner. He drops like a mere grain of sand into a viscid mass, fighting it with fists clenched in panic. It seethes and is slowly closing over his head, when he leaps for the stars.......

  Kudram wakes on the golden bed. The room is flooded with early sun. The beasts are composedly in place, the stars dimmed by daylight.

  Shakily he climbs from the bed and crosses the carpets’ passive flowers. He looks from a window. Nolybab - his unique creation - shines, in tact in the sun. He hurries outside. The gardens glow with bignonias, convolvulus, lilies. In the centre where the mother plant reared unchecked, his mixture of night-scented flowers lazily intertwine, peacefully punctuated with cool green shrubs.

  A dream. He had slept after all. Tiamat has returned to the realm of outlandish folklore. He steps through his dazzling display into the centre plot. The plants pull back as though drawn by an invisible hand. And in their midst, shivering in the shade, lies a pool.

  Kudram kn
eels and dips in a finger. The liquid is like the inside of a mutilated eye. He cannot rise. He stiffens in the sun.

  And that is how the first people arriving in Nolybab, find their lifeless leader, kneeling in the middle of the garden, tightly bound by bright green tendrils. No botanist is able to name them.

  BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TREES FOR GODS AND GARDENERS

  Trees have been worshipped, abused and admired. They have been thought to be house spirits, to prophesy and some have provided staple food for centuries. Many smaller species are ideal for the southern garden.

  From acorns “mighty oaks do grow.” But planting an avocado stone is quicker. Admittedly mine was in a pot so the most I have is a pleasing green plant that withers in the winter wind but regenerates at the first sign of spring.

  And from witnessing the rollicking rites of goddesses to casting shade for Hippocrates as he taught young men medicine, trees have inspired fantasy and awe and, with tenacious dignity, will outlive us all.

  In Crete they have suffered dire depletion, thanks mainly to palace and boat building and erosion caused by grazing goats. So those remaining are to be valued all the more, from the ubiquitous Cypress to the Cretan Palm. And, with the avocado, there are elegant species to grow in the garden.

  Ancient man saw spirits peering through leaves, heard godly voices when the wind blew and even invented an alphabet based on trees used by Druids for divination.

  The Oak is particularly auspicious. That which grew at Dodona in Epirus, was the oracular Tree of Zeus. Its roots were believed to be as deep below ground as its branches reached above, symbolizing the presence of the god in heaven and the Underworld.

  Oak oracles were probably brought to Greece by the Achaeans. Certainly Dodona has a sense of ponderous prophecy and when I was there one September, the thunder for which it is famous - symbolic of Zeus - was rumbling like a disgruntled audience round the theatre.

  Mary Renault, in her book Fire From Heaven, about Alexander the Great’s childhood, writes of three old women servants in “mothy cloaks” greeting the future conqueror. She describes the votives thrust into the folds of the ancient trunk - offerings so old they had become part of the tree. There was worm and rot. Some branches had died. Sacred doves huddled and the women brought an old black and red jar depicting a priestess. Alexander was given a strip of soft lead and a bronze stylus with which he wrote out his wish and dropped it in the jar.

  The power of Dodona was said to come from Egyptian Ammon, the “father of oracles.” There was a settlement at Dodona in 2,500 BC and in the 18th century BC, priests and prophets dedicated a temple to Zeus and built a theatre with 17,000 seats. The site was pillaged in 219 BC by Aitolians.

  The first prophecies were read in the flight of the Oracle’s pigeons, later in the rustling leaves and then a marble column was built on which stood a bronze boy holding a scourge with lashes of chain that had weighted ends. These whirled in the wind, striking a cauldron. The sound echoed on hollow bronzes placed on tripods around the tree. A priest interpreted the sound of their vibrations as the will of Zeus. What an opportunity, if he was so inclined, to con the listener. Who knows what connivance with politicians and kings went on.

  Alexander had another encounter with a magical tree during his conquests. This tree bore the heads of beasts and one of a woman. They spoke, criticising his ambition and told him he would die in a country far from home. A miniature from the 15th century Shah Namah shows him listening with apparently no intention of taking heed.

  The oak recurs in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. He recalls Orpheus being attacked by the Ciconian women and how Dionysos was distressed at losing the poet. The Thracian women who had watched the assault were “fastened to the ground, there in the woods, by means of gnarled roots. The god drew out their toes, as far as each had followed Orpheus and thrust the tips down into the solid earth. Just as a bird, finding its legs caught in the hidden snare of some cunning fowler, beats its wings when it feels itself held and tightens the bonds by frightened fluttering, so each of the women, as she became rooted to the spot, went mad with fear, and vainly tried to flee, while the tough root held her fast, preventing her attempts to pull herself away. Each one of them, as she looked for her toes, her feet and nails, saw wood spreading up her shapely legs; when she tried to smite her thighs, in token of her grief, she struck against the bark of an oak tree. Their breasts too, and likewise their shoulders turned to oak; their arms appeared to have been changed into long branches, as indeed they were - it was no illusion.”

  The great Plane that spread about Hippocrates on the island of Kos is indeed impressive, while needing treatment itself, with props to aid old age. It stands opposite the castle entrance and is thought to have been planted by Hippocrates 2,400 years ago. He taught students there and St Paul preached in its shade. It is said that in September children collected sea water and 40 small stones which they placed round the trunk with the wish - a true challenge to medical science - to live as long as the tree. Some people left fallen teeth by the tree, hoping for good luck and a long life!

  The village of Platanias in western Crete is named after the plane tree. In Crete we have the Oriental Plane (platanus orientalis). But the most famous plane tree stands at Gortyn, where Theophrastus claims Europa was seduced by Zeus. It is said that in memory of their sacred marriage, the tree never lost its leaves. But there are 29 examples of planes on Crete that do not shed leaves. They are a mutation from the past.

  The Turks hanged an orthodox Cretan priest on a plane east of Souda Bay, which they say made the tree immortal and its leaves evergreen. St. John, pursued by highwaymen, hid in the hollow trunk of a plane but was discovered and killed. That plane also, of course, kept its leaves in winter.

  The oriental plane grows near water and is usually deciduous. Its huge branches may stretch as wide as it is high which can be up to 30 metres. It symbolises the acquisition of wisdom.

  Xerxes, the Persian king, found a plane in the Meander Valley in Lydia that was so beautiful, he hung it with gold ornaments and appointed a guardian to watch over it.

  The oriental plane is the “Chenar” of the Persians and Moghuls and was planted for shade and ornament in their gardens.

  The Cypress instantly evokes Crete. The wild cypress (cupressus sempervirens) can grow into any shape and root on the hottest rock. If sheltered, it grows tall, if exposed, it develops a flag shape.

  The biggest in Europe grows at the top of the Samaria Gorge in the White Mountains of Crete. Some may still consider it sacred - if only in the interests of conservation. There was a sacred sanctuary of cypresses at the Aesculapius on Kos. Anyone who felled one was fined 1,000 drachmas. Some cypresses are cut down though, and the bark used for beehive roofs. The narrow cypress is a cultivated variety and is often found in churchyards, its tip a slender spear aiming for the gods.

  The Olive (olea europaea), is indispensable to the Mediterranean, although I once closely watched the progress of one planted with a surprising variety of trees in a London park. It never seemed entirely at home but it lived.

  The olive is one of the oldest cultivated trees. The gods said that Attica would belong to the god who could offer the most useful present. Athena suggested the olive. Poseidon a spring of clear water. The gods voted in favour of Athena. The olive has since been her symbol. It has also come to represent victory and peace.

  The tree first probably appeared around 60,000 years ago. There is evidence that in Neolithic Crete olive and other trees were worshipped. On the sarcophagus from around 1500 BC found at Agia Triada, there is an olive tree in the sacred grove behind the altar. And in Zakros, eastern Crete, edible olives 3,500 years old were found. Again on the island, in the town of Dreros, there is an inscription which obliges young men to plant and care for at least one olive tree.

  Hera smoothed on its oil when about to seduce Zeus and later it was used for lighting, cooking and anointing the body at festivals. The oil is used too fo
r making soap, in medicine and for dressing wool. And of course the fruit is eaten is countless ways, from being flavoured with herbs and spices to topping taramasalata.

  Around my home Orange trees light the winter landscape; their fruit brilliant against stormy skies, the scent of their blossom drifting on the spring winds.

  Oranges have evolved from three kinds; the Sweet or Common orange (citrus sinenis) and the bitter or Seville orange (citrus aurantium). Arabs may have brought the orange tree to the Mediterranean in the 10th century.

  Pliny says a Willow grew outside the Cretan cave where Zeus was born. The willow was sacred to the moon goddess because this tree loves water and the goddess of the moon provided moisture and dew.

  Her orgiastic bird, the wryneck or snakebird, was a spring migrant that hissed like a snake, lay flat along a branch, raised a striking crest when angry and lay white eggs. The V markings on its feathers were like those on the scales of oracular serpents. The willow was sacred to Hecate, Circe, Hera and Persephone - death aspects of the Triple Moongoddesses.

  There is a wonderful Renaissance drawing from the Florentine Picture Chronicle, of Theseus and the Minotaur with a round tree, that may have been unconsciously depicted as a cosmic centre. According to the Greek philosophers Parmenides and Plato, “being” itself is round. In this drawing Theseus holds the “sphere of being” - the ball of thread given him by Ariadne - which with the Tree and the Labyrinth symbolise the unfolding of man’s essential being in time and space.

  Among other trees instantly associated with the south is the Fig (ficus carica), whose half ripe fruit is poisonous, but when ready, delicious and rich in sugar. When cultivated the fig has no male flowers and the fruit ripens without sexual union. But sometimes branches of the wild fig are hung in orchards and a pollinating insect (blastophaga grossorum) flies from the wild figs and enters the female cultivated fruits to lay its eggs.