Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 11

Knidos had been a well-known and prosperous city, but the last one hundred years or so had witnessed the buildings of this once wealthy entrepôt smashed into rubble by a whole rash of earthquakes, its inhabitants ravaged by bubonic plague and its great monuments left abandoned in ruins on the hillside. News of the devastating assaults led by Yazid’s father had already sent the population of Knidos plummeting further as its maritime economy collapsed, its eastern trading prospects terminally blighted and then dashed by the depredations of these Arab raids. And now the feared Arabs had come west again, like the ultimate curse of God. This must have been the last straw. By the time Yazid arrived the people living at Knidos must have dwindled to almost nothing.

Let us follow Yazid as he climbs, for climb he surely did, up from the ancient marble quayside to view what remained of what had been a great metropolis. He must have looked out across an urban wilderness, a once thriving city in terminal decay, its temples supplanted with churches which themselves have been torn apart and tumbled in the tectonic upheavals that had recently shaken and shivered the whole region. Classical pillars lie scattered about on the ground like so many groves of felled trees. The huge terrace walls, once retained by rows of marble blocks, have burst with such ferocity that their surmounting monumental buildings have debouched onto the terraces below in a cataclysm of destruction. Houses and villas lie burnt and already overgrown, their contents long since pillaged and picked over. Its civic buildings have collapsed and been plundered decades ago. And on this day, the day of Yazid’s arrival, the very last inhabitants who had been eking out a pauper’s existence in temporary rubble hovels have already fled over the mountains the moment they saw the lateen sails on the horizon near Rhodes. They will never return. No-one ever will, not to live.

Walking up the stepped streets of this ghost town, the paving stones worn with hundreds of years of use, Yazid arrives at the Christian Cathedral of Knidos. The roof has collapsed, but the sturdy hemi-domes of the triple

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