"Ian Watson - The Black Wall of Jerusalem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

THE BLACK WALL OF JERUSALEM
Ian Watson
SHORTLY after I returned to England, the dreams began. Nightly, a four-legged Ang
bright armor bears me upon his back into domains where I witness marvels and atroci
before we are forced, by a Harpy, by a Buddha-Toad, by a Woman-Whirlwind, to withdraw
Meanwhile, in Israel, helicopter gunships are rocketing Arab cars and houses-it's
wrong war, the wrong war!
Do I report my dreams to the Knights of the Black Wall back in Jerusalem? Might
inviting an assassin to visit me? I'm definitely a link, a channel. Can the Black Wall appe
my own country, especially if Jerusalem is incinerated in a Middle Eastern holocaust, w
heaven forbid. Heaven, indeed! And will those feet in modern times walk upon Engla
mountains green? And will the Centaur-Angel be on England's pleasant pastures s
Beyond our world lurk other potent dimensions, parasitical and expansionist, seeking
place in the true sun.
I am being incoherent.

Some time before the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, the Knights Templar expe
from their Order and from the Holy Land a certain Robert de Sourdeval. During the 19
workmen renovating the Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount found hidden in its roof spa
parchment alluding to the expulsion. Sourdeval's crime remained a mystery until a fu
document was offered to an antique dealer in East Jerusalem in the 1950s and came into
possession of a Polish-American garments millionaire who was passionately interested in
"occult" side of history: Kabbalah, Sufism, Masonry, and such.
This document, a copy of a letter written in Latin by Sourdeval to an unknown recipien
the earliest recorded description of the Black Wall of Jerusalem and of the "demonia
beings beyond it. Two other accounts exist, one in Hebrew by a Rabbi and the other in Ar
by a Sufi, and neither is as lucid.
Why did the Knights Templar expel Sourdeval? That military order of monks w
obsessed with Solomon's bygone temple, on the site of which they had established
headquarters, converting the Aqsa Mosque for this purpose. For the Templars, Solom
Temple was the supreme example of sacred architecture. Its geometrical proportions
deduced from the Bible, offered a key to the fundamentals of space and time, as we would
nowadays, and so could reveal the underpinnings of the universe and of life itself.
Sourdeval to insist on the existence-even the fleeting and visionary existence-of a
anywhere in the vicinity which enshrined creatures more demonic than angelic must have
anathema. His testimony must be suppressed.
I'm running ahead of myself. . . .

I was a lecturer in Art History with a particular interest in apocalyptic art, Altdorfer
such. Philip Wilson was also a poet with a minor reputation-the emphasis should be on w
dreamed of blowing people out of the water one day with something major and sustaine
the caliber of William Blake. Yet as another William-Butler Yeats-put it, "I sought a theme
sought for it in vain." So far, I had been penning clever poems mainly inspired by ar
visions. Did I have no unique vision of my own, and could this be due to my own lack of
faith? Yeats managed to find his themes and visions. Might Jerusalem-the bubbling cauldro
religions, the real Jerusalem rather than Blake's resounding verses-prompt me with somet
suitable and major?
I had a sabbatical term due, and no ties. Trish had walked out on me, and by then I
glad of this. At first her passionate enthusiasms and loathings had been stimulating, but af
while these came to seem like a series of self-indulgent fads, a sort of self-generated hys