There were beads of sweat.
They formed on my face.
My thick eyebrows soaked the perspiration from my brow, a few escaped still and puddled politely on my closed eyes lids. The moisture was chill to the senses but my face warm. It was not the sweat that woke me.
The click of an intercom from out the opened window and a harsh ramping of a raspy melody rose me. If you hadn’t noticed, the larynx has a way of clicking like the intercom before it makes a sound. It’s soft and subtle but measurable. The Jews call the silence Aleph. The first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The sound of words coming. And there were undoubtedly words coming.
Allah-hoo Akbar...God is Great/Transcendent
It was Arabic that jittered me from a jet lagged sleep. Pasty drapes, the kind you find in hotels without a designers insight, glided across the window sill in willow-like elegance. It’s poise like a siren of a midnight dream, sultry but gentle, beckoning from its frame to its frame. Nevertheless, this siren call of the sill was overshadowed by the Imam’s siren to prayer; a tocsin for morning worship. It did not have the same elegant etiquette as the willow drapes.
I sprung from my rented stiff single mattress. My roommates were just as aware of the siren call as I was, however, the two continued to sleep waving off all pre-dawn frustrations. It was curiosity, my adventurous companion, that moved me to the dancing drapes and its mythical sill.
Out of my window, the courtyard was visually quiet, unmoving. Inanimate. Thick foreign words reverberated in the stone courtyard with echos of a longstanding tradition. The yard was the center of the hotel and was fortified by four or five stories of rooms. It resembled more of a residential building than a hotel. American hotels are stale and sterile. My hotel, as it would be for the next several days, was well-lived and collected a tattered patina with every year passing.
Awe gripped me, harmonies induced me. I stepped over Roommate #1; he groaned. I passed Roommate #2; he was as quiet as he was when conscious.
The hall didn’t move but it seemed to shift. Bending it’s structured proportions into parallelograms and trapezoids. My eyes weary, I hugged the walls with my palms. The hall lingered quietly, eerily. European 70s seemed to be the motif. The carpet having a commercial-like shortness to its cushiness beneath my heels. The color was monochromic to my colorblindness and lack of light. Lights at the end of the halls were my illuminaries. A warm glow refracting through the exterior windows. Space, or low gravity emptiness, is what it felt like floating through the vestibules of the aging old-world elegance hotel. Ancient by American standards.
A sinking quality shimmied down my spine. I was tired and so was my vision. Alien syllables and peculiar pronunciations sliced the moisture thickening air with great determination. And the only singular word I could scramble was a name. Allah.
God.
The stairway winded and so did my sleepy steps. Moving with caution for I was in this new country and for the first time away from home. The stairs were conquered in the resident stillness. A stillness that rivals silence. A roof house was the goal of the upward stairs. Windows were covering every wall. Upon exiting the room, the silence was filled in an instant.
Wind. Mighty Wind. Plump and Robust.
That sometimes torrential sound overcame the silence and colors spotted the landscape from illuminated structures; man-made structures. And there she was.
The old city. Ancient Jerusalem latching onto, and perhaps more accurately into, modern Jerusalem. Al Quds, ‘The Holy Sanctuary’ of the Western World, mediating its humanity with their creator. Al-Balāṭ, the poetic palace. Oasis of Justice. Tzur Hamishor, the rock of the plain. The whore. The holy. The tent of Jehovah.
Rolling with armageddon speed, low clouds rushed and were backlit with a lunar glow. This was the great city. The city I had fantasied about for six years, to see it in the way I did at that very moment. Crusader walls still towering; modern skyscrapers in the eastern high ground; crosses and minarets littering the valleys of Kidron and Hinom and the hills of Zion, Mariah and Olives. I’d waited for all these years to see this historical site. This is where the great God’s presence was heavy on the land. The pre-dawn morning surreal; brisk with a spirited but muffled wind.
The minarets, that was the source. I had found my waking noise. The prayers of my morning. They were ever present in the holy city. I hadn’t thought that the mosques would be so overwhelming. Nor did I expect the sound of competing Ṣalāt prayers in a menagerie of tones. My fantasies had no room for these prayers, let alone Islam, in this city. It was a Jew city, a Christian city. Muslims were minor in my western levant interpretation. Nonetheless, in modern reality, they dominated the skyline. Who is this Allah? What is this Islam? I was compelled.
Fajr, the first of five daily Ṣalāt prayers, means ‘dawn’. The bold arabic statements are the progression of the call to prayer. However it's name, in Jerusalem the mosques can be unpredictable and untimely with their dawn prayers. That morning, the first prayer was at 3:13 am and from only one mosque. My bedside clock reminded me of this fact when I woke up in a sweaty furry. Two other mosques had joined in by the time I reached the roof. Then two more after the first two concluded.
