The Bathhouse at Qusayr Amra

Al-Walid II, whose tastes were too peculiar to find expression in Damascus, turned to Qusayr Amra, his desert palace and bathhouse, to satisfy his eccentricities. Obscured from the critical gaze of zealots, in a kind of ritual exile, as he liked to think of it, he indulged in his lust for heat and human forms. And who could begrudge him for adorning the walls of his bathhouse with frescoes of unclad, high-breasted women—in the austerity of the desert, surrounded by measureless expanses of lifeless dust, no less?

The journey from Damascus to the remote desert palace lasted a quarter of a lunar cycle, during which the camel-borne heir to the caliphate passed the time by reading his favorite rhetors: Gorgias, Quintilian, Dionysus of Halicarnassus. But as his royal train came nearer its destination, the landscape required increased attention. In the distance the silhouette of mountains, like wales surfacing from the deep, crept along the horizon while the immediate pans of bone-dry clay absorbed the sun’s unrelenting heat. Finally, the train came upon an unlikely furrow in the desert, a riverbed, along which the palace and bathhouse were erected.

There was nothing in Damascus to rival the grandeur of the frescoes that greeted Walid II’s arrival. Towering above the future Umayyad emperor, framed by vaulted doorways and stacked columns, stood giant, matronly figures which gave Walid II the pleasant feeling of being small, like an infant. Yet these matronly figures invited the viewer with a flirtatious half smile, and beside them ranged animals of all kinds—representing a veritable bestiary—which could not be found in the desert in even the wettest of seasons.

Walid II took particular pleasure in seeing those animals amid the mortifying dunes of that inhospitable desert. He, the future caliph, had brought them somewhere that Allah could not; and he numbered this among the achievements—besides being the nephew of the present caliph—which made him an earthly divinity.

It would be misleading, though, to assume that the animals gave him more pleasure than the frescoed women who towered pleasantly above him. Their soft, honey-colored skin, expertly (and clandestinely) rendered by the caliphate’s best painters—who, he thought, had all too often employed their skills in the painting of script or rote coloring—produced an impression of voluptuousness that he believed to befit his divine appetite.

Being no stranger to the grand artworks of the Roman world, and having visited the salons of Ravenna and Constantinople, he thought himself to have produced a commendable facsimile at Qusayr Amra.

It was rare, given the sensitivity and secularity of his collected artworks, for Walid II to receive a guest; yet in the month of Ramadan a certain Al-Farghani, famous throughout the Muslim world for his engineering along the Nile and his mastery of astro-navigation, arrived at Walid’s pleasure palace in a cavalcade of Bedouin footmen. Al-Farghani, known for his wisdom, discretion, and intimate friendships with potentates, had long hoped to visit his friend Walid II’s desert palace, where the dome capping the caldarium was purported to have been inlaid with a perfect model of the celestial firmament.

The longstanding friendship between Walid II and Al-Farghani was born from a mutual admiration and respect; although, suspected Al-Farghani in the privacy of his mind, Walid II imbued him with a certain mystical significance that he found to be vexingly, and sometimes dangerously, idolatrous. And indeed, Walid II wasted little time before escorting the travel-weary Al-Farghani to the bathhouse, where they were washed, pampered, and bathed, before hurrying him along to the caldarium, where the scarce water that had been channeled to the palace was undulating in clouds of steam. Here, Walid II hoped that his mystical friend, an agent of God himself, could be coaxed into giving him a glimpse into his future.

When the two sat stark naked on a polished slab of marble and began to smoke from their briarwood pipes, the steam in the caldarium was still dense above them. Walid II was eager to discuss the duration of the present drought, which had decimated the harvest, starved thousands, and now threatened to disrupt his bathing at Qusayr Amra. Al-Farghani could answer these questions easily enough, as providence had granted him with a knowledge of seasons and their fluctuations, but when Walid II began to ask the esteemed engineer and mystic about his future legacy, he was at a loss. He could easily flatter the ruler, which required little in the way of intelligence or creativity, but instead he sat without saying a word and looked reverently to the heavens—a practice for which he could beg his interlocutor’s patience.

Gradually, through the obscuring mists of the caldarium, the sign of Taurus, the bull, appeared to Al-Farghani. The Minoans, as he recalled, revered Taurus as an auspicious sign—and justifiably so, for it signaled the approach of spring. But the character it approximated here, in Walid’s ostentatious caldarium, began to trouble him. It was not, after all, the heavenly firmament to which he directed his gaze, but a vain—though not unsightly—reproduction.

Walid, the engineer addressed his friend familiarly, I cannot see into the future the way I see the bull above us now, but I can tell you: there is nothing on this earth that will outlast the stars, and that, I think, is for the best. The desert will one day reclaim your palace, and the stars will one day reclaim the desert, and Allah will reclaim the stars. Be glad, then, that what pleasure you enjoy here will remain here concealed from the world. You are free.

Thus he spoke to Walid II, and he was well contented by this answer.

The bathhouse at Qusayr Amra was rediscovered a millennium later by Alois Musil, a second cousin of the novelist Robert Musil, in 1898. Musil was shown to the palace by his Bedouin guides. When he first entered the sand-engulfed ruins of the ancient Islamic bathhouse he did not suspect his reputation would be made by the rediscovery of this remote Umayyad bastion. Only when he gazed up at the dome above the caldarium did his breast begin to tingle. Supported by polished bricks of basalt and limestone, Musil recognized the sign of Taurus, the bull, surrounded by a hemisphere of cosmic figures, the Zodiac cycle, just barely visible through beams of waning desert light. When he presented his findings to his colleagues in Austria-Hungary, they dismissed him as a lunatic.