O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [64]
“I shouldn’t worry, Russell. Mahmoud certainly doesn’t seem to.”
“You think not?”
“If anything, I should say he feels mildly relieved, to have had it out in the open for once.”
I had not thought of that.
The magic of the sea was somewhat deflated. After a while we swam back to the shore, took turns rinsing off the salt in the freshwater spring, and resumed our dirty clothes for the walk up the beach to our encampment.
And thus to our beds, nestled in the soft sand and warm beneath the blanket of moist, salty, insect-free air that covers the Ghor.
Before I drifted off to sleep, I lay playing the entire evening over in my mind, and it came to me that it had been a gift, that night—a birthday present, as it were, given me by Holmes, slipped to me under the table without acknowledgement of either party.
A sly man, Holmes, but not without generosity.
* * *
ELEVEN
ذ
Mâr Sâbâ —Accommodation will be found by gentlemen in the monastery itself; ladies must pass the night in a tower outside the monastery walls. Visitors must knock loudly at the small barred door for the purpose of presenting their letter of introduction… The divans of the guest-chamber are generally infested with fleas.
—BAEDEKER’S Palestine and Syria,
1912 EDITION
« ^ »
We came to Mar Sabas on the afternoon of the second day. The hard miles between our Dead Sea camp and our first sight of that extraordinary monastery were a considerable contrast to our dreamlike night on the beach. We picked our way over mile after mile of loose, jagged rock, and although Ali kept reassuring us that Mar Sabas was just ahead, I no longer held much hope that I should see the place in this lifetime. One of my boots was sprung, I had twisted my ankle taking an incautious step, my tongue was swollen with thirst, my woollen garments and the snug binding I wore around my chest chafed and itched abominably, and the patches of raw skin, irritated by the salt water, now stung fiercely when the sweat trickled into them. I had long since entered that timeless state of mere endurance, placing one foot in front of another until strength failed or I ran out of ground.
It was very nearly the latter. My mind had retreated from its body’s discomfort and was miles away, reliving the strange sensations of that glorious night’s swim, the unnaturally thick, slippery water followed by the tingling, all-over scrub in the clear spring, the half-moon that rode the black sky, the eerie colours the fire made burning the scavenged, mineral-laden drift-wood, like a hot rainbow in the circle of stones. I concentrated on the memories, my thoughts far, far away, until I did literally run out of ground. With no warning, my eyes fixed unseeing on the hazardous track, I walked smack into one of my companions, stumbled slightly to one side, and then Mahmoud’s hand was gripping my shoulder, keeping me from stepping off into space. I looked down a sheer drop at a frothy blue ribbon six hundred feet below, and then raised my eyes.
“God Almighty,” I declared, not without reverence.
“It is a singular place,” said Holmes in agreement.
“It’s… Yes.”
It looked like the home of a race of mud wasps infected with cubism. Directly across from us, the opposite wall of the wadi, which was light grey like all the Negev Desert and tinged with a seasonal whisper of green, rose up towards distant hilltops that were identical in colour and shape; to the horizons, all the world seemed made of grey, pitted rock. Then the eyes focussed on the facing rim, dropping down into the pits and shadows of erosion until they were caught by the sudden awareness that some of those pits were too square for natural artefacts, and that many of the shadows had remarkably sharp edges. Off to the right a worn path, little more than the track of a mountain goat, followed the striations of rock and led to an actual building, a small cluster of walls and roofs in a courtyard. Caves