O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [66]
“Did you find the thing you were looking for here?”
“It is not here. The candle in Mikhail’s pack did not come from these bees.”
“How can you be certain?”
“The smell of the candles in the chapel here was entirely different,” Holmes said, “and the colour and texture were wrong.” I did not question his judgement; after all, beekeeping was the avocation to which he had devoted innumerable hours in the years since his premature retirement. I merely stood up and cast a last glance at the unearthly landscape of the wadi.
“Shall we go and see what Ali intends to inflict on us for supper?”
To my surprise we were once again installed in our tents outside the monastic walls. Ali produced a dish of some unidentifiable meat that tasted like chicken but had rather too many vertebrae, and as I perched gingerly on the inadequate carpets, picking meat from bones, I reflected on the incongruity of how difficult it was proving to keep kosher in the Holy Land.
The ground was very hard, and when Mahmoud began to make coffee I gave up trying to find a decent seat and perched on my heels. I removed my boots first, examined the sprung seam on the side of the one, and asked Ali if he had a needle and tough thread I could use to repair it.
“Why didn’t we stay in the monastery tonight?” I grumbled. My threadbare stockings and the carpet beneath them were little protection against the stones, my twisted ankle hurt in the squatting position, and my backside hurt if I tried to sit. “The ground inside the walls is considerably smoother,” I added, and then cursed under my breath as the blunt end of the needle buried itself in the thick of my thumb.
“Did you discover who are the occupants of the guest-chamber?” Holmes asked Mahmoud.
“There are no occupants of the guest-chamber,” Mahmoud replied. “The servant who cares for guests is away, and the monk did not wish to be bothered with us.”
I removed my punctured thumb from my mouth. “We could insist,” I suggested hopefully.
“The divans of the guest-chamber are generally infested with fleas,” remarked Mahmoud unexpectedly in English. For some reason this set Ali off on a gale of giggles. It sounded like a quotation, and was obviously a private joke.
“Have they had many guests?” Holmes asked.
“One week ago a party of four Englishmen, and a group just before Christmas. No-one at the time of the new moon.”
“I thought not. Very well, we shall go north tomorrow.”
The rocks remained every bit as uncomfortable as they had started out, to the extent that at two in the morning, flea-infested divans began to seem attractive. It was no hardship to rise early and return to the road.
We turned back towards the sea and north, and trudged for twenty dreary miles (how far I had come since the first sparkling day out of Jaffa, a bare two weeks before!) down out of the desert hills and into the Jordan Valley, where the river emptied into the Dead Sea. When it first appeared, I welcomed the green of palm and banana and sugarcane and the rustle of birds in the leaves, but with every step the air grew warmer, and so damp that it became a struggle to breathe. The mules plodded with their heads down, dripping sweat from their necks and flanks. Their humans did much the same.
The monastery of St Gerasimo was another disappointment, as were the following day the various small monasteries around the site of John the Baptist’s immersion in the Jordan. We pushed west through the thorns and the oppressive air towards Jericho, a squalid little settlement unworthy of its ancient and noble history. We were aiming our steps at the Greek monastery on the Mount of Temptation to the north of town, after which we would turn our faces towards the monastery in Wadi Qelt and then to those along the Jerusalem road, but no sooner had we shaken the town’s mongrel dogs from our heels than we stumbled upon an archaeological dig inhabited by an elderly Englishwoman with a passion for the subject as a whole, a positive lust for potsherds in particular, and a furious store