“Did you say something, Russell?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“Good. You might go and fill the water-skin, then, if you have nothing better to do than sit and snort.” He dropped his head back onto the sand and closed his eyes.
I kept my face straight until my back was to them, then allowed myself to grin all the way to the spring. Holmes, ever the dramatist, would tell us all what he had in mind for the evening when he was good and ready.
Imagine my surprise, then, when darkness fell, the moon rose, and Holmes made no move to follow Mr Bashir or cross over to question the Bedouin encampment on the opposite bank. The haze that had lain over the sea all day dispersed with evening, and the reflection of the half-full moon was a bright, faintly quivering line stretched across the still sea, before Holmes stirred.
“So, Russell. Are you ready to bathe?”
I was completely nonplused. “You were serious?”
“I am always serious.”
Any number of answers to that rose to mind, but I kept them to myself. “I have no bathing costume,” I objected, which I knew was ridiculous even as I said it.
“Russell, I shall stand guard and keep Ali and Mahmoud from ravishing your young body.”
The words hung in the air as heavy as the sarcasm in his voice, and made me uncomfortably aware of all the males in the world around me. I tried to stifle my discomfort by looking out at the sea, dark and flat. Portions of my skin had not felt the touch of water in days, and God alone knew how long it would be before I had the next opportunity. My scalp cried out to be free of its confining wrap. I stood up.
“May I have the soap, please?”
Holmes was as good as his word, turning his back while I scuttled through the pale moonlight between clothing and water. I scrubbed deliciously with soap and sand, rinsed everything and scrubbed again. The salt-heavy water stung ferociously at my myriad cuts and blisters, and I did not actually feel much cleaner, but when I judged the dirt gone and the dye threatened, I tossed the bar of hard soap up onto the dry sand and launched myself out into the sea.
Trying to rinse myself off by submerging had been a bit like pushing a cork into water, but floating was an extraordinary experience. The water was as warm and dense as a living thing against my naked flesh, and I found that if I remained perfectly still, my limbs stretched out limply and my hair in a great cloud along my arms and back, it was difficult to perceive where Mary Russell ended and the Salt Sea began. The air along my exposed front was slightly cool, but the sea’s temperature was mine, and the heartbeats that thudded slowly through my veins became the pulse of the sea. The moon and stars gazed down as I floated on my back atop the buoyant salt fluid, and the loudest thing in the universe was my breathing, travelling in and out of my nostrils like a great wind.
It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe while he guarded against intruders. I sat up in the water.
“Holmes, I hardly think you need stand guard against the hyrax and foxes. Come in and have a swim.”
For a minute there was stillness where he sat, and then I perceived movement. In the dark and without my spectacles there was no danger of my witnessing anything untoward; nonetheless I turned and struck out into the sea.
We were both strong swimmers, accustomed to the cold waves of the English Channel, and we were nearly at the shore of the peninsula two miles away before we slowed, and stopped. Holmes had maintained a scrupulous distance, close enough for companionship but not in the least improper. I could see him as a ghostly shape, near enough for conversation.
Sitting upright was awkward, like a cork trying to float on end. Eventually I settled on stretching out in the water with my hands behind my head, which kept my ears above the water without having to work at it.
The slight disturbance of our own movements died away; the sea went absolutely still. There was no current here; this was where all the water of the Jordan Valley came to be turned to vapour; it flowed no farther. I was intensely aware of my own skin, vulnerable and safe in the thin moonlight, cradled in the warm, thick, sensuous water. I was even more conscious of Holmes, fifty feet away and in the same condition, and on the distant western shore Ali and Mahmoud, reclining by the faint glow that was the low-burning fire. And no doubt listening to our every splash and bit of conversation.
With Mahmoud in my mind’s eye, and keeping my voice low lest it carry across the water, I spoke.
“Holmes?”
“Yes, Russell.”
“When Mahmoud says he was questioned by the Turks …” I stopped.
“Torture, yes,” Holmes confirmed.
“I thought so. It was stupid of me to ask. I should have …” Again the words drifted off.
“Guessed?” he asked sardonically.
“Known. I should have known. I did know—the scar had to have been linked in his mind with some mental trauma as well as the obvious physical one: His fingers worry it when he’s under pressure.”
“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 fresh-water 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.
Mar Saba—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
e 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 were fronted by low stone parapets, recesses were blocked off by high stone walls with doors let into them: Mud-wasp caves were rendered into human habitations.
Then to the left, the cubist tendencies of the wasps had gone mad, and a tumble of angular buildings, hard planes of stone and tile, spilled down into the wadi, beginning high above with a pair of square watch-towers planted firmly on the road that ran along the top of the western rim. Walls, windows, roofs, terraces, buttresses, and stairways, in varying states of repair, looked as out of place as an upended tub of monochromatic building blocks. The only reminders of organic shapes in the monastery’s centre were two domes and a sprinkling of trees.
“Come,” Ali said. “They will not admit us after sunset.”
We dropped down a faint pathway cut into the precipitous face of the wadi. A couple of hours later we had gained the bottom without serious mishap, hoisted our skirts to wade across a shallow place, and climbed up again to reach the gates of the monastery. The sun was low above the hills when Ali stepped forward to pound a demand on the small barred door. It took three tries, increasing in their authority, before the door edged open.
“Too late,” said the figure within.
“It was not sunset when first I knocked,” answered Ali.
“Come tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow we are gone.”
“So much the better.” The door closed, but on Ali’s boot.
“We wish to worship,” he said, and then astonished me by adding, in passable Latin, “Do not deny us the hospitality of thy gates, O holy one.”
“There is a party already in the guest rooms,” the truculent monk replied.
“We have tents, and do not wish to be greedy.”
“You must have a letter from Jerusalem. I cannot admit you without the permission of our monastery in the city,” the monk added with a note of triumph.
“I have a letter,” Ali answered. The monk sighed, and put his hand out of the door. Ali handed over a dirty and very worn piece of paper, but as it was not dated, and it was clearly signed, the gatekeeper had no choice but to admit that there was no dislodging Ali’s foot. Besides which, the hinges might not have withstood a fourth assault. The door opened, brother porter handed the letter back to Ali, and stood back. We led the mules in, surrendered them to a servant, and followed the monk into the heart of the order.
The monk, once he had received our donation, led us on a desultory tour through the buildings, over the carefully tended terraces where they grew figs and olives, melons and vegetables. A great many birds made their homes here, and we noticed a hive of bees in a protected corner of one terrace garden. There was a domed chapel, ornate to the point of biliousness, which we were taken through and made to admire. We also saw a pile of skulls stacked behind iron grating to commemorate the disastrous Persian invasion of 614, the small patch of ground where more recent residents lay buried, and a cavern to the south of the monastery where St Sabas himself was reputed to have lived peaceably with a lion.
All the monks in that place, who numbered less than fifty, were thin and brown and leathery, and the entire time I was within the walls I remained acutely conscious that no other woman had entered these walls since the monastery had been founded in the sixth century. Unless, of course, she too had been in heavy disguise.
As the sun receded, the birds in the palms quieted; eventually, as the moon rose over the rim of the wadi, the water below could be heard, tumbling on its way to the Dead Sea. The monk left us, and then Ali and Mahmoud went away. It was utterly still, and cold, and the desolation of the rocks in the blue light of the moon was eerie. I suppressed a shiver.
“We could be a thousand miles from anywhere,” I said quietly.
“We are three hours from Jerusalem.”
The night seemed less cold; my spirits rose. “Is that all? When will we go there?”
“Patience, Russell. We need data first.”
“But will we go there?”
“You yourself have told me that Jerusalem is regarded as the centre of the universe. I believe we will find that it lies at the centre of this mystery as well.”
“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 r
ustle 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 of energy at her command. In our enervated state she had no trouble in seizing us and dragging us off to her home, where she questioned us and lectured us and put us up for the night, returning us to our path the following morning clean and fed if delayed and rather dazed by the assault.
From her peculiar encampment we travelled north towards the Mount of Temptation (it being a steep climb to the top, I planned on volunteering to stay behind and guard the mules). Before we reached it, though, about a mile outside of town where the track passed through a small plantation of young banana trees watered by the ages-old Jericho springs, a car stood waiting.
It was a heavy car, an open Rolls-Royce of the sort used only by the highest-ranking army staff officers, its chassis virtually indestructible over the roughest of roads. The driver sat on the running board, smoking a cigarette and watching us come along the dusty track. As we approached he straightened, flicked the end of his cigarette across the road, and nodded in a familiar way to Mahmoud.
“I’ve arranged for you to leave your mules and kit with the family in the next farmhouse,” he said politely in an English straight out of Edinburgh. “General Allenby would like a word.”