“No doubt the central man would have preferred to seize one of the Hazr brothers, but as chance would have it, they were thrown free and I was thrown into the arms of the men laying the trap. Maalesh,” he commented with a crooked smile. The abbot picked up the bottle and filled Holmes’ glass again without speaking.
“This is what I know of him,” Holmes concluded. “I ask you again: Do you know the man?”
“He is not a man.”
Holmes and I looked at each other, startled.
“Surely you can’t mean—” Holmes began.
“He is a demon.”
“Ah.” Holmes subsided, and did not glance at me this time.
“But perhaps your vision of the world does not allow for the existence of evil creatures,” the abbot said.
“Well,” said Holmes slowly, “yes. I should say that I have met evil, true evil. Not many times, but often enough to recognise it.”
“And you would agree that it is different from mere wickedness?” I thought perhaps the good abbot had a modicum of Jesuitical training somewhere in his past, or perhaps he came by it naturally.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you agree that evil walks in human guise. I call that a demon. You call it what you may. And yes, he came here, three days after the Western celebration of Christmas.”
“How did you … know what he was? What did he do?”
“I did not know at first meeting him. A holy man might have done; ordinary human beings are not given such a degree of insight. I watched him.
“A … being such as he lives for the discomfort of others. He feeds off any degree of pain. He probably grew up pulling the wings off butterflies and graduated to hurting small animals. Under a regime such as our past rulers oversaw, such a tendency would be a useful thing. It would have been fostered, put to work. Under the guise of promoting order, keeping disruption and revolt in its place, he was without a doubt one of those men allowed to feed his urges while serving his masters: politics and pleasure intertwined. I have seen other backs like yours, Mr Holmes. I have seen far worse. His sort is adept at inflicting torment; one might even call him a connoisseur of pain—both physical and, through the body, the spiritual agony of guilt and shame. Certainly he understands that injuries to the spirit tend to be longer lasting than those of the body.
“Now, after years of freedom to do as he wished under official sanction, he can no longer control his need for causing hurt as once he undoubtedly could. It is a compulsion. When he came here, he could not resist reaching for the hand of Brother Antoninus, twisted by arthritis, and squeezing it firmly. He had to seek out one of our younger brothers who is going through a period of doubt, and suggest further things for the young man to worry about. Similar events, little things, but, in a small community, potentially deadly. After the second day I had to let him know I was watching him. He left the next morning. I considered it fortunate that we only lost a few possessions, most of them easily replaced.”
“What did you lose, Abbot?”
“As you said, two habits, a dozen large candles and some small ones.”
“Two habits?”
“Two. Also one of our climbing ropes—”
“Climbing ropes?” I interrupted. It was only the second time I had spoken, but the image of mountaineering monks was too incongruous for silence.
“We live on a cliff,” Abbot Mattias pointed out with a smile. “There are times when we need to rescue the straying kid of a Bedouin flock or remove a boulder that threatens our heads or our roof tiles. Some of the younger brothers enjoy the task. I know I did when I was younger. Also a small amount of money,” he said, returning to Holmes’ question. “We never keep much. Our needs are met by our mother monastery in Jerusalem.”
“Does that house also dress in the same habits?”
“Of course.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. And one other thing. A small ikon. Not valuable monetarily outside the community, but of historical significance and of great value to us. A painting, six inches by eight, of the Holy Virgin Mother.”
“Have you reported any of this?”
The abbot just smiled sadly. This land had a long way to go before it could think of the police as either friendly or helpful.
“Father Abbot, may I suggest that your house in Jerusalem be warned to watch for any strangers who might be trying to pass themselves off as monks?”
“I shall write to them, yes. However, Jerusalem is filled with strangers in monastic dress, from all the corners of the earth.”
“One last thing.” My head came around involuntarily at the tightness in Holmes’ voice. “Can you give me a description of the man?”
The question surprised the abbot enough to cause his eyes to narrow. “I understood that you had met him.”
“I … encountered him. I should know his voice if I heard it again, his smell, possibly his step, but I never laid eyes upon him.” Holmes’ face was shut up, rock hard but for a tiny spasm of tension in his jaw. I looked back up at the Virgin, who seemed to tell me that she had seen it all before, but I did not find the thought comforting.
“I see,” said the abbot.
“I do know a great deal about him. I know that he was born in the vicinity of Istanbul approximately forty years ago. I know that he went to university in Germany and spent time in Buda-Pest. I know he is highly educated, thinks of himself as cultured, is near my own height, and right-handed. He is missing two or three teeth in the back of his mouth, and he prefers Western-style trousers and boots with soft heels. He bathes twice a day, uses a French hair pomade, and smokes expensive Turkish cigarettes. I know that he has read widely in European philosophy, that he speaks German, English, Turkish, and three dialects of Arabic fluently, and other tongues with a lesser degree of comfort. I know that he controls his subordinates with a combination of reward and fear, that they are terrified of his temper, which is cold and vicious rather than violent. I know that he enjoys causing pain in the innocent. I know he is a dangerous man. I do not, however, know what he looks like, because he never … approached me to my face.”
He was, I think, telling me what he had been through as much as he was answering the abbot, and my stomach turned at the picture. To be strung up with one’s arms together so as to make turning the head impossible; to stare at a blank wall and have pain inflicted without even seeing it coming, by a person—no, the abbot was right, this was not a person—by a creature who was no more than an accented voice, an elusive drift of odours, a step of shoes, and a rustle of clothing.
The abbot blinked his lizard blink. “Your ears and nose told you all this?”
“My mind told me this,” Holmes replied coldly.
“God has given you a great gift, my son.” It was Holmes’ turn to blink. “The man is, as you say, tall, perhaps an inch less tall than you, and heavier, but not fat. His hair is black and beginning to thin, his skin slightly swarthy, his eyes dark. His beard was full but neatly trimmed. Not a distinctive face, but his mouth betrays him. His lips are too heavy. His is a greedy mouth, never satisfied.”
“Would he appear European, if he had no beard?”
“No,” the abbot replied. “Not the least bit.”
So, this was not the man who had spoken with the mullah in Jaffa.
“Any scars, marks, features that stand out?”
The abbot thought. “A small scar, here.” He laid his finger at the outside edge of his left eye. “And a mark, a mole, just past his beard here.” He raised his chin and tapped the right side of his throat. “Also, I believe he was accustomed to wearing a ring on his right hand, although he did not have it on while he was here. There was a light patch on the finger,” he said.
“Abbot Mattias, you would have made a good detective,” said Holmes.
“And you, my son, in very different circumstances, might have made a good abbot.”
I had not thought to hear Holmes laugh for a long time. The sound cheered me a great deal.
/> The half-moon lit our way as we followed a sleepy brother up a path to a pair of cells—enlarged caves, in the hillside. The night was cold, but heavy wraps made it bearable, and I fell asleep quickly.
During the night a noise outside my monastic cell woke me: Holmes moving past, outlined against the moonlit sky. I slid from my pallet and went out onto the pathway, where I watched him make his way down from our quarters to the central portion of the monastery. He stopped outside the abbot’s door, and must have tapped or called quietly, because after a minute the door opened and Holmes went inside. He was still there an hour later when I went back to sleep.
I did not awaken until the sun crept through the cave entrance. I knocked a scorpion out of my boots, fixed my turban firmly in place, and came out to find Holmes sitting on the ground in front of his cell, watching the small signs of life in the wadi before us. He looked rested: the bruises were fading, his eyes were clear again. I sat down ten feet away from him, and considered asking him about his midnight visit to the abbot. If it was about information, it clearly had no urgency about it, but there was also the distinct possibility that he had gone to the man for what could only be called pastoral care. In that case it would be best to pretend I had slept through his nocturnal excursion. We sat together in the morning sun and meditated on the life of the Wadi Qelt.
The sun heated the rocks around us, causing a smell of warm dust to rise up and mingle with the crisp odour of the wet stones of the stream below. Our clothing smelt, too, although I was becoming accustomed to that, and the air moving down the valley brought with it a hint of incense from the chapel, accompanied now and then by the rhythm of chanted prayer. Bells had sounded earlier, the dull clatter so different from the resonant English bells; now I heard a tiny scuffle coming from beneath a bare shrub, which proved to be a small brown bird scratching in the dry leaf fall for its breakfast. Other birds squabbled and gossipped in the fronds of a palm tree, an eagle rode the heating air high over our heads, a pair of lizards came out to bask on the rocks, and once I caught a glimpse of a turbanned head passing by on the track on the opposite rim of the wadi. I could begin to understand the appeal of a monk’s cell in the desert. If only the vow did not include obedience.…
Breakfast was bread and sour milk and dried apricots, and afterwards we went for a final interview with the abbot. He greeted us by holding out a letter.
“This is to my brethren in the monastery in Jerusalem. Would you please see that the abbot there receives it?”
“Certainly,” said Holmes, tucking it inside his robe.
“In it I mention the two of you. As you appear, shall I say, rather than as you are. It is possible you may need assistance in the city. That letter will ensure that you receive it.”
“Thank you, Abbot.”
“I wish you good hunting, my son. I shall pray for you.”
“Thank you.”
“And you, my silent daughter. Uncharacteristically silent, I suspect.” The gleam in the old man’s eyes was unmistakable now; it was nearly a twinkle. “I give you my blessing.”
I hated to disappoint him, but I had to tell him gently, “I am not a Christian, Abbot Mattias.”
“God does not mind, my child. He was, after all, your God before He was ours.”
“In that case I accept your blessing, with thanks.”
“And now you have before you a long and dusty walk. I have arranged safe passage for you. Not, I fear, an armoured vehicle; you will have to walk. However, you need not worry about being seen by your enemy. Gasim!” he called.
The door behind him opened and a Bedouin came in, looking enough like Ali to be a younger brother. “This is Gasim ibn Rahail,” the abbot told us in Arabic. “His people are on their way up to Jerusalem. You will go with them. Gasim, these are my friends. Care for them as brothers.”
“Your word, Holy Father,” the young man said, and gave us a grin that made me wonder if he spoke in mockery. It was, however, merely affection untempered by awe, and it suited us very well. We took our leave of Abbot Mattias and his monastery, and turned our faces, at long last, to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, the centre of three religions, is not at all a town for amusement.
—BAEDEKER’S Palestine and Syria,
1912 EDITION
e came to the city in the afternoon, climbing up the dusty road from Jericho in the company of six tents of Bedouins, ten camels, and an uncountable number of goats and fat-tailed sheep. The Bedu chose to stop the night on an over-grazed flat to the east of the city near a well called the Apostle’s Spring, the water of which was possessed of numerous small red wriggling creatures. After we had drunk a final cup of coffee with the sheikh (Gasim’s father), been presented with all his camels, goats, and horses, given our own meagre possessions to him in return, then reciprocally given back each other’s gifts with lengthy and painfully gracious protestations of unworthiness, we thanked him for his hospitality by declaring our worthless selves his slaves for eternity, and finally took our leave.
Walking towards the setting sun, we came to the Mount of Olives, a great sprawl of tombs and gravestones, and there at our feet lay Jerusalem.
She is a jewel, that city, small and brilliant and hard, and as dangerous as any valuable thing can be. Built in the Judean hill country at the meeting place of three valleys—the Kidron, the Hinnom, and the long-buried Tyropoeon—Jerusalem had moved uphill from the year-round spring that had made her existence possible. When I first laid eyes on her, some of her structures were already thousands of years old. It was 401 years since the Turks took the city, 820 years since the Crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon had slaughtered every Moslem and Jew within the walls (and a good number of unrecognised native Christians as well), eighteen and a half centuries since the Romans had last razed her stones to the ground, and still she rose up within her snug, high walls, a nest of stone set to nurture the holy places of three faiths, a tight jumble of domes, minarets, and towers, dominated from this side by the flat expanse of the Temple Mount, the holy place called by Arabs Haram es-Sherîf, the largest open space in the city, a garden of worship set with tombs and mosques and the enormous, glittering, mosaic and gilded glory of the Dome of the Rock.
Built towards the end of the seventh century, the Dome of the Rock cost its builders the equivalent of seven years’ revenue from all of Egypt. It is constructed as an octagon of three concentric stages, at the heart of which lies the Rock, an uneven grey slab some forty-five feet by sixty. If Jerusalem is the umbilicus mundi—the umbilicus of the world—then the sacred Rock is the heart that drives the life-blood through the umbilical cord. The Talmud declares that the Rock is the earth’s very centre. Here the priest Melchizedek offered sacrifice, here Abraham bound Isaac in preparation for offering his beloved son’s throat to God, and from this place Mohammed entered heaven on the back of his mighty steed, el-Burak. The Ark of the Covenant rested on the Rock, and tradition maintains that it still lies buried beneath, hidden there by Jeremiah as the enemy entered the city gates. The Rock bears the imprints of the angel Gabriel’s fingers and the Prophet Mohammed’s foot, and ancient legend has the Rock hovering over the waters of the great Flood, or resting on a palm tree watered by the rivers of paradise, or guarding the gates of hell. In a small cave beneath the Rock, benches mark where David and Solomon, Abraham and Elijah all prayed; in the Time of Judgement, God’s throne will be planted upon it. The Rock had been a sacred place to humankind back through the dim reaches of memory, and would continue to be so when the city before me had been buried yet again—either by the forces of destruction, or through being built up beyond recognition.
Beyond the Haram es-Sherîf, the city itself clusters close, all whitewashed domes and pale golden stone. A soft breeze came up, and I watched as her colours deepened with the approach of night. When the sun lay behind her, despite the scurry of lorries and the dust and the smoke of the evening fires, she took my breath away, that city. There were tears in my eyes and a psalm on my lips,
and for the first time I knew why Jews, as one, declare that we will meet “next year in Jerusalem.”
The sun had gone and the lights were up before I recalled my companion, seated near me on the stone wall smoking his pipe.
“Holmes—I’m so sorry, you must be famished. It was just so beautiful.”
“Quite.”
“And the moon will be over it before long.…” I said wistfully.
He stood up and smacked his pipe out against his boot. “We don’t have to be in the city until tomorrow,” he said impatiently. “I shall find someone to sell us our supper. All my life I have wanted nothing better than to spend a night amongst the tombs on Olivet.” I ignored the sarcasm: It was a gracious gift, if churlishly given. I sat and waited for the moon to climb, peripherally aware of the night noises, pilgrims returning late from the Jordan, the occasional army lorry grumbling its way towards Bethlehem, the jackals and donkeys to which I was now so accustomed blending with the calls of the muezzins and the sound of church bells and the low, constant hum that emanated from the city of seventy thousand souls.
I ate and drank the food Holmes put in my hand, accepted the thick robe he wrapped around my shoulders, and watched, enchanted, as the city slept and changed shape beneath the waning moon, until in the morning the sun woke her and restored to her that bright, hard beauty. Holmes again pushed food into my hands, cadged a mug of coffee from somewhere and gave me some, and when the city across from us was veiled by the dust raised by lorries and donkeys and the sun on our shoulders held a promise of heat, we rose, and went up to Jerusalem.
The city had seen more activity and renovation in the last twelvemonth than she had the whole of the Turkish occupation. The roads into the city were crowded with lorries carrying boulders and timber and tiles, with donkeys carrying rocks, sacks, and provisions, and with thoroughly draped women carrying a little of everything. Upon reaching the valley bottom we inserted ourselves between a caravan from the east and an army lorry whose driver’s accent declared him from the East End. At camel pace we circumnavigated the walls until we reached the Jaffa Gate, our lungs full of dust and our ears assaulted by shouts and curses, and I felt that had this not been Jerusalem, I might have turned on my heel and fled back out into the clean, simple, silent expanse of the desert.