From The Holy Mountain (73 page)

Outside Asyut, we passed through a thin strip of arable land: the farmers were rising now, old men on donkeys disappearing down lanes, women carrying panniers of dung on their heads as they walked in pairs down avenues of palm trees. Soon after that we crossed an invisible boundary and left the cultivation for the desert. There our escort turned back, and we pulled in to say goodbye.

'From here it should be safe,' said the Major. 'As long as you reach Kharga by nightfall.'

Ahead of us stretched an apparent infinity of empty desert. The dunes were made not of sand but of a white powder so fine, so light, so easily blown into the atmosphere by the slightest breeze, that the desert seemed to steam like a white swamp. From that swirling surface the powder rose, fugging the atmosphere, obscuring the sun, blowing onto the road and dusting the car bonnet and windscreen.

The desert played tricks with our senses. In such a place it was impossible to verify the size of any object that might break this white madness. Outcrops of rock might be pebbles, boulders or small mountains. At one point, shortly after leaving our escort, we came across a group of workers who were labouring to mend a stretch of road badly damaged by a freak storm that had hit Asyut a month earlier. From a distance the men appeared like giants; as we got nearer they shrunk to dwarves. Only as we passed alongside them were we able to judge their true height with any certainty.

In the entire journey only one geological feature broke the formless hallucination through which we passed. This was the massive faultline which ran straight through the middle of the wasteland. For hundreds of miles the desert extended onwards, completely flat. Then it hit the faultline - a near-vertical cliff-face a thousand feet high - before continuing at the new lower level, as resolutely horizontal as before. It was an extraordinary sight and must have been even more dramatic for travellers like Moschos and Sophronius who passed this way on foot, striding wearily over the sand dunes, the hoods of their habits wrapped over their mouths to keep out the choking white dust.

The face of the cliff was pitted with caves, and I wondered whether any contained a spring that might have allowed monks to live there. It was certainly the sort of remote, suggestively apocalyptic location which would have appealed to the imaginations of the Coptic monks. It made me think of a gruesome story told by the hermit Paphnutius:

I thought one day that I would go into the inner desert to see whether there were any monks beyond me. So I walked on for four days and four nights, and did not eat bread or drink water. On the last day I came to a cave, and when I reached it, I knocked on the door for about half the day. No one answered me, so I imagined that there was no one there. I looked inside and I saw a brother sitting down, silent. So, I grasped his arm and his arm came away in my hands and was like this earthly dust. I touched his whole body and found that he was dead, and indeed had been dead for many years. And I looked and saw a sleeveless tunic hanging up, and when I touched this, it too fell apart and turned to dust. And I stood and prayed and I took off my cloak, and I wrapped him up. I dug with my hands in the sand and buried him, and I came away from that place
...
[That evening I was still walking when] the sun was beginning to set. I looked up and saw a herd of antelope coming from a distance, and in their midst was a monk. And when he approached me he was unclothed, and his hair concealed his nether parts, serving for clothing around him. And when he reached me he was very afraid, thinking I was a spirit, for many spirits had tried him
...

After winding our way down the face of the cliff, nothing else broke the relentless white emptiness of the desert until, in the middle of the afternoon, we saw the first hint of green on the horizon. We were held up for a quarter of an hour at an army checkpoint, and shortly afterwards entered the date palm plantations that today, as in Byzantine times, mark the edge of the Great Oasis.

Kharga still feels like the end of the earth. In the
1950s
Nasser attempted to move some of the population of the Nile valley to this place, and for ten years much energy was expended in trying to make Kharga into a prosperous and innovative new town. It came to nothing. The city was too isolated and too remote. Since the Second World War it has rained only once in Kharga, for ten minutes, in the winter of
1959.
The population, lured there by the promise of grants and tax breaks, slowly drifted back to their homes by the Nile. After Nasser's death the political urge vanished too, the tax breaks dried up and Kharga was left a bleak, empty monument to the clumsiness of central planning, a maze of silent roundabouts, derelict factories and empty apartment blocks.

The vast
1950s
Kharga Oasis Hotel is a witness both to Nasser's hopes and, in its terrible emptiness, to their spectacular disappointment. After we had checked in, Mahmoud and I went to eat lunch in the dining hall. There we sat next to the only other guests staying in the hotel. They were engineers refurbishing the huge Kharga prison which, they whispered, was Egypt's principal depository for political prisoners. As in Byzantine times, the Oasis had proved to have only one real use: hermetically sealed by the wastes surrounding it on every side, its isolation and bleakness still made it an ideal place to hide the embarrassing and banish the unwanted. Only the cast has changed, with communists and militant Islamists now filling the cells once occupied by Nestorian heretics.

After lunch, I gave Mahmoud the slip and walked out alone to the place where I wanted to end my pilgrimage, alone. Two miles outside the town, amid the date palms on the edge of desert, there stood the ruins of an ancient Pharaonic temple to the god Amun. In Byzantine times the old Pharaonic priests had been expelled and the site taken over by monks. They erased some of the more erotic of the Pharaonic sculptures and erected in their place a series of pious Greek inscriptions, punctuated here and there with crosses. These were intended to keep away the families of demons the monks believed to have inhabited the temple under its previous management. The ruined temple is almost certainly the site of the Lavra of the Great Oasis which Moschos mentions as having been sacked in a nomad raid immediately before his visit:

When the Mazices came and overran all that region, they came to the Great Oasis and slew many monks, while many others were taken prisoner. Among those taken captive at the Lavra of the Great Oasis were Abba John, formerly lector at the Great Church of Constantinople, Abba Eustathios the Roman and Abba Theodore, all of whom were sick. When they had been captured, Abba John said to the barbarians: 'Take me to the city and I will have the Bishop give you twenty-four pieces of gold.' So one of the barbarians led him off and brought him near to the city. Abba John went to the Bishop and began to implore him to give the barbarian the twenty-four pieces of gold, but the Bishop could only find eight. He gave these to Abba John, but the barbarian would not accept them. The men of the fortress had no choice but to hand over Abba John, who wept and groaned as he was carried off to the barbarians' tents.

Abba Leo [an old friend of Moschos] happened to be in the [oasis's] fortress at that time. Three days later, he took the eight pieces of gold and went out to the barbarians. He pleaded with them in these words: 'Take me and these eight pieces of gold, and let those three monks go. They are sick and cannot work for you so you will have to kill them. But I am in good health and I can work for you.' So the barbarians took both him and the eight pieces of gold, letting the other monks go free. Abba Leo was carried off by the barbarians and when he was exhausted and could go no further, they beheaded him. Thus did Abba Leo fulfil the scripture:
Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends.

Overlooking the monastery ruins, on top of a low hill a short distance out into the desert, lay the Coptic necropolis of Bagawat. I walked over there in the bright red evening sun. The necropolis was like a Byzantine village sitting amid the dunes: long streets of simple
cafe-au-lait
mud-brick tomb-houses and chapels: some flat-topped, others with domes, a few decorated with blind arcad-ing or naive frescoes, many severely plain. Some of the tombs had clearly held the bodies of saints or holy men, for their walls were marked with pious Byzantine graffiti: 'Pray for the soul of Zoe',

'Blessings on Theophilus', 'Remember Menas'. But the tombs had decayed in the winds of
1,500
winters, so that the brick was cracked and britde, and many of the buildings were left like skeletons, without a roof or a back wall. Many had been attacked by tomb-robbers, and deep pits had been dug to reveal the hidden burial chambers. Others had collapsed altogether. The whole complex was windswept and eerie, and a gathering breeze wailed through the broken doorways.

These tombs, I realised, must have been the last thing that John Moschos saw before he left the Great Oasis on the Alexandria road,
en route
to his final exile in Constantinople. Sitting there, looking out over the temple-monastery where his friend Abba Leo had lived before being carried off into slavery, Moschos must have known that his whole world was crumbling. But I wondered whether even he realised the extent to which he was witnessing the last days of the golden age of the Christian Middle East.

Soon after his return to Alexandria, the city was to fall to the Persians. Briefly recovered by the Byzantines, it fell again in
641
a.d
., this time to the Muslims. Islam has held it - and most of the rest of the Middle East - ever since. The Christian population that Moschos knew and wrote about - the monks and the stylites, the merchants and the soldiers, the prostitutes and the robber chiefs - all the strange and eccentric characters who wander in and out of the pages of
The Spiritual Meadow,
were conquered and subjugated, their numbers gradually whittled down by emigration, intermarriage and mass apostasy. With occasional intervals of stasis, such as the early Ottoman period, that process has persisted ever since, greatly accelerating in this century. It is a historical continuum that began during the journeys of Moschos and the final chapter of which I have been witnessing on my own travels some fourteen hundred years later. Christianity is an Eastern religion which grew firmly rooted in the intellectual ferment of the Middle East. John Moschos saw that plant begin to wither in the hot winds of change that scoured the Levant of his day. On my journey in his footsteps I have seen the very last stalks in the process of being uprooted. It has been a continuous process, lasting nearly one and a half millennia. Moschos saw its beginnings. I have seen the beginning of its end.

So, as the sun sank down behind the date palms of the oasis, I thought of Moschos standing on this hillside amid these tombs at the end of the world, fretting about the heretics and brigands on the road ahead, checking in his bag to make sure his roll of notes and jottings was safe, then turning his back on this last crumbling outpost of the Christian Empire, and tramping on over the dunes to catch up with the tall, ascetic figure of Sophronius.

I left them there, and wandered back down the hill alone. As I walked, I realised I had now been on the road for more than five months. I had left Scotland in midsummer. Next week would be Christmas. On the front of my diary was a damp-ring left by a glass of ouzo I drank on the Holy Mountain. Inside were stains from a glass of tea knocked over in Istanbul. Some sugar grains from the restaurant in the Baron Hotel have stuck to the pages on which are scribbled my notes from Aleppo. Around these marks, this book is filled with a series of names, places and conversations, some of which even now seem strangely odd and distant.

As I was standing there a flight of brilliant white ibises passed overhead, circling down to roost at the pool beside the old temple. I pulled up the collar of my jacket and headed back out of the desert into the oasis, ready now for the journey home. Darkness was drawing in, and behind me at the top of the hill a chill wind was howling through the tombs.

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