Sinai Tapestry (11 page)

The landscape cracked a final time and the city was lost in haze and dust. As promised, the raw network of scars had engulfed his brain.

Wallenstein sank to his knees and collapsed on the ground. A white film covered his eyes, fevers shook him, open sores spotted his skin, his hands were immovable claws, one ear hung by cartilage and his nose was eaten away, to all appearances a leper in the final stages of decay, utterly broken by his nineteen years in the Holy Land.

And untouched by the world. So of course he never knew that a German scholar, searching the shelves of St Catherine’s a short time later, came across the issue of his unparalleled devotion and proudly announced the discovery of the most ancient of Bibles, a beautifully written manuscript that both refined and authenticated all subsequent versions, irrefutable proof of the distant origins of traditional Holy Scripture.

Scholars were entranced, the young German was world-famous. And after some decent haggling the exquisite manuscript was acquired by Czar Alexander II, at that time as powerful as any defender of any faith and appropriately enough, like the now insane lost hermit, a namesake of one of the military heroes the original storyteller and scribe had seen fit to have die at the early age of thirty-three along with one of their spiritual heroes.

Alexander the Great and Christ, a blind man and an imbecile, the czar and Wallenstein all steadfastly sharing their profane and sacred concerns over the centuries.

In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

A
FTER STRONGBOW DISAPPEARED FROM
Cairo his botanical monographs appeared less and less frequently. A year might go by with only one page published in Prague. Yet his exercises were so masterful and obscure it was generally believed he had begun some extraordinary project of which these meager presentations were but random footnotes. Given his brilliance in botany, no other explanation could be found for his apparent indifference to it.

After the middle of the century this opinion was strengthened when nothing whatsoever was heard from Strongbow for a dozen years. By then botanists everywhere were convinced the eccentric scholar had taken refuge in some remote corner of the desert to assimilate his findings, which he would soon present to the world as a monumental new theory on the origin of plants, much as his contemporary Darwin had recently done with the origin of species.

And indeed Strongbow was assimilating findings and formulating a theory but it had nothing to do with plants, a phenomenal change brought on by his brief encounter with the gentle Persian girl. And there was no way his subject could elude him in his endless disguises as a poor camel driver or a rich Damascus merchant, a harmless haggler over pimpernel or a desert collector of sorrel and similar spring herbage, an obsessed dervish given to trances and an inscrutable hakïm or healer, dispensing quinine and calomel and cinnamon water, a few grains of rhubarb and one of laudanum.

It was true no European had the opportunity to speak with him during those decades of wandering, yet there were suggestions of what was to come.

In one of his flower monographs, published in 1841, he hinted that Englishwomen in the Levant were known to sweat and that their sweat had a strong odor. If anyone at the time had considered the unholy implications of this statement it might have been realized that Strongbow was already moving inexorably toward some vast and unspeakable indecency.

But no one did notice. Scholars concentrated on his daring descriptions of new flowers, and thus while his peers rummaged through the English countryside awaiting a botanical study, Strongbow continued his epic journey across a quite different landscape.

Then too, all the accounts of Strongbow brought back to Europe over the years were more than misleading. Without exception they were totally false, the ludicrous fancies of other Europeans.

With genuine Levantines his behavior was prodigious and volatile. With them he devoured whole lambs and braces of pigeons, washing down these mountainous meals with gallons of banana beer and quarts of a frighteningly powerful alcohol he made by tapping certain palm trees and letting the juice ferment, which it did rapidly, doubling its potency every hour.

When the eating bout had been a serious one he often slept for a week, his immobile and immensely long frame stretched out like a python digesting a kill. And if the alcohol consumption had been greater than usual he might lie in his tent for as much as two weeks letting his head and organs repair themselves.

Nor did he disdain tea. On the contrary, Strongbow probably consumed more tea than any Englishman who had ever lived. Regularly each month a tea chest ordered from Ceylon arrived for him in Aqaba. In the course of a single month he drank it to the bottom, then packed the tight dry chest with the notes and journals he had accumulated during the same period.

Tea out. A great stream of piss. Notes and journals in.

As for conversation of any kind, he could find no end to it. For three or four weeks he would sit with a man, any man, feverishly discussing cryptology or music or the course of an invisible planet, the manufacture of transparent beehives, the possibility of a trip to the moon or the principles of a nonexistent world language. Wherever he found himself he would instantly seize on any stray topic that chanced to arise in the flames of a campfire or the dimness of a smoky tent, in a bazaar back room or under the stars in a watered garden.

In Tripoli, having long noted the affinity between sleeping and mysticism, wakefulness and madness, he learned the techniques of hypnotism while curing some prostitutes of their price-reducing habit of snoring.

In Arabia he observed that the temperature in the summer at five thousand feet was one hundred and seven degrees in the shade at midday, while in the winter all land above three thousand feet was covered with snow.

Miracles of rain occurred in the desert but not in every man’s lifetime. The Wadi er-Rummah, forty-five camel marches or one thousand miles in length, had once become a mighty river with lakes three miles wide where Strongbow had lived for a time on a raft, ferrying stranded bedouin from side to side.

On one day alone, a twenty-third of June, he recorded sixty-eight varieties of a minor sexual act practiced by a remote hill people in northern Mesopotamia. And in a single small notebook he catalogued no less than one thousand five hundred and twenty-nine types of sexual activity practiced by an even more remote tribe unvisited by an outsider since the age of Harun al-Rashid, a people who had spent their entire history circling an oasis on the tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Darwin was said to have performed a feat similar to the first of these with a species in Brazil, and a feat similar to the second with specimens in Uruguay.

But Darwin’s species had been a minute beetle and his specimens had ranged from fish to fungi, which he then shipped home in wine for later classification, whereas Strongbow’s Levantine subjects were life-sized, could only be plied with wine on the spot and even then tended to alter their characteristics incessantly before his eyes.

Deep in the Sinai, Strongbow sat with the elders of the Jebeliyeh tribe and asked them what unusual information there might be in those parts. They replied that not too long ago a hermit had spent ninety moons in a cave on the mountain above the monastery of St Catherine’s.

The monks had thought the hermit was praying but the Jebeliyeh knew better. Actually the hermit had been scribbling on old paper, composing a thick volume which also appeared to be very old. They hadn’t seen it closely but they knew it was written in ancient languages.

How do you know? asked Strongbow.

One night, they said, an old blind man familiar with many tongues happened to come to our camp and we led him up the mountain to hear what he could hear. The old man said the hermit was muttering a mixture of archaic Hebrew and archaic Greek and some tongue he’d never heard before.

Did the old man just listen?

No; being blind he was also clever with sounds. He listened long enough to know the hermit thought he was talking to a mole, then he cast his voice as if speaking for the mole, making the squeaks but using words as well. Since the hermit was mad he wasn’t surprised at the mole’s questions and he answered them. But of course the answers didn’t make any sense.

The mole asked what was being written?

He did, and the hermit replied that he was rewriting a sacred book he had unearthed nearby, perhaps in the monastery.

Why was he rewriting it?

Because it was chaos, a void containing all things.

And what was he going to do with his rewritten copy?

Leave it where the world would discover it.

And the original?

Bury it again so the world wouldn’t discover it.

Strongbow leaned back by the fire and considered this dialogue between a mole and a hermit. As he knew, the Bible manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus had only recently been found in St Catherine’s. But what if it was a forgery? What if the real document presented a totally different view of God and history?

After a time he took a Maria Theresa crown from his cloak and placed it on the ground in front of the Jebeliyeh elders.

This marvelous tale well pleases me. Is there more to it?

Only that the old man who was the mole forecast the hour of his death upon his return from the mountain and went to bed to await it. He never woke up. Subsequently the hermit left the cave and never came back. We can take you up there if you like.

Strongbow agreed and they climbed the mountain in darkness. Outside the cave he lit a candle. The opening was too small for him to crawl inside but he pushed one arm in and took measurements. Then he thanked the elders for their information and left toward midnight for Aqaba, normally a distance of eight marches. But Strongbow was intrigued by what he had heard and the next thing he knew a dog was yapping around his heels, a sure sign he was near an Arab village. For the first time he laid aside his speculations and raised his eyes from the ground. A shepherd boy was watching him.

What place is this?

Aqaba, answered the boy.

And the day?

He was told. He looked back at the desert and smiled. He had walked through two sunsets and three sunrises without noticing them. The shepherd was saying something. He turned to the intent little face.

What’s that, son?

I asked, master, whether you’re a good genie or a bad genie?

Strongbow laughed.

And why might I be a genie?

Because you’re twelve feet tall and because you’ve just walked out of the Sinai without a waterskin or a pouch of food or anything else.

Nothing?

Only your empty hands.

Yes only those, said Strongbow slowly. But a genie isn’t always tall, is he? He may be small and live in a tiny cave and never go anywhere in ninety moons. And in all that time he may speak only once and then only to a mole.

The boy grinned.

So that’s what you were doing out there, master, and now you’ve just changed your shape and size again the way your kind is always doing, from a mole to a giant as it pleases you, in an instant or after ninety moons. Well the water is that way if you want to wash your face, I know you don’t need to drink it. But before you go, genie, won’t you tell me the one thing you said to the mole?

How’s this? Confide the whole truth to a shameless scamp, a mere slip of a rogue?

I’m not a rogue, master.

Promise?

Yes, please tell me.

And you won’t repeat a word of the secret to anyone?

No, master.

Briefly then Strongbow recounted an obscure tale from the
Thousand and One Nights
and walked on, leaving the little boy gazing dreamily down on the gulf where a dhow was approaching with spices from India and a bulky wooden chest bearing a familiar inscription in Singhalese stating that therein was to be found the finest selected tea from Kandy, site of the temple that housed a tooth of the Buddha.

After the middle of the century there was a period of a dozen years when nothing was heard from Strongbow, the time he spent producing his study, not in a remote corner of the desert as was generally assumed but rather in the very heart of Jerusalem, where he both lived and worked in the back room of an antiquities dealer’s shop.

For Strongbow those were peaceful years. The sturdy tea chests filled with his notebooks lined the walls. He used several tea chests as his desk and a giant Egyptian stone scarab, cushioned with pillows, was his seat. An antique Turkish safe was his filing cabinet and a rusting Crusader’s helmet served as an object of contemplation, much as a skull might have rested in front of a medieval alchemist.

With its heavy masonry the vault was snug in the winter, cool in the summer and nearly soundproof. When he was at his desk small cups of thick coffee were sent in every twenty minutes from a shop down the alley along with a fresh handful of strong cigarettes. During that period of concentration he seldom spoke with anyone but the antiquities dealer who was his landlord, and, less frequently, with a fat oily Arab in the bazaar from whom he bought his writing paper on the first Saturday of every month.

A cognac with your coffee? asked the stationer as Strong-bow settled himself on the cushion indicated, at the front of the shop.

Excellent.

The usual order of fifteen reams?

If you please.

The man shouted instructions to his clerks and then arranged his robes on the cushion opposite Strongbow, where he had a clear view of the narrow street outside. He patted his glistening hair and puffed lazily on his hookah while they waited for the order to be counted out.

The composition goes well?

It seems to be on schedule.

And it still concerns the same subject? Only sex?

Yes.

The sleek Arab listlessly applied a fresh coat of olive oil to his face and gazed at the passing crowds. Occasionally he exchanged a nod or a smile with someone in the alley.