O Jerusalem (22 page)

“There are many monks in the land. Many monasteries.”

“Not as many as there were in times past,” I commented.

“This may be true. Still, there are monasteries in the Sinai, St Catherine’s being the most famous. There are the monasteries of St Gerasimo and St John and St George near Jericho, Mar Elyas and Mar Sabas and St Theodosius; Latrun, St Elijah, and in Jerusalem itself another St Elyas. Also St Mark’s, the Monastery of the Cross, the Abyssinian monastery, the Armenian monastery, the—”

“Enough,” said Holmes. “We are looking for a monastery within one or two days’ journey from here on horse, in a lonely place, preferably in or west of the Ghor. A place a stranger could visit for a day or two without causing comment or disruption. A place …” He paused, tapping his pipe stem against his lower teeth and staring vacantly at the edge of the water a stone’s throw away. “A place with beehives.”

Ali looked at him dubiously, but Mahmoud simply recited, “Mar Sabas, St George, St Gerasimo, St John, the Mount of Temptation, and Mar Elyas.”

Holmes took his map from his robe and spread it on the ground. “Show me.”

Mar Sabas was to the north-west of us, in the hills between the Dead Sea and Jerusalem. The monastery of St Gerasimo was in the land between Jericho and the northern tip of the sea, with St John on the path worn by pilgrims between Jericho and the river Jordan to the east. St George was in a wadi to the west of Jericho, near the old road leading up to Jerusalem, the Mount of Temptation was to the north of Jericho, and Mar Elyas lay south of Jerusalem, off the Bethlehem road.

“There are of course many others, in the towns or else hermitages that do not permit visitors. These six meet your description. Although,” Mahmoud added with a faint air of apology, “I will say I am not certain that the Mount of Temptation has bees, and none of them would be an easy matter to reach in a day.”

“These will do as a start.” Holmes folded up the map and returned it to his robe. “We start for Mar Sabas tomorrow, then, and after that we shall see.”

“It is yet early,” suggested Ali. “If we start now we will be at the monastery by nightfall tomorrow.”

“No,” said Holmes, settling back onto the warm, salt-rimed sand. “We are comfortable here, and besides, Russell has yet to swim in the Dead Sea. One cannot come all this way and fail to float in the waters.” With all the appearance of a holiday maker he lay back on the beach, dug his shoulders back and forth in the sand to shape a hollow, and tipped his bearded features to the sun. Ali and Mahmoud looked at him sourly, obviously wondering what hidden purpose the man had in staying on here. Holmes opened one eye.

“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.

I
magine 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?”

H
olmes 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.