“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.”