“For me, it doesn’t matter so much,” he said, trying to sound resigned. “I’m an old man.”
“You’re hardly an old man.”
“Old enough,” he’d replied. “But you are just at the beginning of your career. You do not want to offend the powers that be. Life is a hard journey, with many unexpected setbacks,” he said, and she knew he was thinking that if he’d played the game better, he’d have been appointed the head of the ministry himself, long ago. “You do not want to make enemies along the way, as I did.”
“We are defined as much by our enemies as we are by our friends,” she’d retorted, and her father had turned up his palms in defeat, as he often did when they had an argument.
“You are cut from the same cloth as your mother,” he said.
“And as you.”
Within a matter of weeks, she had assembled a skeleton crew of drivers, bearers, and a Bedouin guide to take them where they would need to go — the Sahara el Beyda, or White Desert, a vast and largely uncharted section of wasteland that began fifty miles southeast of Cairo. Simone and her father had traced the location of the tomb by laboriously piecing together the shreds of the scroll that had been mixed in, rather inexplicably, with a clutch of Hebrew fragments recovered long ago from the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat. The document, rendered in early Arabic, indicated that the monk Saint Anthony — perhaps the most famous hermit in the whole Christian canon — had been buried in a secret cavern under a “spitting cobra.” Plainly, no real snake could be expected to remain in one place, much less mark a spot for eternity. But Simone knew that the ancient limestone and chalk of the Sahara, which had once comprised the bed of a prehistoric sea and which lent the region its distinctive name, had been scoured by the winds of millennia into fantastic rock formations that resembled everything from teapots to minarets.
There would even be one, she strongly suspected, that looked like a spitting cobra, and if the document was true, it was located within a single day’s camel ride, due west, from the oasis at Baharīya.
The first leg of the trip was made in jeeps, carrying supplies and provisions, over the almost impassable road that followed the meanderings of a primitive camel track. But once they had reached the oasis, the jeeps could go no farther. There was not even a semblance of a road, and the sand dunes would only engulf the tires if they tried to drive any farther. Simone stretched out under the stars and palm fronds that night, while her father slept in the back of the jeep. For hours, as the others snored and slept around her, she could barely close her eyes, so eager was she to get up with the dawn and begin the search for the cobra rock and the sepulcher that the ragged scroll said lay beneath. The discovery would be a vindication of her father’s work, a laurel wreath to crown his career, and at the same time a brilliant start to her own.
The stars were so thick in the sky that she could not even begin to find the most elementary constellations. They were like a million glistening grains of sugar on a black velvet cloth, and the waning moon shone like a Saracen’s blade. Occasionally, she heard the furtive movement of the little desert foxes, sniffing the dying smoke from the fire, poking their noses into the encampment, once or twice snatching some bit of refuse and scurrying back into the blackness. It was as peaceful and beautiful a night as she could ever have imagined, and she understood what drew the Bedouins to this barren place and kept them there.
When the sun rose, the distant rocks took on the most magnificent hues — the peachy gold and pale strawberry and pistachio green of ice cream — and Simone was quick to mount a camel and, with spurs and a riding crop, urge it on.
“The rocks aren’t going anywhere,” their teenage guide, Mustafa, warned her from the back of his own lumbering beast. “If you push him too hard, he’ll dig in his heels.”
Simone’s father, bringing up the rear, laughed. “They’re a perfect match then.”
Simone smiled, but kept up the pace. The orange sand gave way to ground as white as snow, covered with a powdery chalk, and as she entered the field of rocks, some as big as locomotives, others the size of dogs and cats, she marveled at the variety of shapes they had assumed. It was like an enormous menagerie, miles long and miles wide, of real, and mythical, creatures. One rock looked like a sphinx with its paws extended; another like a heron about to take flight. And the wind, which had sculpted them, continued its incessant battering, knocking Simone’s hat off her head more than once and making the sleeves of her khaki shirt ripple like waves.
But she had yet to see a formation that resembled a rearing cobra. Mushrooms, yes — the wind had a way of scrubbing the bottoms of the rocks more harshly than the top, leaving what looked like a crop of enormous, teetering toadstools; acres of them surrounded her. But the papyrus was old, and perhaps this particular formation, which had once resembled a snake, had been reduced to dust by now. Somehow, in her haste, she had not considered how hard it might be to spot one fanciful shape among a battalion of others. She wished that the papyrus had been more explicit. While it had extolled the bravery of the sainted monk who had gone, alone, into the wilderness and wrestled there with demons — legend had it that Anthony had even broken the tail off of one, before strangling it with his bare hands — the scroll did not provide directions, and the compass had not yet been invented in Saint Anthony’s time.
Born into a prosperous family in the upper Egypt town of Coma in 251 AD, Anthony was orphaned at eighteen, and took the words of the Lord to heart: “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor — you will have riches in Heaven.” In obedience, he sold off everything he owned, including a vast herd of swine, and gave the money away. Then he deposited his sister with a community of nuns and wandered off to live alone in the barren desert, where his only companions were the snakes and scorpions, hawks and foxes.
But after years of solitude and self-abnegation, his fame began to spread, and soon enough, pilgrims were flocking to the cave where he had taken up residence, bringing him tribute of everything from animals to incense. Some were searching for spiritual guidance, others for more practical help. His natural poultices and remedies, made from the roots and brambles found in the arid soil, were said to cure many ills. He was especially known for treating skin afflictions, often with an application of pork fat, and as a result, he had come to be associated with such skin diseases as eczema and the eponymous Saint Anthony’s fire. Pigs became a symbol of his ministry, and in religious iconography he was generally portrayed as a swineherd, with a tau — T-shaped — cross in his hand.
Exactly what Simone hoped to find in the tomb, she wasn’t sure. It would not be riches; that was for certain. This was no Pharaoh. What she was looking for was the truth — proof that the man had lived, and died, as the Holy Scriptures said. Proof that the ancient stories weren’t just that — stories — and that there might be something more to this world than met the eye. For all her education and worldliness, Simone had a streak of the speculative in her. No girl brought up in the mighty delta of Egypt, where three of the major faiths had taken root, where the pyramids of kings had weathered sandstorms and floods for thousands of years, where seas had reputedly parted and prophets walked, could be without it. Even her mother, known for her wild ways, had become, particularly later in life as the cancer ate away at her, devoutly Catholic, and some of that, too, had been imparted to the young and impressionable Simone. What was it Cardinal Newman had once said? “If I have them at six, I have them for life.” Something like that. But Simone wasn’t of any one faith; she was simply a seeker, a scholar of the unseen and the ineffable as much as of the known and empirical world. In the undiscovered tomb of a saint, she hoped to find a mixture of both.