by Timothy Egan
Punishment for this level of insubordination—a general defying the direct order of an emperor—was death. Maximian commanded that one soldier out of every ten be executed, a decimation, as the word came to us. This was followed by a second decimation, and a third, until the entire Theban Legion of more than six thousand men was wiped out. Maurice himself was beheaded on a slab in this valley, at the former Roman encampment, in the year 287.
Much of the story may be apocryphal. It wasn’t passed on in the historic record until at least a century had gone by. But as with the legend of Clovis and the holy oil from the dove, the facts themselves may not matter so much as how the narrative of Maurice the martyr, answering to a higher cause, spread throughout the world, and still lives, larger than ever. For centuries, he was a white guy, and somewhat obscure. It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that the leader of the Theban Legion was accurately depicted as dark-skinned. A statue of Maurice, wearing chain-mail armor and coat of arms, was erected in the cathedral of Magdeburg in Germany, in 1250—he became a patron saint of the Holy Roman emperors of that northern territory. There is no mistaking his race; the sculpture is said to be the first realistic depiction in stone of a black African in Europe. The Swiss resort town of St. Moritz was named for him about the same time. The Swiss Guard, protectors of the pope, honor Maurice as their guiding saint. The statue in Germany still stands. Maurice, however, fell back into obscurity at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, when people who looked like him were kidnapped and sold into human bondage by some of the leading Christian nations of Europe.
His modern comeback has much to do with the vibrancy and growth of Christianity in Africa, at a time when Christianity in Europe is dying off. If present trends hold, within twenty years Africa will have more Catholics than Europe. And let’s be honest: Maurice’s story is much more thrilling than that of the monastery’s founder, Sigismund the Son Killer. Maurice has long been revered by Coptic Christians in Egypt. The Catholic church in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, an area submerged by the waters of Hurricane Katrina, is named for Maurice—one of 598 houses of worship to bear his name. Our train to this site was full of dark-skinned schoolchildren from Germany and France making a pilgrimage to the place where the warrior from Thebes chose death rather than kill another Christian. Maurice is alive in one other sense: the permanent prayer was started in honor of his memory.
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OUR NEXT TARGET is the cliff. High overhead in the near distance at the edge of town is a chapel and hermitage, dating to the seventh century, carved into what looks like a sheer vertical wall at the base of the big mountains. The trailhead has a warning sign for those who fear heights. We start our way up the narrow path, 478 steps of stone, with a handrail on one side to cling to. The valley floor recedes. The mountains open up. Cars, houses, and the station below look like the set of a toy-train town. The last stretch is a strain, but worth every muscle ache. We level out at the most breathtaking spiritual lair on the Via Francigena—the Chapel of Our Lady of the Rock. It is carved into and mortared onto the mountain, defying time and gravity. It looks organic, an artful accident of geology, stones stacked against a much bigger stone anchoring the Alps, topped by a small bell tower. How did any of these pieces get up here? Casey is hesitant about going inside, assuming correctly that we’ll find the usual reliquary holding body parts of some forgotten saint. But the small space in this nest of God is very moving, and he crosses the threshold to light a votive candle for his grandmother. The air is cool, a welcoming chill, like being in a well-furnished cave. Back outside, the view is one that belongs to raptors riding afternoon air currents.
Close to the chapel is a hermit’s quarters, first used by a man named Amé, born in the year 560. He clambered up this rock and settled into a flat on the cliff “to pray, mourn his faults in this narrow place, and serve his redeemer with perfect submission,” as a plaque at the base of his small statue explains. Saint Amé lived in sheepskin and walked barefoot. Friends from the valley brought him barley bread, water, and nuts. After he died in 627, he left something behind: those relics inside the chapel are his remains. People can still apply for solo residency on the rock. The last person to live here was a lapsed lawyer and ex-politician, Nicolas Buttet. He left just a few years ago, shucking his prior life to take priestly vows. “Once I spent nine days with only a jar of honey to eat,” he wrote. And in a very curious twist, that former hermit on the ledge is now spiritual adviser to the archbishop of Canterbury, the ever-surprising Justin Welby.
We take our time walking down the 478 steps. We hate to give up the view. Back at the monastery, we rest in the long shadows of the cloister, framed by Roman arches dripping wisteria vines, a fountain in the middle. Next door, the latest iteration of the permanent prayer is under way in the basilica. It’s a song in Latin. The plain and powerful voices are those of Augustinian monks, with a handful of young men among the older brothers—the Sleepless Ones doing their aural duty. Into the pool of these sweet male basso tones, linked through fifteen hundred years to Saint Maurice and his Theban Legion, to the pleas of all the pilgrims who’ve passed through this valley, I add my little prayer. It’s a request, and somewhat selfish as these things often are, and also coming from a sense of helplessness. Things have only gotten worse for the person I love, on behalf of whom I seek intercession. Stall the cancer. Give my wife’s sister a bit more time.
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CASEY HEADS BACK to grad school for summer quarter, and I’m left with the great wall of the Alps. I miss him, and his original take on settled debates, before he even steps onto the train. My first dinner without him is particularly depressing. He’s such a stimulant. What would Napoleon do? He would push on, push on, upward into the clouds, toward rock scrambles and narrow ledges. Thunderstorms are still in the alpine forecast, and fresh reports from a trickle of V.F. walkers I run into coming this way from Italy are terrifying. It’s blue skies everywhere but up there, where the mountains brew their own weather. One couple tells me they waited almost a week to crest the divide at Great Saint Bernard. I spend a few days hiking uphill, building strength, inching forward and trying to swat away doubt.
I like to think I’m ready for the mountain ascent. My legs are strong but for the gimpy thigh. Feet blister-free. Endurance good, except at the very end of the day, when I’m flat with fatigue. In the mornings, I feel like the rusted and locked-up Tin Man—“oil can, oil can” needed to loosen the joints. But it gets better with caffeine and recuperative Swiss air. These afternoon t-storms are clangorous, deadly, and scare the crap out of me. REI has nothing to shield a hiker from a thunderbolt. The locals know enough to stay off the mountains, or where to find cover during the danger hours.
My goal is Martigny, a village ten miles up the valley. The walk is gradual, through fruit orchards and some grapevines. Just before town, I lose the Rhône. It cuts sharply to the left. I continue on straight, into a much narrower valley, the big walls blocking out the sun in the hours at the edge of the day. I’d hoped to stay in a pilgrim accommodation in Martigny, but no one answers the phone number I was given. I backtrack, settling for a B&B in the hamlet of Vernayaz, another thirty-minute walk. I get the little kid’s room, with a too-small bed and books without words.
The next morning brings fog, visibility about fifty feet. It should lift. I’m aiming for another village, Orsières, eleven miles on the Chemin Napoléon, as they call this part of the route to Rome. I’ve learned since Calais that there is no single way on the Via Francigena. It’s a blend of paths and pavement, nature trails and the old road of the Empire, shepherds’ shortcuts and village connectors, moving in one direction—in this case up. For several hours, I don’t see a hut, a hiker, a trail indicator, nothing but trees appearing spookily out of the mist. I wonder if, while daydreaming, I took a cow path the wrong way, something that will dead-end beneath one of the cliffs overshadowing me. By midday, I’m convin
ced that I’m lost. I feel a pang of real loneliness as well. I sit on wet grass and stew while noshing on a granola bar. I’ve had it in my pack for too long and it tastes like sawdust. The guidebook is not reassuring. “This is the worst section of the whole Via Francigena, all the way from Canterbury to Rome,” writes Alison Raju, putting aside her understated and nonjudgmental prose. “You do need to be very careful if it is wet and windy, all the more so if you are alone.”
I stagger on in a sunless soup of Swiss anxiety. When at last my fears get the best of me, I retreat to the B&B, arriving late, wet, despondent. Even a cheese plate and a snort of schnapps from the owner fail to cheer me. I’m back in the little kid’s room. I strip off my wet clothes, take a shower, and lie on the dinosaur-print comforter, wondering what’s next. At least there’s adequate Wi-Fi, allowing me to access a glimmer of hope in my latest email from the Vatican. It came through the Jesuit back channel, an influential priest in Rome who writes many of the pope’s speeches. He tells me that my letter has been personally delivered to Francis, that he held my request in his pontifical hands, and now “the Holy Father is considering your words.”
Considering my words. Holy shit. Should I have rephrased them? Showed more piety? Groveled? I feel humbled, energized, but also guilty. With all the troubles in all the world, from religious genocide in Myanmar to refugee children staggering ashore on the Greek islands to a collapse in belief throughout Europe, why should the pope give a sniff about one pilgrim lumbering toward Rome? What can the Wizard of Christianity’s Oz say that hasn’t already been said? Why am I even troubling him with a handful of age-old, seemingly unanswerable questions?
And there’s a larger issue about my motives. After what happened in our parish on Indian Trail Road, do I tell the pope that most of our family is not ready to forgive the church? That we feel deceived and heartbroken—like people in so many parts of the Catholic world? What hope is there that pope number 266 can do anything about these ingrained abominations that the other 265 could not?
I use the Wi-Fi to get a call through to my wife. She’s in Los Angeles with her sister, trying to find an oncologist who can buy some time for a stage IV cancer patient. Fresh scans reveal fresh trouble spots—a radar of death. Margie has lost a ton of weight, and much of her hope. My wife pushes on, Napoleon to her own Great Saint Bernard Pass. It’s so much easier to cross a mountain range. She will never give up, even as the returns on her initiatives are diminishing. Her sister weeps throughout the day, a wail in waves, a sound that people make when death seems near or pain is so deep you have no other way to react. And yet, she still teaches piano. She puts on makeup, fluffs her thinning hair, gets in a car, and drives to someone’s house, challenging a child to play like Mozart. Or she teaches through a Skype link. I cannot possibly begin to describe my day after my wife tells me about the chemo, the nausea, the inability to hold anything down, the weakness, the doctors who can’t mask their feelings of failure. My day is nothing. In the dark and despair, in the discomfort of the too-small bed, I thrash and think about the impassable col at Great Saint Bernard, the pope and his compromised faith, my sweet sister-in-law and the randomness of fortune and sorrow. For the first time on the Via Francigena, I have a sleepless night. And when the gray half-light of morning comes around, I know I’m done. I have to go back.
III
ANSWERS
LAND OF MIRACLES AND WONDER
TWENTY-ONE
A PILGRIM OVER THE ALPS
All summer the heat bears down on the southern half of the Via Francigena, one merciless day after the other. Rivers shrink and lakes dry and fish rot on hot clay that was once underwater but is now terra cotta. Trees lose their green and wither and catch fire. Sunflowers droop and crisp and turn away from the source of their former radiance. One day in the Umbrian town of Orvieto, it’s 112 degrees Fahrenheit. In Rome, it’s 104, and for the first time in more than a century, all 2,800 fountains are turned off. The aqueducts from the mountains, some dating to Julius Caesar’s day, will soon run dry if this heat continues. The drought is “exceptional,” the government says, the searing temperatures “unprecedented.” Wildfires rage in the mountains and near the sea. In the afternoons, the sky is white with torpor. It’s climate change, or maybe not. Italians agree on nothing, as always. But they settle on a name for this summer of swelter—Lucifer.
I went home, but my heart, head, and soul never left the V.F. I missed being a pilgrim. I missed days without digital distraction, days of discovery and setback, moving toward something. I missed a routine that was simple but never predictable. I finished more books by Augustine and another by one of his modern tormentors, the British atheist Richard Dawkins. I tore through volumes on the history of Jesus, from one claiming he was at heart an angry rebel who defied Jewish orthodoxy, to another saying he favored the wealthy and espoused a “prosperity gospel.” I could find no consensus on anything but his death, the bare-bones historical record. I followed the weather on the V.F. and read Carlo’s blog, as the English pilgrim tried to stay hydrated through doubt and drought. A better man than me, he. The soles of his boots were worn to a sheen, and it took him a long time to recover at the end of every brutal day’s slog.
Margie didn’t die. Nor did the cancer recede. Her days were filled with chemo, scans, radiation, waiting for results, uncertainty, and still she taught piano, because music made her something more than a patient. I can still see her playing “Forever Young,” lifting Bob Dylan’s words with her voice, when the cancer was just starting to eat her alive—though none of us knew it at the time. Over the last month, she seemed to strengthen a bit, and started to eat more, and then she weakened. My wife said I should get back on the trail. She said that if her sister stabilized, she would try to join me. Our daughter offered to meet me in the mountains of Italy. I didn’t tell Margie about my request at Laon for a miracle, or the plea on her behalf that I slipped into the fifteen-hundred-year-old prayer-stream at the Abbey of Saint-Maurice. Because why? My thoughts and prayers are with you? No sentiment in America had been more devalued in so short a time. And yet, it was all I had.
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I’M BACK in the Swiss village of Vernayaz, and this time I’m not stuck in the little kid’s room. I would have a view of the mountains, if I could see anything. The window is smeared with the tears of the Alps. It’s the first day of September, and what happened to Lucifer? Weather is drama in raw form, the surprises, the turns from one extreme to the other, the consoling calm after the tempestuous battering. Just as I arrive, the unbearable heat disappears, summer becomes late fall in a day. It’s safe to go outside again. The pears in the upper Rhône Valley are big and the apples bigger, almost the size of cantaloupes, but the leaves and much of the fruit have heat blisters from Lucifer’s breath. The forecast is dismal, a storm lasting several days: cold slashing rain, high winds, freezing temperatures, snow at Great Saint Bernard Pass, and below, down to the 6,000-foot level. Snow! Summer has three weeks to go.
Moonlight through the window wakes me. It’s three a.m., or thereabouts. A clearing sky? A better forecast? A return of Lucifer? But it’s just a passing—clouds racing by the silvery disc, flickering the light. I try to sleep and not bother about the weather, to get back into pilgrim mode. You command nothing. You’re insignificant, a speck. Allow things to happen as they will. Do not hurry. Do not worry.
Dawn brings a decent breakfast of fruit and fresh zucchini bread, and goodbye to ground that is plumb. I will not be walking on flat surface until I reach the rich land in Piemonte where the Po drains northern Italy. Shouldering my possessions feels good, or at least right. Hello backpack, my old friend. It’s heavier than it was in June. I’m carrying winter clothes—an old down coat, fleece, rain pants, cap and gloves, and a few emergency provisions that any pilgrim in distress can’t do without. The legs feel fine. In Seattle, I finally went to see a doctor. He told me that the rupture left one of my quad muscl
es useless, balled up in the upper thigh. At some point, I might want surgery to reattach it. At some point are the only words I remember.
Today, I will try for Orsières, on the higher Napoleonic route, where I fell short two months ago. It’s twelve miles of moderate uphill. Signs warn to stay out of the riverbed that parallels the path, La Dranse, a smaller stream than the Rhône. Don’t be fooled by the water at low babble. In no time, it can become a flood, strong enough to dislodge boulders. The dam upriver is opened and shut, per the weather, a hydraulic punch in the waiting. I have new boots, lightweight Merrells, low-top leather with a great grip of the soles that give me the confidence of a mountain goat. I’ve studied the description in the guidebook to the point of memorization. I will not get lost. I will not blister. Saddled up and ready to go. Heidi ho!
I make it to Orsières just as the farmers’ market is finishing up on this Saturday afternoon. Only one more village of any size stands between this town and the pass. I’m hungry enough to eat pinecones and wash them down with petrol. Lucky me, the bounty of an alpine harvest is there for the asking—huge, bright orange carrots, gourds that look as if they were raised on performance-enhancing drugs, and many herbal and medicinal teas from plants grown in the mountains. One man is selling honey-brown rounds of bread made from long-forgotten grains. A loaf is nearly the size of a basketball. I get a quarter round, pick up some soft cheese and a drool-down-your-cheek peach. I have not felt happier all summer.