It was easy to see that Melchior was well-versed in the subject.
Peter always enjoyed listening to people talk about the things they were passionate about. It didn’t really matter to him what those things actually were. He had once attended a dinner where he had spent the entire evening sat next to a man who was studying frogs. His enthusiasm for the creatures had been so infectious that Peter had gone to Boekhandel Kooyker the very next day and bought a book about them.
‘The hymn describes the first sunrise,’ Melchior continued enthusiastically. He was in full flow now. Perhaps it was the relief of knowing that their trip to Sharm el-Sheikh wasn’t going to be the disaster they had been imagining. ‘It goes like this: “Thou appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven, thou living Aton, the beginning of life! When thou art risen on the eastern horizon, thou hast filled every land with thy beauty.” And then night falls and darkness comes, and Aten’s absence is felt like a death. When Aten reappears in the morning, the world is reborn. “All the world, they do their work. All beasts are content with their pasturage. Trees and plants are flourishing. The birds fly from their nests.” Many people are convinced that Akhenaten’s ideas about worshipping one god, about monotheism, had an influence on Judaism. According to the most accepted chronology, Akhenaten’s reign coincides with the time that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, so we can’t entirely rule it out.’
‘That’s a pretty big coincidence, right?’ Katja chimed in.
She seemed to enjoy being able to tell Peter something that he appeared to know little about. She kept putting her hand on his leg, and the sudden warmth of her hand through his thin cotton shorts caught Peter by surprise each time he felt it, but it was quite pleasant, nonetheless. However, the alcohol was now taking its toll. He wanted to get up early the next day to visit the monastery, and he regretted having downed four beers in such quick succession.
Let me tell them something they’ve probably not heard before, he thought.
‘But what if the Exodus never actually happened?’ he asked them. ‘What if the whole story is completely untrue, not even the slightest bit true? What if the Israelites were never in Egypt at all? Then the Old Testament story would lose much of its meaning and significance, wouldn’t it? It would just be one more text like so many others you can find all over the world in which a supreme god – one who doesn’t even deny the existence of other gods – is praised for the splendour of his creation. You can probably find similarities between them all, as you just did with the “Great Hymn to the Aten” and Psalm 104. Although a likeness doesn’t necessarily mean a link, of course.’
Melchior and Katja went quiet, as though they had never considered this possibility.
‘Well, yes,’ Melchior said cautiously. ‘But what if the story didn’t happen exactly as it’s described in Exodus, but it does contain a grain of historical truth? Namely that we believe in one god because a pharaoh came up with the idea and the Israelites took that idea with them to Palestine?’
‘Personally, I think,’ Peter said, ‘and a lot of serious academics agree with me, that the Israeli Jews are actually just descended from tribes that lived in Palestine. The Israelites weren’t a separate people that came from somewhere else and conquered Canaan. They already lived there. The Exodus story was cut from whole cloth, invented to reinforce the Israeli national identity and back up the claim to the land. It’s true that when they were writing the Bible stories, they borrowed from neighbouring cultures and possibly the Egyptians as well, so could have got the idea of monotheism from Akhenaten, but you’d have a hard time proving it. They probably brought it with them from Babylon where they’d been in exile. It was only after then that they started to write the Bible stories down. I’m reading a book at the minute by two leading Israeli archaeologists. It’s called The Bible Unearthed. You should read it. It’s eye-opening stuff.’
‘Yes, but …’ Melchior started to argue, but then he suddenly stopped and let out a long yawn. ‘I’m really tired,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting off to bed, Katja?’
Peter couldn’t tell if Melchior really was tired or just tired of the conversation.
‘Have you found somewhere to sleep?’ Peter asked.
‘Yes,’ Katja replied. ‘One of the hotels is letting us sleep on their roof. It’s actually pretty romantic. It’s a flat terrace with a wall all around it, and you can lie there and look up at the stars. It only costs about two euros a night. For both of us!’
‘Well, that doesn’t sound too bad at all,’ said Peter, feeling oddly relieved that they wouldn’t have to risk sleeping on the beach.
They said goodbye, and Katja hugged him again, even tighter and for longer than she had done before.
‘You will be careful tomorrow, won’t you?’ she whispered in his ear.
It sounded like a warning.
Chapter 35
‘Allahu akbar!’ The message echoed from the speakers on the minaret near the hotel.
God is great.
The call to prayer began just before the alarm on Peter’s phone went off. He had slept poorly, and he’d had to get up to go to the bathroom a few times too. With a headache pounding at his temples and his eyes screwed up with sleep, he dragged himself into the shower. He turned on the cold tap, hoping it would wake him up, and leaned on the wall with one hand for support.
You will be careful tomorrow, won’t you?
Katja’s parting words were still making him feel uneasy. He turned off the tap, dried himself off and got dressed.
He bought some bread, fruit and two large bottles of water in the shop next door where he had bought the adaptor the night before.
The early morning air was slightly chilly, but Peter knew that it would be hot by seven o’clock.
He walked along the street to where a line of yellow taxis stood waiting for customers. They all looked empty, but when he looked through the dirty window of the car at the front of the row, he saw a man asleep on the back seat. He had contorted himself into a strange position that allowed him to fit most of his body on the seat.
Peter tapped on the window.
The man woke up, and with what looked like a considerable amount of effort, emerged from the car.
‘Katrîne, Katrîne,’ the taxi driver said before Peter could say a word.
Peter nodded.
They agreed on a price. Peter had no idea if it was a good deal or not – he just wanted to get going.
As he was about to get into the car, he saw the now familiar figures of Melchior and Katja walking towards him and waving enthusiastically. His first impulse was to get in the taxi and tell the driver to go, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He waited for them to reach the car.
Katja hugged him again.
‘You’re going to Saint Catherine’s too, right?’ Melchior asked.
Peter realised that it was going to look very odd now if he didn’t offer them a lift. Besides, he’d already agreed on a price with the driver.
‘They’re coming too,’ Peter said to the taxi driver. The man objected theatrically but backed down as soon as Peter pressed an extra twenty dollars into his hand.
‘We’ll pay our share,’ Melchior said, clearly for form’s sake because he didn’t ask what the fare would be. He got into the passenger seat, leaving Peter and Katja to share the back seat again.
The driver turned on the radio, filling the small car with loud Arabic music. It was about a two-hour drive to the monastery, so if all went well, they would arrive by 8 a.m.
Suddenly, Peter felt a pang of doubt.
Why didn’t I just go home? Why am I getting myself even more mixed up in this when Tony’s death has already brought the whole affair to an end? Not a very satisfying end, it’s true, but still …
But he couldn’t let go of the idea that if he found the hidden manuscript, Coen and Yona wouldn’t have given up their lives for nothing. Nor would the two men in Jerusalem. And in a way, even Tony’s death wouldn’t have be
en in vain.
Apart from that, Peter had naturally grown curious about what the secret knowledge was. What sort of information could be so important that it had been handed down through the generations for thousands of years via ‘living books’?
What if I’m wrong and don’t find anything at the monastery? How would I even go about looking for it? It’s not as if I can just walk in and say: ‘Hello, I’m looking for a document containing secrets that have been hidden for thousands of years. Could I come in and have a little look?’
It was no more than a hunch, an inkling, a gut feeling.
It had all gone so quickly that there had been no time or room for doubts. He’d not even had a chance to rest since arriving in Sharm el-Sheikh because of meeting Melchior and Katja at the bar, drinking too many beers, going to bed too late and then having to get up so early.
He looked down at Katja, who was resting her head on his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, and she looked like she had fallen asleep, although Peter couldn’t imagine how that was possible because the back of the car was so uncomfortable, the music was so loud, and an increasingly warm wind was blowing through the windows.
Before long, they had left Sharm el-Sheikh and were driving along a wide, flat stretch of road. There were no road markings, and the verges erratically appeared and disappeared, half obscured by the sand that had drifted onto the asphalt.
Is that someone’s job, Peter wondered. Is someone employed to clear off the sand every day with a road sweeper? What an endless, Sisyphean task that would be.
They zipped through the desert at high speed. It was much more colourful than Peter had expected. There was sparse vegetation here and there – shrubby bushes that were more brown than green – but in the constantly changing light, the sand and rocks took on new hues: yellow, orange, pink, sometimes even purple, and dark brown, like an experimental painter’s palette.
Melchior appeared to be using the journey as a meditation exercise; he stared out of the window, watching the landscape as it flowed past.
Katja was fast asleep now. Her head lolled heavily on Peter’s shoulder.
So far, they hadn’t seen anyone else on the road.
‘There aren’t many tourists?’ Peter shouted at the driver, trying to make his voice heard above the noise of the music, the wind, and the car’s engine.
The driver twisted around to look at him, and the car swerved dangerously across the road. ‘No tourists!’ he shouted back, stabbing the air emphatically with his index finger. Fortunately, he soon turned his attention back to the road. ‘No one! They say terrorists in Sinai, but no terrorists here. Only good people here. Good Muslims.’
More to check the time than anything else, because obviously, there was no signal out here at all, Peter took his phone out of his backpack. He saw that it was almost 7 a.m.
He scrolled through some photos that reminded him of home, of Fay and Agapé in the hofje’s courtyard, him and Fay together in Leiden’s botanical garden, a photo of Judith.
He put the phone back in his bag.
A herd of camels wandered over the road ahead, seemingly without anyone leading them.
The car began to slow down, and Melchior seemed to perk up.
‘Could you stop for a minute?’ he asked the driver. ‘I want to take some pictures.’
The driver drove slowly towards the camels and then stopped on the side of the road.
‘Come on,’ Melchior said to Peter enthusiastically, like a National Geographic photographer finally spotting an animal long thought to be extinct.
Peter moved away from Katja as carefully as he could, but she woke up anyway. She groggily asked if they were there yet, but kept her eyes closed. She stayed in the car while Melchior and Peter got out.
Peter was glad to be able to stretch his legs after almost an hour scrunched up on the cramped back seat. He decided he might as well follow Melchior over to the increasingly large herd of camels.
The taxi gradually caught up with them and then manoeuvred carefully around Peter, Melchior and the camels before pulling up again to wait for them further along the road.
I suppose this is no different to tourists in the Netherlands stopping their cars to take photos of the cows.
As Melchior walked back to the taxi, Peter closed his eyes and enjoyed one last long stretch before getting into the car again.
All of a sudden, he heard tyres screeching on tarmac.
The taxi pulled away at high speed, and judging by the noise the engine was making, it was doing it in the wrong gear. The wheels skidded in the sand on the road but soon recovered their grip. Katja waved at him from the back seat. Peter thought he saw her smiling and sticking both her thumbs up at him.
At first, he was too shocked to react, like someone seeing an accident happen and not knowing what to do. Then he burst into a panicked sprint. This was an utterly pointless exercise, he soon realised, because ten or twenty seconds later, the taxi was no more than a tiny yellow dot on a long, straight road stretching endlessly away from him.
Is this … Is this some kind of terrible joke?
He stood in the middle of the road, half expecting the car to turn around and come back for him in a twisted display of German humour. But it quickly became clear that he shouldn’t count on it.
They had been in the car for an hour, so they were about halfway to Mount Sinai. That meant it was at least a hundred and twenty-five kilometres in either direction, so walking there wasn’t an option and nor was walking back.
His bag was still in the car, so he had no food or water with him. His short sprint had left him sweating and thirsty. All he had with him was his passport, some money and a credit card, stashed in the money belt around his waist.
‘You will be careful tomorrow, won’t you?’ Katja had asked him the evening before.
What did she know then that she didn’t want to tell me? Couldn’t tell me?
Peter suddenly wondered how coincidental their meeting at the airport had been. The feigned helplessness, the plausible story about a conman, the pleasant evening together with food and beer.
Had this all been part of a sophisticated ruse? Had he walked into a trap with his eyes wide open? But he had approached them at the airport, hadn’t he? Or would they have found another way to make contact with him? And whose orders were they acting on?
Peter started walking back in the direction they had come from, but he knew it was futile and soon gave up. The few kilometres he’d be able to cover by walking would only make him exhausted and dehydrated. In this environment, the sun would finish him off in no time.
He recalled the tragic death of the manager of the 013 concert venue in Tilburg. He and his girlfriend had been visiting the Joshua Tree National Park in North America when their car got stuck in the soft sand. They had tried to walk to find help, only to be overcome by dehydration and the forty-degree heat. Their bodies had been found just a few kilometres from their car.
I’m so thirsty!
His tongue already felt like an old chamois leather rag, which wasn’t helped by last night’s salty food and this morning’s hangover.
There was no shade anywhere here, and the sun was growing stronger with each passing minute. He had left his cap in the car, so he had nothing to protect his head or his eyes. He was overcome by a feeling of despair.
Why? Why? Why? Surely this isn’t how my life ends? But then, that’s probably what anyone would think if something like this happened to them.
In Plymouth, too much water had almost killed him. Here, the lack of it would do the same if he didn’t find help soon.
He decided to walk to the first bend in the road in the hope of finding some sort of shade. It turned out to be a vain hope. All he saw was a pathetic little shrub with just a couple of leaves on it. He walked on.
This is not good, Peter thought dispiritedly.
His head started to throb with pain.
I should have taken some aspirin for my hangover this morning.
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The tiredness from travelling, the fight with Tony, his narrow escape from America, and most of all, this betrayal by Melchior and Katja and the dire situation they had left him in, it all came out now. For the first time in many years, Peter broke down and wept.
He screwed his face into a strange grimace in a desperate attempt to catch the precious moisture in his tears in his mouth, but it was useless.
He saw a small bush that cast a pale shadow on the ground.
A headache, exhaustion, stress, thirst, and a hangover … I can’t imagine a worse state to be in in this situation.
He lay down on his side in the sand and did his best to position his head in the shrub’s thin shade.
Maybe another car will come along.
He covered his face with his arm to protect it from the relentless heat of the sun.
Have to save my energy as much as I can now … he thought before he slowly slipped into unconsciousness.
Chapter 36
Peter’s eyes fluttered.
I’m still here, was his first thought. I haven’t seen a tunnel of light. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. There weren’t any dead relatives or radiant, benevolent beings telling me to return to my body because I still have work to do on earth.
The fact that his soul was still firmly attached to his body was made abundantly clear by his pounding headache. He opened his eyes. Wherever he was, it was dark, but not entirely. The light was being filtered somehow.
The skin on his cheek felt raw from the rough material he had been lying on for who knew how long. He tried to sit up, but the violent thumping in his head forced him to fall back again. After a few more attempts, he eventually succeeded. He was lying on a simple cot made of what looked like an animal hide stretched over a wooden frame. Someone had taken off his shoes for him, but he was still fully clothed.
The Pilgrim Conspiracy Page 42