by Guy Stagg
Curved roads rise up from the crossing, past souvenir shops selling crates of decorations and an inflated Father Christmas bobbing by the high street, his plastic face puckered in the heat. I keep climbing until I can see the whole town laid out beneath me, churches and religious institutes enclosed by flat houses with untidy roof terraces. A sparse skirt of green circles the town, but beyond that the earth is stale, crumbling like bread.
The Church of the Nativity occupies the eastern end of Bethlehem’s main square. Its walls of soft-hued stone have discoloured with age, turning a burnt brown or a cavitied black. The door is a narrow opening no taller than a child, where crowds of people queue to enter. But I do not join them, because I am going to see the desert.
Heading east from Bethlehem, I enter a chain of villages with half-finished houses dragging down the road. No pavements now, so the children play on the trampled ground beside the tarmac. Sometimes they call hello, or run towards me with hands outstretched, tugging the straps of my rucksack or slipping my water bottle from its netting. A few chase after me on bicycles, until their father shouts from a doorway and they scatter.
Then I leave the villages behind and the children’s voices fade.
Blunt ridgelines break up the distance. The sun has stripped the earth, revealing the rude geology beneath. No grass, no scrub, not even the chapped lichen that grows on exposed rock – just a ribbon of road unravelling over wasted desert. Hills of limestone, dolomite, clay and chalk mound up next to the road, cliffs grazing their heights and wadis scoring their bases. Animal tracks stitch the slopes, resembling thread veins showing through thin skin, and the hilltops are littered with sediment, pale like sand and powdered like sand. But it is not sand, only baked soil and broken marl.
All afternoon I walk towards the horizon, yet the ridgelines come no closer. The landscape has the texture of old ash, dead snow, and bone polished blue by water. It is a landscape of icons, a supernatural landscape, the most beautiful landscape that I have ever seen. A place never peopled. A country without a past.
Around teatime the road runs out and I enter the Kidron Valley. The valley walls are cut so steeply that I do not notice until I reach its upper rim.
A pair of Byzantine watchtowers stand at the end of the road. One of the towers is ruined, and from here I can see Mar Saba. The monastery is the size of a mountain village, poised above the drop. Every church, chapter house and cellblock is propped on stone buttresses or embedded into the cliffs, and each building has the golden sheen of a locust’s shell.
Afternoon now, almost five. I’m hoping to spend the night here, yet when I knock on the door the guest master asks if I have a letter of permission from the Orthodox Patriarch.
I do not.
He shakes his head.
I want to tell him that, in the last ten months, I have visited almost a hundred monasteries and never once been turned away – until I came to the Holy Land. But I say nothing, only stand in the doorway looking disappointed.
Eventually he suggests that I sleep in a cave on the far side of the valley. Then he hands me a pot of honey with Cyrillic lettering on the label.
Natural honey, he tells me. From Romania. No liquid, only natural.
Footpaths etch the valley, descending towards a curtain of reddish rock. The rock is stepped in layers of scree, with caves lodged into the crags. A wrecked chapel occupies the mouth of one cave, while another has a wooden door pitched above a thirty-metre precipice, too high for anyone but climbers and angels. As I approach I realize that they are cells: the whole eastern edge of the valley is riddled with hermit cells.
After crossing the valley floor I climb up to the caves. There are coffin-shaped burrows and cone-shaped hives, chambers with dry-stone walling and warrens several storeys tall. They are all deserted, but some of the floors are inlaid with mosaic and one cell has a shrine cut into its corner. The shrine is spattered with candle wax, the deposits smooth as scar tissue.
I leave the remains of my rucksack by the entrance and duck into the cave. Within, the air smells stale like horded newspapers. Mar Saba is opposite now, and from here it resembles an optical illusion. Turquoise domes, rock-cut steps, open courtyards and overhanging balconies – all perched at that impossible angle. Beneath, the Kidron Valley carves a thirty-kilometre corridor from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. On the day the world ends, this is where God will sift the saved from the damned.
Evening is coming on, and the sun has hidden behind a hunched shoulder of rock. There is no noise in the valley but the distant whinnying of the wind. When I hold my breath, I can hear boundless silence. When I close my eyes, I can see sparks.
I unroll my sleeping bag and lay my clothes on the floor. After three hundred days of walking – five thousand five hundred kilometres – my arms and legs have burnt a deep brown. New muscle swells at the neck and calves, but otherwise the flesh has been eaten away. The spoke of each rib spreads wide when I inhale, the hips jutting out like handlebars. My waist is dented, my stomach starved, and scars fleck my palms from half a dozen falls: in the woods south of Reims, on the pavements of Thessaloniki, and in the mountains above Lake Karacaören. And there are other, older scars. The kink in my left arm, where the bone was cracked. The seam at my left eye, where the skin was split. Yet, standing above the Kidron Valley, I am thankful for these wounds, thankful for the mistakes that brought me to this place.
The light is failing and the cave beginning to simplify. Watching the valley fill with shadow, I remember that murderers once walked to Jerusalem as penance for their sins, and that suicide was once the gravest sin of all, for it meant despairing of God’s grace. After death the body of a suicide was an unclean thing, buried at a place where two roads meet. Buried beneath a crossway. Standing there, watching darkness pour into the valley, I wonder whether a life could be emptied out like the desert. If fear is the shadow the past casts upon the future, would consolation with the past set us free from fear? Is that how it feels to be saved? In which case, resurrection needs no miracle – the dead need not rise, nor Creation burn – only a moment of gladness for the things we have suffered.
Tonight I will try to sleep, yet wake dreaming of firelight in the caves nearby. At dawn I will rise and start hiking, my path pointing east along the valley. Canyons will lift up beside me – two hundred, three hundred metres – the route dropping down a grand staircase of stone and entering the lowest place on the planet. The daylight will wash clean the shadows, the desert bleach white as the sky. The sand will be salt at my feet, the silence fantastic.
Midmorning I will catch sight of a stranger, pacing forwards out of the sun. He will greet me, welcome me, wonder how far I have come. He will ask about my route, ask who gave me shelter. He will want to know why I am walking.
I will look away, telling him it is a long story.
He will turn his face towards mine.
‘Speak.’
Acknowledgements
My greatest debt is to the many priests, monks and nuns who housed me during ten months of travel, as well as the countless strangers who offered me food and shelter. Without such kindness, the pilgrimage would have been impossible. In addition, I am grateful for the hospitality of Elena Narozanski and her family, and of Alev Scott, Alex Reddaway, and Claudia Lewis. Also, for the generosity of the HRH Prince Hamzah bin Al Hussein Travel Award, and the company of Charles Marshall.
William Dalrymple and Caroline Finkel provided valuable guidance during the planning of the trip; Habib Malik and Tom Fletcher did the same while en route. During the writing, the feedback of Ed Gorman and Edward Charlton-Jones was particularly appreciated, as was the advice of Henry Hitchings, and the encouragement of the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers’ Award judges.
Special thanks to my agent Zoë Waldie and my editor Kris Doyle, who have given this book all the commitment and care I could have hoped for. And to Kate Mason, first reader and dearest friend.
Above all, thank you to my parents, who supported this journ
ey from the start, and every step along the way.
Select Bibliography
PROLOGUE
Léon Aubineau, La vie admirable du saint mendiant et pèlerin Benoît-Joseph Labre (Paris: Société Générale de Librairie Catholique, 1883)
Giuseppe Loreto Marconi, The life of the venerable Benedict Joseph Labre: who died, in the odour of sanctity, on the sixteenth of April, 1783, trans. James Barnard (Wigan: William Bancks, 1786)
Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage (1975; London: Faber, 2002)
PART ONE
Bernard of Clairvaux, The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (London: Burns, Oates, 1953)
Janet E. Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011)
Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe 1090–1500 (London: Routledge, 2013)
Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons (London: Ward and Downey, 1887)
—Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger Nash Baldwin (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927)
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1929)
Claire Marquis-Oggier and Jacques Darbellay, Le bienheureux Maurice Tornay: un homme séduit par Dieu (Martigny: Éditions du Grand-Saint-Bernard, 1993)
Thérèse of Lisieux, Autobiography of a Saint: the complete and authorised text of ‘L’Histoire d’une âme’, trans. Ronald Knox (London: Harvill Press, 1958)
PART TWO
James Glass Bertram, Flagellation & the Flagellants: A history of the rod in all countries, from the earliest period to the present time, by the Rev Wm. M. Cooper, B.A. (London: William Reeves, 1877)
Debra J. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: continuity and change (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000)
Daniel E. Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: popular devotion in late medieval Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957; London: Pimlico, 1993)
John Henderson, ‘The Flagellant Movement and Flagellant Confraternities in Central Italy, 1260–1400’ in Studies in Church History, Vol. 15 (Cambridge: Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978)
Desmond O’Grady, Rome Reshaped: Jubilees, 1300–2000 (New York: Continuum, 1999)
Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (London: SPCK, 1976)
Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade, The Life of Petrarch: Collected from Mémoires pour la vie de Petrarch, trans. Susannah Dobson (Dublin: John Beatty, 1777)
Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (1969; London: Penguin, 1982)
PART THREE
Robert Byron, The Station: Athos: Treasures and Men (London: Duckworth, 1928)
Robert Curzon, Visits to monasteries in the Levant (London: John Murray, 1849)
Pierre Gilliard, Thirteen years at the Russian court: A personal record of the last years and death of the Czar Nicholas II and his family, trans. F. Appleby Holt (London: Hutchinson, 1921)
Loren R. Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, Naming Infinity: A true story of religious mysticism and mathematical creativity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009)
G. M. Hamburg, ‘The Origins of “Heresy” on Mount Athos: Ilarion’s Na Gorakh Kavkaza (1907)’ in Religion in Eastern Europe, Vol. 23 (Newberg: George Fox University, 2003)
Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: popular movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (1977; Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality (New York: Doubleday Books, 2001)
R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy: Faith and power in medieval Europe (London: Profile Books, 2012)
Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism (1948; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: documents in translation (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 1980)
Edvard Radzinsky, Rasputin: The Last Word, trans. Judson Rosengrant (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)
Grigori Rasputin, My Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, trans. Todd Bludeau (1911; New York: Liberty Publishing, 2013)
Steven Runciman, The medieval Manichee: A study of the Christian dualist heresy (Cambridge: CUP, 1960)
The Encyclopædia Britannica: a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature and general information, 11th edition (Cambridge: CUP, 1910–11)
‘The Presbyter Cosmas’s sermon regarding the newly appeared Bogomil Heresy’ in Monumenta Bulgarica: a bilingual anthology of Bulgarian texts from the 9th to the 19th centuries, compiled by Thomas Butler (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1996)
The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, trans. R. M. French (London: SPCK, 1954)
PART FOUR
Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: A new history (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004)
Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge: CUP, 1978)
Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, Le Tombeau de Jacques Molai: ou, Histoire secrète et abrégée des initiés, anciens et modernes, des Templiers, francs-maçons, illuminés, etc. (Paris: Desenne, 1797)
Chronicles of the First Crusade, 1096–1099, ed. Christopher Tyerman (London: Penguin, 2012)
Anna Comnena, The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena: being the history of the reign of her father, Alexius I, Emperor of the Romans, 1081–1118 A.D., trans. Elizabeth Dawes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1928)
Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum: The Deeds of the Franks and other pilgrims to Jerusalem, ed. Rosalind Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ‘Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum’ in Fundgruben des Orients, ed. Gesellschaft von Leibhabern (Vienna: Anton Schmid, 1818)
Conor Kostick, The Social Structure of the First Crusade (Leiden: Brill, 2008)
Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A new history (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001)
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: Athlone Press, 1986)
Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades: Volume 1, The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: CUP, 1951)
The Rule of the Templars: The French text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar, trans. J. M. Upton-Ward (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992)
Christopher Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2015)
PART FIVE
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)
‘Cambrai Homily’ in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A collection of old-Irish glosses, scholia, prose and verse, eds. Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (Cambridge: CUP, 1903)
Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, trans. Oliver Dunn and James Kelley (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988)
—The Book of Prophecies, ed. Roberto Rusconi, trans. Blair Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (London: Harper Collins, 1997)
Carol Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (London: Duckworth, 2012)
Early Travels in Palestine: comprising the narratives of Arculf, Willibald, Bernard Sæwulf, Sigurd, Benjamin of Tudela, Sir John Maundeville, De La Brocquière, and Maundrell, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848)
Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 2005)
The Irish in Early Medieval Europe: Identity, Culture and Religion, eds. Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder (London: Palgrave, 2016)
F. Thomas Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem: pilgrimage and travel in the Age of Discovery (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2007)
John Ryan, Irish Monasticism: origins and Early Development (New
York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931)
The Voyage of St Brendan, trans. John J. O’Meara (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1978)
‘Guy Stagg makes a pilgrimage across Europe, into history and, most powerfully, the (troubled) interior of his soul. He takes us on a journey full of wonder and woe, poetry and pain; writing in prose that’s as sure-footed as it is unsettling in its honesty. A brave and beautiful account of a man’s search for meaning.’
RHIDIAN BROOK, author of The Aftermath
‘A marvellous book. There’s a lovely plainsongish immediacy to the telling that I found hugely beguiling, and (unusually) Stagg is as effective on people as he is on place. It’s also a generous piece of self-reckoning.’
WILLIAM ATKINS, author of The Moor
‘A gorgeous and moving book.’
JAMIE QUATRO, author of Fire Sermon
‘The Crossway is moving and unique, with the sense that no one else can write like this about such places as the abbeys of France, the cities of Rome and Istanbul or the daunting landscape of pilgrimage and the often astonishing people whom Guy Stagg meets. At the book’s heart is his own story; troubled, he seeks redemption and hope. Does he find them? He makes his search into a story that is gripping and uplifting.’
MAX EGREMONT, author of Forgotten Land
‘What a privilege it’s been to read this compelling and moving book, to travel with a writer who records everything he sees and feels with such care and passion. The writing is beautiful and his voice so engaging, so unflinchingly honest, throughout. I finished The Crossway and just wanted the author to keep walking.’
JAMES MACDONALD LOCKHART, author of Raptor
Guy Stagg was born in 1988 and grew up in Paris, Heidelberg, Yorkshire and London. The Crossway is his first book.