by D. J. Niko
She kept staring at the words. “You say this stele was near our site. Where is it now? I should like to see it.”
“It is in private hands, I’m afraid. This was stolen from Ethiopia by bandits many years ago and sold on the black market to a German collector. No one knew where it was until he died and his estate was auctioned. We tried to acquire it but were outbid by an anonymous collector. We managed to get these photos from the auction house.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me why you asked me here.”
“It’s … complicated.” Matakala seemed to weigh his words. “Are you a person of faith, Doctor?”
“I am a scientist. I believe what I can see, hear, and touch.”
“This is a matter of faith. Let me see if I can put it plainly. As you may know, our faith recognizes nine saints—the Tsadkan, or righteous ones. These are the pious men who spread the word of Christianity and built monasteries across our country. But according to Coptic mysticism, there was a tenth saint. We had no proof of this until we saw the inscription on this stele. It’s all there, etched in stone: the man to whom the stele refers was made a saint by the Ethiopian church a good century before any of these nine men walked our lands.”
Sarah interrupted. “What do you know about this tenth saint?”
“According to legend, he wasn’t Ethiopian; he was from the West. That’s conjecture, but it’s all we know.” He leaned forward. “Dr. Weston, we need your help.”
Sarah knew what was coming. She gritted her teeth and let him talk.
“We believe what you have found is the tomb of our tenth saint.” His gaze hardened. “I cannot emphasize enough the significance of this individual to our religion. We …” He raised a loose fist to his lips. “Let me put it another way. As a guest of our government, you have certain rights. No one disputes that. We are prepared to grant you a state-subsidized labor force in order to hasten your excavation of the royal necropolis, but we must insist that this particular find be turned over to the Ministry.”
Sarah’s face burned, but she spoke calmly. “Presuming I cooperate, what will the Ministry do with it?”
“The saint belongs to the sacred ground of Dabra Damo Mountain. We intend to return him to his gravesite and seal the tomb. We will then turn everything over to the church. Those are the wishes of our bishop, and we are obligated to abide by them.”
“And wipe out the historical record,” she said with an ironic smile.
“I know this is not the way of the West, Doctor. But it is how things are done in Ethiopia.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I don’t recommend it. It would be unwise to challenge the powers at play here.”
“Mr. Matakala, first of all, I am not challenging anybody. I am completely within my rights to be here.” The moment felt surreal, as if someone else were talking through her as she watched the scene unfold. “Secondly, my first and only commitment is to science. My job, if you didn’t know, is to research and document ancient history through remains such as these. I don’t care if the tomb in question is of Jesus Christ himself. That would not stop me from excavating the truth; it would compel me to do so. You see, Mr. Matakala, just as you believe the devout have a right to keep their holy man buried in silence, I believe the people have a right to know their past. So I’d say it’s your will against mine.”
“Be careful, Doctor. You don’t know whom you’re up against.”
“Is that a threat?”
“I suggest you give some thought to our request— if you want to continue working in Ethiopia, that is.”
Sarah nodded and briskly turned toward the door.
“Oh, Dr. Weston?” Matakala called. “Have you ever seen this?”
Sarah stopped and took a deep breath. She turned to face him.
The ideogram from the burial site filled the projection screen.
Against a tide of emotions, she struggled to keep an expressionless face.
“This is the symbol of an ancient religious brotherhood. Its members will stop at nothing to protect what is theirs.”
She fixed her gaze on his.
Matakala closed the laptop. “Around here, people only get one warning. If I were you, I wouldn’t squander it.”
Five
Days wax and wane, winters give way to spring, and famines claim the lives of the weak, but tribal life persists as it always has, earnestly and without ceremony. The way of the nomad is to accept everything as it comes: there is no anticipation for better days, no longing for the unrequited, no despair for loss. The day-to-day existence is hard enough without such complications. Egoism is a luxury the nomad cannot afford, not when there are goats to milk, sheep to shear, camels to saddle, bread to bake, children to feed, blankets to weave, night skies to interpret, seasons to predict, music to play by the campfire.
Days go by mostly without event; nothing, at least, that would shatter the sacred routine. The men and boys spend every hour of daylight driving the livestock to water and grasses and letting them have their fill, not knowing what tomorrow may bring. Pastures are few and far between in the desert, but the Bedouin knows how to navigate the sands to find errant patches of life or, better yet, full-blown oases where streams flow and plains are fertile and palms are pregnant with dates. They do not linger long, only enough to bolster the strength of the beasts and replenish their own supplies. The law of this inhospitable land is unwritten but commonly respected: every passing tribe consumes modestly, then allows the resources to replenish themselves for those who come next. It has been done this way for centuries, and no one questions it. Greed is a serious infraction in these parts. The shaykh of any tribe that breaks the law is hunted down by the violated and variously humiliated, robbed, or beaten, depending on the extent of his trespass.
The women have their own responsibilities. At dawn, they collect the daily water for cooking, drinking, and washing. They prepare the meal for their goum, as the Bedouin family is called, in the morning and let it sit in covered pots until the men come in from the plains. Depending on the day’s bounty, the meal might be as elaborate as mutton stew on the days a sheep is slaughtered or as simple as a watery legume broth mopped up with globs of sticky cornmeal or bread baked in a sand oven. On a good day, the men bring fish they catch in the streams and the women rub them down with crushed cloves and cook them over an open flame.
After the siesta, when everyone naps to escape the punishing heat of the midday sun, the men return to the grazing lands and the women gather in circles to gossip, giggle, and sing as they weave their daughters’ dowries. Weaving and embroidery are hardwired into the genetic code of Bedouin women, so much so that it is customary for proud fathers to proclaim that their daughters are born holding needle and thread. Traders offer fancy beads, sacks of pepper, spices, and ivory amulets in exchange for the weavings, but the Bedouin women decline, not because they cannot be parted from their masterpieces but because they are serving a useful purpose, like separating the men’s quarters from the women’s or keeping the children warm on icy winter nights.
Evenings are special in the desert, a time for the goums to celebrate surviving yet another day on this unforgiving land full of dangers and hardships and interminable solitude. Men and elders, women and children take their places in the circle by the fire, chatting to their neighbors about not much at all until one of the younger men begins the festivities by pounding on a goatskin drum or scratching the strings of the rababa. The others join in one by one. The flutist blows into a clay pipe, releasing the cheerful, simple singsong of the animal herder. The old me n contribute to the percussion by shaking small dried-goatskin casks filled with date pits or seeds. The women are the singers of the group. Sitting together in a chorus of sorts, they sing of the seasons or the day’s events or love, their melancholy high-pitched voices piercing the silence of the night like claws of a tigress ripping the flesh of her prey.
Gabriel waited for the blood ink to dry before putting aside the length of
dried goat hide that had been presented to him as a gift when he had emerged from the healer’s tent. It was symbolic of new life, an offering to show renewal of the flesh. He had been with the tribe many moons, too many to count, spending most of his time in solitude, observing and writing. He knew nothing of the desert, the sky, or these people who huddled by the fire night after night, their faces glowing copper in the blackness. He kept a journal in English, the only language he knew, hoping the recording of his impressions would help him come to an understanding of this place.
It had. What had started as impatience and intolerance of a culture utterly unknown to him had evolved into a sort of compassion. The nomads let him be but never treated him as an outsider. He was always welcome to participate, or not, and tonight was no different.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
Hairan gestured toward the fire circle as he spoke.
Gabriel didn’t have to speak the language to understand the old man wanted him to join the festivities. He was reluctant. “Thank you,” he said, waving off the invitation. “I don’t think I am up to it. Perhaps another night.”
Hairan nodded, but the children had no use for such courtesies. Encouraged by the invitation of the chief, they rose from the campfire and gathered round the stranger. Giggling, they examined his long, pale fingers, his ashen blond hair, knotted and wiry from dryness and neglect, the unruly reddish beard covering his face from the cheekbones down, hiding his milky skin and giving him the gruff cast of an old man. The boys kneeled around Gabriel and lifted up his robes to see what unusual features lurked beneath, whispering their curiosity to one another. One took Gabriel’s hand and pulled him toward the group. The other youngsters joined in, expressing their enthusiasm with laughter, until he had no choice but to accept the hospitality of his hosts.
The children led Gabriel near the young men of the tribe, and he took his place among them, awkwardly nodding his greetings. He wrapped his woolen blanket around his body to ward off the chill and tried to get lost in the background. It was impossible. Everyone was aware of his presence. He knew he was as unfamiliar to these people as they were to him. They all stared, not in a threatening manner but in study, as if prolonged exposure to the subject would help them understand his nature.
Gabriel avoided meeting their eyes, staring instead at the belly of the fire. Perhaps the Bedouins did not feel threatened by him, but he wasn’t sure he felt the same of them.
How had he ended up amongst these people? He struggled to recall something about his life before, but he could not. Memory was a charlatan, cheating him of something so basic as his identity. It was as if his life had begun on the night he’d woken, tenuously clinging to life, in Hairan’s tent. All that came before was a mystery whose veil had yet to be lifted.
He stared at the fire and tried to concentrate. What came to mind was the same jumble of nonsense: faces with no names, unfamiliar places, images ebbing and flowing like the tide of his dreams.
The shrill voice of a woman singing a cappella interrupted his racing thoughts. She carried a tune admirably, her voice rising and falling and reverberating in her throat, floating dreamily in the space between reality and illusion. Everyone was still, transfixed by the chanteuse, as if nothing mattered but her song.
Gabriel was surprised by the reverence for beauty displayed by the people he had dismissed as philistines. A wave of shame washed over him.
The songbird’s anthem was the prelude for an entire evening of dance and song. The musicians played with a fervor usually reserved for big events, like the passage to spring or a birth, human or animal. The instruments wailed under the continuous pounding, plucking, and blowing.
The women kneeled before the men and poured wine from goatskin bladders into small clay cups. Taneva, the eldest of the womenfolk, bowed before Gabriel and poured wine into his cup. The old woman looked at him with the tender eyes of a mother and smiled broadly, revealing the four teeth that clung like stalactites to her purple gums.
Gabriel had no idea who she was, nor that it was she who had excavated him from the eternal sands. He drank. The liquid tasted like vinegar, sour and sharp, but he was parched, so he gulped. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being watched until the young men around him whooped their approval as he upended the cup. He winced at the aftertaste.
Two of the young men pulled Gabriel to his feet and dragged him, in spite of his protests, toward the center of the circle. To the happy beat of a bucolic flute song, the men stomped and rocked and waved their arms skyward, chanting an unintelligible cadence. They prodded him to move as hysterical laughter and good-natured hollers from the crowd ensued. He had no choice but to have fun and let himself be made fun of. He did his best to imitate the other men’s movements, but he lacked the grace to improvise a dance to an unfamiliar tune. It was of little consequence to him or to anyone else, for that matter. The idea was to delight in the moment. Eventually, he released his inhibitions and let the music take his feet as he gazed dreamily at the strange and beautiful scene around him.
The children were asleep by the fire. The stars— so many stars—quivered like acrobats balancing on a tightrope above a black abyss. Gabriel danced until the smoke from the waning fire stung his eyes, his cue to call it a night.
By the time Gabriel awoke the following day, the desert felt like a sauna. The dry heat, mixed with smoke from the cooking fire, rudely invaded his air passages. He parted the flap of his tent and realized he had slept later than he’d intended. The men were gone and the women were at work, the younger ones cooking and the older, feebler ones launching into their weaving and embroidery projects.
The weaving looked to Gabriel like complicated business, and he marveled at the dexterity of the women as they brushed the raw wool on carders made from palm leaves and spun it with hypnotic rhythm. They separated the threads from the tufts of wool entirely by hand, their fingers moving as quickly and fastidiously as if they were making music on a complicated instrument. The bundles of yarn were dyed in pots bubbling with concoctions of saturated earth colors—indigo from the shells of sea snails, brown from canyon clay, yellow from saffron, red from the crimson mountain worm or animal blood—and then set to dry on grids made of intersecting tree branches. The weavers slipped into primitive backstrap looms fashioned of sticks and rope and sang as they worked, simple tunes about the stars, the plenitude of the oasis, the stubbornness of the animals, the loneliness of the desert. It was a ritual born of necessity, for the women made these textiles for function and warmth, but there was immense beauty in it.
Weaving was an outlet for expressing emotion, and it was evident in the finished piece. If a woman had just taken a husband and was in good spirits, her cloth depicted abstract figures reaching to the sky. Trees laden with fruit symbolized fertility and life. If a woman had recently suffered the loss of a child, her textile somberly depicted stars and scrolls representative of the spirit-sky. Gabriel looked down at his own blanket, examining the characters for the first time. It was an elaborate pattern of scrolls and peaks arranged in concentric circles, which he interpreted as the changing seasons in the desert.
Behind him, a voice spoke. Gabriel turned to see a boy who couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He was diminutive in stature, no taller than five feet, his hands and feet as small as a young child’s, but didn’t seem to be intimidated that Gabriel towered over him. Back straight and chest out, he asserted his presence. He pursed his fleshy lips as if he was considering the odd man before him.
“I don’t understand, my friend,” Gabriel replied.
The impish boy spoke and placed his hand on his chest. He repeated slowly: “Daaa’ud.”
“Da’ud. Pleasure to meet you.”
The boy pointed to Gabriel. “Abyan.” He said something more and started to walk away but turned back and signaled him to follow.
The sand felt like dried breadcrumbs to Gabriel’s naked feet. It was unusually coarse in this part of the desert, where basalt ou
tcroppings protruded from the sand and gravel to give the land a prehistoric appearance. It was just one of many faces of the desert. Day to day and week to week, the terrain changed from vast dustbowl to scattered stone fields to brush plains to fecund oasis. It was this variety that enabled the nomad to subsist, and his survival depended on his knowing the idiosyncrasies of each terrain as he knew the stride of his own camel. But to Gabriel, it was all frustratingly foreign and unpredictable.
Gabriel wondered where the young man was leading him. The Bedouin tents were well out of sight now, and the two of them were threading their way around a basalt labyrinth. These stones, bleached to a chalky gray by the cruel sun of the millennia, had surely seen it all: volcanic eruptions, continental drifts, ice ages, meteor impacts. Now they were headstones in a sandy graveyard, the silent sentinels of some universal secret containing all the wisdom of the ages in their fossilized masses.
Da’ud said something to him, then disappeared behind a monolith and into a cavity in the massive boulder’s underbelly.
Gabriel crawled in behind him. It was dark and cool, a welcome reprieve from the punishing heat. The air smelled of ash.
Da’ud proceeded to light a fire with some sticks and dry brush that someone had left in the cave.
A refuge. Gabriel would have never fathomed, had he not seen it with his own eyes, that a place as hostile and bleak as the desert could provide so well for its creatures. Shelter, food, and water were always available for those who knew the desert’s curves and caprices and were willing to submit to her rhythms rather than create an order of their own.