After a few hundred metres, the wash came out at a great dry confluence, a high-walled stadium whose braided grit floor told of dozens of rushing streams. The surface was rilled and islanded and terraced where water had done its folding, planing and carving. Here and there were dumps of sediment and rocks and vegetation—mesquite beans, dry grass, whole dead bushes and the disembodied heads of fifty-year-old saguaros like drowned reptiles. And yet this morning, all that remained of the water, which would have foamed a metre or more deep in places, was a slight darkening under the surface, and an abundance of vegetation. The place was a carnival of birdsong, a reminder that the Sonoran Desert is an extension of the Sierra Madre tropical biome: jungle desert. To negotiate the undergrowth took time, along with a kind of instinct—to detect the narrow, bouldered washes that were easier to walk down and where you were less likely to stumble on a hidden snake. I moved east, into the broader, deeper Hot Springs Canyon, cutting from wash to wash between the zones of scrub and grass, seeking the rocky or gritty ground. I settled on an open passage cut a metre into the surface, where flowing water had graded the grit flat and smooth. The tamarisk shrubs brushing my arms were as even as a suburban hedge. This peculiar orderliness. In the grit at the path’s cool margin I noticed a spiral impression ringed by larger stones and wondered if it was drawn by a short-lived whirlpool—before it occurred to me that it was a rattler’s waiting place. There was intimacy in that mark, as in any empty bed.
Occasionally, where the wash meandered, the grit coarsened to a stretch of rubble or boulders or was crossed by a small tree washed down from upstream, which had to be climbed over or ducked under. I came to a flat upright triangle of yellow stone, as tall as myself, fallen from the canyon wall. After another kilometre of mazelike corridors I found the way blocked by a linking of branches hung with a web in which was stationed a large black spider. I remove my backpack, slung it under the barrier, and, checking for snakes, crawled after it. For forty minutes I continued, as the canyon walls closed in and became higher, and the air grew cooler. The shadows of dragonflies were busy on the ground. Lizards darted ahead, quick and agile themselves as those dragonfly shadows. Just as I was wondering if the heat would repel me before I reached water, the path (that is what the wash had come to feel like) was glimmering ahead and flowing with shallow water, and there was water’s delicious sound, too, and I was elated, shouting with it. I had that dreamy sense of the landscape as chiefly a symbolic realm, a sequence of messages to be interpreted.
I was answered, by the water—and by something other than the water, though its voice did not register. To my left the stream threaded brightly within a broad corridor of grey sediment; to my right it was stiller, deeper—and of course it was this deeper water that attracted me. Still aglow with my arrival, I strode over the cobbled shore, and it rose up and warned me—rattlesnake, rearing sinew ten metres away, in the shadow of its waterside boulder. I stepped back three paces, and watched as it continued to buck and hiss and rattle—that refined, music-less rattle that is higher and more prolonged than the low benign thrum of the cicada. It did not settle until I moved away, and from then on, for the rest of the day, I told myself to watch every step, to watch the ground three metres ahead, and again one metre ahead. After all, what would I do if I was bitten, without antivenin, twenty kilometres from the nearest house—a house whose exact whereabouts was anybody’s guess? A down-washed root was a snake; an S-shaped ledge cut into the sand was a snake; the shadow of my own stick…In the grit I drew a reminder to my returning self:
After another hour of hyper-alert walking, dousing my wand back and forth ahead of me like a blind man, I came to the place that had been my destination all along, though I hadn’t known it was there. It was heralded by a small cyclone of cadmium-yellow butterflies, and high above, two circling eagles. The place was just a green cottonwood tree whose leaves were moved by a continuous breeze, and in its shade a brook knee-deep and on either bank long grass, and midstream a slab of limestone two metres across and almost square. And it was there, on the slab, that I spent the rest of the morning, watching the butterflies, and the dragonflies that baited them; and the pairs of eagles in the blue sky above the canyon walls. I was not impatient to move. For an hour I dozed in the cottonwood’s shadow. Why, asked the anthropologist, are so many of your songs about water?
* * *
—
BACK IN THE CABIN was a guestbook. Many of the entries, going back to the 1990s, quoted the Bible or Christian mystics. All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. This is a day the Lord has made, let’s rejoice and be glad in it. We should put the Bible on the shelf for twenty years and listen to our nature. Solitude is the furnace of transformation. My yoke is easy, my burden light. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Silence is the home of the word. I, Solitude, am thine own self; I, Nothingness, am thy all; I, Silence, am thy Amen.
Hundreds of words—Julius of Norwich, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen—precise and loving and fully meant; and yet when I was reading them after returning from my walk they began to liquefy before my eyes. It was as if language was being lost to me, or I to it. Merton’s lines alone were an anchor: silence as Amen, nothingness as all. The hike back had taken about three hours. I drank plenty, four or five litres, and had refilled my CamelBak from the stream, but in such heat—I didn’t have a thermometer but I’d guess forty-five degrees—fluid is not always enough to regulate the body’s temperature. I’d felt woozy since I got back an hour earlier, too woozy to sleep, somehow, though as I flicked through the guestbook I seemed to be on the edge of sleep, the deepest sleep.
I put the book down and sat up, and found that my neck was disinclined to bear the weight of my head. Sick was brewing like an encounter between two inimical gases; I wasn’t sure if I wanted to weep or vomit. Or: was I going to shit myself? Life can be exciting.
I stood up, and sensing that I would collapse, sat down. A gust of wind hit the cabin and threw open the door, filling the room with the noonday heat, then slammed it shut again. I thought of W. J. McGee’s stages of “thirst”: “normal dryness,” “functional derangement,” “the cottonmouth phase,” “the phase of the shrivelled tongue,” “the stage of structural degeneration”…Sitting on the bed, my head in my hands, I tried once more to remember the song—the song Absalom had played on his defective Samsung on the edge of the Taklamakan a year earlier. I was getting better at remembering how it went; each day a new line:
High on a hill was a lonely goatherd,
Lay-ee-odl-lay-ee-odl-lay-hee-hoo,
Loud was the voice of the lonely goatherd,
Lay-ee-odl-lay-ee-odl-oo…
I sat there on the bed and yodelled into my lap, and then I think I passed out.
* * *
—
THE WORD APOPHASIS comes from the Greek phasis, meaning “image”; and apo, meaning “beyond.” It is used to describe the unknowability of God and the ineffable character of the divine. In the Old Testament, Moses on Mount Sinai finds that God dwells in “thick darkness.” In the New Testament Paul tells us that He “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” Evagrius of Pontus, a monastic living in Egypt’s Wadi Natrun in the fourth century, counselled supplicants to “strive to render your mind deaf and dumb at the time of prayer, and then you will be able to pray.” Abba Pambo, another Desert Father, visited by a prelate seeking spiritual guidance, received him in abject silence: “if he is not edified by my silence, he will surely not be edified by my speech.” Abba Agathon of the Wadi Natrun kept a pebble in his mouth to prevent himself from speaking.
It was not until the sixth century that apophasis—also called the via negativa—was first articulated as a theological stance, by Pseudo-Dionysius. When we are confronted by God, he wrote, we “find ourselves not simply running short of words but
actually speechless and unknowing.” Moses himself was able only “to contemplate the place where God dwells.”
One of the things that set me off in the first place was that night at the Royal Geographical Society in London; the speaker describing his triumphal procession across the Arabian sands. I had been yearning for retreat—the cure for loneliness, they say, is solitude—but in the wood-panelled lecture theatre it was all I could do to refrain from telling him to put a sock in it. And that was what it came down to: why couldn’t we put a sock in it, all of us? Just for a minute. Or not a sock—a pebble, like good Abba Agathon. Pebbles for everyone! Settling down in the London flat under my grave-mound of books, I felt that even they were a distraction, the books; that there was nothing they could teach or I could learn from them in a year that was as edifying as a minute’s total shtum.
“A time is coming,” St. Antony warned, “when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will say, ‘You are mad, you are not like us!’ ”
Jim Corbett’s desert unbelief, it seems to me, was a contemporary form of apophasis. “The source of creation is unimageable,” he wrote. “The way towards shalom [‘harmonious community’] is revealed to us in the unclaimed wilderness of Sinai, because it has been and is offered to every people.” Solitude, he seems to be saying, is solidarity. This the Desert Fathers understood. Monasticism, the life given up to prayerful resistance, never has been a turning-away from the world, even if it is a turning-away from the word.
The next thing I remember is walking in small circles outside the cabin, as the sun began to go down, in the shadow of the great saguaro. And though it was still hotter outside than in, I was feeling better—the pounding in my head quietened, my vision cleared, my balance returned. I drew some water from the drum and dragged a chair into the shadow of the cabin, and soaked a scarf and wrapped it round my head and neck. From the end of a rafter a lizard watched me. I stood up, naked apart from my boots and the scarf, and sang to him:
Folks in a town that was quite remote heard,
Lay-ee-odl-lay-ee-odl-lay-hee-hoo,
Lusty and clear from the goatherd’s throat heard,
Lay-ee-odl-lay-ee-odl-oo…
It was the closest I could get to psalmody. Away the lizard skittered. It was wonderful, this return of alertness, of language, voice. I wondered if it carried to Daniel down in Cascabel. Rejuvenated, giddy, I went back inside the cabin and sat at the table, and it returned, the nausea, the heaviness. I stopped singing. But it wasn’t heatstroke or heat exhaustion or dehydration or “functional derangement.” Standing between the storm lantern and the bottle of wine was the camping stove, and its ratcheted black gasket was just off the vertical, slightly open. Ever since I’d brought it back in after making this morning’s coffee, butane had been silently filtering into the room, silently gassing me. I opened the windows and propped the door open and sat outside while the cabin aired.
7
THE INNER MOUNTAIN
The Eastern Desert, Egypt
In my cell in the monastery on the edge of Dartmoor, three years ago, was a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict. There are four kinds of monk, it began: coenobites, who live communally under an abbot; sarabaites, who have “been tried by no rule”; anchorites, who reside alone and are “well trained for single combat in the desert”; finally, landlopers, “who keep going their whole life long from one province to another.”
I am sitting 3,600 kilometres from Dartmoor, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, in the refectory of St. Antony’s Monastery, eating fava-bean stew. Today there is molasses for pudding. Peter, whom I eat most of my meals with, is tall and broad-shouldered and has the sort of luminous complexion you’d expect of a twenty-eight-year-old who practises tae kwon do daily, spends his evenings reading scripture, goes to bed early and consumes nothing that might threaten his body’s optimal performance.
His parents moved to Germany from Eritrea before he was born, and though he has visited Eritrea only once, he considers it his motherland and spiritual home. His slightly apologetic English is transformed when he talks about his faith, Jesus Christ, the Antichrist and eternity, and the Eritrean and Ethiopian anchorites he admires above anyone. He shows me a picture on his phone, the way another man might a picture of his wife or children: a beaming Ethiopian monk in bright yellow robes, perched owl-like in a hole in a rock face.
One of the kitchen cats places its paws on his knee for scraps: he scratches its head and imagines aloud its wily voice: “I don’t believe we’ve met, gentlemen…” He’s capable of this kind of humour. But the devil for him is ever present, a cause of constant anxiety, sadness and pity. He often speaks about the Evil One’s instruments and designs: the damage the multinationals have done to Africa, America’s illusory democracy, Europe’s racist treatment of Eritrean refugees, the barbarism of Israel’s actions in Palestine. But what preoccupies him above all is Islam. “The Muslims will cause many problems for Europe,” he’ll say. Or: “Islam cannot compromise.” I’m not to get him wrong—some of his closest friends are Muslims, kids he grew up with in Munich. “They are like brothers to me”—but, he says, they have scarcely read the Koran. They only know what their imam tells them each Friday and what they watch on YouTube. So naturally they are blind to their religion’s falsity. Besides, they do not wish to know. “They would never dream of doing violence, but the Koran teaches them to admire men who go to war for Islam.”
The refectory is a long room within a larger complex, with a black-and-white tiled floor and tables ranged along each wall. Almost filling the end wall is a framed photomontage twelve metres square showing the gate towers of the monastery overshadowed by an image from an icon: giant, haloed St. Antony, clutching wooden crucifix and tau staff. Lining the entrance hall, and in the corridors that lead from it to the adjoining guest rooms, are fish tanks, eight of them, landscaped with ibex horns and ammonites and rocks from the mountains. Brightly lit, the tanks are perfectly dry apart from one whose few inches of milky water are populated by ten jostling, flaking yellow fish.
The refectory has seating for a hundred, but Peter and I are usually the only ones here, other than the two skinny serving boys always to be found slumped over a table in the adjoining kitchen, waiting—literally slumped—to feed any guests who might arrive, and whose sullenness seems impenetrable until you smile and place your hand on your heart. Then they are glad to see you. Sometimes they excitedly make us fresh lemonade from the small hard lemons that grow in the monastery gardens. We suspect it is a minor infraction, if only of propriety. They are not novitiates, they tell me, just Copts who live in the complex of houses that adjoins the monastery. They admire Peter’s tattoos, especially the elaborate Coptic cross on his chest, visible over the neck of his T-shirt. He had it done a couple of years ago, he tells me. The simpler Coptic cross tattooed on the inside of his right wrist is older.
We are sharing the guest apartment and are the only Western visitors. He is ten years younger than me, but I often feel like an apprentice in his company. There’s no stridency about him, nor any missionary arrogance; just a simple devout certitude that makes itself known in his fluency. Any anger he has is reserved for the devil. Humankind he only pities. The vast majority of us, after all, are destined for eternal suffering. “Some of them even know this—and still they continue to sin!”
For himself, it was three years ago that the Holy Spirit finally entered him, the day he gave up Facebook, movies, TV and music. “My friends thought I was very strange, but my life is better. Purer.” He is considering becoming a monk. That is why he is here—to see if this is enough to renounce the world for, and to see if God wants him. “We live for a hundred years, if that is God’s will,” he says. “But the devil has lived for thousands of years, and he uses that experience against us. He watches us. We cannot surprise him! He knows how we will behave in any situation. It is his job. He is very good at it.”
&n
bsp; “Then the devil is growing stronger?” I say.
“Of course.” He stirs his molasses with a scrap of flatbread, but does not eat. “Every day. Everywhere. Even here. People believe the world is ruled by God. But God is not in charge. He did not win!”
It was in this desert 1,700 years ago that St. Antony was tested. The demons assailed him and he suffered the temptations imagined by a thousand artists. We look out of the refectory window at the dry valley of the Wadi Araba, a view Antony knew. An immense shallow depression broken by low hills of dark limestone, the valley traverses the mountainous desert between the Nile and the Red Sea and is a trade route pre-dating even the Roman occupation of Egypt, dividing two ranges of mountains. On its far side, thirty kilometres away, the North Galala Mountains are just visible through the rising dust of morning. Beyond them, 160 kilometres north-west, is Cairo. The South Galala range, which towers behind the monastery, extends hundreds of kilometres to the south towards the border with Sudan, walling off the Eastern Desert from the humidifying effect of the Red Sea.
It was probably the Wadi Araba that Antony followed when he left the Nile Valley. He had been living there at Pispir for twenty years when, frustrated by the acolytes who had joined him, he left in search of greater solitude. Joining a caravan of Saracens he travelled to the South Galala Mountains—Mount Colzim, in St. Athanasius’s Life. Perhaps he recognised the place as his home as they approached: the shelter promised by the mountains, this raised prospect clear across the desert, and of course the spring at the mountains’ foot. The desert might symbolise death but it was the possibility of life that allowed St. Antony to stay here. Water, first and foremost, accounts for the monastery’s existence.
The Immeasurable World Page 31