In the darkness I only have a sense of the huge space through which we are clambering; the impression is of ascending a staircase through a void. But the darkness is never absolute, any more than the silence. From some distance away, perhaps a kilometre, there is a murmuring, a human sound, some lone monk in his mountain devotions. There’s something terrifying and appalling about the sound, the utter loneliness of it. Though loneliness is surely not what he feels. Father Lucas prefers to walk without torchlight, and so as the three of us climb I am aware only of the swaying black mass of the monk ahead, a blacker black against the black of the mountains. The sound of our breathing, the swish of our hands on the steel handrail. When we stop halfway to rest, Father Lucas utters only one sentence: “Tell me this, is it the man who makes the place holy or the place that makes the man holy?” He is not unhappy with our silence.
When we reach the cave, others are waiting at the entrance, young men, the group lit up with their smartphones’ flashlights. On their phones they also carry the three Coptic liturgies of St. Basil, St. Gregory and St. Cyril, the full psalmody and the Agpeya, the cycle of canonical hours. They are pleased to see Father Lucas. He blesses them and tells them to turn off their flashlights; he doesn’t like the dazzle.
The Frenchman Jean Coppin, in the seventeenth century, described arriving at the cave, having climbed from the monastery: “The entrance is no more than two feet wide and four and a half feet high. This opening goes for some yards into the rock but does not widen out, so that two men could not pass through it abreast.” Three centuries of use has not made it more capacious. Ducking, Father Lucas blesses himself and goes crabwise into the cave, one of the novitiates following with his phone as a light. It’s a while before the passage opens out into the main chamber. It smells of incense—years, generations of incense, not sweet, more like the smell of an inactive furnace, at once metallic and earthy and herbal. The very stone is imbued with the fragrance; it is visible as a resinous glaze on the walls’ surface and you can scrape it with a nail. The stone is burnished wherever it is accessible to hands—the walls, the low ceiling, millions of caresses. And in every crack and crevice are jammed folds of paper—one cannot praise a saint but one can ask for his favour.
For Copts, merely to be in this place is a form of blessing; holiness is accretive, a function of time, and the ancient soot of incense- and candle-smoke is time and praise substantiated. The twelve of us process down a short flight of steps into a domed pit the size of a garden shed. For those of us who find ourselves positioned at the edge of the chamber, where the roof lowers, it is impossible to stand up straight. At one end is a rock altar adorned with modern icons of St. Antony. This small lightless space is where Antony, so the monks believe, spent the last forty years of his life. Six candles are lit and each one, planted in a drop of its own melted wax, is set in a natural niche or on the edge of one of the stone steps. The chasuble and chalice are taken from a locked cupboard under the rock altar, and wine poured into the chalice, and white vestments quickly pulled on by Father Lucas and his two aides.
I experience a bafflement that I’m becoming familiar with. I am handed a candle as slender as a pencil, which I clutch between two fingers as you would a cigarette, leaving my hands more or less free. I open the Liturgy of St. Gregory on my phone, but soon lose track of what is being chanted, and simply stand, head bowed, listening to the psalmody thrown back and forth between Father Lucas and the novitiates. And as the singing escalates, and the heat within the cave intensifies, I suppress a feeling of panicked claustrophobia. After an hour, I can feel the air thinning, air that is now dense with incense smoke. Just as the candle is burning down to my fingers, the words scatter and slow to an uncertain close. Father Lucas turns, dips his hand in a bowl, and splashes water over us, once, twice, three times, and I look around and everyone is smiling. Sheer relief. Father Lucas’s final few utterances are like the last birds of dusk.
The candles are blown out and we file up the steps to the cave’s throat, edging out like potholers into the fresh night. Two hours have passed. I feel slightly astonished. Night after night, these eager young men climbing 400 metres and pressing themselves into a hole in the earth for hours at a time, and doing it with joy. They’re all but indistinguishable—save for their phones and trainers—from their predecessors of the past fifteen hundred years; and that is at the heart of their pleasure, of course.
We sit exhausted outside the entrance, looking down at the night desert—a single pair of headlights is crossing the Wadi Araba twenty kilometres away—and up at the night sky. The younger boys—not novitiates, just local Copts—have brought water in a three-litre plastic canteen: they hand it to me, it’s cold, pieces of ice shucking as I upturn it to my lips. Peter is settling beside me; it’s good to see him. He won’t have any water. “Drink,” I say. He says he’s fine. “Do me a favour.” He obliges. But he’s not exhausted; he’s galvanised and newly garrulous; if he were a different sort of person you’d think he’d just eaten a good meal or had sex or watched his football team win. The sky is framed by the arch of the overhang that hoods the cave’s entrance, its shape expressed as an absence of stars. “It is so amazing!” he says, lying back. “The greatness of God’s work. So great that we cannot imagine it.” I ask him if the night skies are like this in Eritrea. “Yes! Yes, exactly the same. Beautiful. In the stars you see the pure breath of God.”
* * *
—
TOMORROW IS MY last day before I walk to St. Paul’s. Through the church windows this morning the sky has lightened to a pale blue. Soon the sun will touch the tops of the North Galala Mountains, fifty kilometres away across the Wadi Araba, but direct sunlight will not come to the monastery for an hour or more. This is the time I love most, here as in Arizona, the half-hour or so of passive light when night is giving way to the luminous time before the sun hits the ground around you. Today is a national holiday. I had expected to walk out of the monastery into the usual deserted dawn car park, but there are perhaps twenty coaches already idling, and others arriving, bringing pilgrims from Cairo and Alexandria and all along the Nile to start the climb to the cave before the sun rises.
This form of informal pilgrimage, known as rihla, is a modern phenomenon facilitated by the desert highways. It’s a day out, tourism as much as pilgrimage; but Copts also visit the monasteries to receive the grace, the baraka, of the fathers and the place itself, as well as praying before the church altars and making supplications to the remains of saints. Back inside our rooms there is no peace: from outside comes shouting and laughter, the sounding of horns and the revving of engines. The front door rattles and I open it to find two little boys running away, shrieking with laughter. The world. I’m glad to see it—the women and children, especially—but for Peter it’s too much. He’s putting on his shoes. I fill my water bottle and don my rucksack and together we go out into the smog and the honking.
The trail to St. Antony’s cave, visible 1,500 metres away, is thronged, a line of people almost unbroken threading up the steps. We push through the coaches and the crowds—by now there are perhaps five hundred people here, eating breakfast, kicking footballs, hollering to one another—and find our way around the monastery walls to the rear, where the slope to the mountains begins. Here there is no one, only the pale wall behind us and the dark face of the mountain ahead. But the horns are still audible. At the foot of the slope the track that runs behind the monastery has just been tarmacked and our feet stick to the glossy black surface as we cross. I find a trail—human or animal it is hard to say—that runs along an alluvial fan and up the mountainside. The way is rough and demanding, but well used, and not only by ibex and foxes. Close to the top, at about four hundred metres, where the face becomes vertical, a few flights of crude steps have been built, with a scaffold-pole handrail. I notice twin black power cables snaking up from the monastery. It’s not clear if we are trespassing; still, there is no question but
that we will continue to the top, if only for the view. Once we get there we see that we have reached not the top but the edge of a terrace scattered with towering dunes of limestone rubble intersected by a single winding path, and that the mountains continue to rise beyond this plateau, surging to eight hundred metres or more. “The devil is like a snake or a scorpion,” Peter says suddenly, as we walk between two hills of rubble. “We only need to say the name of Christ and it is as if he is crushed under our feet.” He is trying to comfort himself: it is not the devil that is preoccupying him but the thought of real snakes and real scorpions. I’m not sure whether his unease is just that of one accustomed to the city or if he recognises these mountains as an extension of the wildernesses of the Old Testament. He has read Athanasius and knows that the Inner Mountain was never a place of tranquillity for St. Antony. Nor was the devil ever subdued for long.
Antony’s acolytes, when they visited, “saw the mountain become full of wild beasts, and him also fighting as though against visible beings…Almost all the hyenas in that desert came forth from their dens and surrounded him.” And as we proceed, following those black power cables, we see that battle is still being joined. Built into a narrow escarpment is a small wooden hut. As we are approaching it, we see another on the other side of the path. It is these that the cables are supplying. They are like sentry houses positioned to guard the passage between the hills, the way to the monastery from which we have climbed. The doors are closed, the windows shuttered. Outside one of them is a wooden bench, but a monk’s prayer is done inside his cell, for hours without pause, for days (and who knows what his private devotions might be?), and so we cannot know if the cells are occupied or not, and we daren’t approach them for fear of disturbing someone submerged in prayer. We walk on into the maze of hills.
Limestone, I tell him, is a product of the sea; the hardened remains of tiny creatures sunk to the bed and tamped down, layer upon layer, over millions of years. But it is as if Peter, usually such a careful listener, is paying no attention. He stops and stares up at the peaks above us, at their stark line against the blue sky. Then he walks on. Close to the path ahead lie a pick and shovel. An effort has been made to dig a flat shelf from the rock slope, a sleeping place or a platform for a new cell. Where the rock’s laminations have been exposed by the digging are dozens of fossil shells. I lever one out and hand it to him. I’m not trying to prove anything. He frowns. He’s amazed. “Really? All of this, under the sea?” I pick out some more and put them in his open palm.
“How do you know this?”
I tell him it’s just a fact; we forget how we come by certain knowledge.
“You will laugh at me…” he says.
“If you say something funny.”
“Well,” he says. “Perhaps…perhaps, the Great Flood?…The flood of Noah?”
Yes, I tell him, perhaps that; perhaps the Great Flood—though these mountains are millions of years old.
He’s struggling to reconcile biblical time and geological time, but he seems to put it out of his mind as we walk on, into the wilderness. I remember what he said the other night, as he looked up at the stars outside St. Antony’s cave, thinking, perhaps, of what he could do to his life—God’s work, so great we cannot imagine it…
It is hard to imagine the monastic tradition being born in any fertile place, in any place of birdsong or children’s laughter. Only in the desert does the austerity of the prospect echo the austerity of the existence, only this mineral landscape could speak to a monk’s own avowed barrenness. We walk in the mountains for the rest of the morning, and find, lodged here and there among hidden crevasses, further monks’ cells, as well as blankets and oil lamps abandoned beneath overhangs. There is a feeling of the mountains as a dormitory. Few live here permanently. High in the mountains we follow a series of small red crosses painted onto a succession of boulders: way-markers.
* * *
—
YOU CAN COME to dread the sun, even when shelter and water are at hand: its heat, but also its light. No sooner has it risen than I long for it to set. That afternoon I retreat to the Church of St. Antony. The pilgrims are gone, and the monastery is quiet once more. Peter has been summoned to help the fathers with some work. Sitting on the floor in one corner is Brother Joachim, the novitiate whose job it is to care for the church. He’s an affable, slightly bumptious man, with a moustache that is far thicker than the beard it surmounts. He gets to his feet, glad to see me; I place a hand on my heart, he on his, and he gestures me to sit with him. He’s eager to talk (the novitiates often are). He has been here only sixteen months, he tells me. I use the word “amazing” to describe the wall paintings—I mean to put him at his ease, but it’s a fool’s word. Nevertheless it is this word he picks up, repeatedly, to describe his life here at the monastery, though it seems more the case that it is his being here, living this life, that amazes him, rather than the place or the life itself. He would not be the first to awaken to the reality of his own life with a sense of surprise. “Amazing…But it is very hard. You can read about the life of the monk, but you cannot understand it until you live it. To leave your family and your friends…”
He is young, he has not yet taken his vows. He wonders if he has made a mistake—this wondering is the essence of every monk’s life’s work. And then there are the visitors, those thousands of pilgrims who are the monastery’s lifeblood and its burden. “God knows I love you,” the fourth-century anchorite Abba Arsenius told his followers, “but I cannot be with God and with men.”
“The people think we are perfect. They come to us because they no longer trust the priests,” Joachim says. “They tell us this. They even make confession to the fathers. The work of the clergy has fallen upon the monasteries. But a man can live one life only: the life of the monastery or the life of the world.”
He lists the three eternal duties of the monk: chastity, poverty, obedience. “When there are many people here, they bring the devil with them. The devil knows how to tempt us. Maybe you see a nice car, a BMW: ‘Am I wasting my life? Is this all for nothing?’ This is how the devil works.”
He doesn’t mention the women, the silk-haired Cairenes stepping down from coaches, or the bands of roaring twenty-something men in aviator sunglasses, arms around one another’s shoulders. He doesn’t mention the new silence when the last coach has gone.
He likes novels, he tells me—he mentions Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak—and in his old life, during his twenties, he spent much of his time reading. Here, it is true, he is free to read whatever he pleases, whatever he himself deems appropriate. “But we are told that we are not here to learn about the world. We are not here for our education. Knowledge, reading, studying: it is all a distraction from prayer. Some of the best fathers, the old men, they know nothing of the world but scripture.”
Despite the monasteries’ libraries and scriptoria (the library here remains off-limits to visitors), reading—the word—has always been a subject of suspicion among the desert monastics. Athanasius tells us that, even as a boy, St. Antony “could not endure to learn letters,” and while claims that he was illiterate are undermined by letters attributed to him, he was no bibliophile: “My book,” he said, “is the nature of created things; whenever I want to read the word of God it is always there before me.” Joachim goes on, “Our father Antony said, ‘In the person whose mind is sound there is no need for letters.’ ” God, as Moses knew, is “beyond images” and thus beyond words. The desert is not a blank page; it is a library whose shelves have never been occupied.
As I’m getting up, Joachim asks me to stay. “You have an appointment? An important meeting? Stay. Stay for a while. Look.” He stands and bends down to lift a corner of the church’s red carpet, revealing a pane of dusty reinforced glass covering the ancient crypt. “There are many secret places here, you see; and there are many secrets.” But he won’t elaborate, he only smiles and holds my gaze a
s if we both understand. He only means, I think, that the life the visitor sees is not the true life, that there is something of the actor in the public monk.
It’s hard to imagine this guy who likes to read Pamuk, whose favourite singer is Susan Boyle, and who is so eager for news of the world, ever reconciling himself to the principles of chastity, poverty and obedience. But then it is not a life to which one is expected to become reconciled. It is amazing.
* * *
—
IT HAS BEEN an unusually hot day. This afternoon one of the novitiates came to our quarters and told Peter there was work to do. He, Peter, had been pleading for labour all week. Prayer and fasting were not enough. While some of the monastery’s water still comes from the spring that first brought St. Antony here, much of it is piped in. Somewhere out there on the plain of the Wadi Araba the pipe had ruptured, and since Peter was keen to know the monk’s life in all its parts, he was to join the work gang.
When I get back from the church he is sitting on the edge of his bed, head in hands. He looks up at me, then places his head in his hands again. “Peter,” I say. He looks at me exhausted. I fill a mug and mix some electrolyte powder into it: “Drink.” I’m constantly telling him to drink. He drinks. For four hours he’s been out in the midday sun, hatless, digging the rocky ground. “They told me I could leave, but I didn’t want to.” He looks drawn and spacey, his speech is slightly slurred. On his bedside cabinet are the hand-cymbals he uses to accompany his private prayers and a candle burnt down to a nub.
The Immeasurable World Page 34