The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  They successfully uncovered the pipe, fixed the leak, filled the hole. But he’s dehydrated and I’m worried about heatstroke. I tell him to sleep, but he wants to talk. “The fathers did nothing,” he says, “only shouted instructions.” He laughs. “It wasn’t what I expected!”

  “Drink.”

  “I feel fine.”

  I go and refill his mug. At dinner in the refectory he is better; his eyes have lost their stickiness, water is doing its work. But his fervour of a week ago is spent. As he and the novitiates dug, dug, fixed, and refilled, he says, the fathers stood around the hole drinking Pepsi and laughing. They had called him “German”:

  “ ‘Dig, German!’

  “Some of the monks are good,” he says, “some are bad. You can see—at the morning praises, sometimes only a few of the fathers are there.” Maybe they’re praying in private, I say, or in one of the monastery’s other churches. “I’m not judging them,” he replies quickly. “But—would I be like that, if I came here? I am not judging them…” But he goes on: “If you want to live the life of the city, to drink coffee”—and Pepsi—“and meet new people, why not do God’s work in the city?”

  He is still exhausted, but there is energy in his gaze.

  “If we live as Jesus wished, then we will hate the world. God hates the world, because it is evil. Yes, there are some good people, but most people do not live good lives. Evil is there for us to look at. In the Sinai desert the Bedouin kidnap Eritrean refugees and if the family will not pay twenty thousand, thirty thousand dollars, they kill them; then they cut out the heart and the liver and they sell them—”

  I interrupt him. “How old are you?”

  “You know how old I am. Twenty-eight. When I was nineteen, I hated getting older: ‘Oh no, I am twenty! Oh no, I am twenty-one!’…Since Christ came to me, I long to be older! To be fifty, to be sixty, to be close to the end—to paradise. You see? When we are in paradise the pain of this world will be…oh, like the sting of a mosquito…or an accident we had when we were a child. Of course God hates the world. God did not win.”

  I am tiring of the Evil One. To doubt the existence of God is one thing, it seems; but to question the reality of Satan? Evil is there for us to look at. Go to YouTube and watch those men in orange jumpsuits being led along a Libyan beach. Google the rate for an Eritrean’s heart.

  Tomorrow morning I’ll leave the monastery for good, and cross the mountains to St. Paul’s. Peter’s flight is not for another week, but he’s made his decision. The hours of digging in the desert, the fathers in black chugging Pepsi—“Dig, German!”: a turning point. Perhaps the turning point he was seeking…He will go to his parents’ motherland, Eritrea (Eritrea, from where a whole generation longs to escape), where the monastic life is truer to that which St. Macarius and his followers lived—behind walls without gates, or in “hyena holes”; or in caves deep in the desert, paneremos, le désert absolu, eternally anonymous. It is they who inspire him, those of whom no one will ever know.

  On the way back to our quarters we stop in the corridor to watch the fish in their tank. The water hasn’t been refilled since yesterday; it evaporates quickly in this dryness, and as it evaporates it becomes cloudier and cloudier. Another day or two and the fish will die. You can barely see them through the murk. Peter goes to the kitchen and returns holding a large tin cooking pot to his chest. Together we lift it and tip the water into the tank. “Drink!” he tells the fish.

  * * *

  —

  THERE ARE NO good maps of the South Galala Mountains—the best I’ve come across was drawn by British military surveyors in 1891. You’d trust it at your peril. A few years ago, an American expat set out to walk between the monasteries alone. He was found too late, having lost his way and run out of water. Only the Bedouin of the northern Eastern Desert, the Ma’aza, know the mountains, and as a foreigner it is prudent to at least get their consent before setting out. Moussa, an English-speaking Coptic guide, is recommended to me by a friend. He makes contact with Mussalem, a member of the Ma’aza, and Mussalem’s cousin Khaled. They were among those who found the American. The journey will take us two days. Khaled will transport our dinner, and our water for the second day, along with my luggage, and meet us at this evening’s campsite in his truck.

  I attend matins for the last time before we leave. In Greek there is the word apatheia, which means something like “the stilling of the passions.” It is the most hard-earned of the monks’ aspirations. Few achieve it. A state of holy tranquillity that equates to disinterestedness, indifference, detachment. Disinterest not towards duty, but towards social expectation; indifference to the opinion of others; detachment from the laws of the human world: this is apatheia. It is related to apophasis: you first have to acknowledge the incalculable value of silence. As the theologian Evagrius of Pontus said, “desert apatheia has a daughter whose name is love.” It is this—love, agape—that is visible in the deportment of the older fathers during matins: their reverence for the church and the liturgy and their forebears, their small tendernesses to the other monks and novitiates. The desert, in its harshness, is the external complement of the indifference that love requires.

  Moussa, when we meet outside the monastery gates, is boisterous and obliging, with the slightly guarded air of liberation you find in new fathers away from home (his wife’s just had their third baby). He’s good company even when we are walking in silence. I’m his first client in months, he says. Egypt’s tourist industry is all but nonexistent following the war in neighbouring Libya and the bombing of a Russian airliner flying from Sharm el-Sheikh. He was a tour guide in the Sinai desert, but he has had to retrain as a teacher. For him, as a Copt, our journey is in the nature of a pilgrimage. Mussalem, a foot shorter than Moussa, scarcely speaks, and walks ahead—always several metres ahead—navigating the rubble and boulders as if gliding just above the wadi floor. He wears an off-white dishdasha and a white headscarf. Slung across his back are his canvas satchel and a canteen formed from coloured yarn woven snug around a two-litre plastic water bottle. Over one shoulder, all day, he holds a plastic bag containing flatbreads and tubs of halva.

  After a morning spent walking the boulder-strewn plain of the Wadi Araba we meet Khaled for lunch under an acacia tree, the only vegetation above ankle-height we’ve seen since leaving St. Antony’s. Having eaten, Moussa and I rest for an hour in its shade while Mussalem and Khaled lie under the truck. A fly’s attentions serve as a reminder of what reeks about you: where does it attend? Nostrils, ear-holes, eye-corners, lips; wherever there is fluid. Along one of the acacia’s branches a line of ants processes. From another, Khaled has hung a plastic bag. I watch as blood drips from one corner onto the dust by my feet, pools. And yes, as it dries, I see that its colour is not red but grey.

  We see Khaled off for the afternoon and turn right, following a wadi into the mountains. There is a feeling of containment after the infinite openness of the plain. Containment and the relief of shade. The only animal life we see are two indignant finches in a solitary wild fig tree. The valley closes in—on either side, ten-metre walls of gravelly conglomerate carved with vertical channels where water has cascaded. The sun is getting low. We’ve walked about thirty kilometres. On the other side of the wadi we see a white Toyota Hilux moving parallel to us: Khaled.

  Once he has lit a fire, Mussalem puts the flame of a lighter to a plastic water bottle and carefully tears off its funnelled top. He pushes one of the monastery’s candles into the coarse sand of the wadi floor and fits the half-bottle over it, mouth first, to serve as a wind-break, then lights the candle. He repeats this with our remaining empty water bottles, so that our camp is ringed by flickering, crystalline cones of plastic. After dinner I find a windless spot for my sleeping mat.

  It’s about three hours later when I’m snapped awake by a noise. I blink and the valley walls are ablaze in shifting, rocking yellow light. Passe
ngers. Mussalem, Moussa and Khaled sit up as headlights dazzle us and a rusted Toyota truck skids to a halt metres from our camp. There’s a moment’s silence, then a door slams.

  Moussa is kneeling in his sleeping bag, one hand visored on his brow. Mussalem is up and shouting at the strangers. The headlights are switched off and I can see nothing. “Who are you?” Mussalem is demanding. “What are you doing on our land?” They shout back; another door slams. The exchange cools. The two men are Ma’aza from another clan, apparently looking for a herd of absconded camels. This is precisely what the men who sped up to our lunch camp in Oman two years ago said. Perhaps it’s just the story one feeds strangers after the fact. They have tea with us before returning to their truck.

  The engine-growl withdraws and the night is returned to quiet, and I register a sound that is familiar to me now: the sound that is what we call silence: the deep, mysterious internal piping: blood in movement, or the generation of cells, or some discreet regularising of aural pressures.

  Yesterday morning, as we were walking to matins, Peter stopped and said, “There: there is the best place to be a monk.” He was looking at the moon. It is not visible from the valley floor tonight, but its light touches the heights of the mountains.

  In The Desert, John C. Van Dyke asks: “Have we not proof in our own moon that worlds die? And how came it to die?…Perhaps it died through thousands of years with the slow evaporation of moisture and the slow growth of the desert.” Which leads him, naturally, to ask: “Is then this great expanse of sand and rock the beginning of the end? Is that the way our globe shall perish?” But the ever windless, ever waterless moon is an imperfect analogue for the deserts of earth. In 1911 an American astronomer, seeing the dark lines that appeared to crisscross Mars’s surface, postulated that they were irrigation canals constructed by the Martians to bring fertility to the desert planet. Told that the dark ribbons were tens of kilometres across, he responded that of course they were; what was visible were not the canals themselves but the margins of irrigated land lining their banks. Where they intersected, he reasoned, great cities stood. Since Viking I and II were dispatched to Mars’s surface in the 1970s and 1980s, four further vessels have landed on the planet, including two mobile rovers. The images they have sent back show features that would be familiar to the Bedouin: alluvial fans, gibber plains and playas. There are dust devils eight kilometres tall, and seasonal dust storms that engulf the whole planet. On the sweeping northern plains, meanwhile, are monstrous sand seas whose dune formations—rectilinear, longitudinal, transverse, crescentic, barchanoid—are indistinguishable from those of earth.

  I wake to the murmuring of prayer: Mussalem kneeling on his rug on the rocky ground as orange sunlight touches the summits. There are yellow-grey clouds, the first clouds I’ve seen since coming to Egypt. We say farewell to Khaled, whose vehicle can go no further. After breakfast we clamber along crumbling limestone banks above what, in times of flood, would be an immense staircase of waterfalls. It’s two years since the last flash floods, Mussalem says. In the pit of every dry falls is an island of acacia and tamarisk. From a wild fig tree I pick a fruit no bigger than a cherry; velvety-soft, pale green, bitter. A leaf, glossy and pliant when I pick it, has crumbled to brown flakes in my pocket a few hours later.

  Towards midday, as we continue to climb, there’s a sense of approaching a precipice or a summit. A new expansiveness to the light. Moussa shouts back at me, grinning, but his words are inaudible. A single step higher and the wind hits me, snatches my hat and frisbees it into the valley behind us.

  Far below, on the other side, is the Red Sea coastal plain, and fifteen kilometres away the thin blue line of the Gulf of Suez. Just visible beyond the water are the mountains of Sinai. And there, nestled in the foothills far below us, a grid of limewashed buildings within a defensive wall.

  At the monastery gate a guard is surprised to see anybody other than monks approaching from the mountains. When Moussa tells him where we have come from he laughs and lets us in and goes to fetch one of the English-speaking fathers. Arriving twenty minutes later, he is a man in his thirties, with a hollow, red-cheeked face and large lips dried salt-white by the sun, whiter still against his black beard. A thin, sunburnt Allen Ginsberg, who of course speaks with a soft, east-coast American accent—though he prefers not to tell me where he is from, just as he prefers not to tell me his name. A reluctant docent, not unfriendly. Father Allen.

  In the small, dim, half-buried church built over St. Paul’s cave, he shows me a wall painting matching the one at St. Antony’s: the two saints wide-eyed and small-mouthed in the tradition of Coptic art. Elevated between them is the raven, holding in its beak a round of bread, the bread it brought for St. Paul and the visiting St. Antony. The ravens are a nuisance, Father Allen tells me—they steal dates from the monastery palms and interrupt the liturgies with their cawing. In the old days the monks used to shoot them, despite the service the birds’ ancestor did for St. Paul.

  We stand and talk in the shade. “My personal view,” he says, “is that the clergy exists to speak to the people. This”—he means attending to visitors—“is not part of the monk’s work. A monk’s work is to be hidden.”

  I think of Peter and his Ethiopian monks lodged happily in their desert holes. Father Allen prefers not to have his photo taken. He prefers not to tell me how long he has been here. Before returning to his cell, he shows us where the spring flows from the foot of the mountain along a narrow channel cut into the stone floor. On a plastic chair lies a steel cup. I crouch and fill it and pass it to Moussa. He drinks, and returns the cup to me. It’s sweet, less mineralised than the water at St. Antony’s. I refill the cup and drink again; refill it once more—drink.

  In a few hours I’ll be back in Cairo, with its two million vehicles and their two million horns. We find a taxi and drive towards the Red Sea highway, dropping Mussalem at a junction from where he’ll hitchhike back to his village. A couple of kilometres from Zafarana, near the huge windfarm that fills the Wadi Araba where it meets the Red Sea, I get the driver to pull up at a deserted tourist restaurant beside one of the Russian-owned resorts. While he and Moussa have coffee, I cross the hundred metres of hard brown sand. It’s not a tourist beach and there’s a smell of engine oil, but the sea looks clean enough. I strip in the shade of a fisherman’s hut and pick my way towards the water.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The people and organisations to whom I’m most indebted are mentioned in the text, though not always under their real names. My gratitude to them is beyond measure.

  At Faber I’m grateful to my editor Lee Brackstone, Ella Griffiths, Lizzie Bishop, Samantha Matthews, Lauren Nicoll, Ruth O’Loughlin, Dan Papps, Donna Payne and Kate Ward. At Doubleday I’m indebted to my editor, Gerald Howard, and to Michael Goldsmith, Nora Grubb and Lauren Weber; thanks, also, to Doug Pepper and Louis Dennys at Signal/Knopf, Canada; to Alan Horsfield for the maps; and to Lucy Ridout, who copyedited the book.

  I owe a great debt to my friend and agent Patrick Walsh, and to other friends, allies, supporters and inspirations: Stuart Evers and Lisa Baker, Stephanie Cross, Lucy Abraham and Neil Cameron, Betsy and Thomas Cameron, Guy and Alanna Griffiths, Ellen Blythe, Judith Adams and Simon Warner, John Ash, Simon Baker and Hilda Breakspear, Maryann Bylander, James Cowan, Catherine Eccles and Joe Gannon, William L. Fox, Peter Gale, Andrew Goudie, Philip Hoare, Nick Holdstock, Brad Holland, Gregory McNamee, Megan Miller, Richard Muir, Elna Otter, Daniel Baker and James McPherson, Daniel Pinchbeck, Owen and Catherine Sheers, Rhonda Walker, Michael Welland and Carol Welland, Susan Whitfield, Joy Williams, the Yateses (especially Charlie and Evie), Chris and Angus Patterson, and Chloe, Katherine, Keith and Gill Atkins.

  I’m grateful to Arts Council England for a grant; to Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, for a residency; and particularly to Philip Davies and the Eccles Centre for American Studies, for the gift of an Eccles British Library Writer’s Award.<
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  TEXT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Lines from Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, trans. John Rutherford, reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House. Lines of Taras Shevchenko’s verse translated by Pavlo Zaitsev, from Taras Shevchenko: A Life, reproduced by permission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, New York; lines from “The Lonely Goatherd” © 1959 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of Williamson Music, a Division of Rodgers & Hammerstein.

  IMAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1 Saint Antony Abbot with Saint Paul the Hermit, lithograph by F. Blanchar after J. de Madrazo after Velazquez, copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0, Wellcome Library.

  2 The Temptation of St. Antony, follower of Hieronymus Bosch, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

  3 Bertram Thomas and Retinue © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

  4 Marcoo nuclear test © Newspix.

  5 From Mildred Cable, The Gobi Desert.

  6 Bishop Wang (by Aurel Stein) © Bridgeman Images.

  7 From Sven Hedin, Through Asia.

  8 Taras Shevchenko, Burning Steppe, reproduced by permission of Taras Shevchenko Museum, Canada.

  9 Taras Shevchenko, Untitled, reproduced by permission of Taras Shevchenko Museum, Canada.

  10 Taras Shevchenko, Untitled, reproduced by permission of Taras Shevchenko Museum, Canada.

  11 From Harper’s Magazine, May 1957.

  12 J. Goldsborough Bruff, The Rabbit-hole Springs © Huntingdon Library.