From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  Miss Christina shrugged her shoulders. 'Now books are my greatest friends here. Even if they have given me cataracts from reading by bad light in bed.'

  I asked whether the change in Alexandria had happened slowly.

  'Phh!' spluttered Miss Christina, raising her eyebrows. 'It happened overnight. After Nasser threw the Europeans out everything ground to a halt: the Italian opera, the French concerts, the theatre. Before that Alexandria was like Paris. It was the most creative town - all these different cultures collaborating and mingling with each other: conferences, lectures, galleries ... This was the cafe of the artists. They would all come here. Particularly the writers and the poets.'

  'Lawrence Durrell?'

  'No, I never met him. But I liked Justine. I think it's a good portrait. In fact I have a cat named Justine. But she is very old now.'

  'What about Cavafy? Did you know him?'

  'Yes, Cavafy I knew very well! Of course, as he died in '33, he was an old man when I was a young girl. But he used to come here every day. We have five of his original manuscripts, including "The God Abandons Antony".'

  'So your family knew him very well?'

  'His house was just around the corner, in rue Lepsius, and I suppose we did see quite a lot of him. He loved this area. There was a brothel immediately below his rooms - the English used to call it rue Clapsius - the Patriarchal Church was nearby and the Greek Hospital was opposite. He used to say that the area had everything he ever needed in life: "Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.'"

  Miss Christina smiled. 'That's his portrait,' she said, pointing to a framed photograph at the back of the cafe. It showed a willowy young man in a three-piece suit with round Aldous Huxley spectacles, a centre parting and a rather anxious expression.

  'He was a perfect gentleman: very well dressed,' said Miss Christina. 'But he was very serious. Never smiled. People used to try and talk to him but he always wanted to be alone. Perhaps he was thinking too much.'

  Miss Christina sipped her coffee. 'Sometimes he could be very gloomy. He was unhappy whenever he looked in a mirror and saw himself getting older. Every night he would rub cream into his face to try and stop the wrinkles. I think he was afraid of death. But for all that, no one would dispute that he's the best poet in Greek this century.'

  'Was he kind to you?'

  'To me, yes. When he came here I would always give him a sweet-smelling flower, the fouli, a cousin of jasmine. I think he liked that. But in general he did not like women. It was because of his mother.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'He was the last of eight boys. His mother wanted very much a girl, so she dressed him as one, in little girlie dresses, caressing him very much: "Oh, my sweet boy! My sweet sweet Costakis! Oh, my darling." So he became a homosexual.'

  Miss Christina lowered her voice and bent closer to me: 'He wrote many poems about the bodies of young boys. But he was very careful. He did not expose himself.' 'Expose himself?'

  'I mean he never published these homosexual poems,' hissed Miss Christina. 'Why?'

  'Because,' said Miss Christina, 'he was absolutely terrified of what his mother might say.'

  Alexandria, 5 December

  One morning in the first year of the twentieth century a donkey-herder was driving a mule train through the outskirts of Alexandria when the frontmost ass suddenly disappeared into the ground in front of him.

  Such events are not uncommon in Alexandria: no other city in the world is given such frequent reminders of the cavernous chambers and unexplored treasures that lie buried just beneath its streets. Only recently a wedding was celebrated in the city centre near the supposed site of the Soma, the lost tomb of Alexander; the pavement opened beneath the bride and she was never seen again.

  For centuries Alexandria was not just the capital of Egypt, she was the Queen of the Mediterranean, the greatest port of the classical world. 'She is undoubtedly the first city of the civilised world,' wrote Diodorus of Sicily in the first century b.c., 'certainly far ahead of the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury.' Her villas and temples, palaces and monuments, churches and colonnaded avenues extended for many miles beyond the limits of the modern city - and yet not one building of this legendary Alexandria survives today above the ground; everything is hidden beneath the mundane surface of the modern streetscape. Under the city's cheap hotels and bare-shelved shops, its brothels and seedy restaurants, lie many of the greatest buildings of antiquity: the Caesarium, where Cleopatra committed suicide; the Pharos lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the World); the Great Alexandrian library with its seven hundred thousand scrolls; the Mouseion; the Serapium; the tomb of Alexander. All have disappeared, utterly and completely, so that at street level only a handful of fallen pillars and broken capitals remain to mark the site of some of the most magnificent buildings the world has ever seen.

  Yet, subtly, the ancient city continues to make its presence felt. Every so often the earth will give way and some unsuspecting Alexandrian will plummet into the cellars of a lost temple or a forgotten palace crypt. Certainly when, in 1900, the donkey disappeared into the ground, the muleteer knew exactly what to do. The authorities were summoned, and they in turn summoned the archaeologists. In a short time work had begun on uncovering one of the most extraordinary complexes of catacombs to survive from the ancient world.

  I walked over there this morning from my hotel. Off the back-streets of the town, in a narrow lane blocked by donkey carts and lined with teashops full of old men with hubble bubbles, a low-roofed roundhouse gives onto a circular flight of stairs. The shaft corkscrews downwards for turn after turn, until it leads quite suddenly into a honeycomb of underground chambers. These rock-cut caverns with their flat limestone divans were feasting rooms where bereaved families would meet to toast the memory of dead relatives; though the catacombs were long forgotten, even to legend, the broken fragments of the pots and plates left over from these feasts have given the area its modern Arabic name, Kom el Shogafa, the Mound of Shards.

  From the feasting halls, the galleries lead down again, deeper into the ground, darker, further from the light. Down here in the partially flooded depths of the complex lie the burial chambers themselves. What is so odd about this part of the catacomb is less the size or magnificence of the mortuary chambers than the bizarre nature of their decoration. At first sight this decoration appears merely standard Pharaonic: a pair of Egyptian papyrus capitals lead into an inner chamber where the jackal-headed figure of Anubis stands over a recumbent mummy, holding in his hand the bloody heart of the dead man; to one side falcon-headed Horus looks on, impassive.

  But the more closely you look, the odder the reliefs become. Flanking the pillars on either side are a pair of medallions sculpted with Greek Gorgon heads, below which rises, in high relief, a pair of very Roman bearded serpents from whose powerfully piled coils emerge the suggestively phallic pinecone sceptre of Dionysus and the serpent wand of Hermes. More confusingly still, on either side of the entrance door stands a single figure. To one side is Anubis again, still with his dog's head, but now dressed up as a Roman legionary with breastplate, short sword, lance and shield; flanking him is an image of the Nile god Sobek, who, despite being a crocodile, has also been squeezed into a legionary's uniform. Whole cultures are colliding here: it seems that the Graeco-Egyptian burial syndicate who commissioned this strange complex would think nothing of being buried in Greek sarcophagi and guarded by Egyptian gods in Roman military uniform.

  This subterranean tomb, at first sight merely eerie, is in fact vastly important. A random quirk of fate has left this small upper-middle-class burial chamber as the sole object in the entire city that looks now almost exactly as it would have done to an ancient Alexandrian; it is, therefore, one of the only indicators of the mood of Alexandria at a time when that city was about to become the intellectual capital of Christianity. That mood, as i
s indicated by the strange syncretic catacomb sculptures, was one of exceptional intellectual tolerance and experimentation: it was a city where, even in death, the inhabitants would attempt to fuse oppo-sites, to reconcile two entirely different artistic traditions and religious pantheons, to mix deities as lightly as Durrell's Alexandrians would mix their cocktails.

  This, then, was the heady world into which, in the late first century a.d., Christianity was about to be thrown - and from which the religion would emerge with its theological underpinnings and its artistic iconography altered for ever.

  Alexandria was the scholarly capital of the late classical world. Situated at the meeting place of trade routes linking both Asia and Africa with Europe it was quite natural that the city should be a centre of intellectual ferment. Indian sadhus wandered its streets, debating with Greek philosophers, Jewish exegetes and Roman architects. It was here that Euclid wrote his treatise on geometry, that Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the world (he was only fifty-four miles out), that Ptolemy produced his astonishing maps and that a great team of seventy-two Hellenistic Jews produced the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Old Testament.

  The same spirit of breezy internationalism that guided the scholars of Alexandria also informed its mystics and its priests. Religions in Alexandria were notoriously porous, ideas and images from one faith trickling imperceptibly into another: the Alexandrian god Serapis, for example, combined elements of the Egyptian cults of both Osiris and Apis, grafted onto that of Greek Zeus.

  The arrival of Christianity from Palestine at first merely added to the mix. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria regarded pagan Greek philosophy as divinely inspired, and wrote of Christ driving his chariot across the heavens like the Sun God; indeed many pagans (including the young Tertullian) believed, perhaps correctly, that the Alexandrian Christians actually worshipped the sun, meeting as they did on Sunday, and praying to the east, where the sun rises. Other Alexandrian Christians undoubtedly worshipped Serapis. As late as the early fifth century a pagan philosopher from Alexandria, Synesius, was chosen to be a bishop although he was not even a baptised Christian. He accepted on the condition that though he might 'speak in myths' in church, he should be free to 'think as a philosopher' in private. It was this cross-fertilisation of Christianity with Alexandrian Greek philosophy that drew the developing Christian doctrines away from the strictly Jewish traditions which had given them birth, and which raised the religion - initially a simple series of precepts addressed to the poor and illiterate - to the level of high philosophy.

  The evidence of the confusion that resulted from this promiscuous conjunction can be seen most clearly in the Alexandrian Graeco-Roman Museum. Here, in gallery after gallery, there is an easy drift of pagan and Christian motifs, styles, subjects and iconographies. The ankh, the Pharaonic symbol of life, appears on early Christian Alexandrian gravestones transformed into an ambiguous looped cross. The image of Isis nursing Horus is reused in the Christian era unchanged, but now depicts the Virgin suckling the Christ child. A sword-wielding Anubis, holding the heart of a corpse, sprouts wings and turns into St Michael weighing the souls of the dead. Apollo raises a lamb over his shoulders and becomes the Good Shepherd. The Romano-Egyptian image of a mounted Horus in Roman military uniform lancing the Seth-crocodile transforms itself into St George on his charger spearing the dragon. Dionysian vine scrolls tangle around scenes of the vintage; the same scrolls, hastily baptised with a cross, tangle on unchanged into the Christian era as a Eucharistic symbol. Nereids and victories swoop down from capitals and turn into angels midflight; pagan deities - Osiris and Aphrodite, Orpheus and Dionysus, Leda and the Zeus-Swan - survive into an afterlife as demons and godlings, removed from the centre of shrines but lurking still unvanquished at the back of Alexandrian churches, as in the dark recesses of Egyptian folk memory, peeping down from architraves or glaring maliciously from the metopes or dadoes.

  Amid this fizz of dissolving philosophies, this iconographic metamorphosis, there is a thrilling feeling of being present at the birth of medieval art. On all sides one can hear the soft ripping of gossamer as old pagan images emerge from the Alexandrian chrysalis transformed into the conventional Christian symbols, the same symbols and images that will carry on reappearing in gospel books and altarpieces, stained glass and frescoes, diptychs and triptychs, fixed and immutable for centuries to come.

  Alexandria, 6 December

  This afternoon, after a siesta, I returned to the garden of the Graeco-Roman Museum. There I sat in the shade of an orange tree, surrounded by fragments of Byzantine sculpture, reading John Moschos's account of the now buried city from which these sculptures had come.

  Moschos and Sophronius spent so much time in Alexandria that in one of his books, Sophronius, a native of Damascus, actually refers to 'us Alexandrians'. The two monks probably paid their first visit to the city in the winter of 578-9, at the very beginning of their travels. They may have had the same weather I am having now: crisp, sunny days growing slowly colder and shorter. Nearly thirty years later the two monks returned, this time by sea, as refugees fleeing the sack of Antioch by the marauding Persian army. On both occasions, Alexandria was their base for an extensive exploration of the monasteries of desert Egypt, reaching, on their second trip, as far south as the Great Oasis.

  During this second Alexandrian period, the two monks appear to have based themselves in the city on and off for the seven years between 607 and 614 a.d. During this period Sophronius seems to have been suddenly struck down with blindness, then equally suddenly cured during a visit to the Shrine of Saints Cyrus and John at Menuthis (the shrine's own name eventually came to replace Menuthis, so that for the last thousand years the place has been known as Abukir). In gratitude for his miraculous healing, Sophronius wrote a book containing stories of some of the shrine's more remarkable cures, in the process of which he allows us an intriguing peek into what was contained in a Byzantine doctor's bag: if Sophronius is to be believed, a standard prescription was a compote of Bithynian cheese, wax, and roast crocodile.

  Following Sophronius's cure, the two monks began to campaign energetically against the Monophysite leanings of the local Egyptians, tendencies that had already begun to lead to a schism between mainstream Orthodoxy (identified with Egypt's Greekspeaking, Alexandrian-based upper class) and the indigenous Coptic-speaking Egyptians (the word Copt simply deriving from the Greek term for a native Egyptian, Aiguptios).

  Finally, however, in the spring of 614, the Persian army caught up with the two monks. As the Persians breached the walls of the city and put it to the sword, Moschos and Sophronius were again forced to take ship. This time they were accompanied by John the Almsgiver, Alexandria's Orthodox Patriarch, whose biography Sophronius was later to write. In a state of some distress, the party stopped off in Cyprus, where the heartbroken Patriarch died. The boatload of refugees finally reached the safety of the walls of Constantinople some time later, probably towards the end of the year 615.

  The burning city they left behind had clearly changed dramatically since the prosperous, free-thinking days of the second and third centuries a.d. This was not just because Alexandria was already full of penniless refugees fleeing the earlier Persian assault on Palestine; the change was more profound. For in Alexandria the triumph of Christianity had been effected by hordes of often fanatical Coptic monks who would periodically sweep down from their desert monasteries, attacking the pagans and their shrines, and burning any temples left undefended; in 392 a.d. they finally succeeded in burning the Serapium, and with it the adjacent Alexandrian library, storehouse of the collected learning of antiquity.

  The houses of the city's pagan notables were ransacked in the monks' search for idols; no one was safe. The most notorious outrage was the lynching of Hypatia, a neoplatonic philosopher of the School of Alexandria and a brilliant thinker and mathematician. She was pulled from her palanquin by a lynch-mob of monks, who stripped her, then dragged her naked through the
streets of the town before finally killing her in front of the Caesarion and burning her body.

  This murder was applauded by the monastic chroniclers. 'Hypatia was devoted to her magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music,' wrote Bishop John of Nikiu. 'She beguiled many people through her satanic wiles. [After her murder] all the people surrounded the Patriarch Cyril [who had instigated the mob] and called him "the new Theophilus" for he had [completed the work of Patriarch Theophilus who had burned the Serapium and] destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.' The pagans, understandably, were less enthusiastic: 'Things have happened the like of which haven't been seen through all the ages,' wrote one distraught student to his mother in Upper Egypt. 'Now it's cannibalism, not war.' 'If we are alive,' commented another, 'then life itself is dead.'

  Nevertheless, there are hints that the intellectual spirit in the city had not died completely. According to Moschos's near-contemporary, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, 'even now in that city the various branches of learning make their voices heard; for the teachers of the arts are somehow still alive, the geometer's rod reveals hidden knowledge, the study of music has not yet dried up and some few still keep the fires burning in the study of the movement of the earth and stars. The study of medicine grows greater every day, so that a doctor who wishes to establish his standing in the profession can dispense with the need for any proof, by merely saying that he trained at Alexandria.' This seems to have been true: it was in Alexandria that Caesarius, brother of the theologian Gregory of Nazianzen, obtained the qualifications that won him the post of Byzantine Court Physician.