From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  Gradually, as the liturgy stretched on into its third hour, the fog of incense grew so thick that the monastic presence at the front of the nave became dim. From my place at the rear all I could see was the distant image of a line of dark figures standing at the lectern, and a little behind them a gaggle of novices in white gelabiyas prostrating themselves on the ground. Around me a group of large, black-clad peasant women from Upper Egypt arranged themselves in a circle, earnestly scribbling prayers and petitions onto scraps of paper. Their children and grandchildren were then dispatched to post them in the letterbox attached to the velvet-covered shrine of St Antony. At the very back of the nave another small group of Coptic pilgrims were now circling the icons, touching the face of a saint then kissing his fingers, or attempting to use saliva to stick piastre coins onto the glass of the icon-frame.

  As I watched the pilgrims at work, I found myself increasingly distracted by the various images and icons of St Antony which dotted the church. Although they clearly dated from many different periods, their iconography was fixed and consistent. St Antony was shown as an old man whose white beard stretched down to his knees. He was barefoot and wore only a simple monastic habit, belted at the waist; in some icons the habit appeared to be made of animal pelts. Often the saint was shown in the company of his friend St Paul the Hermit: while St Antony was held by the Copts to be the first monk, St Paul was said to be the first hermit. When the two were shown together they were always accompanied by a raven who, according to St Jerome's version of the legend, diligently brought a loaf of bread every day to their cave. In some icons the two men were also accompanied by a pair of lions, again a reference to St Jerome's Life of St Paul the First Hermit, which tells how the lions helped St Antony bury his friend:

  Even as St Antony pondered how he was to bury his friend, two lions came coursing, their manes flying from the inner desert, and made towards him. At the sight of them, he was at first in dread: then turning his mind to God, he waited undismayed, as though he looked on doves. They came straight to the body of the Holy Paul, and halted by it wagging their tails, then couched themselves at his feet, roaring mightily; and Antony knew well they were lamenting him, as best they could. Then, going a little way off, they began to scratch up the ground with their paws, vying with each other to throw up the sand, till they had dug a grave roomy enough for a man ...

  The reason for my particular interest in the icons of St Antony was that during the Dark Ages the saint was also a favourite subject for the Pictish artists of my native Scotland, as well as for those across the sea in Ireland. The Celtic monks of both countries consciously looked on St Antony as their ideal and their prototype, and the proudest boast of Celtic monasticism was that, in the words of the seventh-century Antiphonary of the Irish monastery of Bangor:

  This house full of delight Is built on the rock And indeed the true vine Transplanted out of Egypt.

  Moreover, the Egyptian ancestry of the Celtic Church was acknowledged by contemporaries: in a letter to Charlemagne, the English scholar-monk Alcuin described the Celtic Culdees as 'pueri egyptiaci', the children of the Egyptians. Whether this implied direct contact between Coptic Egypt and Celtic Ireland and Scotland is a matter of scholarly debate. Common sense suggests that it is unlikely, yet a growing body of scholars think that that is exactly what Alcuin may have meant. For there are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other Western Churches. In both, the bishops wore crowns rather than mitres and held T-shaped Tau crosses rather than crooks or croziers. In both the handbell played a very prominent place in ritual, so much so that in early Irish sculpture clerics are distinguished from lay persons by placing a clochette in their hand. The same device performs a similar function on Coptic stelae - yet bells of any sort are quite unknown in the dominant Greek or Latin Churches until the tenth century at the earliest. Stranger still, the Celtic wheel cross, the most common symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth century, three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland.

  Certainly there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that contact between the Mediterranean and the Celtic fringe was possible. Egyptian pottery - perhaps originally containing wine or olive oil - has been found during excavations at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, the mythical birthplace of King Arthur. The Irish Litany of Saints remembers 'the seven monks of Egypt [who lived] in Disert Uilaig' on the west coast of Ireland. But the fullest account of direct contact is given by none other than Sophronius himself. In his Life of John the Almsgiver (the saintly Patriarch with whom he and Moschos fled Alexandria in 614 a.d.), Sophronius tells the story of an accidental voyage to Britain - more specifically, in all likelihood, to Cornwall - undertaken by a bankrupt young Alexandrian aristocrat to whom the Patriarch has lent money:

  We sailed for twenty days and nights [reported the man on his return] and owing to a violent wind we were unable to tell in what direction we were going either by the stars or by the coast. But the only thing we knew was that the steersman saw [an apparition of] the Patriarch [ John the Almsgiver] by his side, holding his tiller and saying to him: 'Fear not! You are sailing quite right.' Then, after the twentieth day, we caught sight of the islands of Britain, and when we had landed we found a famine raging there. Accordingly, when we told the chief man of the town that we were laden with corn, he said, 'God has brought you at the right moment. Choose as you wish either one "nomisma" for each bushel or a return freight of tin.' And we chose half of each. Then we set sail again and joyfully made once more for Alexandria, putting in on our way at Pentapolis [in modern Libya].

  I was still thinking over all these curious links joining the Celts with the Copts when vespers finally drew to a close. There was a last procession of the monks around the nave, then slowly the brethren began to file out of the doors into the fresh air and pale evening light.

  As I stood outside the church, Fr. Dioscuros came over and introduced me to the Abbot. As we chatted, I happened to mention how St Antony had once been a highly revered and much sculpted figure in my home country. Surprised, the Abbot questioned me closely about the Pictish images of his patron saint, and I described to him the scene shown on a particularly beautiful seventh-century Pictish stone from St Vigeans (near Dundee) which illustrates the scene in St Jerome's Life of St Paul the First Hermit where the two saints meet for the first time. They eat together but cannot agree which of them should break the bread. Each defers to the other, until finally they 'agreed that each should take hold of the loaf and pull towards himself, and let each take what remained in his hands'. In the Pictish version of the scene, the two saints are shown in profile as they sit in high-backed chairs facing each other, with one hand each stretched out to hold a round loaf. It was a very different image, I said, from any I had seen in the monastery, all of which showed St Antony standing full-frontal, staring into the eyes of the onlooker, in the classic Byzantine manner.

  'You are wrong,' said the Abbot, smiling enigmatically. "We have your image as well. Come, I will show you.'

  We walked through the darkening monastery, the Abbot leading, staff in hand. As we made our way through the maze of mud-brick buildings, monks would emerge rustling from the shadows to touch the Abbot's feet. Eventually we arrived at a stucco-covered building. The Abbot drew a bunch of keys from his habit, selected one and turned it in the lock. The door was stiff, but he pushed it open and led me inside.

  The library was narrow, long and ill-lit. On either side stretched glass cabinets, seven shelves high, stacked with a riot of heavy old liturgical books, leather-bound folios and great rolls of charters and manuscripts. Without hesitation, the Abbot walked straight over to a pillar in the middle of the room. On it was hung a framed picture.

  'Here,' said the Abbot.

  My heart sank. I had dreamed of stumbling across some ancient but unnoticed Coptic
icon, a copy of which might have made its way to Dark Age Scotland, there to inspire the Pictish images of St Antony and St Paul I knew so well. But the picture at which the Abbot was pointing was not only a conventional Byzantine-inspired image of a full-frontal standing figure, it was also clearly very late: perhaps seventeenth or eighteenth century.

  'But that's just St Antony,' I said. 'It's not Paul and Antony breaking bread. It's not in profile. It's not even ...'

  'Not the main picture,' replied the Abbot gently. 'Look at the side panel'

  I looked where he was pointing. There, under the outstretched arm of the saint, a much smaller scene had been painted. Two figures, immediately recognisable as Paul and Antony, sat facing each other in a cave under a hill, on top of which grew a palm tree. Both figures had one arm outstretched to grasp a round loaf of bread with a line down its centre. It was exactly the image sculpted by the unknown Pictish artists in seventh-century Scotland.

  What was more exciting still, the image showed every sign of being closer to the original iconography of the scene than that sculpted on the Pictish stone. There, the two saints sit facing each other in high-backed chairs, unnaturally close. But in the image in the library, the two saints are correctly shown to be in St Paul's cave, each sitting on a rock ledge. Their close proximity, almost head to head, is due to the narrowness of the cave. The oddness of the Pictish scene results from the sculptor moving the saints from the constriction of their cave but otherwise maintaining the original composition.

  The only conceivable explanation of the similarity of the two scenes - one in Scotland, one in Egypt, whole continents apart -is that the icon in the library must be a late copy of a much older Coptic original, an earlier version of which had somehow made its way from Egypt to Dark Age Perthshire, either by trade, pilgrimage or in the hands of wandering Coptic monks. Another piece in the unlikely jigsaw linking the deserts of Coptic Egypt with the bleak snowfields of early medieval Scotland had fallen into place. I beamed at the Abbot, immensely pleased.

  It was my last evening in the abbey. On the way back to the guest rooms, prompted by the Abbot, I dropped into the abbey church to pray for St Antony's blessing on the last and probably the most dangerous section of this pilgrimage: the journey through Upper Egypt, past the fundamentalist strongholds of el-Minya and Asyut, then on through the Western Desert to the Great Kharga Oasis. I sat in front of the tomb for twenty minutes before heading back to my cell. There I opened this diary, lit the paraffin lamp and wrote into the night.

  Hotel Windsor, Cairo, 15 December

  A party of Coptic pilgrims took me as far as a filling station outside Suez. After standing there for half an hour with outstretched hand, I was picked up by a servis taxi on its way to Cairo.

  My companions were a group of drunken Egyptian construction workers. They begged me to change my itinerary: 'Meester! You go Hurghada! Nice! Too much arak! Too many girlses! Too many boyses! Nice! Not expensive!' They passed a bottle of arak around the taxi, smoked incessantly and told smutty stories about their time at a beach resort on the Red Sea coast. There was much miming of outsized breasts and suggestive waggling of first fingers, followed by gales of laughter. They sang along to wailing Egyptian disco music ('Isk Isk Iskanderiyaaa ...'), stopping only to urinate into the open desert. For five hours I sat in the back, frowning like an outraged Mother Superior.

  The servis dropped me at a traffic island in the middle of the smoggy, hooting, ill-tempered Cairo traffic. After five days in the calm and quiet of monastic seclusion, I was horrified by everything I saw. Cairo suddenly seemed to be a nightmare vision of hell on earth, fly-blown and filthy, populated entirely by crooks and vulgarians, pimps and pickpockets, a city of seedy degenerates hustling and haggling their way to the fires of Gehenna.

  When I had unpacked my rucksack in the comforting quiet of the Hotel Windsor, I opened at random my copy of The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. My eye fell on an aphorism of St Antony: 'Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lose everything we have gained.'

  I made up my mind not to linger in Cairo, and to get away as quickly as possible to the troubled desert monasteries of Upper Egypt. Besides, I reminded myself, I had already spent over a month in Cairo earlier in the year.

  I had visited Cairo for the first time in early March when the Sunday Times had flown me there to interview President Mubarak. The paper's Washington correspondent had passed on to London a leak he had received from contacts in the CIA. Apparently the Agency was gravely concerned that Mubarak's moderate and secular regime was about to fall. I was dispatched to Cairo with a view to recording the run-up to the expected Islamic revolution. At the time, the CIA assessment did not seem to be overalarmist. In the spring of 1992, severe cracks in Mubarak's regime had begun to appear. It was at this time that the Gema'a al-Islamiyya first began making the headlines with a series of murderous attacks: in April, the fourteen Coptic Christians massacred for refusing to pay protection money; in June, the same group shot down Dr Farag Foda, a secular writer who had dared to condemn the movement in print. At the same time hit-and-run attacks on foreign tour-groups began in earnest, killing eight and wounding nearly a hundred tourists. The following year, in the summer of 1993, the Islamic militants began a series of assassination attempts against the Prime Minister and two other prominent government ministers, all three of whom were wounded. In November the militants hatched a plot - uncovered in advance by the security forces - to blow up Mubarak himself.

  By the beginning of 1994 tens of thousands of Islamic activists had been arrested under emergency regulations, while around 330 people had been killed in the accelerating cycle of violence which had developed between the police and the militants. Cassandras among the foreign press began making comparisons with Iran in the period leading up to the Islamic Revolution, or the crisis in Algeria, where around four thousand people had been killed in the previous two years. Others speculated on an unstoppable Islamic fundamentalist wave gathering force along the shores of the Mediterranean, poised - so they said - to sweep away every secular Arab government from Casablanca to Baghdad.

  I spent all of March in Cairo investigating the situation. What I found was very different from what the CIA assessment had led me to expect. In Europe and America analysts may have been fretting over Reuters reports of bombs and death threats, but in Cairo the buses continued to run, the shops were open and spring was in the air. The situation in Egypt appeared far more threatening when viewed from the newsrooms of Fleet Street or the conference halls of the Pentagon than it did from the calm and shady banks of the Nile. The tourist fatality rate was still lower than that in, say, Florida. The militants seemed by all accounts to be poorly trained and lightly armed; moreover, they had only limited popular support.

  Mubarak was not personally unpopular - he was certainly not in the situation of the Shah of Iran in 1979 - and it seemed most unlikely that he was in imminent danger of being overthrown by any sort of revolution, Islamic or otherwise. Commentators in Cairo were genuinely baffled when they read some of the grimmer prophecies then being made in the Western press - as indeed was President Mubarak himself: 'It is a PROPAGANDA!' he boomed during our interview when I mentioned the reports suggesting that his regime was tottering. 'A BIG propaganda! I wonder why, whenever some small, small incident takes place here in Egypt, in the foreign media [I read articles claiming] "there is no stability" or "regime is shaking". Even in your Sunday Times they were writing this. I was wondering, where are they getting these informations? I was wondering,' and here he leaned forward conspira-torially, 'maybe they are taking their informations from the fundamentals.' When I told him the source of our information his face darkened, adding that the Americans had never understood the Middle East, and probably never would. (At the request
of the horrified Interior Minister, I later removed this quote from the published interview.)

  In fact, far from tottering, Mubarak's regime seemed that March to be successfully digging in. Everyone I talked to in Cairo repeated the same thing: that since the government crackdown the previous year, things had become much better. The violence - though still extremely bad - was now mainly limited to a few towns and villages in Upper Egypt. As for the conventional wisdom that Mubarak was alienating large swathes of the population by the heavy-handedness of his measures, that was not the story you heard on the streets. While no one denied that the police were capable of behaving extremely roughly with suspects, people complained less about the abuse of human rights than about the fact that the crackdown had been so long delayed.

  'The government always knew who the Gema'a al-Islamiyya people were,' I was told by Boutros Gabra, a Coptic goldsmith. 'As long as they just shot up a few Copts, the government was happy to tolerate them. Only when they started attacking foreigners and threatening tourism did the government take the necessary steps.'