Walking the Bible (33 page)
Authors: Bruce Feiler
This reaction, I was coming to see, is the first lesson of the desert: By feeling uneasy and unsure, by fearing that you’re out of your depth and therefore might falter, by feeling small, and alone, you begin—
slowly, reluctantly, maybe even for the first time in your life—to consider turning somewhere else. At first that somewhere else is some
one
else: a Moses, an Aaron, an Avner. But ultimately, maybe even inevitably, that some
one
else is some
thing
else. For the secret lesson of remapping yourself, as I was just finding, is that you eventually grow wary of the flat and easy, the commonplace and self-reliant. You begin to crave the depth, the height, the extremes. You begin even to crave the fear.
A little after seven we reached one of the few four-way intersections in the Sinai, where roads come from the north, south, east, and west, converging at the entrance to the high mountains. The air was noticeably cooler, and as we stopped to pull out our sweaters, Avner suggested we take in the scene. We were minutes away from Saint Catherine’s, the small village at the base of Jebel Musa that took its name from the monastery. The red in the landscape had disappeared with the sun, so the mountains were mostly shadows in the sky. Everything was still. “When I first came here, in 1967, I was in shock with the beauty,” Avner said. “I could have lived anywhere in the Sinai, but once I saw this, I knew this is where I wanted to live.”
He talked about some of the battles he and his team of archaeologists faced in trying to open up the region to exploration, but also in trying to maintain its isolation. “For a long time we fought very strongly, and with some success, not to turn this region into a place that was built, to keep only a minimum touch with the outside world. But we did the one thing that almost destroyed the place: We introduced it to the world. Before 1970, the mountain was almost unknown in the world. It was unchanged since the Middle Ages.”
“And what was that like?”
He went back to the car and returned with a small brown book he had brought from home. The book was
Egeria’s Travels,
the account of a fourth-century Byzantine nun who ventured through the Near East visiting biblical sites. He opened to the part where she describes coming upon Jebel Musa, which had just been identified as being Mount Sinai.
We made our way across the head of the valley and approached the Mount of God. It looks like a single mountain as you are going round it, but when you actually go into it, there are really several peaks, all of them called the Mountain of God. And the principal one, the summit on which the Bible tells us that God’s glory came down, is in the middle. I never thought I had seen mountains as high as those around it, but the one in the middle was the highest, so much so that when we were on top, all the other peaks looked like little hillocks far below us. And another remarkable thing, even though the central mountain, Sinai proper, is higher than the others, you cannot see it until you arrive at the very foot of it. It must have been planned by God
.
We returned to the car and drove down the narrow road to the base of the mountain and the small brick guard shack that protects the monastery. I grabbed my backpack and sleeping bag and we walked up the dirt path to the door of the compound, a crowded sixth-century complex about the size of a city block that contains a church, a mosque, a library, cloisters for housing the eighteen or so monks, a well where Moses is said to have met the daughters of Jethro, and the monastery’s botanical jewel, the purported burning bush itself. Though it was only 8
P.M.
, the entrance was pitch dark by the time we arrived. An almond tree bloomed in the courtyard. One orange lightbulb was the sole source of light. Our plan was to ask the monks if I could spend a night in the monastery, a rare privilege normally extended only to pilgrims on a holy visit. Avner would stay with friends in the village.
We knocked on the wooden door and an elderly monk with a Santa Claus beard appeared. We introduced ourselves and made our request. The man examined me for what seemed like minutes. Finally he spoke. “Are you Greek Orthodox?” he asked in stern, broken English.
“Uhh . . . no,” I said.
“Are you
Catholic
?” He raised his eyebrows.
At this point my inclination was to say, “Actually, can we discuss this? I’ve been traveling through the desert, thinking about . . .” But I caught myself. “No, sir,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”
“Well, then . . .”
He disappeared inside the door and I looked at Avner as if to say, “Did I give the right answer?” Avner chuckled. “Here it’s better to be Jewish than Catholic,” he said.
Moments later the monk appeared again in the doorway. “You are invited to stay in the monastery,” he said. “Go see Father Paulo. He’ll show you to your room.”
I
bolted upright the first time I heard the bells—a sound so loud it yanked me from sleep. I held my ears when I realized the clamor was just outside my door. And when the ringing showed no signs of stopping, I stuck my head back under the covers for a few minutes of muffled relief: a carillon fifteen centuries old; a wake-up call older than the clock.
A few minutes later the chimes finally did stop and I emerged from my cocoon. I looked at my watch: 4:25. The room was whitewashed, with a bed, a desk, and a chair. A reproduction of an eighth-century crucifix hung on the wall, alongside a small painting of Saint Catherine, the Egyptian martyr. Before I came to the mountains various people had warned me—“Staying in
Saint Catherine’s
was the longest night of my life,”“the coldest night of my life.” As a result, I had brought enough equipment for Everest: sleeping bag, gloves, hat, scarf, toilet paper, turtle-neck, extra socks. “Would you like a sleeping pill?” Avner had asked. But the room was quite accommodating, with two sheets, a bean pillow, three blankets, and a comforter. There was also a portable heater in the cupboard, a switch for hot water, a toilet, and even, for cleanliness-conscious Muslims or prissy Europeans, a bidet. This was the Ritz for pilgrims, a hermitage with a view.
I slid on my boots without touching the floor and splashed water on my face. The morning service started in five minutes, and I didn’t want to be late. Outside, the courtyard was still dark. A rosefinch hopped quietly
on the banister; even the birds didn’t speak at this hour. I was stationed on the third floor of the dormitory, a dark wooden building with slabs of plaster that was Tudor not just in appearance. Shakespeare could have slept here. Across the square was another three-story building that looked almost Moorish, with stone arches and candles flickering in the rooms. In between was a jungle of structures with assorted ecclesiastical purposes—a refectory, a handful of chapels, a library, even a mosque, built in the twelfth century to appease marauding Muslims. With its contrasting styles, angled walls, and competing rooflines, the monastery had the appearance of one of those milk-carton cities children make in school, then leave in the attic to collect dust and nostalgia and when discovered a generation later seem more charming than ever.
The previous night, after checking into my room, I sat on the banister and admired the timelessness. The place seemed almost haunted, with cats scampering across the eaves, skeleton keys dangling against brass doorknobs, and doors opening, creaking, then slamming shut. A monk chanted evening prayers. It was impossible not to think of
The Name of the Rose,
with its intrigue and manipulations; death in the abbey of the Lord. But even in this stew of allure, I felt remarkably safe. The black cat that ran across my path made me smile, not quiver. With its church and mosque and bedouin well, Saint Catherine’s touches all bases, even superstition. By 9
P.M.
there was a not a person in sight.
Before going to bed I decided to go for a stroll and visit the burning bush. The bush, which grows alongside the chapel, is a rare mountain bramble akin to the raspberry that monks say is the actual shrub in which Moses first heard the words of God. I went from the third-floor perch where I was sitting, down across the roof of another building to a set of stairs that led to the base of the chapel. At the stairs a deep darkness seemed to reach out from below and I realized I was scared, that little boy afraid to go into the attic. Across the alley was a crypt with the bones of every monk who ever lived in Saint Catherine’s, including a heaping mound of hundreds of hollow-eyed skulls that spill onto the floor like dry cereal from a box. How many creepy images could this place conjure up? I wondered. How many childhood anxieties? I opted
to go back for my flashlight. I climbed back to my room, embarrassed, and in my nervousness started to unlock the door adjacent to mine. This made me even more nervous. Was I disturbing some hermit from Greece? By now my hand was shaking. It was less than an hour since Avner had left me alone and I’d managed to work myself into a state.
I retrieved my flashlight and retraced my steps, cursing the creaky floors that seemed to broadcast my every move. I tried an alternate route, climbing down a wooden staircase behind the chapel, but found myself in a dead end, with dark clothes on a line, smoke curling out of a chimney, and a locked wooden gate that squealed but wouldn’t open. I backed away, tiptoed through an alley, and found the same stone steps as before. Even with the light they seemed bottomless. I hurried down and tried not to look in any window. On the ground level I exhaled and rounded a corner. A cat was digging in the flower bed like a squirrel. He looked up at me and meowed. I jumped, despite myself, then stopped to feel my heart. How silly.
I took a few more steps and rounded the last corner of the alley. To the right was the back wall of the chapel, about twenty feet high. Directly across the walkway was a rounded stone wall about ten feet high that looked as if it were made of peanut brittle. Sprouting from the top was an enormous, fountaining bush. The plant was about six feet tall, with large, dangling branches like a weeping willow that sprouted from the center like a cheap wig. A white cat with a brown splotch around one eye was perched at the base of the bush, and off to the side was a slightly out-of-date fire extinguisher.
A fire extinguisher?
At first I thought it was an eyesore, but then I realized the unintended humor. Was this in case the burning bush caught on fire?
I sat on a stone bench just below the bush. There was no light in sight, except for the sky, which was indigo, the color of deep ocean. I stayed on the bench for a long time, the bush to my left, the church to my right. After a while I began to feel a certain pressure from the buildings and I realized that the chapel had been constructed on an angle, so that the back wall sloped away from the building and leaned slightly in the direction of the bush, which in turn leaned toward the chapel. It was as if they were trying to touch, like figures from the Sistine Chapel. The
stars were twinkling now, and without warning, a light came on at the end of the walkway, illuminating, in perfect silhouette, a wooden cross about a foot high. There was nothing remotely contemporary about this scene—the stones, the chapel, the sky, the cross. It reminded me of one of those medieval paintings where the perspective is all wrong.
And kept getting wronger. The chapel would lean a bit more, the cross would grow a bit taller, the round fence would bulge at the seam, and the bush would fountain higher, fuller, until everything else would have to adjust. It went on like this for a while—lean, step, push, collapse, lean, push, jump, reach, until all the pieces were moving at once, compressing into one another, pushing back and forth in time and place, and creating, somehow, out of the combustion, a warmth that filled the courtyard. The result was a feeling I had sensed before on this trip, a feeling that the physical components of the environment—the stones, the buildings, the space in between—were somehow transforming into a spiritual entity that almost seemed to reach up, tugging at something inside me. I was just noticing a heat inside my jacket and reached up to touch my cheeks—was this feeling coming from me or from the place, or were we somehow bringing it out in each other?—when suddenly the white cat with the splotch around one eye leapt from the wall with a screech, landed at my feet, and sent me scurrying back to bed.
By the time I arrived in the chapel it was just after 4:30, and the morning service was under way. The basilica was still dark, except for some candles above a lectern, where a monk in thick, black robes was chanting a prayer in Byzantine Greek, a mix of Slavic harsh consonants and Mandarin singsongy vowels. I slipped into a wooden chair along the outer wall, and even though Father Paulo had invited me to the service the previous evening, I still felt a bit like a voyeur. In the first few minutes, several monks began making their way around the room lighting the dozens of brass lamps that hung from the ceiling. Several of the lamps began to swirl as the monks raised them, lowered them, spun them, stopped them. Gradually with the glow of the light, like liquid apricot, the dimensions of the room became apparent.
The basilica, built between 542 and 551
C.E.
, is small, designed for the monks, not for the masses. The granite walls and pillars are original, as are the cypress doors and ceiling. The expansive mosaic above the apse depicting the Transfiguration of Jesus, flanked by Moses and Elijah, is one of only three surviving Byzantine mosaics in the world. The highlight and by far the dominant architectural feature of the room is a lavish floor-to-ceiling wooden iconostasis, built in the seventeenth century, that’s basically a wall-sized picture frame decorated with images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and a number of saints. It divides the nave from the altar. Altogether, with the scarlet robes on the icons, the green on the ceiling, and the gold on the iconostasis, the chapel looks like a walk-in version of one of those gilded medieval triptychs that fill European museums: one part pedagogical tool, one part inspirational message, one part awesome display of wealth.