A Traveller's Life (29 page)

By the time everything was sorted out it was almost the hour for lights out. Electric power was produced only in the evenings by a generator which closed down at nine p.m. sharp. At ten to nine there was a premonitory flickering of bulbs, upon which everyone – monks, guests and any Israeli soldiery immured there on outpost duty (the monks were regarded as a security risk, presumably because their archbishop resided in Cairo) – began to zoom around, some of the most fortunate wearing long woollen underwear, all trying to reach their respective ‘dorms' (dormitories) before total darkness prevailed. Although the monks manufactured candles from beeswax they were not available for secular purposes. It was early February, and we were five thousand feet up in the Sinaian highlands. What we needed were arctic sleeping bags, some of the long woollen issue underwear and portable stoves. Without these, nights in the monastery were almost unimaginably cold. The summers, we were told, were almost equally unimaginably hot, but summer was months away.

The last thing I saw before the lights cut out was a battered notice: ‘Suez to the monastery two hundred and eighty miles. Cairo to the monastery four hundred and seven miles'.

The monastery is Greek Orthodox. It was founded in AD 530 by order of the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, on the site where the Burning Bush still grew, in which God appeared to Moses. There was already a well of good water and a tower in which the hermits and the other holy men in which the region abounded, took refuge from time to time in order to avoid being slaughtered by the Saracens, although they were seldom successful in this.

When the commissioner responsible for the construction of the monastery returned to Byzantium the Emperor asked him why he had built it in a place where it could so easily be rendered untenable by the barbarians, who had only to stand on the slopes of the mountain on the eastern side and lob rocks into it (he seems to
have forgotten about the necessity of building it around the Burning Bush). The commissioner's excuse, that there was no room for such an edifice on the adjacent peaks and that there would have been trouble with the water supply, was not regarded as sufficient by the Emperor who, before having him beheaded, told him that he should have reduced that particular mountain to the level of the surrounding plain before proceeding with the work.

The Emperor provided the monastery with a staff of slaves, some of whom were Egyptian, some Christians from Wallachia (a region of southern Roumania), and their descendants still performed the menial tasks of the monastery. Some of them are supposed to resemble Wallachians to this day, but if one has never seen a Wallachian it is difficult to hold any strong opinion about this – the Jebeliyeh boy I had met the previous evening was certainly more European-looking than Egyptian or Beduin. The last Christian Jebeliyeh, a woman, died in 1740, but although they are now all Muslims they are still looked down on by the Beduin of the peninsula as Nazarenes (Christians) and
fellahin
(peasants).

These Jebeliyeh, People of the Mountain, as they are known, worked in the gardens, at the monastery and also in Jebel Feirân, where they cultivated dates. They also provided camels to carry visitors part of the way up Mount Sinai. For this they received a small pittance from the monks, who reserved to themselves the right to strike all bargains with visitors. The monks also provided them with their daily bread, which was baked in the monastery and then let down to them by the windlass. Although a custom hallowed by age and of considerable importance to the Jebeliyeh, it was not a very edifying spectacle, and it was said to have been interrupted by the Six-Day War.

It was for this reason that the camels, which had been ordered from the Jebeliyeh for four o'clock the following morning, failed to appear. At the time, being ignorant of the hierarchical
arrangements, I attributed this to the fact that it was still pitch dark and freezing, not because I had failed to book them through the proper channels. As a result several hours passed before the gates were finally opened, and when we did begin the ascent of Mount Sinai, it was on foot by way of the camel track, one of the five accepted routes to the summit.

On the summit there was a chapel with a corrugated-iron roof and a mosque, both built of the pink granite of which the mountain is made. Under one side of the mosque there was a sort of cave, nothing more than a hole really, in which Moses crouched while the Glory of the Lord passed by during his forty-day fast on the mountain, now filled with the debris of picnics. Here, once a year, the Muslims sacrificed a sheep or a goat to the memory of Nebih Salih whose tomb, or one of his reputed tombs, we had visited on the way to the monastery, smearing the doorposts of the mosque with its blood.

There was not much room for anything else on the summit of Mount Sinai. From it, in the screaming wind which had turned the granite slabs which littered it to plates of ice, there were awesome views to the Red Sea, nearly seven and a half thousand feet below, over some of the wildest and most desolate country on earth. These views included Jebel Katharina, which is more than eight and a half thousand feet high. It was to this mountain that the remains of St Katharine were transferred by angels from Alexandria in the early part of the fourth century, after the machine specially constructed to torture her had chewed up its operators instead, and there was no one sufficiently skilful left to do anything but behead her. There on the mountain, in the eighth or ninth century, the monks found the body of the young virgin, unmutilated, uncorrupted and resting in a rocky depression. The depression was full of what was to become much venerated and much prized oil, which her body had secreted, and it continued
to do this in gradually decreasing quantities until the flow ceased altogether in 1489, by which time it was reduced to three drops a week. From the summit of the mountain they carried her down to their monastery, which up to this time had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary and henceforth would be dedicated to St Katharine.

We went down by the old penitential route, which was designed to be ascended rather than descended if one was to appreciate properly its penitential significance. It consisted of thousands of stone steps, variously estimated as being fourteen thousand by an Italian pilgrim called Gucci in 1384; six thousand six hundred and sixty-six by an Arab, Al-Makrizi, who lived from 1364 to 1442, quoting another Arab; three thousand five hundred, source unknown; and five thousand by Richard Pococke, the English Orientalist and traveller who visited the monastery in 1726. However many there were, and we soon gave up counting them, it must have been an appalling job putting them in position.

On the way we saw the footprint of Mahomet's camel and three chapels, one dedicated to Moses or Elishah, another to Elijah, and the third, the Chapel of Our Lady Oikonomissa (on the Mount), to the Virgin Mary. It was here that together with the Child Jesus the Virgin made a miraculous apparition, which led to the monastery being supplied with a camel train of food, and to the banishment of a horde of giant fleas which had infested it so thoroughly that the monks had been forced to evacuate it. We also passed through two penitential gateways, at one of which St Stephanos the Doorkeeper used to sit hearing confessions or receiving certificates from pilgrims attesting that they had already confessed and were therefore in a fit state to ascend the holy mountain. At the very bottom was the Well of Jethro, where Moses is said to have watered his father-in-law's flocks, although the monks themselves believed that its only claim to fame was that
Sangarius, a cobbler who was also a saint, drank the water from it when he lived there.

At the time when I visited the monastery there were only eight monks, most of them Greeks and Cypriots, all members of the order of St Basil. In the year 1000 there were about three hundred; in the fourteenth century the numbers varied between four hundred and two hundred and forty; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were between thirty and fifty. In 1620 there were only two or three. In the eighteenth century the numbers rose again to around fifty, but in the nineteenth century they were down to less than thirty. By 1938 the actual inmates were reduced to nineteen. (The total number of monks in the whole of Sinai, at that time, including those working outside the monastery, was forty-nine.) In 1971 the oldest monk was eighty-five years old and had been in residence for forty years; another, also very old, for twenty years. Three of the eight monks who made up the entire population of the monastery, the Vicar-General, the Treasurer and the Steward, constituted the chapter, which discharged the obligations of their ‘Father-in-God, the Archbishop of Sinai, His Beatitude Gregoric II'. They did so according to a precise set of rules as constricting for the archbishop as they were for the monks and chapter. At that time, with a state of war existing between Egypt and Israel, the archbishop spent three months each summer at the monastery, and the remainder of the year in Cairo, travelling between the two by way of Cyprus with the aid of a special
laisser-passer
.

The longer I remained within the walls of the monastery, and every day I became more disinclined to leave it, the more striking its resemblance to Mervyn Peake's mythical Gormenghast, which he describes in a series of novels, became. Within its walls, just as in Peake's enormous castle, a handful of persons, not all of whom could be said fully to understand its significance (I intend this in no derogatory sense), sustained a highly complicated, protracted
and exacting ritual, beginning the first of their twice-daily devotions soon after four in the morning – at one time when there were more monks they took place twice daily and twice nightly – summoned by the striking of the
symendra
, a resonant piece of wood, having been previously awoken by the tolling of a bell to the number of times equal to the number of years of Christ's life on earth; but unlike some of the inhabitants of Peake's demesne, living on what was a very thin diet for anyone engaged in all the multifarious activities which the monastery demanded in order to keep it going.

Beyond the walls lived the equivalent of Peake's wood-carving ‘Dwellers', the Jebeliyeh, serfs dressed not as Beduin but as
fellahin
, with whom the inhabitants of the monastery had no kind of social intercourse, and of whom very few were ever admitted within its walls, and then only to perform menial tasks. As in Gormenghast there was a library, to which probably not more than one or two of the occupants had recourse or even access. It was one of the oldest and richest libraries of its size in the world, and one of the least studied, made up of more than three thousand Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Palestinian, Georgian, Armenian, Slavonic and Ethiopic manuscripts, including the Codex Syriacus, parts of which date back to the fourth century and earlier.

Peculiarly Gormenghastian are the circumstances in which Constantin von Tischendorf saved forty-three priceless leaves of the Septuagint from being incinerated out of a total of one hundred and twenty-nine which still existed in the monastery in 1844, and of how, in 1859, he was able to return there, after an abortive visit in 1853, and acquire three hundred and forty-seven leaves of a fourth-century manuscript of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament, which was to become known as the Codex Sinaiticus, thus preserving them from almost certain destruction. Yet in 1971, more than a hundred years later, Tischendorf's name was still anathema in the monastery.

Extraordinary, too, were the congeries of buildings linked by a labyrinth of passages. Exploring them was like a dream in which one floated through narrow tunnels in the immensely thick walls (the lower courses made up of enormous blocks of granite), constructed by Justinian's men and repaired by those of General Kléber, sent there for this purpose at the time of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, with on either side the workshops of Jebeliyeh craftsmen dead and gone, who also worked on the fabric; past chapels closed because there was no one to serve them any more; up winding staircases; along balconies supported by flimsy bamboo laths and crumbling plaster; into vaults and windowless courtyards, in which the apparatus for distilling raki from dates lay long abandoned. (Apparently the principal reason for this distillation was to gain income by selling it to pilgrims. Records of monkish drunkenness are rather rare.)

On under trellises of vines, into bakeries furnished with wooden moulds to embellish the bread with the outlines of St Katharine and huge wooden troughs excavated from trunks of trees (How did they come here, and where did they come from? Were they dragged overland from Lebanon?); into a disused refectory with a vaulted roof and embrasures cut through it to let in the light, its walls covered with graffiti done when this was, temporarily, a Crusader officers' mess. Outside, growing against one of the curtain walls in a little enclosure, was a plant that resembled a raspberry. A notice, gratifyingly in English, stated that it was the Burning Bush. It seemed impossible that all this could exist within a space of 280 by 250 feet.

A door was opened and we were confronted with the skulls and bones of three thousand monks, neatly stacked. How little space three thousand of us take up when our skulls and bones are neatly stacked. Others, abbots mostly, were alone in small crates. And presiding over this charnel house, dressed with ghastly
elegance, almost gaiety, in what the monks called megaloschemos, the ‘robe of angels', worn only by monks of the highest monastic rank, were the remains of St Stephanos the Doorkeeper, who used to sit hearing confessions at the Penitential Gateway on the steps leading up to the holy mountain.

The most important remains were in the Church of the Transfiguration, the Byzantine basilica: the skull of St Katharine, covered with jewels, and her left hand, each contained in a golden casket. In the church was a small part of the more than two thousand ikons, the earliest of which date from the sixth century, with which the monastery was endowed. And somewhere in the sacristy of this church was the treasury which only the treasurer, not even the archbishop, had the right to open. More than two thousand ikons, some of them painted in the sixth century, together form what is probably the most important collection in the world.