The transition was sudden, as always in Middle and Upper Egypt. The fertile valley of the Nile was a vivid and glorious sash of green across the ochre of the Saharan wilderness, but when the desert began it did so with a painful severity: in a second one travelled from emerald to grey, or from city to nothingness.
Ahead of them, in the first desert sands, was the White Monastery. In truth it looked quite unprepossessing, like an ugly and very humble pile of mud bricks and cracked pillars, yet it was one of the oldest church buildings in the world.
‘I wait here. You take time. Plenty time.’ Walid parked, with a brisk spin of the wheel, at the steel gates of the monastery complex.
Victor ejected himself from the taxi, his chest and his knees complaining at the effort. Two bored-looking Coptic men greeted him, and frisked him, then allowed the harmless old man beyond the gates. He was instantly greeted by a young, anxious-eyed Copt called Labib – a ‘server’, not a monk. Labib spoke good English and wore badly-fitting jeans and poignantly cheap shoes; he carried a large bunch of keys. It seemed he single-handedly ran the White Monastery complex.
First, Victor made a generous offering to the monastery coffers, and then Labib spent the next tedious hour showing Victor the remnants of the old monastery, the Armenian brickwork, the fifth-century apse and the huge monastic graveyard, and then he showed his visitor all the exciting new buildings: the grotesquely ugly new church with its glass elevator, the bizarrely fresh murals of Adam and Eve painted in red and green on the perimeter wall, and then, the greatest triumph of all, a six-metre-wide animatronic statue-fountain of Christ’s Miracle of the Watered Sheep.
‘Look,’ said Labib, sighing slightly. ‘I can show you the miracle.’ He stepped behind the huge, cement-and-plaster sculpture. Victor leaned on his stick with a grasping sense of despair. He heard the squeak of a metal tap being turned.
The water duly cascaded from a fake cement rock and ran past the smiling plaster Jesus who lifted his holy plaster hand and the animatronic sheep bent their animatronic heads in the manner of sheep drinking at a miraculous stream in the desert.
Victor flushed with faint embarrassment, and looked away. He had at least five more monasteries to visit. And then what? Victor felt the full futility of the exercise. Even if he found the right monastery, how was he going to get into the archives? Was he going to burgle them at night? Climb through the mud-brick windows? Hire a tractor and smash the walls down?
Labib emerged from the back of the automated Jesus, and gestured at the sheep. ‘It is a good miracle. Do you think?’
‘Yes. Ah. It’s marvellous.’
Labib gazed at Victor, and smiled forlornly, and shook his head. ‘No it is not … It is stupid. You know this.’
‘Erm …’
‘I can see you are intelligent man.’ Labib turned, and gestured at the wide-eyed Jesus. ‘Look. This is what we are reduced to, the Copts, making stupid miracles out of toys. But what can we do? We are in prison.’ He exhaled, with enormous weariness.
There was nothing to be said. Sassoon gazed at some crumbling, pitiful heaps of mud brick as they began the trudge back to the gates. He tried to change the subject to something more fruitful. ‘The White Monastery was much bigger once?’
‘Yes it was,’ Labib answered. ‘Many times bigger. We had kitchen and churches, and the great library. A thousand monks lived here in Saint Shenouda’s time. Fourth century.’
‘You know a lot of the history.’
‘I was a history teacher, at the university, Sohag. But they closed the department. Islamists did not like us teaching Coptic history. Now I have three children to feed, so I do this. I make the sheep drink from the miracle water. Twice a day.’
Victor paused. And daubed his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Tell me about the library.’
‘It was famous. The Codex Borgia came from here, and the Gospel of St Bartholomew, the Acts of Pilate, Gospel of the Twelve – many, many texts. But it was all scattered: Arabs burned some of the books; people stole them, Germans and French and English. Many times monks hid the books – in the caves in the hills. Now we are trying to rebuild the collection.’
‘What hills, Labib?’
The young man pointed at the desert cliffs beyond the gate, to the west. ‘The Sokar cliffs.’
Victor gazed at the wall of daunting rock.
Labib muttered, ‘I think Sokar is the name of an Egyptian god? There are many caves.’
Victor thought the puzzle through. There were probably a thousand places in Egypt named after Sokar: a god of the sands, of the western afterworld, of cemeteries and canals. But the coincidence of this and the library? He had surely found his goal. He stared at Labib. Gentle, sad, helpful Labib, a scared and unhappy young man, with a family he was desperate to feed.
It was time. Victor Sassoon abandoned his last shred of morality. ‘Labib,’ he said, ‘do you ever think about emigrating?’
The eyes of the young Copt glanced upwards, as if God might disapprove of his answer.
‘Yes, yes of course. Many Copt thinks of this. I want to go to Canada, take my wife and children … I have cousins there already. But I do not have any money.’
‘How much money would you need?’
Labib laughed, long and bitterly, in the desert sun. ‘Five thousand dollars. Ten? It is just a dream.’
Victor opened his arms as if offering the world.
‘I will give you ten thousand dollars if you do something very difficult for me.’
The sun burned down on Labib’s astonished face. ‘Do what?’
Victor took him by the arm and explained. Labib stared. And stared. And stared. And the plaster Jesus behind him lifted his mechanical hand, and blessed the miraculous waters.
They arranged to meet the next evening, in Victor’s hotel, at nine p.m. Ten minutes before the designated time, Victor took the clattering hotel elevator down to the lobby, where he sat and gazed at the headscarved women drinking Lipton’s tea; then he looked at his watch, on and off, for two hours.
Then he went to his room and drank whisky. Labib had not shown up.
At midnight he got a cryptic text message:
Cannot get in. I will try again one more time. If I succeed I see you in hotel tomorrow 21:00 at your room. Labib.
Precisely twenty-one hours later, Victor heard a furtive knock at his hotel-room door.
Labib.
Labib was out there in the twenty-watt darkness of the landing, carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. Mutely, full of shame, the Copt handed it over.
Victor grabbed the bag. An urgent glance inside gave him confidence. The contents looked authentic. Victor strained to contain his agitation, and his jubilation.
Now it was his turn. From the inner pocket of his blazer he took a thick envelope.
Labib didn’t even bother to count the thousands of dollars therein. Instead, he just smiled, very regretfully; then turned and walked away down the landing.
Alone in his room Victor sat on the bed, trying to quell his excitement. But his hands were trembling as he opened the bag and gazed at the frail documents bound in even frailer goatskin.
The call to prayer echoed across Sohag, across darkened Akhmim, across the moonlit reaches of the Nile, as Victor Sassoon took out the crumbling papyrus sheets of a very ancient document, and began to read.