Perhaps he was secretly canoodling with the belly-dancer mistress of a major-general in Heliopolis. It is a mystery. And there it is. C’est tout. Would you like something else while we are? Here. Look. I have a precious jar of Mummy Violet.’ Like a cardsharp, Hanna flourished a small silvery, seemingly antique steel jar from a pocket of his suit jacket, and carefully unscrewed the top. ‘It is a pigment used by painters, made from the decayed corpses of the Egyptian dead, from mummies, mummiya, hence its name: Mummy Violet. I believe the Pre-Raphaelite artists were very fond of it, the hue it offers is intense, though of course some find the concept, eheu, politically incorrect, and a touch Hitlerite, like those lampshades. Consequently it is very rare, I can sell it for two thousand US dollars – a pigment made from the desiccated flesh of the ancient dead – imagine what your exciting London artists could do with that!’
Sassoon stood up. He had his information.
Hanna raised a hand, looking up at him. ‘Please, Monsieur Sassoon, I did not wish to offend. The Jews are a great people, and I know you are a great believer, as well as a great scholar. Allow me to say one more thing.’
‘What?’ Sassoon was impatient to get going.
‘Mr Sassoon, please be careful.’
‘You mean it is dangerous? The journey?’
‘No. Yes. A little. But it is more that … you might be careful of what you wish for. My half-brother told me that when he saw Qulta …’ Hanna’s face was almost invisible, the velvet-draped bar was now so dark. ‘The poor monk was quite deranged. It seems the contents of the Hoard are, in some form, sincerely devastating. Really quite calamitous.’
But Sassoon didn’t care to listen; he was already walking to the door. The idea had entirely seized him with its romance, its intense biblicality. To find his prize, his promised treasure, he had to cross the Egyptian wilderness, to the very shores of the Red Sea.
Like Moses.
The Monastery of St Anthony, the Red Sea, Egypt
It took Sassoon two days to find a taxi driver who was willing to make the journey. The driver who finally agreed was fifty, and shifty, and hungry, and desperate, and he said he would charge Sassoon five hundred dollars for the job. He spoke a slangy Arabic so accented it sounded like a different language, but Sassoon certainly understood the figure ‘500’ when the man wrote it with a stubby pencil on his tattered map of Egypt.
They left at dawn to avoid the rush hour but got caught in traffic anyway. It took two hours for them to crawl out of the final dreary suburbs of Cairo, past the last shuttered Coptic grocer, with its defaced sign advertising Stella beer; and then they headed into the grey austerity of the Eastern Desert, the rolling dunes and stony flats, stretched out beneath an overcast sky.
The driver played loud quartertoned Arab music all the way, music that sent Sassoon half crazy. It felt like the music of delirium. But he was also glad that he didn’t have to talk to the driver. Talking would be pointless anyway: they couldn’t understand each other.
Six hours later they attained the outskirts of Suez, and the driver made an extensive detour, avoiding the centre of the city entirely. Sassoon guessed why: the Al Jazeera English news had told him last night. Central Suez was in uproar. Riots were wracking the city, several youths had died and, even worse somehow, several people had been blinded by plastic bullets aimed deliberately at their eyes. The televised image of one protestor, his sockets empty yet filled with blood, had stayed with Sassoon for half the night.
The hours droned past. The wailing music droned on. The desert became emptier and dustier. It was now clear they weren’t going to make it in a day, so the driver pulled into a scruffy truckstop with a village attached.
What looked from the distance like a public lavatory turned out to be their designated resting place. A ‘hotel’ with cracked windows, five rusting beds, and one shared and fetid bathroom. Sassoon drank whisky, alone, in his bare cement room, to force himself to sleep. The mosquitoes danced around his face, drunkenly, as he nodded out.
Morning cracked blue. The sun of the desert had won. And Sassoon’s spirits rose as the driver slowed, and turned the music down, and Sassoon caught his first glimpse of the Monastery of St Anthony, lost in the fathomless depths of the desert.
It looked enchanting: a complex of spires and tiled arches and archaic chapels, tucked into a fold of red desert rocks. This was it, the oldest monastery in the world, founded by St Anthony in 250 AD.
The car stopped; Victor disembarked. ‘Shukran,’ he said, handing over the dollars.
The driver took the cash, shrugged, gave Victor a faint smile of pity; then he turned on the hollering music, and sped away.
Hoisting his heavy bags, Victor stumbled across the road and under the arch. At once he was engulfed by the silence, the silence of silent worship, of punitive adoration, the silence of the endless Red Sea sun.
And then a monk came out from a darkened chamber, squinting at this sweating old man in his ludicrous blazer with his walking stick, and the young monk smiled quietly and said, in accented English, ‘Hi, I am Brother Basili. Andrew Basili. This way please. You are a pilgrim? You can stay here, no worries. There are no other visitors, they’re all too scared of the troubles. You must be pretty brave. This way. Over here. Guess you’ll want some refreshment? You are in time for breakfast.’
Breakfast turned out to be austere plates of olives and flatbread, and carafes of water, consumed at a long table in the refectory in almost total silence, apart from a monk intoning the psalms.
During the morning Victor was left to do as he pleased. In the central courtyard, the sun blazed. The monastery was mute. One youthful monk was hurrying about his business, keeping to the shade of the stumpy colonnades.
Victor approached. ‘Salaam—’
But the monk shook his head. When Victor tried again, the young monk blushed and fled.
Victor sat on a stone bench, rubbed his aching chest and read his guidebook.
‘The body of St Justus the monk is kept in a passage by the Church of the Apostles …’
In the afternoon he located the monastery library, domed and white, and delicately frescoed with images. A reverential hush pervaded the eight-hundred-year-old room: it felt wrong to talk. But Victor had to try, and Brother Andrew Basili was at the other end of the library, immersed in at least three open books.
‘Hello,’ said Victor.
Basili’s smile was brief and a little cold. He evidently didn’t want to be interrupted. But Victor had to try.
‘This is a fine library.’
Basili’s nod was terse. ‘Used to be better. Then the Bedouins raided it, in the eighteenth century. They burned many of our volumes as cooking fuel.’
Victor listened, finally placing the accent. Australian. This was not unexpected; Sassoon knew that many young men from the Coptic Diaspora – in Australia, Canada, America –
