Drifting away to the desert while Solomon was building his temple? Coming to rest at the foot of Moses'
mountain for no other reason than to ease their arthritis? Lunatic prophecy and moronic fancy collaborating to produce original Holy Scripture fully seven hundred years before the first appearance of the Old Testament? More than eleven hundred years before the first tiny fragments of the New Testament?
Chants by dusty waysides varied to vary the entertainment? Lyres and flutes and ram's horns squeaking and rumbling to attract attention? Roadside gossip overheard and repeated? Men begatting in Canaan?
Curious inventions in Canaan? These and other odd bits of rumors twisted and retold for a copper coin?
Then on to another dusty wayside? Eventually to retirement in a warm place good for the joints? The divine source of inspired religion, these whimsies concocted by two rambling anonymous tramps in 930
B.C.?
Brother Anthony went down on his knees and prayed for enlightenment Night came. He wrapped the manuscript in its swaddling cloth and reburied it in the storeroom cellar. On the way to his cell he made signs that God had instructed him to remain in seclusion until he found the solution to a personal problem.
For the next week he fasted in his cell, drinking one small cup of water at sunrise and another at sunset, and at the end of those seven days he decided what had to be done.
Melchizedek must have his City of Peace, men must have their Jerusalem. There had to be faith in the world and if the cause for it wasn't there, he would provide it. If the Father of the real Bible was an aging blind beggar and the Son was an imbecilic scribe, then Wallenstein would become the Holy Ghost and rewrite Scripture the way it ought to be written.
The decision he had made in his cell was to forge the original Bible.
Of course he couldn't place his forgery in the tenth century B.C., when the imbecile had recorded the blind man's recitations. His Bible had to be a genuine work of revealed history, not a jumble of capricious tales assembled by two stray tramps. Thus it had to come sometime well after Christ, which meant writing it in Greek.
But when?
In prayer he turned to his namesake for guidance and at once the question was answered. The great St Anthony had gone into the desert in the fourth century, so that would be the date of his forgery. Time enough after Christ for all the truths to have been gathered, yet still earlier than any complete Bible in existence.
Secretly he revisited the storeroom cellar and buried the real Sinai Bible more deeply in the clay so that it would not be discovered in his absence. Then without warning he left the monastery and returned to Jerusalem, to the quarters of his order, where his unauthorized arrival during the morning meal caused worried looks from his brothers.
Immediately he shattered the silence by announcing he had learned something at St Catherine's that transcended his vows of obedience, silence and poverty. He must be allowed to go his own way for a number of years or he would be forced to abandon the Trappists.
The monks in the refectory were stupefied. When his shocked superior warned in a quavering voice that merely suggesting such blasphemy constituted a fatal nakedness before God, the former Brother Anthony at once removed not only his cassock but his loincloth, exposing even his genitals, and left the room without an explanation of any kind. Behind him his weeping former brothers stayed on their knees for hours praying beside their bowls of gruel.
Wallenstein meanwhile, penniless and naked and shivering violently in the cold winter wind, limped through the narrow alleys of Jerusalem abjectly begging coins. And although soon starving and frostbitten, his first coins went not for a crust of bread or a loincloth but for a stamp and an envelope. In this letter to Albania he directed that a huge sum of family money, his by right as the Skanderbeg of his generation, be sent to him.
While waiting for the money he continued to beg in the streets but also found time to begin his special studies, the cumbersome process of teaching himself the secrets of ink, more specifically the techniques of making ancient inks from dyes and crude chemicals. He also began teaching himself to analyze ancient parchments by feel and taste and smell in order to determine their exact age. Lastly he applied himself to the eccentricities of writing styles.
Throughout this period of second initiation he wore only a loincloth and lived in a miserable basement hole in the Armenian Quarter, supporting himself by begging.
When the money finally arrived Wallenstein equipped himself as a wealthy and erudite Armenian dealer in antiquities and journeyed to Egypt seeking a large supply of blank parchment produced in the fourth century, neither weathered nor well cared for during its fifteen hundred years, parchment that had been quietly resting in some dry dark grave for all that time.
In Egypt he was unsuccessful and returned to Jerusalem nearly insane with despair only to discover the parchment he sought was already there in the Old City, apparently buried at the bottom of an antique Turkish safe in a cluttered shop owned by an obscure antiquities dealer named Haj Harun, an Arab so destitute and bewildered he readily parted with the treasure as if unaware of its immense value.
Wallenstein rejoiced. Undoubtedly a man less fanatical could never even have conceived of such a forgery, for the task he had set for himself was no less than to deceive all scholars and chemists and holy men in his own era and also forever.
But Wallenstein was fixed in his love for God, and in the end he did succeed.
It took him seven years to assemble his materials. Another five years were spent in the basement hole mastering the precise style of writing he would need for the forgery. During this time he assumed many disguises so that every step of his work would always remain untraceable. And he had to spend the entire Wallenstein fortune, selling off farms and villages in Albania, to maintain his disguises and buy what he needed.
At last when all was ready he traveled once more to St Catherine's and presented himself as a ragged lay pilgrim of the Armenian church, requesting and being given a tiny cell in which to meditate. That night, as planned, while the moon waned to nothing Wallenstein crept into the storeroom cellar he remembered and stole the real Sinai Bible from its hiding place.
The next morning the shabby Armenian confessed he needed an even more lonely retreat and said he would seek a cave near the summit of the mountain. The Greek monks tried to deter him, knowing him to be mad, but when they saw he couldn't be swayed they blessed him and prayed he would find relief in the examination of his soul.
Once in the cave Wallenstein unpacked the supplies he had cached there, the chemicals and stacks of precious fourth-century parchment. Then he knelt and embraced the sensuous gloom of his martyrdom.
-3-
Cairo 1840
When last seen and recognized as himself, in Cairo at the age of twenty-one, Strongbow was described as a thin broad-shouldered man with straight Arab features and an enormous black moustache. Summer and winter, no matter how hot the weather, he wore a massive greasy black turban and a shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats' hair, these barbaric garments said to be gifts from some wild mountain tribe in outer Persia. His face was proud and fierce and melancholy, and when he smiled it was as if the smile hurt him.
In the streets of Cairo, even in the most elegant European districts, he carried a thick heavy club under his arm as if on guard, some kind of polished twisted root. But by far his most striking characteristic was his piercing stare, which seemed to look through a man and see something beyond.
It was said he slept only two hours a day beginning at noon. One of his pleasures in those days was floating down rivers on his back, naked, at night. In this solitary nocturnal manner he had explored all the great rivers of the Middle East and he was fond of repeating that no single experience could compare to arriving in Baghdad under the stars after long hours drifting on the dark languid waters of the Tigris.
His professional work, which was still assumed to be botany, occupied only three hours of his day.
Specimens were examined and catalogued from eight to nine-thirty in the morning and again from ten-thirty until noon, the rest of his time being given to thinking and walking or floating.
He seldom spoke to Europeans and if one of them said something irrelevant to his needs he either turned his back or menacingly raised his polished twisted club. Yet he would tarry for hours in the bazaars with the poorest
