There was a party of white-robed monks coming UP the stone stairway, and
Tessay stopped briefly to chat to them. As they went on she told
Nicholas and Royan, 'Today is Katera, the eve of the festival of Timkat,
which begins tomorrow. They are very excited. It is one of the major
events of the religious year.'
'What does the festival celebrate?' Royan asked. 'It is not part of the
Church calendar in Egypt.'
'It's the Ethiopian Epiphany, celebrating the baptis of Christ,' Tessay
explained. 'During the ceremony the tabot will be taken down to the
river to be rededicated and revitalized, and the acolytes will receive
baptism, as did Jesus Christ at the hand of the Baptist.'
They followed the staircase down the sheer cliff face.
The treads of the steps had been dished by the passage of bare feet over
the centuries. Down they went, with the great cauldron of the Nile
boiling and hissing and steaming with spray hundreds of feet below them.
Suddenly they came out on to a wide terrace that had been hewn by man's
hand from the living rock. The red rock overhung it, forming a roof to
the cloister with arches of stone left in place by the ancient builders
to support it.
The interior wall of the long covered terrace was riddled with the
entrances to the catacombs beyond. Over the ages the cliff face had been
mined and burrowed to form the halls and cells, the vestibules, churches
and shrines of the monastic community which had inhabited them for well
over a thousand years.
There were groups of monks seated along the length of the terrace. Some
of them were listening to one of the deacons reading aloud from an
illuminated copy of the scriptures.
'So many of them are illiterate,' Tessay sighed. 'The Bible must be read
and explained to even the monks, for most of them are unable to read it
for themselves.'
'This was what the Church of Constantine was like, the Church of
Byzantium,' Nicholas pointed out quietly.
'It remains the Church of cross and book, of elaborate and sumptuous
ritual in a predominantly illiterate world today.' As they wandered
slowly down the cloister they passed other seated groups who, under the
direction of a precentor, were chanting and singing the Amharic psalms
and hymns.
>From the interior of the cells and caves there came the IC hum of
voices raised in prayer or supplication, and the air was thick with the
smell of human occupation that had taken place over hundreds of years.
It was the smell of wood smoke and incense, of stale food and excrement,
of sweat and piety, of suffering and of sickness. Amongst the groups of
monks were the pilgrims who had made the journey, or been carried by
their relatives, down into the gorge to make petition to the saint, or
to seek from him a cure for their disease and suffering.
There were blind children weeping in their mothers' arms, and lepers
with the flesh rotting and falling from their bones, and still others in
the coma of sleeping sickness or some other terrible tropical
affliction. Their whines and moans of agony blended with the chanting of
the monks, and with the distant clamour of the Nile as it cascaded into
