A barrage of clearly unamused looks greeted his words.
Dalton half-smiled, sheepishly. “Sorry,” he offered apologetically, and left the room.
They walked down the hall in silence, the sheer magnitude of the discussion sinking in. As they reached the stairwell, Gracie noticed Dalton looking particularly adrift.
“What?” she asked.
He stopped, hesitated, then said, “What if that Bible-thumping nut back there is right?”
She shook her head. “There’s got to be a better explanation for it.”
“What if there isn’t?”
Gracie mulled the question for a moment. “Well, if that’s the case, if it’s really God,” she said somberly, “then for someone who had me totally convinced He didn’t exist, He sure picked one hell of a moment to show Himself.”
Chapter 9
Wadi Natrun, Egypt
Labored breaths and sluggish footfalls tarnished the stillness of the mountain as the three men trudged up the steep slope. Every step, every scattered rock and rolling pebble echoed, the small sounds amplified by the harsh, lifeless dryness of the hills around them. The moon had been conspicuously absent that night, and despite the fading array of stars overhead, the early dawn light and the chilling solitude weighed heavily on them.
Yusuf had driven straight to the monastery from the cafe. Like many other devout Coptic Christians, the taxi driver donated as much as he could afford to the monastery, delivering free fruit and vegetables from his brother’s stall at the market and helping out with various odd jobs. He’d been doing that for as long as he could remember, and knew the monastery like the back of his hand. Which was why he’d been to the cave, delivering supplies every few weeks to the recluse who was its sole inhabitant, and why he’d seen what was inside it.
Muttering the most profuse of apologies, he’d startled the monk he knew best, a young man with alert gray- green eyes and a gregarious demeanor by the name of Brother Ameen, out of a deep sleep with his startling news. Ameen knew Yusuf well enough to take him at his word and, driven by the old taxi driver’s urgent tone, he’d then led him to the cell of the monastery’s abbot, Father Kyrillos. The abbot listened, and reluctantly agreed to accompany them back to the cafe at that ungodly hour.
The monastery’s amenities, unsurprisingly, didn’t include a media room, and so they’d all watched the footage on the TV at the cafe. It had thoroughly shocked the monks. And although they were both certain that Yusuf was right, they had to be absolutely sure.
And that couldn’t wait.
Yusuf had driven them straight back to the monastery, where they’d counted down the hours anxiously. Then at dawn, he drove them six miles out, to the edge of the desert, where the barren, desolate crags rose out of the sand. From there, the three men had climbed for over an hour, pausing once for a sip of water from a leather gourd that the young monk had brought along.
The trek up wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. The steep, uneven slope of the mountain—a barren moonscape of loose, crumbling rocks—was treacherous and hard enough to navigate by daylight, let alone like this, in near- darkness, with nothing more than the anemic beams of cheap flashlights to guide them up the slope that was still bathed in shadow. It also wasn’t a path they knew well at all. Visits to the caves were a rare event. Access to the desolate area was, as a matter of principle, fiercely discouraged out of respect for the occasional, driven soul who elected to retreat into its harsh seclusion. They reached the small doorway that led into the cave. A simple wooden door guarded its entrance, held shut by an old, rusted latch. A small timber window, fashioned from a natural opening in the rock, sat beside it. The abbot, a surprisingly fit man with penetrating yet kind eyes, dark, weathered skin, and a salt-and-pepper, square-cut beard that jutted out from the embroidered hood of his black cassock, shone his flashlight briefly into the window and peered in, then retreated a step, hesitating for a moment. He turned to Ameen, unsure of whether or not to proceed. The younger monk shrugged. He wasn’t sure either.
The abbot’s expression darkened with resigned determination. His hand shaking more from nerves than from the cold, he gave the door a soft, hesitant knock. A moment passed, with no answer. He glanced at his companions again and gave the door another rap. Again, there was no reply.
“Wait here,” he told them. “Maybe he can’t hear us.”
“You’re going in?” Ameen asked.
“Yes. Just keep quiet. I don’t want to cause him any distress.”
Ameen and Yusuf nodded.
The abbot steeled himself, gently lifted the latch, and pushed the door open.
The interior of the cave was oppressively dark and bone-chillingly cold. It was a natural cavern shaped out of limestone, and the chamber the abbot now stood in—the first of three—was surprisingly large. It was empty, save for a few pieces of simple, handcrafted furnishings: a rudimentary armchair, a low table facing it, and a couple of stools. Beside the window was a writing table and a chair. The abbot aimed his flashlight toward it. The table had a lined notebook on it, a fountain pen lying across its open pages. A small stack of similar notebooks, looking well thumbed, sat on a ledge by the window.
His mind flashed to the notebooks. To the frenzied, dense writing that filled their pages, pages he’d only glimpsed, pages he’d never been offered to read. To how it had all started, several months earlier, unexpectedly.
To how they’d found him.
And to the
The abbot shook the thoughts away and turned. That could all wait.
He lowered the beam toward the ground and stood motionless for a moment, listening intently. He heard nothing. He took slow, hesitant steps deeper into the cave until he reached a small nook that housed a narrow bed.
It was empty.
The abbot spun around, shining his flashlight across the cave walls, his pulse rocketing ahead.
“Father Jerome?” he called out, his voice tremulous, the words echoing emptily through the chamber.
No answer.
Perplexed, he retreated back into the main chamber, and turned to face the wall.
His hand shook with a slight tremble as he raised the flashlight, lighting up the wall that curved gently into the cavern’s dome-like roof. With his heart pounding in his ears, he surveyed its surface, the flashlight’s beam lighting it up from the cave’s entrance all the way back to its deepest recess.
The markings were just as he remembered them.
One symbol, painstakingly painted onto the smooth rock face using some kind of white paint, repeated over and over and over, covering every available inch inside the cave.
A clearly recognizable symbol.
The same symbol he had just seen on television, in the skies over Antarctica.
Yusuf was right.
And he’d been right to come to them.
Without taking his eyes off the markings, the abbot slowly dropped to his knees and, making no sound, began to pray.
Chapter 10
