Trying to rinse myself off by submerging had been a bit like pushing a cork into water, but floating was an extraordinary experience. The water was as warm and dense as a living thing against my naked flesh, and I found that if I remained perfectly still, my limbs stretched out limply and my hair in a great cloud along my arms and back, it was difficult to perceive where Mary Russell ended and the Salt Sea began. The air along my exposed front was slightly cool, but the sea’s temperature was mine, and the heartbeats that thudded slowly through my veins became the pulse of the sea. The moon and stars gazed down as I floated on my back atop the buoyant salt fluid, and the loudest thing in the universe was my breathing, travelling in and out of my nostrils like a great wind.
It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe while he guarded against intruders. I sat up in the water.
“Holmes, I hardly think you need stand guard against the hyrax and foxes. Come in and have a swim.”
For a minute there was stillness where he sat, and then I perceived movement. In the dark and without my spectacles there was no danger of my witnessing anything untoward; nonetheless I turned and struck out into the sea.
We were both strong swimmers, accustomed to the cold waves of the English Channel, and we were nearly at the shore of the peninsula two miles away before we slowed, and stopped. Holmes had maintained a scrupulous distance, close enough for companionship but not in the least improper. I could see him as a ghostly shape, near enough for conversation.
Sitting upright was awkward, like a cork trying to float on end. Eventually I settled on stretching out in the water with my hands behind my head, which kept my ears above the water without having to work at it.
The slight disturbance of our own movements died away; the sea went absolutely still. There was no current here; this was where all the water of the Jordan Valley came to be turned to vapour; it flowed no farther. I was intensely aware of my own skin, vulnerable and safe in the thin moonlight, cradled in the warm, thick, sensuous water. I was even more conscious of Holmes, fifty feet away and in the same condition, and on the distant western shore Ali and Mahmoud, reclining by the faint glow that was the low-burning fire. And no doubt listening to our every splash and bit of conversation.
With Mahmoud in my mind’s eye, and keeping my voice low lest it carry across the water, I spoke.
“Holmes?”
“Yes, Russell.”
“When Mahmoud says he was questioned by the Turks…” I stopped.
“Torture, yes,” Holmes confirmed.
“I thought so. It was stupid of me to ask. I should have…” Again the words drifted off.
“Guessed?” he asked sardonically.
“Known. I should have known. I did know—the scar had to have been linked in his mind with some mental trauma as well as the obvious physical one: His fingers worry it when he’s under pressure.
“I shouldn’t worry, Russell. Mahmoud certainly doesn’t seem to.”
“You think not?”
“If anything, I should say he feels mildly relieved, to have had it out in the open for once.”
I had not thought of that.
The magic of the sea was somewhat deflated. After a while we swam back to the shore, took turns rinsing off the salt in the freshwater spring, and resumed our dirty clothes for the walk up the beach to our encampment.
And thus to our beds, nestled in the soft sand and warm beneath the blanket of moist, salty, insect-free air that covers the Ghor.
Before I drifted off to sleep, I lay playing the entire evening over in my mind, and it came to me that it had been a gift, that night—a birthday present, as it were, given me by Holmes, slipped to me under the table without acknowledgement of either party.
A sly man, Holmes, but not without generosity.
ELEVEN
?
—
BAEDEKER’S
,
1912 EDITION
We came to Mar Sabas on the afternoon of the second day. The hard miles between our Dead Sea camp and our first sight of that extraordinary monastery were a considerable contrast to our dreamlike night on the beach. We picked our way over mile after mile of loose, jagged rock, and although Ali kept reassuring us that Mar Sabas was just ahead, I no longer held much hope that I should see the place in this lifetime. One of my boots was sprung, I had twisted my ankle taking an incautious step, my tongue was swollen with thirst, my woollen garments and the snug binding I wore around my chest chafed and itched abominably, and the patches of raw skin, irritated by the salt water, now stung fiercely when the sweat trickled into them. I had long since entered that timeless state of mere endurance, placing one foot in front of another until strength failed or I ran out of ground.
It was very nearly the latter. My mind had retreated from its body’s discomfort and was miles away, reliving the strange sensations of that glorious night’s swim, the unnaturally thick, slippery water followed by the tingling, all-over scrub in the clear spring, the half-moon that rode the black sky, the eerie colours the fire made burning the scavenged, mineral-laden drift-wood, like a hot rainbow in the circle of stones. I concentrated on the memories, my thoughts far, far away, until I did literally run out of ground. With no warning, my eyes fixed unseeing on the hazardous track, I walked smack into one of my companions, stumbled slightly to one side, and then Mahmoud’s hand was gripping my shoulder, keeping me from stepping off into space. I looked down a sheer drop at a frothy blue ribbon six hundred feet below, and then raised my eyes.
“God Almighty,” I declared, not without reverence.
“It is a singular place,” said Holmes in agreement.
“It’s… Yes.”
It looked like the home of a race of mud wasps infected with cubism. Directly across from us, the opposite wall of the wadi, which was light grey like all the Negev Desert and tinged with a seasonal whisper of green, rose up towards distant hilltops that were identical in colour and shape; to the horizons, all the world seemed made of grey, pitted rock. Then the eyes focussed on the facing rim, dropping down into the pits and shadows of erosion until they were caught by the sudden awareness that some of those pits were too square for natural artefacts, and that many of the shadows had remarkably sharp edges. Off to the right a worn path, little more than the track of a mountain goat, followed the striations of rock and led to an actual building, a small cluster of walls and roofs in a courtyard. Caves were fronted by low stone parapets, recesses were blocked off by high stone walls with doors let into them: Mud-wasp caves were rendered into human habitations.
Then to the left, the cubist tendencies of the wasps had gone mad, and a tumble of angular buildings, hard planes of stone and tile, spilled down into the wadi, beginning high above with a pair of square watch-towers
