So Jesus took his courage from the stork to edge along the cliff on hands and knees, looking for a way down to his cave. It was not difficult. It was not long before the ground grew rougher underfoot and underhand. There was a rockfail, where the land had split and slipped, like a broken crust of bread. Jesus started to climb down. The marl was soft enough to crumble between his fingers. There were struggling signs ofgod’s creation, at last. A few opportunist plants — morning star, hyssop, saltwood — had taken root in the crevices and on the leeward side ofrocks. They lent their odour to the climb and left their muffled blessings on his palms whenever he took hold of them. Hyssop was familiar, a herb for eggs and f ish, but now it was the smeil of vertigo and fear. When the rockfall steepened, Jesus descended on his thighs, facing outwards. The ground was loose but firm enough to take his weight. He did not trust his feet. They were already tom and bleeding from the walk and now were further scratched and battered by the earth. He tried to put as much weight as he could on to his hands and thighs as he went down below the level of the slope on to the precipice. He had to hurry. It was almost dusk. The cliffs were facing east. The sunlight ended sharply. He was climbing on the dark side of the world, his back pressed hard against the earth.
He reached his lodgings for the night more easily than he had expected. The route was steep but well provided with handholds and platforms for his feet. His fear of heights and falling rocks made him quick and nimble for a change. He was propelled. He almost found the climbing pleasurable. He was the boy he’d never been.
The entrance was much larger than he’d thought. The cave was deep. There was no sign of life, not even any bird lime on the rocks, or sand-fish burrows. No screaming bats. No perching angels. He called out from the rocky platform at the cave’s mouth. The echo of his nervous greeting came back twice. ‘Is anybody there ody there ody there?’ He wept, of course. What young man, alone in such a wilderness, wouldn’t weep to hear his own voice mocking him and reassuring him? No echo would be worse. He couldn’t light a fire or lamp. There wasn’t any food or drink to comfort him, but he had eaten anyway, in the merchant’s tent and in the shepherd’s hut. Two meals that day. He couldn’t think what he should do. Give thanks? Protect the entrance of the cave with stones? It was too cold to sit outside and watch the stars come out. He hadn’t brought a cloak to wrap around himself So he found a pocket of warm air, out of the draughts, and curled up on the dry clay in the cave, in his thin clothes. He made a pillow of his open palm, still smelling of the hyssop, and protected his body with his elbows and his knees as if he thought he might be kicked by demons. Would there be scorpions or snakes? Would there be nightmares? He closed his eyes. He brought his lids down on his fear. He put his trust in god; an optimist again. He could rest. He could rely on god’s provision, yes. The travelling was over. He fell asleep, almost at once.
Sleep is a medicine. When he woke up on his first day of quarantine, his spirit was repaired, as was his confidence. There was no walking to be done that day. He did not have to climb. He only had to shake the stiffness from his limbs and go outside to meet the day. The rosy epaulettes of light on the peaks of Moab which Marta was admiring at that same moment from her own cave entrance, seemed heavenly to Jesus. He sat crosslegged on his angel perch. He could hear the bluster of a wind, blowing on the cliff-tops and the hills, but not descending to his cave. God was taking care of him. Jesus would explore the cave when it was fully light outside, but for the moment he simply waited for the epaulettes to spread into a cloak, and for the cloak to throw its wa^th across his shoulders. Time was slow, of course. He filled it with prayer, and thinking of his parents
watching him pray. They couldn’t come and shake him now.
There was nothing else for Jesus to do, except to simplify his life. Repentance, meditation, prayer. Those were the joys of solitude. They had sustained the prophets for a thousand years. And they would be his daily companions. He started rocking with each word of prayer, putting all his body into it, speaking it out loud, concentrating on the sound, so that no part of him could be concerned with lesser matters or be reminded of the fear, the hunger and the chill. He seemed to find his adolescent rhapsodies. The prayers were in command of him. He shouted out across the valley, happy with the noise he made. The common words lost hold of sound. The consonants coUapsed. He called on god to join him in the cave with all the noises that his lips could make. He called with all the voices in his throat. He clacked his tongue against his mouth, Tok-tok tok-tok tok-tok.
He must have recited a hundred prayers that morning, before the sun obliged and wa^ed him through. His prayers brought up the sun. His prayers suppressed his appetite. His prayers picked out the sunlight on the dead and silver sea and hardened it. It turned it into jeweUery. The water was as solid as a silver plate. It rose from the distant valley into the mid-air haze. Jesus had to look at it through half-closed eyes, it was so bright. The more he looked, the more transformed he felt. He could have taken this to be the natural way of water and light. But Jesus had not come this far to witness only godless routines of the sun and sky and sea. He had to take each shift of light, each colouring, each shadow of a bird to be the evidence of god. He had to persuade himself, before the forty days were up, that he’d been awarded a brief view of god’s kingdom. Let the silver plate be paradise. Let god be calling out to give to him his new commandments, as he had given al his laws to Jews in this same wilderness. What would his parents and his neighbours say when he went back to
preach the word of god? They would not shake his shoulders, send his brothers to distract him, use the stick. They would rejoice in him. He could congratulate himself, and did. He was shoeless, homeless, without food. He’d slept on naked ground. But he was at last without fear or sorrow. ‘^m I not free?’ he asked himself, ‘Am I not blessed?’
Finally it was too warm to sit out in the sun, and he was trursty. He put a pebble in his mouth. He went back to the cave and slept again, just inside the entrance. He dreamed he was a. common fly and climbing down a crust ofbread. It broke away. He fell with crumbs ofbread between his legs. His wings weren’t any use. He fell awake. Flies on his face were feeding on the mucus of his nose and eyes and lips. There was indeed a noise of falling without wings. A few stones dropped outside his cave. A little further along the cliff a new landslip was underway. God’s footfall made its mark on earth.
The earth had quietened by the time that Jesus went outside. There was nothing on the precipice to see, but there were voices and movements on the rim above. He turned his back to Moab and looked towards the sununit of the cliffs. Dust fell on his face and hair. A pebble hit his shoulder. His company had come at last; rus guide, his god, his friend. He would not pass his quarantine alone. He waited for a face to show itself. Perhaps there was a face already; he was not sure. He thought he saw the blond hair of an angel and a face the colour of a honeycomb. He thought he heard a joyful voice call out, in a mocking echo ofhis dream, ‘Fly, fly. .’ Were they the words? There was a further fall of earth and then there was a vision that he could not understand. Its meaning was obscure and dark and troubling. A donkey seemed to come out of mid-air, falling through the sky at him. It dropped down the precipice to the right ofhis cave. It turned. It hit the rocks and bounced once more, high above the valley. Then it fell towards the silver plate. A sacrifice towards the silver plate. Its legs were wings. It seemed to have no weight, no eyes. Its head was loose like cloth, as if the bones along its neck were less substantial than the air.