In Tripoli, having long noted the affinity between sleeping and mysticism, wakefulness and madness, he learned the techniques of hypnotism while curing some prostitutes of their price-reducing habit of snoring.
In Arabia he observed that the temperature in the summer at five thousand feet was one hundred and seven degrees in the shade at midday, while in the winter all land above three thousand feet was covered with snow.
Miracles of rain occurred in the desert but not in every man's lifetime. The Wadi er-Rummah, forty-five camel marches or one thousand miles in length, had once become a mighty river with lakes three miles wide where Strongbow had lived for a time on a raft, ferrying stranded bedouin from side to side.
On one day alone, a twenty-third of June, he recorded sixty-eight varieties of a minor sexual act practiced by a remote hill people in northern Mesopotamia. And in a single small notebook he catalogued no less than one thousand five hundred and twenty-nine types of sexual activity practiced by an even more remote tribe unvisited by an outsider since the age of Harun al-Rashid, a people who had spent their entire history circling an oasis on the tip of the Arabian peninsula.
Darwin was said to have performed a feat similar to the first of these with a species in Brazil, and a feat similar to the second with specimens in Uruguay.
But Darwin's species had been a minute beetle and his specimens had ranged from fish to fungi, which he then shipped home in wine for later classification, whereas Strongbow's Levantine subjects were life-sized, could only be plied with wine on the spot and even then tended to alter their characteristics incessantly before his eyes.
Deep in the Sinai, Strongbow sat with the elders of the Jebeliyeh tribe and asked them what unusual information there might be in those parts. They replied that not too long ago a hermit had spent ninety moons in a cave on the mountain above the monastery of St Catherine's.
The monks had thought the hermit was praying but the Jebeliyeh knew better. Actually the hermit had been scribbling on old paper, composing a thick volume which also appeared to be very old. They hadn't seen it closely but they knew it was written in ancient languages.
How do you know? asked Strongbow.
One night, they said, an old blind man familiar with many tongues happened to come to our camp and we led him up the mountain to hear what he could hear. The old man said the hermit was muttering a mixture of archaic Hebrew and archaic Greek and some tongue he'd never heard before.
Did the old man just listen?
No, being blind he was also clever with sounds. He listened long enough to know the hermit thought he was talking to a mole, then he cast his voice as if speaking for the mole, making the squeaks but using words as well. Since the hermit was mad he wasn't surprised at the mole's questions and he answered them. But of course the answers didn't make any sense.
The mole asked what was being written?
He did, and the hermit replied that he was rewriting a sacred book he had unearthed nearby, perhaps in the monastery.
Why was he rewriting it?
Because it was chaos, a void containing all things.
And what was he going to do with his rewritten copy?
Leave it where the world would discover it.
And the original?
Bury it again so the world wouldn't discover it.
Strongbow leaned back by the fire and considered this dialogue between a mole and a hermit. As he knew, the Bible manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus had only recently been found in St Catherine's. But what if it was a forgery? What if the real document presented a totally different view of God and history?
After a time he took a Maria Theresa crown from his cloak and placed it on the ground in front of the Jebeliyeh elders.
This marvelous tale well pleases me. Is there more to it?
Only that the old man who was the mole forecast the hour of his death upon his return from the mountain and went to bed to await it. He never woke up. Subsequently the hermit left the cave and never came back. We can take you up there if you like.
Strongbow agreed and they climbed the mountain in darkness. Outside the cave he lit a candle. The opening was too small for him to crawl inside but he pushed one arm in and took measurements. Then he thanked the elders for their information and left toward midnight for Aqaba, normally a distance of eight marches. But Strongbow was intrigued by what he had heard and the next thing he knew a dog was yapping around his heels, a sure sign he was near an Arab village. For the first time he laid aside his speculations and raised his eyes from the ground. A shepherd boy was watching him.
What place is this?
Aqaba, answered the boy.
And the day?
He was told. He looked back at the desert and smiled. He had walked through two sunsets and three sunrises without noticing them. The shepherd was saying something. He turned to the intent little face.
What's that, son?
I asked, master, whether you're a good genie or a bad genie?
Strongbow laughed.
And why might I be a genie?
Because you're twelve feet tall and because you've just walked out of the Sinai without a waterskin or a pouch of food or anything else.
Nothing?
Only your empty hands.
Yes only those, said Strongbow slowly. But a genie isn't always tall, is he? He may be small and live in a tiny cave and never go anywhere in ninety moons. And in all that time he may speak only once and then only to a mole.
The boy grinned.
So that's what you were doing out there, master, and now you've just changed your shape and size again the way your kind is always doing, from a mole to a giant as it pleases you, in an instant or after ninety moons. Well the water is that way if you want to wash your face, I know you don't need to drink it. But before you go, genie, won't you tell me the one thing you said to the mole?
How's this? Confide the whole truth to a shameless scamp, a mere slip of a rogue?
I'm not a rogue, master.
Promise?
Yes, please tell me.
And you won't repeat a word of the secret to anyone?
No, master.
Briefly then Strongbow recounted an obscure tale from the Thousand and One Nights and walked on, leaving the little boy gazing dreamily down on the gulf where a dhow was approaching with spices from India and a bulky wooden chest bearing a familiar inscription in Singhalese stating that therein was to be found the finest selected tea from Kandy, site of the temple that housed a tooth of the Buddha.
After the middle of the century there was a period of a dozen years when nothing was heard from Strongbow, the time he spent producing his study, not in a remote corner of the desert as was generally assumed but rather in the very heart of Jerusalem, where he both lived and worked in the back room of an antiquities dealer's shop.
For Strongbow those were peaceful years. The sturdy tea chests filled with his notebooks lined the walls.
He used several tea chests as his desk and a giant Egyptian stone scarab, cushioned with pillows, was his seat. An antique Turkish safe was his filing cabinet and a rusting Crusader's helmet served as an object of contemplation, much as a skull might have rested in front of a medieval alchemist.
With its heavy masonry the vault was snug in the winter, cool in the summer and nearly soundproof.
When he was at his desk small cups of thick coffee were sent in every twenty minutes from a shop down the alley along with a fresh handful of strong cigarettes. During that period of concentration he seldom spoke with anyone but the antiquities dealer who was his landlord, and, less frequently, with a fat oily Arab in the bazaar from whom he bought his writing paper on the first Saturday of every month.