Secretly he revisited the storeroom cellar and buried the real Sinai Bible more deeply in the clay so that it would not be discovered in his absence. Then without warning he left the monastery and returned to Jerusalem, to the quarters of his order, where his unauthorized arrival during the morning meal caused worried looks from his brothers.
Immediately he shattered the silence by announcing he had learned something at St Catherine’s that transcended his vows of obedience, silence and poverty. He must be allowed to go his own way for a number of years or he would be forced to abandon the Trappists.
The monks in the refectory were stupefied. When his shocked superior warned in a quavering voice that merely suggesting such blasphemy constituted a fatal nakedness before God, the former Brother Anthony at once removed not only his cassock but his loincloth, exposing even his genitals, and left the room without an explanation of any kind. Behind him his weeping former brothers stayed on their knees for hours praying beside their bowls of gruel.
Wallenstein meanwhile, penniless and naked and shivering violently in the cold winter wind, limped through the narrow alleys of Jerusalem abjectly begging coins. And although soon starving and frostbitten, his first coins went not for a crust of bread or a loincloth but for a stamp and an envelope. In this letter to Albania he directed that a huge sum of family money, his by right as the Skanderbeg of his generation, be sent to him.
While waiting for the money he continued to beg in the streets but also found time to begin his special studies, the cumbersome process of teaching himself the secrets of ink, more specifically the techniques of making ancient inks from dyes and crude chemicals. He also began teaching himself to analyze ancient parchments by feel and taste and smell in order to determine their exact age. Lastly he applied himself to the eccentricities of writing styles.
Throughout this period of second initiation he wore only a loincloth and lived in a miserable basement hole in the Armenian Quarter, supporting himself by begging.
When the money finally arrived Wallenstein equipped himself as a wealthy and erudite Armenian dealer in antiquities and journeyed to Egypt seeking a large supply of blank parchment produced in the fourth century, neither weathered nor well cared for during its fifteen hundred years, parchment that had been quietly resting in some dry dark grave for all that time.
In Egypt he was unsuccessful and returned to Jerusalem nearly insane with despair only to discover the parchment he sought was already there in the Old City, apparently buried at the bottom of an antique Turkish safe in a cluttered shop owned by an obscure antiquities dealer named Haj Harun, an Arab so destitute and bewildered he readily parted with the treasure as if unaware of its immense value.
Wallenstein rejoiced. Undoubtedly a man less fanatical could never even have conceived of such a forgery, for the task he had set for himself was no less than to deceive all scholars and chemists and holy men in his own era and also forever.
But Wallenstein was fixed in his love for God, and in the end he did succeed.
It took him seven years to assemble his materials. Another five years were spent in the basement hole mastering the precise style of writing he would need for the forgery. During this time he assumed many disguises so that every step of his work would always remain untraceable. And he had to spend the entire Wallenstein fortune, selling off farms and villages in Albania, to maintain his disguises and buy what he needed.
At last when all was ready he traveled once more to St Catherine’s and presented himself as a ragged lay pilgrim of the Armenian church, requesting and being given a tiny cell in which to meditate. That night, as planned, while the moon waned to nothing Wallenstein crept into the storeroom cellar he remembered and stole the real Sinai Bible from its hiding place.
The next morning the shabby Armenian confessed he needed an even more lonely retreat and said he would seek a cave near the summit of the mountain. The Greek monks tried to deter him, knowing him to be mad, but when they saw he couldn’t be swayed they blessed him and prayed he would find relief in the examination of his soul.
Once in the cave Wallenstein unpacked the supplies he had cached there, the chemicals and stacks of precious fourth-century parchment. Then he knelt and embraced the sensuous gloom of his martyrdom.
3 Cairo 1840
Dropping from sight with a whoop precisely as the clocks chimed midnight and announced the arrival of the Queens birthday.
WHEN LAST SEEN AND recognized as himself, in Cairo at the age of twenty-one, Strongbow was described as a thin broad-shouldered man with straight Arab features and an enormous black moustache. Summer and winter, no matter how hot the weather, he wore a massive greasy black turban and a shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats’ hair, these barbaric garments said to be gifts from some wild mountain tribe in outer Persia. His face was proud and fierce and melancholy, and when he smiled it was as if the smile hurt him.
In the streets of Cairo, even in the most elegant European districts, he carried a thick heavy club under his arm as if on guard, some kind of polished twisted root. But by far his most striking characteristic was his piercing stare, which seemed to look through a man and see something beyond.
It was said he slept only two hours a day beginning at noon. One of his pleasures in those days was floating down rivers on his back, naked, at night. In this solitary nocturnal manner he had explored all the great rivers of the Middle East and he was fond of repeating that no single experience could compare to arriving in Baghdad under the stars after long hours drifting on the dark languid waters of the Tigris.
His professional work, which was still assumed to be botany, occupied only three hours of his day. Specimens were examined and catalogued from eight to nine-thirty in the morning and again from ten-thirty until noon, the rest of his time being given to thinking and walking or floating.
He seldom spoke to Europeans and if one of them said something irrelevant to his needs he either turned his back or menacingly raised his polished twisted club. Yet he would tarry for hours in the bazaars with the poorest beggars and charlatans if he thought they had something interesting to tell him.
It was claimed he ate almost nothing, restricting himself to a small raw salad at sunset.
His drinking habits were even more abstemious. Alcohol in any form was out of the question, as were Bovril and dandelion brews, milk, coffee and orange presses and mild malt mixtures. But what was most disgusting to his countrymen, he absolutely refused to drink tea.
Instead, at teatime, he sipped mare’s milk warm from the animal, a cup then and another at sunrise.
When last seen and recognized as himself, Strongbow had also begun to acquire scars from his travels.
A javelin thrown by a tribesman in the Yemen transfixed his jaw, destroying four back teeth and part of his palate. With the weapon still in his head Strongbow fought off the tribesmen with his club and spent the rest of the night walking to a coastal village where there was an Arab with sufficient understanding of anatomy to remove the javelin without taking his jaw with it.
The work was done but the jagged mark down the side of his face remained.
While swimming across the Red Sea under a full moon he fell victim to a fever that blistered his tongue with ulcers and made it impossible for him to speak for a month.
Near Aden, after secretly penetrating the holy sites of both Medina and Mecca disguised as an Arab, only the second European to have done so, he was stricken with another fever that he treated with opium. While largely unconscious he barely escaped being bled to death by a local midwife who solicitously shaved his body and plastered his groin with a thick mass of leeches.