And given his humility it also never occurred to Wallenstein that in the course of his long sojourn in a desert cave, following the example of St Anthony, he might have performed a monastic feat equal in magnitude to St Anthony’s and thereby become a new St Anthony.
Or simply the real St Anthony, a hermit who knew no era in his love for God.
Or what could have been stranger still, that in the course of his trial of fatigue and hunger, tormented by the glaring sun and lonely stars and yet surviving in his cave, he had in fact relived the lives of those two unknown wanderers whose recitations in dusty waysides had finally led them to the foot of the mountain three thousand years ago.
That Wallenstein had thus found nothing and forged nothing.
That instead, in bewilderment and wonder, no less than a blind man and an imbecile, he had construed his own sacred chant to the mystical accompaniment of an imaginary lyre and flute and ram’s horn.
Intricate possibilities and revolving speculations, in any case far beyond Wallenstein’s ravaged mind. With the last of his strength he dragged himself out of the desert and up to the gates of Jerusalem, which immediately overwhelmed him with its multitude of sights and sounds and smells, so shocking after seven years of solitude in a Sinai cave.
In fact Wallenstein was totally lost in the maze of alleys. He wandered in circles and might have kept wandering until he collapsed in Jerusalem, an insignificant clump of rags on the cobblestones clutching a precious bundle in death, if he hadn’t chanced to stumble upon the antiquities shop where he had once bought the parchment for his forgery.
The elderly owner of the shop, Haj Harun, didn’t recognize his former acquaintance at first, but when he did he quickly offered food and water and a bed, all of which Wallenstein refused, knowing his time was almost at an end. Instead he begged Haj Harun to lead him to the Armenian Quarter, to the basement hole where he had acquired the skills for his task so long ago.
You’re not going down into that again? said Haj Harun, disturbed as always by the filth and darkness of the hole.
I must, whispered Wallenstein, for my bundle’s sake. Good-bye and God bless you, brother.
With that Wallenstein turned and painfully crawled down into the hole. He searched the dirt floor. Where should he dig?
A crack appeared in the dirt, the scar on his eyes.
He bent over the crack and pawed furiously at the earth, ripping his nails and tearing his fingers, desperately working to dig the well of memory while there was still time. Whenever another scar appeared in the earth he attacked it savagely, in dismay, boring ever deeper into the spreading cracks in his mind.
The bones in his hands broke against stone. He had dug down into a paved hole, old and dry and airtight, what might once have been a cistern before it had been swallowed up by the endless razings and rebuildings of Jerusalem. An ancient well in an underground horizon? Exactly what he needed.
He laid his bundle in the cistern and replaced the stones and repacked the well, trampled down the basement floor until it was hard and flat. No one would ever suspect. The heretical book was safely hidden forever.
Wallenstein screamed. The smooth earth at his feet had suddenly shattered and broken into a thousand scars. His terrible presumption on Mt Sinai had led to an end in the desert footprints of God’s ants and now he had to flee, an outcast to the wastes, his Holy City lost to him forever because he had created it.
Moaning softly he dragged himself up the stairs and away from the basement hole, blinded by the scars on his eyes and thus oblivious to the thin figure who had been watching him from the shadows, the man who had led him back to his former home in the Armenian Quarter and then lingered on out of curiosity, a gentle dealer in fourth-century parchment and other antiquities, Haj Harun.
Deaf now to the raucous cries of Jerusalem and blind to its walls, Wallenstein stumbled out of the city and crawled north, reaching a first ridge and then a second. Each time he looked back he saw less and less of the great high mountain and the great city upon it. The jasper was gone and the gold, the domes were splintering, the towers and minarets were toppling.
The landscape cracked a final time and the city was lost in haze and dust. As promised, the raw network of scars had engulfed his brain.
Wallenstein sank to his knees and collapsed on the ground. A white film covered his eyes, fevers shook him, open sores spotted his skin, his hands were immovable claws, one ear hung by cartilage and his nose was eaten away, to all appearances a leper in the final stages of decay, utterly broken by his nineteen years in the Holy Land.
And untouched by the world. So of course he never knew that a German scholar, searching the shelves of St Catherine’s a short time later, came across the issue of his unparalleled devotion and proudly announced the discovery of the most ancient of Bibles, a beautifully written manuscript that both refined and authenticated all subsequent versions, irrefutable proof of the distant origins of traditional Holy Scripture.
Scholars were entranced, the young German was world-famous. And after some decent haggling the exquisite manuscript was acquired by Czar Alexander II, at that time as powerful as any defender of any faith and appropriately enough, like the now insane lost hermit, a namesake of one of the military heroes the original storyteller and scribe had seen fit to have die at the early age of thirty-three along with one of their spiritual heroes.
Alexander the Great and Christ, a blind man and an imbecile, the czar and Wallenstein all steadfastly sharing their profane and sacred concerns over the centuries.
5 The Haj
In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.
AFTER STRONGBOW DISAPPEARED FROM Cairo his botanical monographs appeared less and less frequently. A year might go by with only one page published in Prague. Yet his exercises were so masterful and obscure it was generally believed he had begun some extraordinary project of which these meager presentations were but random footnotes. Given his brilliance in botany, no other explanation could be found for his apparent indifference to it.
After the middle of the century this opinion was strengthened when nothing whatsoever was heard from Strongbow for a dozen years. By then botanists everywhere were convinced the eccentric scholar had taken refuge in some remote corner of the desert to assimilate his findings, which he would soon present to the world as a monumental new theory on the origin of plants, much as his contemporary Darwin had recently done with the origin of species.
And indeed Strongbow was assimilating findings and formulating a theory but it had nothing to do with plants, a phenomenal change brought on by his brief encounter with the gentle Persian girl. And there was no way his subject could elude him in his endless disguises as a poor camel driver or a rich Damascus merchant, a harmless haggler over pimpernel or a desert collector of sorrel and similar spring herbage, an obsessed dervish given to trances and an inscrutable hakïm or healer, dispensing quinine and calomel and cinnamon water, a few grains of rhubarb and one of laudanum.
It was true no European had the opportunity to speak with him during those decades of wandering, yet there were suggestions of what was to come.
In one of his flower monographs, published in 1841, he hinted that Englishwomen in the Levant were known to sweat and that their sweat had a strong odor. If anyone at the time had considered the unholy implications of this statement it might have been realized that Strongbow was already moving inexorably toward some vast and unspeakable indecency.