When sleep finally arrives, it comes with the smashed face of Stephen. An image scorched into the very fabric of Saul’s skin, as if branded by white-hot iron. A burned flesh scarification of the forehead. Like the marking of a slave who has tried to flee.
The plains last for days, flat as the Galilee Sea, empty but for parched bushes in dry runs of the streambeds of the Jordan rift and balls of old dung, gone white like desert eggs. Wilderness should be yellow and green and blue and copper and russet. These plains are cinereous as the scorching of Sodom.
You see faces in the sands if you stare too long. A form of small blasphemy, perhaps, since it is against God’s law to depict animals or people and you have surely painted them in your mind’s eye. But Saul is sick of such small blasphemies, worrying about the motes of Pharisee rules, while nations and mountains fall apart.
The flies alone could send men insane, them and the southern wind. The flies sing in their hissed flight of the death and decay that you must keep pushing onward to evade. They land on you and on your meagre portions of food and they do not fear you as they ought.
When Saul washes his face in a pool, he doesn’t recognize the man who stares back at him. The man who looks back is sleepless and delirious. The man who looks back is a murderer. The man who looks back is close to madness. The man who looks back is a distorted fool who peers into a pool to see, as if in a glass, darkly.
This state of dissonance cannot go on for long. Collapse must come. And maybe what falls can be made better a second time. But before it can be built anew, it must be broken utterly.
They are finally within sight of the worry-lined walls of Damascus when Saul drops, non-resonant, to the dirt. He falls like a nest-tumbled swallow chick. Near motionless and staring at the sky. He wails about the brightness of the light.
If you stare at the sun you may go blind, but at least you don’t see the flies.
And one might say it was hunger, sunstroke and the wind. One might say it was malarial delirium. One might say it was the product of a mind somehow split from itself, a mind fraught with disorder, a mind damaged from external pressures, which it could no longer square with an aggrandized view of itself. One might even say that some grain or fungus, entangled in foraged food, contained hallucinogenic fervour. One might very well indeed say that it was temporal-lobe epilepsy, well proven to cause deeply experienced mystical visions and lingering but temporary blindness. One might say any or all of these things, and others have. But Saul believed he heard Jesus.
And Jesus told him to stop kicking against the goad. Jesus told him to come towards the light. Jesus said: what is sown in dishonour, can be raised in glory; what is sown in weakness, can be raised in power. Jesus said the least can be great.
Three Days before the Crucifixion
A saw-scaled viper lies motionless, shrugged over a boulder, trying to warm its night-cooled frame in the first of the sun. It slowly lifts its head and flicks a hay-fork tongue to taste the breeze, as if sleepily becoming aware of a presence. As it does so Cephas hacks at it with his stubby iron sword. The serpent’s head is not cut cleanly: it is still attached by the leathery skin of one side, though its inner flesh is exposed and its cold blood spurts. The snake tries to strike, but its head flops away, past right angle from its body, like a snapped flower stalk. Cephas brings down his blade again and severs the neck fully this time. The viper’s tail thrashes erratically, then falls off the rock and lies still.
‘Can the snake help being a snake?’ James the Lesser asks.
‘No more than a Roman can help being a Roman, but he is still responsible for his actions,’ Cephas says.
‘And what were the snake’s actions so worthy of death?’
‘Being a snake.’
They withdrew to the safety of Bethany last night. Now, once again, they look down to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. The city walls zigzag across the horizon, in crisp lines like broken matzah bread — the unrisen loaf of affliction.
Below them — descending past Gethsemane to the Kidron valley — are excavated burial caves. Those of the aristocratic Sadducee families have carved entrance ways and inscriptions. Not for the poor such finery in mortality. This valley is the boundary line between the living and the dead. The scriptures say the resurrection will start here at the end of days. Yeshua says this is the end of days.
The valley is on fire. Even the Temple — high above the city ramparts — is part obscured by the smoke that rises from the steep side of the Kidron below it. The plume looks dirty-pink in the morning sun. It lifts to the same height as the holy white smoke that already flows from the pyre of the Temple platform, then both veer off in the strength of an elevated western wind.
Fumes would fill the tomb caves were it not for the round stones rolled across their fronts. Even so, some smoke must be seeping through the cracks and the fissures to mingle with the flesh-desiccated bones within.
The fire is probably a deliberate burning, started to encourage regrowth and to prevent bigger fires later. If the grass of the Kidron valley grows too long and dry it can burn in a conflagration fierce enough to make even those in the city fear. Grass fire could never pierce the great limestone walls, but sparks can fly on the wind and ignite from within. Jerusalem is a city under permanent threat of combustion.
‘Moses was spoken to by a burning bush and below there is a multitude. Perhaps it’s a sign,’ Jochanan says.
‘Yes, it’s a sign. It’s a sign that the goatherds are sick of the gorse scrub and the dumped rubbish,’ says Cephas.
Though not the palm-fronded entrance of yesterday, Yeshua and the disciples have still accumulated a large following by the time they climb the great stone stairway of the Temple. Many know who Yeshua is — some have travelled far to be part of this; others are simply Passover pilgrims, who join the mass of people heading in the small-step crush of the crowd to the Temple gates.
The giant stairs — broad as a field that could feed a Galilee family — are carved from the very rock of the Jerusalem Mount; they are an integral part of this sacred country and the Temple is the holiest place on earth, the one and only seat in all the world where the Israelites can make sacrifice. It is bigger even than the Acropolis or the Temple of Jupiter at Rome; the Jerusalem Temple is perhaps the largest site of worship known to man. Even Gentiles journey here, just to wonder at the magnificence.
Cephas and the rest of the Galileans come from a place where few buildings even have a second floor and a village can mean a hundred houses, or half that. Throughout the year they have followed Yeshua, they have stayed away from the metropolises and even large towns, sticking to rural backwaters when they entered habitations at all. And now they are facing a structure that soars as if it might scrape the heavens. Each hewn-rock block is as high as a man’s chest, held together with no bonding material save their own unimaginable weight. Every new row looms just a finger’s width back from the one below in an imperceptible pyramid, forty rows high. And that monstrous construct is just the platform for the Temple itself — white marble, plated with gold — to stand upon.