Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 96

the bottom and taking a small stamp seal, pressed this onto the centre of the document.

“So is it written,” she intoned, “so shall it be done.”

With that, she raised her arms in blessing. Apollodorus waved me out of the building while he hung back, rummaged in his clothing and gave a few coins to the priestess before joining me in the street. If I had only known at that point what I was letting myself in for, I might not so readily have agreed to make this momentous voyage into the unknown. I naively thought it would be an interesting and exciting journey. Little did I know that this wily old man was well aware of the enormous risks and perils that I would face and that he had deliberately kept those facts from me. I was soon to find out to what extent he had connived in my co-operation.

I walked back along Canopic Street, back through all the maelstrom of traffic to the Jewish Quarter and the old synagogue where I found Andreas, the man who had been baptised with me and with whom I had kept in constant contact. During our time together, he had become a close friend and confidant; he was the same age as me after all. Andreas was an interesting man. He originally came from the ancient Greek city of Ptolemais, one of the Pentapolis in Libya and for some years he’d been loosely attached to the Roman army. He was not a soldier, he had assured me, but had been a junior assistant

THE JOURNEY