Читать книгу The Lost Ark of the Covenant: The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark - Tudor Parfitt, Tudor Parfitt - Страница 7

‘Wallah, this is the hiding place effendi! This is where the Ark was put.’

I had no idea what on earth my somewhat dippy and excitable friend Daud Labib was talking about. For the preceding few minutes I had been reflecting on the fact that over the previous year my interest in the Ark had started to take over my life. Indeed it was principally because of the Ark that I now found myself in the spring of 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, having finally succumbed to Reuven’s entreaties to try to find out more about the world’s most sought after artefact. Whatever reservations had constrained me before had been put aside.

There were two main reasons for coming to Egypt. In the first place I wanted to investigate ancient traditions which maintained that the Ark had been brought here long before the destruction of the First Temple. Secondly, I had wanted to try to understand the background of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Over the previous week I had stood in the shade of the pyramids the Hebrews had helped construct, walked in the fields where they would have collected straw and mud to make their bricks. Whatever the Ark was, and I was still deeply unclear about this, it had started life, at least conceptually, here in the land of the Pharaohs. I had wanted to feel and see and smell the reasons that led to the creation of the Ark.

So far enlightenment had evaded me.

The following day I was going back to England for a stint of library work but when I returned to Egypt I planned to examine various Ark-like artefacts from Ancient Egypt in Cairo’s museums.

My undersized friend was walking in front of me. Gazing down at him I started wondering inconsequentially how it was that his particularly small head could possibly have produced such a disproportionate mass of dandruff: it had settled on the shoulders of his black, synthetic shirt like an ermine stole.

This morning Daud had dragged me out of the archive where I spent most of my time to take me on a tour of his favourite places in Cairo. He was a Copt - a member of the Egyptian Coptic Christian minority - who lived in a suburb of Cairo but who was originally from the southern Egyptian town of Qift which had played an important role in the history of the Copts.

The word ‘Copt’, deriving from the Greek word for Egypt (Egyptos), simply means ‘Egyptian’, a point that Copts are not slow to bring to your attention. Their liturgical language, Coptic, is the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. But no-one speaks Coptic any more - Arabic is the spoken language of the Coptic minority as it is for the rest of the predominantly Muslim populations. The Copts see themselves as the true heirs of the great civilization of ancient Egypt.

Daud was pointing proudly at a nondescript building set back from the dusty road down which we were walking. His dark eyes radiated enthusiasm. ‘The Ark was put here’ he repeated, making a stabbing gesture with his right hand.

Daud was unlike anyone I had ever met in Egypt. A brilliant and scholarly man who was working on a doctorate on ancient Coptic manuscripts, he carried his irritating eccentricity and individuality before him like silken banners.

‘This is where the Ark was put!’ Daud bellowed, pointing to a plaque on the wall which proclaimed that this was the Ben Ezra synagogue.

I knew of nothing which connected the Ark with the Ben Ezra synagogue. This synagogue is world-famous because of the discovery in one of its storerooms of the world’s most important collections of medieval documents. I was planning to see what this archive - the Cairo Genizah - had to say about the Ark, if anything. But that would not be here or now, as the documents had been removed to western university libraries in the nineteenth century. But there was absolutely nothing as far as I knew to suggest that the Ark had ever been hidden here.

‘What are you going on about, you excitable little Copt? How do you mean the Ark? Nobody’s ever said the Ark had anything to do with this place.’

In fact I was more than a little mystified. I’d certainly not mentioned my interest in the Ark to Daud. We were close friends and in the past had shared confidences but once, in an unguarded and inebriated moment, he had boasted about carrying out jobs for the Egyptian Mubahath al-Dawla (the General Directorate of State Security Investigations), and since then I had been a little careful about what I told him. In Egypt, the Ark with all its political and religious ramifications, was not a subject to bandy around with the likes of Daud. How could he possibly know about my involvement? I felt an unpleasant clamminess at the base of my spine. I looked at him questioningly.

‘You know, ya achi, Musa’s basket when he was hidden in the reeds: “the Ark of bulrushes”.’

He began to recite by heart in a monotonous chant, which he accompanied with a rhythmic movement of his hand as if he were swinging a censer:

‘And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive. And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the reeds by the river’s brink.’

In the Hebrew of the original Biblical account, the word used for the humble basket in which the baby Moses was hidden by his mother was teva. But the English translation was ‘ark’. I breathed a sigh of relief. Daud knew nothing about my true reason for being in Egypt. Of course I knew about the ancient tradition that Moses of the house of Levi was hidden on this very site among the rushes in a floating basket, a miniature coracle. The rushes were the feathery papyrus reeds that still line the banks of the Nile and that have been used for making paper for around 5000 years.

His recitation over, my friend made the sign of the cross, bowing and mumbling to himself. Turning his bony, mottled face towards me, he smiled and fingered the large gold cross he wore over his shirt. Daud had crossed himself in a stagey, ironical way, like some corrupt Italian prelate. And like some corrupt Italian prelate I knew it did not mean much. He had begun to lose his faith while he was studying at an American theological college. He had lost it completely by the time he had finished another undergraduate degree and an MA in an English university. He was fond of quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ‘Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.’ Daud was no longer religious but he was proud of his remarkable knowledge of the Bible, great swathes of which he knew by heart and could quote in Coptic, Arabic, or English. And for reasons I did not at first understand, he always wore sacerdotal black shirts with a large gold cross swinging from a metal chain around his neck.

Notwithstanding his overall eccentricity, in one respect he conformed to Egyptian norms: he was opposed to all the doings of the Israeli state (he refused to use the term ‘Israel’ and persisted in calling it ‘the Zionist Entity’) and extended this animosity to the Jews of recent times with the exception of Einstein and the Marx brothers. He had reservations about me, too, as I was a frequent visitor to Israel, but had substantially overcome them as I had done some work on an illustrious ancestor of his called Labib who had played the leading role in the (failed) revival of Coptic as a spoken language. It was my interest in the Coptic language revival that had led me to contact his family, and thus meet up with him.

Daud was anxious to show me this ancient but much restored Cairo synagogue as part of the tour of the city he had planned for me. This was not, however, out of love for the ancient Jewish heritage in Egypt, but because it was the site of an ancient Coptic church. The church, he told me, had been bought by the Jews for the paltry sum of 20,000 dinars over a thousand years before, in AD 882.

‘Only 20,000 dinars - they had it for nothing, effendi. Yo u can’t imagine the price of land in Cairo,’ he said. Once they had purchased the church, the Jews turned it into a synagogue. ‘Damned cheek, ya achi,’ he said indignantly. ‘They tricked us out of our birthright, same as they are doing with the Palestinians.’

His anger caused his face to break out in small pink blotches. For Daud it was as if the purchase of the church had taken place the day before - yet another reminder of the vividness of historical memory in the Middle East.

‘Come on, you ineffably daft Copt,’ I said. ‘The Jews would not have much use for a bloody church, now would they? Anyway I read somewhere that the Copts couldn’t afford to pay their taxes and were forced to sell the church. Yo u could say the Jews helped them out.’

‘Wallah, another Jewish lie!’ he snorted, shaking his head violently and causing another layer of his shedding derma to explode over his shirt. ‘The Copts were rich in those days. They could afford their taxes. They were the intellectual and commercial elite of Egypt - always were, still are. No, the rubbish Jews cheated us.’

The day was oppressively hot. We were standing in the shade of the synagogue. ‘That was the hiding place,’ he repeated, stabbing his finger at a point to one side of the building. ‘That’s where the bulrushes used to be. That’s where the prophet Musa was hidden and that’s why we built a church there - one of the finest churches in the whole of the Middle East.’

He put his arm round my shoulder and opined piously: ‘Wallah, Musa was a great man! He had horns, it is true, like quite a few Jews, so they say. But he was a very great man. A great prophet.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘He managed to rid Egypt of all its rubbish Jews when they escaped from slavery under the Pharaohs.’

His face became sombre again. ‘Problem is, they came back. And desecrated our damned church.’

Again he fingered his cross, a troubled look on his face.

After a brief look around the synagogue, we walked through medinat al-mawta, the City of the Dead, Cairo’s ancient cemetery, which has given shelter to the living as well as the dead for over a thousand years. Thieves, outlaws, pilgrims, professional reciters of the Quran and guardians of graves have often made their homes here in the tombs and, over the last many decades, their numbers have been swollen by hundreds of thousands of homeless people. The cemetery used to be in the desert, far outside the city, but the city has grown around it and this vast area is now right in the centre of the great noisy metropolis that is Cairo.

The City of the Dead was an island of relative calm. In its alleys there were bands of black goats and dirty, ragged children. Today the whole area was covered by veils of smoke and mist which formed and dissolved around the shapes of the tombs, leaving one to guess what was real and what was imagined. The few spring flowers were dulled with a coating of fine white dust.

Daud obviously knew the cemetery well. Walking at breakneck speed, despite his pronounced limp, he led me on a tour that took in most of the important shrines and mausoleums. He gave me a hurried explanation of the main sites and then pushed on restlessly to the next one. Finally he came to something that really interested him. Just next to a stone-built marvel of high medieval Islamic architecture, crowned with a dome, the tomb of some long-dead poet or saint, a group of men were constructing an ugly concrete breezeblock wall around what appeared to be a small vegetable patch.

After our long walk in the heat of the day, the normally indefatigable Daud now complained of tiredness and wanted to stop for a while to smoke a cigarette. We walked over and sat close to them on slabs of masonry from another age fringed with red and yellow lichen. A cold tainted draught seemed to be coming out of the tomb itself.

From the proprietary way he had walked around the tomb, Daud gave the impression that he knew the place.

From the colour of their skin I guessed that the builders were from the south of Egypt or perhaps from further south still, from the Sudan. They were black, emaciated men with faces devoid of any semblance of hope. They appeared so crushed by the burden of their lives that they did not greet us or even acknowledge us.

A woman walked out of a squat aperture set into the side of the tomb. She greeted Daud with a knowing smile. On her shapely hip she was resting an aluminium tray on which I could make out some small gold-rimmed glasses and a number of home-rolled cigarettes. She placed the tray on the ground and poured out thick black tea, the colour of ink, which is typical of Upper Egypt, from a charred pot sitting on the ashes of a cooking fire, and served the men: each one received a glass of tea and a cigarette. The men squatted on the ground, arms resting on their thin knees, in the lengthening shadow of the wall they were building, and lit up. The fragrant smell of hashish mingled with the smoke of the fire.

‘This is a drug den,’ sneered Daud, showing his blackened teeth. ‘They are building the widow a wall, and she pays them with tea, drugs and I don’t know what else. Egypt is a strange place. Our wonderful law bans the growing of tobacco - nobody knows why - so we have to import millions of tons of it every year; but every delinquent grows hashish in his back garden. This widow, this Maryam, grows it and sells it.’

One of the men picked up a drum and started playing an intricate, pulsating African rhythm. Daud had forgotten his tiredness and started performing a kind of lopsided disco dance. Ricky Gervais has serious competition. It was the strangest dance I had ever seen: he would leap in the air, eyes rolling, cross himself fervently and then bow deeply in the direction of the setting sun. No one paid much attention.

After a while Maryam went back into her tomb and came out wearing a colourful sequined shawl over her long shabby cotton dress. She walked over and stood squarely in front of me. Smiling, she too started to dance, her movements sinuous and sexy. Daud eyed her anxiously.

To the widow’s evident annoyance, the drummer stopped playing, put his drum on the ground beside him, and shot me a truculent look, a glimmer of interest in his eyes. I guessed he was wondering if there was any chance that I would pay him something to continue.

The widow faltered in her dance and tossed her head. The dust rose up around her fine ankles like a small cloud as she descended on the drummer. A victorious look on her face, she lifted the drum above her head and started playing it herself. Dancing and playing. Triumph in her eyes.

I was sitting in the shadow of the tomb watching this pantomime. I had wanted to imagine the days before the appearance of the Ark in the world, to understand what may have led to its construction. Bizarrely what was happening here had given me more enlightenment than all my walks around the pyramids and building sites of ancient Egypt. The scene before my eyes reminded me of something I had almost forgotten, something I had read without paying much attention years before when I was a student. I was reminded of the victory dance of Miriam, the prophetess and sister of Moses and Aaron.

Once the Israelite slaves had managed to evade Pharaoh’s army, which was dramatically engulfed by the waves of the Red Sea, Moses recited a poem of triumph known to be one of the most ancient passages in the Bible: ‘I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea…’ Then his elderly sister Miriam takes the stage. Like Maryam here in the City of the Dead, she had a drum (tof ) in her hand - an instrument that the Israelites had encountered and adopted for their own purposes in Egypt - and started to dance, no doubt triumphantly.

As the woman strutted in front of the emancipated slaves, one can imagine the gestures she made in the direction of Egypt.

But the unfragrant widow was no longer dancing triumphantly; she was dancing sexily. To o sexily for my taste, and far too close. I imagined that she was a prostitute of some sort. She was rather handsome and had a lithe, curvaceous body. But this was not for me. Predictably she was holding her hand out for money.

‘She invites you to rest your weary body in her humble tomb. Or do I mean womb?’ whispered Daud, giggling.

‘Er no thanks,’ I said.

‘If the widow is not your style,’ said Daud huffily, ‘I can assure you that she is mine. Very much mine. Perhaps you could lend me a few pounds?’

He was swinging his cross with a circular movement of his hand, one of his eyebrows raised expectantly.

‘You loathsome little Copt,’ I muttered.

Dusk was turning to night and the fruit bats were starting to swoop and circle in the half-light, making their typical highpitched buzzing sound. I had a flight to London the following morning and I was looking forward to an early night. I had little desire to walk back through the City of the Dead alone, nor did I wish to wait around here while Daud had his way with the widow. Shaking my head I stood up to leave and gave the woman a few well-worn Egyptian notes.