From The Holy Mountain (72 page)

'A few have gone to Cairo,' said the priest. 'But the rest of us are staying.'

'This incident has increased our resolve to stay and fight,' said Tosi. 'This is our country. We will stay here for ever.'

Back on the main road, our escort drove into a lay-by and stopped. The leader, a young major, spoke earnestly into his walkie-talkie. Mahmoud got out and asked what was happening. They explained that as we wanted to go to Deir ul-Muharraq, they needed more guards. Mahmoud returned looking anxious.

'I don't understand what has happened,' he said. 'I last came here three years ago with a party of twenty foreign journalists. Then we went anywhere we liked without an escort. Now they are worried that six guards are insufficient.'

I felt more exposed than ever sitting up on the embankment in our black government limousine. Mahmoud clearly felt the same, and after a couple of minutes he remarked: 'The terrorists hide in canebrakes like these and shoot at passing police convoys. I don't like it.'

To pass the time until our second escort arrived, I went up to the Major and talked to him. He was from Alexandria, he said, and didn't like it in Upper Egypt. The people were very primitive, without any manners or education. I asked him about the
Gema'a.
Thankfully, he said, they had no heavy weapons: no grenades or mortars. Nor were they good fighters. When confronted they always ran away. The problem was that they were invisible. Some were educated, some were small landowners, others were just simple farmers. A few had beards but many had shaved them off. They were always young; otherwise they were indistinguishable from any other locals.

'You never know when something will happen,' he said. 'It can be just like now, very quiet, and suddenly two of your men will be dead. Yesterday afternoon, three of the local policemen were killed on this road just half a mile up there. Earlier in the month one of my boys was gunned down a mile to the south. There is no warning, just a shot and then the peace returns. The worst of it is that you never know when it will happen.'

I went back and waited inside the car. After what felt like an age, but in reality was probably no more than twenty minutes, our new escort arrived and we headed on, now sandwiched between two pick-ups bristling with armed men. A little way along the highway we turned off down a narrow mud track, towards a great plantation of palm trees. Before long the fortified walls of the Coptic Abbey of Deir ul-Muharraq, the Burned Monastery, reared up out of the palms.

The monastery is supposed to mark one of the resting places of the Holy Family on their flight into Egypt, but six months before our visit it had become famous for a less uplifting event.

'This was where Amba Benjamin was standing when the
Gema'a
opened fire,' said Amba Beiman, the monk who met us at the monastery gate. He pointed to a patch of dust at his feet. 'And over here, this was where Amba Agabios fell.'

The old monk bristled through his thick black beard as he pointed out the lines of bulletholes in the plaster of the monastery wall. 'We had a tip-off from one of our tenants that something of the sort was being planned,' he said. 'He had heard his nephew discussing plans to attack the monastery and he came here one night to warn us. Three times we begged the police to give us a guard, but they didn't take any action. Now the terrorists have won martyrs' crowns for Amba Benjamin and Amba Agabios.'

Mahmoud, who had been scanning the surrounding palm trees, hurried us into the monastery and porters closed the great ironclad gates behind us.

'We monks don't search for martyrdom,' said Amba Beiman. 'But we welcome it if it comes.'

He led us into the monastery. Like a Crusader castle, it was defended by not one but three rings of walls.

'It was Lent, and none of the fathers would normally have left the monastery gates,' said Amba Beiman. 'But Amba Benjamin had come out to talk to a layman who wanted to get married here. Amba Agabios had followed him to tell him that the Abbot had asked him to lead prayers the next day. The gunmen were waiting in a car in the shadows when they opened fire. The layman was shot too, as was a thirteen-year-old boy. He just happened to be passing at the wrong moment.'

The monk shook his head. "We gave them all nice funerals,' he said.

At this point Mahmoud spoke up: 'Forgive me for asking, Father,' he said. T have never been in a monastery before. Do monks weep when one of you dies?'

'Of course,' said Amba Beiman. 'We are human beings. But we live in contemplation. Our senses are especially delicate. Anything can hurt us. Something like this is terrible for us.'

'Aren't you afraid that the
Gema'a
might come back?' I asked.

'We lost two good fathers in the attack,' said Amba Beiman. 'But we trust in God.'

'And do none of the monks want to move to a safer area, if only for the time being?'

'No,' replied Amba Beiman. 'This is a holy place for us. There have been Christians here ever since the Holy Family took shelter here from King Herod. In dreams some of the fathers still see the Holy Family wandering around here. As monks we should overcome evil, not let evil overcome us. This is a place of visions: we cannot ever leave it.'

By now the sun was sinking low in the sky. Mahmoud urged me to hurry up: he didn't want to be on the roads after dark. But before we left, Amba Beiman insisted on taking us into the innermost courtyard to show us the high castellated keep that the Byzantine Emperor Zeno had built to defend the monks from Bedouin attacks in the fifth century
a.d.

'We Copts have always been attacked for our faith,' said Amba Beiman. 'Compared to some of those attacks, this trouble is nothing.'

'What sort of attacks are you thinking of?' I asked, alarmed. 'Oh, the massacres of the Emperor Diocletian, for instance,' replied Amba Beiman. 'Now there was a
real
persecution.'

The twilight was giving way to darkness by the time we drove into Asyut, sandwiched between our two escorts. Armed soldiers, heavily swathed against the cold, stood at every junction. Paramilitary police sat in open pick-ups scanning the passers-by. Plainclothes security men stood around with walkie-talkies, clutching machine guns and signalling to police snipers on the rooftops. The town felt like an armed camp.

The police had already arranged a hotel for us. Our escort fanned out and Mahmoud and I bolted from the car into the hotel. That night we slept with three armed men guarding the lobby. The journey and the tension had exhausted me, but I slept calm in the knowledge that the difficult part of the journey was nearly over. Only one last stretch of road remained.

Hotel Oasis, Kharga,
20
December

Asyut was known in Byzantine times as Lycopolis. The Byzantines regarded it as the back of beyond, the Siberia of the Empire. As such it was a suitable place of exile for those who fell foul of the Emperor or his consort. John of Cappadocia, Justinian's rapacious Praetorian Prefect (known as 'The Scissors' in reference to his tax-collecting methods), was exiled here after incurring Theodora's displeasure; more humble offenders would be dispatched to spend the rest of their lives in forced labour in the Eastern Desert, mining porphyry and granite at the quarry of Mons Por-phyrites.

But it was not quite the end of the known world. Beyond Lycopolis lay one last outpost of Byzantine rule, the most distant and inaccessible spot in the entire Empire. To this place the most dangerous criminals and subversives were dispatched. In Byzantium, no crime was taken more seriously than advocating heresy, and it was thus to the Great Oasis, modern Kharga, that Nestorius, one of the most reviled heretics in Byzantine history, was banished after his disgrace at the Council of Ephesus in
431
a.d
. John Moschos knew this and includes a story about Nestorius's exile in
The Spiritual Meadow.
Possibly it was his notoriety that attracted Moschos to Lycopolis. Possibly the monk in Moschos was drawn to this place of ultimate spiritual exile, the very last outpost of Christendom. Whatever the motivation, despite the extreme danger inherent in such a journey, Moschos and Sophronius chose to travel to this most isolated oasis settlement, deep in the desert that formed the southern boundary of the Empire.

It was to be the last trip that the friends would make of their own volition. For me too this was to be the end of my journey. At
5.30
a.m. I packed my bags, paid the bill and set out for the last time in Moschos's footsteps.

Our convoy left Asyut at dawn. Mist from the Nile swirled through the riverside streets, deserted except for a scattering of heavily muffled sentries warming their hands at makeshift bonfires. It was still dark and still exceptionally cold. Toad-like armoured personnel carriers and light tanks had been deployed at most of the town's principal road junctions. I had not seen such armour since leaving eastern Turkey, and the sight of it brought back memories of Diyarbakir and the Tur Abdin three months previously.

Despite a similar feeling of political disintegration and, for the local Christians, a sense of siege, the two situations were in fact very different. Indeed the problems faced by the Christians right across the Middle East had proved surprisingly diverse. When I began this journey I had expected that Islamic fundamentalism would prove to be the Christians' main enemy in every country I visited. But it had turned out to be more complicated than that.

In south-east Turkey the Syrian Christians were caught in the crossfire of a civil war, a distinct ethnic group trodden underfoot in the scrummage between two rival nationalisms, one Kurdish, the other Turkish. Here it was their ethnicity as much as their religion which counted against the Christians: they were not Kurds and not Turks, therefore they did not fit in. In Lebanon, the Maronites had reaped a bitter harvest of their own sowing: their failure to compromise with the country's Muslim majority had led to a destructive civil war that ended in a mass emigration of Christians and a proportional diminution in Maronite power. The dilemma of the Palestinian Christians was quite different again. Their problem was that, like their Muslim compatriots, they were Arabs in a Jewish state, and as such suffered as second-class citizens in their own country, regarded with a mixture of suspicion and contempt by their Israeli masters. However, unlike most of the Muslims, they were educated professionals and found it relatively easy to emigrate, which they did,
en masse.
Very few were now left. Only in Egypt was the Christian population unambiguously threatened by a straightforward resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, and even there such violent fundamentalism was strictly limited to specific Cairo suburbs and a number of towns and villages in Upper Egypt, even if some degree of discrimination was evident across the country.

But if the pattern of Christian suffering was more complex than I could possibly have guessed at the beginning of this journey, it was also more desperate. In Turkey and Palestine, the extinction of the descendants of John Moschos's Byzantine Christians seemed imminent; at current emigration rates, it was unlikely that either community would still be in existence in twenty years. In Lebanon and Egypt the sheer number of Christians ensured a longer presence, albeit with ever-decreasing influence. Only in Syria had I seen the Christian population looking happy and confident, and even their future looked decidedly uncertain, with most expecting a major backlash as soon as Asad's repressive minority regime began to crumble.