Sinai Tapestry (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 1) Read online

  A curious man, thought Strongbow. He actually seems to believe what he says. Perhaps someday there’ll be time to get to know him.

  Strongbow’s forty-year haj ended with the publication of his gigantic thirty-three volume study, the volume containing some sixty thousand pages of straight exposition and another twenty thousand pages in fine type listing footnotes and allied contortions, all together a production of well over three hundred million words, which easily surpassed the population of the Western world.

  Most of the footnotes could only be read with a magnifying glass equal in power to Strongbow’s own, but a glance at any one of the volumes was sufficient to convince the most skeptical reader that Strongbow had immersed himself in the details of his subject with unerring scientific skill, making full use of the rational premises of the nineteenth century.

  And this at a time when the authoritative English medical manual on sex stated that the majority of women had no sexual feelings of any kind, that masturbation caused tuberculosis, that gonorrhea originated in women, that marital excess led to a full spectrum of fatal disorders, and that other than total darkness during a sexual act caused temporary hallucinations and permanent brain damage.

  Strongbow’s dismissal of these and other absurdities was nothing compared to the demented esoterica that followed, such as the Somali practice of slicing off the labia of young girls and sewing their vulvas together with horsehair to assure virginity upon marriage.

  Nor was the massive presentation in any way hampered by the engraving on the frontispiece which showed a scarred determined face swathed in Arab headgear, permanently darkened by the desert sun yet still undeniably that of an English aristocrat whose family had been honored in England for six and a half centuries, despite a certain inherent lethargy.

  Nor was the impact lessened by the author’s note in the preface that for the last forty years he had been an absolute master of every dialect and custom in the Middle East, and that he had spent those forty years variously disguised in order to penetrate freely every corner of the region.

  Strongbow’s study was the most exhaustive sexual exploration ever made. Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting bedouin encampments along the way.

  All claims were substantiated at once. The evidence throughout was balanced in the Victorian manner. Yet the facts were still implacable, the sense and nonsense inescapable, the conclusions terminal.

  Given his subject matter, it was only to be expected that the great majority of people would find the work revolting. For even if such practices did occur in the infamous hot lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, there was still no reason to put them into words.

  And especially such explicit words, wogs for example, which had always been used to designate everyone east of Gibraltar but had never before appeared in print, even in the most scurrilous publications. But here was Strongbow making it the contents of his entire first chapter, tirelessly repeating it line after line and page after page together with its customary prefix bloody, bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody as if to signal the utter contempt for all known standards of decorum that was to follow.

  Yet other revolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century were also confronting topics subversive to society, and what was surprising at first was that unlike them, Strongbow solicited no initial support whatsoever. Instead his thesis outraged both the contemporary defenders of Darwin and Marx and the future defenders of Freud.

  And always for the same reason. In both cases Strongbow contradicted the new masters by denying all precepts and mechanisms whether subtle or bold. He had the effrontery to suggest that far from there being any laws in history or man or society, there weren’t even any tendencies toward such laws. The race was capricious, he said, thrusting or withdrawing as its loins moved it at the moment.

  Nothing else was discernible. In the framework of Strongbowism events were random and haphazard and life was unruly and unruled, given to whimsy in the beginning and shaken by chaos at the end, a kind of unbroken sensual wheel made up of many sexes and ages revolving through time on the point of an orgasm. Thus those who courageously held liberal views, and who might have been expected to be Strongbow’s natural champions, found themselves forced to denounce him bitterly with personal cause.

  For there was an unmistakable hint in Volume Sixteen, and again twenty million words later in Volume Eighteen, that all unorthodox thinkers were being indicted for secret crimes. Under the tenets of Strongbowism, these seemingly brave believers in modern times stood accused of an abominable retreat into respectability because they embraced grand schemes of order.

  This they did, said Strongbow, solely to conceal from themselves the rank disorder of their true natures, the inner recesses where sexual fantasies somersaulted down slippery slopes with the gamboling abandon of lambs drunk on spring grass.

  So much for his possible defenders, Darwinians and Marxists alike. Having been apprehended as undercover sex maniacs, they had no choice but to become vehement enemies of Strongbowism.

  As for the great bulk of his countrymen, who were traditionally in favor of dispatching large armies overseas, they were appalled by Strongbow’s assertion that any military expedition was merely a disguised sexual sickness, more specifically a profound fear of impotence.

  In Volume Twelve, repeated ninety million words later in Volume Twenty-two, he pointed out that fuck you and fuck them and fuck off were the common terms of hostility preferred by imperialists and patriots. Thus armies were raised, he said, because it was likely their raisers could raise nothing else.

  As for the very foundations of imperialism, the profits accruing from military expeditions overseas, he likened them in a vulgar manner to excrement. The revolting passage appeared in Volume Eight.

  There is nothing a young child values as highly as his own feces, for the simple reason that it is the only product he can produce at such an early age.

  Therefore builders of empires and others with a concern for money are the perennial children of every era, at flay with their feces, and in yet another guise we find men contriving to clothe their formidable sexual chaos in respectability.

  For it is axiomatic in the West that it is improper to spend one’s life playing with shit, whereas a thoughtful accumulation of lucre is seen commendable and even noble.

  Nor did Strongbow limit his anal assaults to those caught with money in their hands. He also included all club members and anyone who propounded ceremonies or band music. The offensive material could be found in a few short sentences in Volume Twenty-six.

  What are these enthusiasts actually up to? Could it be they fear the slippery and slithering and wholly unmarchable rhythms of true sexuality? Is that why they organize themselves into a counter-orgy of numbing rituals and dreary Sunday afternoon concerts? Because they are reduced to expressing pride in the only sensual act of which they are capable?

  Taking a shit?

  Strongbow’s text was equally offensive to many who cherished romantic notions of the East, such as those who wanted to believe a rumor long current in the more exclusive London men’s clubs that there was a unique male brothel in Damascus, with a special dungeon, where a man could pay to have Moroccan mercenaries cane him for the rest of his natural life.

  Not true, said Strongbow, who then listed all the brothels in the Middle East along with their equipment and activities.

  In addition many of Strongbow’s more homely observations on life among the bedouin were simply misconstrued, such as a minor aside on camel cows. When they gave birth, he said, two of the four teats were bound with twine by the bedouin so the family could share the food by halves with the new calf.

  This was seen to imply incest complicated by bestiality, the whole further debauched by mutilation
and bondage and aberrant lactation methods, the striking multiple perversions at work so complex as to be unthinkable.

  So too some of his simpler travel notes. A passing remark that shrimps eight inches long were generally available in the markets of Tunis, only one entry among tens of thousands on food and eating habits in the region, was singled out as a confession that proved for all time the patient treachery and general depravity long associated with the Eastern mind, trapped as it was in an erotic coma caused by excessive sun and blue skies, deprived of the fogs and mists and rain that maintained human composure in Europe.

  But above all there was that major aspect of Strongbow’s work that had been suggested by his landlord of twelve years in Jerusalem, the shy antiquities dealer Haj Harun. As a result of their brief discussion on daydreaming one hot summer Sunday afternoon, when the old Arab had put on the rusting Crusader’s helmet and smilingly insisted that no event was ever too far in the past to be forgotten, Strongbow had devoted two-thirds of his entire text to his memories of the gentle Persian girl he had loved so long ago.

  These tender passages described his few weeks with her in exquisite detail, the stream in the hills where he had found her and the new flowers of spring and the soft grass where they had lain under the sun and under the stars, the words they had whispered and the joy they had shared in those endless minutes of springtime when he was only nineteen and she a few years younger, love from long ago recalled now in a tale that spanned two hundred million words and was thus the most complete love story ever told.

  Yet that part of Strongbow’s work was completely ignored. The beautiful passages devoted to the gentle Persian girl were passed over in their entirety as if they didn’t exist, of no interest at all to his Victorian audience when compared to such possibilities as a Damascus dungeon where Moroccan mercenaries could be hired to administer secret canings for life.

  Clearly Strongbow had already abused most occupations and all political positions. But he refused to let matters rest there. Indomitably he pushed deeper into a licentious morass of insults until in Volume Twenty-eight, provoked by his own obscene ardor and raving out of control, he went on to pose the possibility that everyone alive, regardless of status or opinion, was sexually suspect.

  Men have a tendency to project their own personal cause as the general cause at large. Thus a cobbler sees the world as a shoe, the state of its sole dependent upon him.

  A naturalist with the wit to realize he has evolved upward since infancy by selecting this and not that, or that and not this, views all the species of the world as having done the same thing. And lastly a political philosopher with heavy unmovable bowels finds the past turgid and ponderous, the future necessarily destined to experience explosive upheavals from the lower regions or classes.

  Of course each of these hypothetical men is right as far as he goes, which is to say all men are right when describing themselves.

  As seen by a cobbler, the world is a shoe. Men do evolve out of their infancies and pent-up bowels may well and probably will explode. But all these innumerable individual acts must not be allowed to obscure what they only take part in, a chaotic universe boundlessly mad.

  Strongbowism, it was apparent, ranged wide. It could and did attack every sort of person. And it was especially damaging to those who wanted to believe there was some kind of scheme operating in the universe, preferably an imposing or dramatic scheme that could provide an overall explanation for events either through religion or nature, society or the psyche.

  Or at least a partial explanation. And if not daily events then events that occurred once in a lifetime. Or once in a century. Or even once in an epoch.

  Or at the very least one reassuring explanation for some event somewhere since the beginning of time, some tiny structure no matter how pathetic. For otherwise what did it all mean?

  And here Strongbow appeared to be smiling. Exactly the point, he seemed to be saying.

  For nowhere in his thirty-three volumes was there to be found even a nascent conspiracy. Not even that. On the contrary, as seen by Strongbow all yearnings for the existence of a conspiracy in life were hopeless illusions from childhood that surfaced later in idle moments, the illusions having been caused by a child’s false perceptions of order above him, the subsequent yearnings arising from an adult’s inability to accept the sexual chaos beneath him.

  To the whore’s interim statement, I’m sitting on a fortune, Strongbow now added a vastly enlarged final statement, I’m sitting on everything which is also nothing.

  This argument appeared in its most cogent form in a barely legible footnote in Volume Thirty-two, printed in such fine type an acuity of eyesight worthy of a bedouin was needed to decipher it.

  All of these various Levantine acts, heretofore described in detail and accounting for life as it is, I have found to be repeated incessantly among the nine sexes, in low stations and high, but never with a view toward organization or design.

  The effect everywhere and at all times has been incoherent, and as much as I would like to think someone has known what he or she was doing at these most crucial moments in life, or even paused to consider the matter, I can’t honestly say I do.

  Rather the obverse obtains. Forty years of research have taught me that men and women fuck with great avidity. When they finish they fuck again and if they are not fucking when next you see them, or gathering the strength to do so, it is only out of some bizarre lack of opportunity.

  In point of fact there is a great deal of fucking in the world but no one is in charge of it, no organization controls it, no recommendations affect it.

  Instead men and women fuck right along as they always have and always will, paying no particular attention to kingdoms or dynasties, ignoring the universal theorems that are regularly announced over the ages as applicable to all when they aren’t, in rapture and headlong chance, spinning round and round the sensual wheel.

  It would be comforting news indeed if we could find a scheme or a plan or even a hint of a conspiracy in life, some stationary point where we could sit and be still at last. But having long studied the spin of our wheel, I have to admit there is none. Alas we are only right there. Each of us.

  Blasting away in another orgasm.

  Nor did Strongbow defend his depraved attacks on everyone by claiming his aim was to diagnose the rampant sexual pathologies of his age in order for them to be cured. In fact cures were inconceivable to him, for it was obvious he believed man was insane by definition.

  This he made plain in Volume Thirty-three.

  Within the animal kingdom we are an incorrigible and lawless member, deathly ill, a species suffering from an incurable disease. Wise men of all ages have known this, ignorant men of all ages have suspected it. It amounts to congenital insanity and because of it man has always wanted to return to the orderly and ordered conditions of the animal state where he once found contentment.

  All memories of lost paradises verify this, as do all visionary dreams of future Utopias.

  Whenever a prophet or a philosopher speaks of a new man in a new age his creation is invariably the same, the old man in the old age, the animal in his animal kingdom, the beast in the grazing herd that browses for forage digesting and rutting and evacuating in a seemingly timeless eternity, untroubled because unaware of the troubles on every side, undying because unaware of death, unliving because unaware of life.

  For an animal this is most certainly a happy existence. But for you and me it can never be again.

  Yet in the closing lines of Volume Thirty-three, Strongbow revealed that in spite of everything he was still willing to live with his findings and even do so with a certain gusto.

  It’s true that life is crumpled and mindless and covered with hairs. But for the few years we have its good memories we also have to admit it remains as pleasantly soft to the touch as an old well-used wineskin.

  Or for that matter, as an old man’s well-used balls.

  Thus Strongbow�
�s thesis was nothing less than a vicious onslaught on the entire rational world of the nineteenth century, where sensible solutions were considered available to all problems. In his systemless universe no one was safe and there were no solutions, just life itself.

  In proof of this he had offered three hundred million words in thirty-three volumes with no deviations from the facts.

  So perhaps it was understandable that Strongbowism never acquired a single adherent in the West. In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

  When the manuscript was ready Strongbow sent it by caravan from Jerusalem to Jaffa, where a large chartered steamship was waiting to carry both camels and manuscript to Venice. There the caravan would be re-formed by its wild bedouin drivers and traverse a stately swaying course across the Alps to Basle, which he had chosen for publication because of traditional Swiss neutrality. Strongbow himself, feeling the need for a vacation after twelve years of uninterrupted work in the back room of the antiquities dealer’s shop, left Jerusalem for the shores of the Dead Sea where the sun was both warm and perpetual.

  At the lowest spot on earth Strongbow lolled comfortably in sulphur baths while his volumes duly appeared in a private edition of twelve hundred and fifty copies, the same number used by Darwin for the first run of the Origin of Species. But the only other comparison with Darwin’s study was that Levantine Sex also sold out on its day of publication.

  There was therefore no need for the British consul in Basle to attempt to have the remaining editions confiscated as he had been ordered to do by Her Majesty’s government. Instead the consul went with his staff to the leading local British banker, who added his staff for the joint visit to the leading local Swiss banker, who closed for the day and collected his considerably larger staff for the march across town to Strongbow’s printer.