“Father Jerome?” he called out, his voice tremulous, the words echoing emptily through the chamber.
No answer.
Perplexed, he retreated back into the main chamber, and turned to face the wall.
His hand shook with a slight tremble as he raised the flashlight, lighting up the wall that curved gently into the cavern’s dome-like roof. With his heart pounding in his ears, he surveyed its surface, the flashlight’s beam lighting it up from the cave’s entrance all the way back to its deepest recess.
The markings were just as he remembered them.
One symbol, painstakingly painted onto the smooth rock face using some kind of white paint, repeated over and over and over, covering every available inch inside the cave.
A clearly recognizable symbol.
The same symbol he had just seen on television, in the skies over Antarctica.
Yusuf was right.
And he’d been right to come to them.
Without taking his eyes off the markings, the abbot slowly dropped to his knees and, making no sound, began to pray.
Chapter 10
Perched on the crest of the barren mountain, high above the caves, Father Jerome contemplated the majestic landscape spread out before him. The sun was crawling out from behind the mountains, backlighting their undulating crowns and tinting the sky with a soft, golden-pink hue.
The thin, old man with the wire-rimmed glasses, the white, buzz-cut hair, and the dishdasha robe spent most of his mornings and evenings up here. Although the climb up the rocky, crumbling terrain had been harsh on his frail body, he needed the escape from the crushing solitude and the oppressive confines of the cave. And once he was up there, he discovered, the mountain presented him with a reward he hadn’t anticipated, a reward far beyond the awe-inspiring magnificence of God’s creation.
He still didn’t know what had brought him there, what had drawn him to this place. He wasn’t the first to come to this valley to serve his faith and to glorify his God. Many before him had done the same, over hundreds of years. Other men like him, men of deep religious faith, who had felt the same divine presence when confronted with the purity and the power of the vast, empty wilderness that stretched up and down the valley. But much as he thought about it, in those endless nights in the cave, he still couldn’t explain the calling that had led him to walk away from the orphanage—an orphanage he had only just opened, several hundred miles south, just over the border with Sudan—and wander into the desert, unprepared and alone. Perhaps there was no explanation. Perhaps it was just that, a calling, one from a higher power, one that he couldn’t not heed.
And yet, somehow . . . it scared him.
When he thought about it, he knew it shouldn’t. It was a grace from God, a blessing. He had been shown a route, a journey, and even if he didn’t understand it or know where it would lead, it was still a great honor for him to be the recipient of that grace. And yet . . .
The nights scared him most. The loneliness in the cave was, at times, crippling. He sometimes arose in a cold sweat, woken up by the howl of the wind, or by the yelps of wild dogs roaming the barren hills. It was in those moments that he was most acutely aware of his extreme isolation. The mountain was a fearsome place. Few could survive it. The early ascetics, the hermit monks who retreated from humanity and lived in the caves long before him, went there to get closer to God, believing that the only path to enlightenment, the only way to get to know God, was through such isolation. Up on the craggy, bare mountain, they could avoid temptation, they could free themselves from all vestiges of earthly desire, and concentrate on the one thing that could bring them closer to God: prayer. But for those who had lived it, the mountain was also a battleground. They were there to pray for us, believing that we were all constantly under assault by demons, no one more so than the hermits themselves, who also believed that the more they prayed, the more they were threatened by the forces of evil they were battling on our behalf.
If he’d been asked about it before coming to this mountain, Father Jerome would have said he disagreed with that rather bleak view of the world. But now, after living in the confines of the