Quarantine Read Free Page A

No need for colours or display. There was no vanity in
    caves.
    The caves near Musa's grave, for all their remoteness, were
    known to be hospitable, much prized by those who sought the
    comfort of dry, soft floors while they were suffering, much prized
    by desert leopards, too. Inside were the black remains of fires
    and, on the walls, the charcoal marks where visitors had counted
    off their quarantines in blocks of ten.
    There were other caves in Miri's wilderness as well, less prized,
    in the sheer and crumbling precipice below the tent, which only
    goats and lunatics could reach and in which only goats and
    lunatics - and bats - would choose to pass a night - though at
    this time of year it might seem that lunatics were just as numerous
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    as goats. This was the season of the lunatics: the first new moon
    of spring was summoning those men - for lunatics are mostly
    men. They have the time and opportunity - to exorcize that
    part of them which sent them mad. Mad with grief, that is. Or
    shame. Or love. Or illnesses and visions. Mad enough to think
    that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of
    interest to their god. Mad enough to think that forty days of
    discomfort could put their world in order.
    Not all the cavers were insane. That spring there had been
    fever in Jerusalem and many deaths. Musa wasn't the only one
    to leave his mouth unguarded. Most of the travellers heading
    eastwards for the solace of the hills were the newly bereaved
    who wished to contemplate the memory of a mother or a son
    in privacy, and for whom the forty days were not remedies but
    requiems. There was a group of nine or ten of these - all Jews
    - who, for a modest rent paid to the shepherd, had taken up
    their grieving residence in natural caves above a stream on the
    trading route just south of Almog, where their deprivations
    would be slight. There were produce markets at the waterhead,
    an undemanding walk away, where they could eat once the
    daylight fast had ended and take their ritual baths, and the caves
    were relatively warm. Bereavement's punishment enough, they
    thought. Why starve? Why freeze at night? Why hide away?
    How would that help the dead, or bring them back?
    There was another group of twenty-four - all men, and
    zealots, pursuing the instructions of Isaiah, 'Prepare straight to
    the wilderness a highway for our god' - who were keeping to
    the Dead Sea valley, looking for the Essene settlements. They'd
    spend their forty days in artificial, dug-out caves, waiting for the
    world to end (Please God the world won't end in forty days and
    one . . .
    ) and sharing their possessions and their prayers, with only
    the palm trees their companions.
    But those who made it to the perching valley where Miri -
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    half open-eyed - was sleeping, and where Musa and the fever
    devil were bargaining the final hours ofhis life, sought something
    more remote and testing than requiems and communal prayers.
    There were five of them - not in a group, but strung out along
    the road where earlier that morning the caravan of uncles had
    passed by. Three men, a woman and, too far behind for anyone
    to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth one was bare-footed,
    and without a staff No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food.
    A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising,
    mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of
    air through which it walked and ripples had diluted it.
    The first four - their problems? Madness, madness, cancer,
    infertility - had started their journeys that morning from the
    same settlement in the valley. Though they had observed the
    proprieties of pilgrimage by keeping some distance apart, they
    had at least endeavoured to keep each other within sight and
    hearing. There were robbers in the hills, army deserters, lepers,
    devils, animals, avalanches of dry scree, and a threatening conspiracy of rocks, wind and heat which made the landscape treacherous and unpredictable.