IN the spring of 578 AD, the Byzantine monk, John Mos and his pupil, Sophronius the Sophist, set off slaves in hand, on a journey that would take them on a survey of the Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the deserts of upper Egypt. What they sought was the wisdom of the desert fathers, the mystics and hermits of the caves, monasteries and remote hermitages of the East what they found was a world in turmoil, for Byzantium was by that time under attack from all sides, from Avars, Slavs and Goths, from desert nomads and Persians.
In the summer of 1994, William Dalrymple set off, notebook in hand, to recreate the monks' pilgrimage - and if the route was perilous in John Moschos's day, it proves to be no doddle a thousand years later, as Dalrymple rattles and bumps his way in a series of dodgy taxis through the devastation of south east Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the dreadful polarisation of the West Bank and the terrors of a fundamentalist uprising in southern Egypt.
Along the way he meets a cast of characters every bit as bizarre as the fanatical stylites of old. There's Father Theophanes, the guest master from the monastery of Mar Saba on the West Bank, who is convinced that the world is in the grip of a massive Freemason conspiracy Father Methodius, custodian of the shrine of St George in Jerusalem, exasperated by the number of Muslims who come to pray in his church, presenting him with sheep and prayer rugs when their prayers are answered; the gentle old Maronite - hermit living in the valley of Qadisha in the Lebanon - "I am a prisoner of God. I cannot leave this place ..."
Dalrymple thickens his contemporary narrative with liberal chunks of John Moschos and spices it up with his own black humour for good measure.
It isn't, alas, a totally successful mix. "A stranger visits the renowned holy man, Abba Olympios, in his monastery in the heat and humidity of the Jordan Valley. How can you stay in this place with its burning heat and so many insects? he asks. The holy man gives a simple answer: I put up with the insects to escape from what scripture calls "the worm that sleeps not". Likewise, I endure the burning heat for fear of the eternal fire. The one is temporary, but of the other there is no end." That's a typical bit of Moschos - touching, perhaps, faux naif, certainly, but it sits uneasily with Dalrymple's caustic comments on such subjects as Ramazan, the Bedu taxi, driver and the public transport system in Turkey.
Tad bed fair to Dalrymple, he admits that - like his Byzantine mentor - he got a lot more on this trip than he bargained for. Before he set out he fondly imagined that he would encounter little pockets of courageous Christians battling the forces of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East. Instead, he found Syrian Christians in Turkey whose ethnic background placed them in the perilous crossfire between Turks and Kurds; Maronites in Lebanon whose intransigence had caused them to reap "a bitter harvest of their own sowing"; Palestinian Christians in Israel who, like their Muslim compatriots, claim to have been systematically discriminated against and treated as second class citizens.
It's gloomy stuff and, not surprisingly, Dalrymple reaches a gloomy conclusion: "In Turkey and Palestine, the extinction of the descendants of John Moschos's Bzyantine Christians seemed imminent; at current emigration rates, it, was unlikely that either community would still be in existence in 20 years. In Lebanon and Egypt the sheer number of Christians ensured a longer presence, albeit with ever decreasing influence." The tone is meant to be elegiac, but somehow comes across as a bit of a whine: John Moschos, you can't help thinking, would definitely have disapproved. {CORRECTION} 97041200146
