Read Online The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi - Free Book Online Page B

portion of the southwestern wall of the Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai.”
    I could see that Glauser-Röist was as happy as I was. His grin was earnest and wide, although his body didn’t move a millimeter. He was as steady as ever. His hands were shoved deep into his pants pockets, and his face expressed a joy I never would have expected from a man like him.
    “Saint Catherine of Sinai?” I whispered. “The Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai?”
    “You got it. Saint Catherine of Sinai. In Egypt.”
    I couldn’t believe it. Saint Catherine of Sinai was a mythical place for any paleographer. Its library, while inaccessible, was the most valuable repository in the world of ancient codices, second only to the Vatican’s. And like the Vatican Library, it too was shrouded in mystery.
    “What does Saint Catherine of Sinai have to do with our Ethiopian man?” I asked, puzzled.
    “I don’t have the slightest idea. In fact, I’d hoped we’d work on that today.”
    “Well, then, let’s get to it,” I agreed, pushing my glasses up onto the bridge of my nose.
    The bowels of the Vatican Library contained a large number of books, memoirs, compendiums, and treaties on the monastery. Yet most people didn’t have the vaguest idea that such an important place existed: an Orthodox temple located right at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the heart of the Egyptian desert, surrounded by sacred summits and built around a site of outstanding religious importance. It was the place where Yahweh, in the form of the burning bush, gave Moses the Ten Commandments.
    The history of the temple was legendary. Around the fourth century, in 337, Empress Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, built a beautiful sanctuary in that valley. From that moment, numerous Christian pilgrims began to journey there. Among those first pilgrims was the famous Galician nun Egeria, who traveled through the Holy Land from the Passover of 381 until the Passover of 384. In her skillfully narrated Itinerarium, Egeria recounted that where the monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai would later be erected, a group of hermits tended to a small temple whose apse protected the sacred bush, which was still alive back then. Because the temple was located on the road connecting Alexandria to Jerusalem, the hermits were constantly attacked by ferocious groups of desert nomads. Two centuries later, Emperor Justinian and his wife, Empress Theodora, ordered the Byzantine builder Stefano de Aila to construct a fort to protect the holy place from raids. According to the most recent investigations, the walls were reinforced over the centuries and to a large extent even rebuilt. Of the original building, only the southwest wall remained, and it was adorned with the same strange crosses that were scattered on our Ethiopian’s skin. The primitive sanctuary was repaired and improved by Stefano de Aila in the fourth century; since then, it has drawn the admiration and amazement of scholars and pilgrims throughout the world.
    In 1844 a German researcher was admitted to the monastery’s library, where he discovered the extremely famous Codex Sinaiticus, the complete copy of the New Testament, the oldest copy ever found, which was dated to the fourth century. Of course, this German researcher, one Tischendorff, stole the codex and sold it to the British Museum, where it still remains and where I had the opportunity to eagerly observe it because, at the time, I was working on its twin, the Codex Vaticanus, which was from the same century and most likely of the same origin. The simultaneous study of both codices would have allowed me to carry out one of most important works of paleography ever. But it was never made possible.
    By the end of the day, we had managed to gather a thick, very interesting stack of documents about the strange orthodox monastery, but we still hadn’t clarified what the relationship was between the scarification on our Ethiopian man and the