Scenes from Cairo Diary: an Egyptian fable

A couple of days ago, I mentioned a recent book talk in Salida, Colorado, and am planning for three more book talks this summer (Napa, Petaluma and San Jose).  I am going to post some of the scenes that I read during such a talk.  Here is the first.

Cairo Diary: an Egyptian fable

April 12, 2006                                       Chapter One

Justine couldn’t wait.  Nadia had offered to show her around Cairo, but she was too eager to set foot in the crypt under St. Sergius Church, a cave that had served as home to the Holy Family two thousand years ago.  Tension gripped her body as she descended the thirteen worn steps down onto the marble floor below. She took each step with deliberate slowness to allow her body to absorb the holy site where the family once lived.  Myth or fact…. or something in between? she mused.

Now inside the crypt, Justine continued to reflect upon the remarkable woman who had captured the imagination of the world. How did she raise her extraordinary sons? Where did Mary spend her nights? Where did Jesus sleep? She stood among the columns, her eyes sweeping over every nook and cranny looking for answers to the questions that drove her search.

The last time Justine was here, the crypt was closed because of groundwater that had seeped in after the ’92 earthquake.  She could now see that the crypt, just recently reopened, had at one time served as a three-aisled chapel with an altar in the front wall. Justine ran her fingers across the smooth plastered walls surrounding four marble-crowned columns and supported by a roughly hewed ceiling.  Primitive lights hung from each side of the room, the cords crawling back up the stairs. Shadows painted haunting images across the walls and ceiling. Perhaps ghosts or saints watch over this holy place, she thought. Not a religious person, nevertheless Justine could be swept up in the historical moment. In this moment.

Nearly four hundred kilometers to the east of Cairo, the morning sun danced a crystalline ballet across the Gulf of Aqaba. Deep below the shimmering waters, the Arabian plate snuggled up against the African plate as it had for millennia. This morning, the earthen plates quivered—only slightly. But enough. Suppressed energy, like flexing muscles, reached the tipping point. The quiver snaked itself west across the African plate, under the Sinai landmass, beneath the Gulf of Suez, and into the eastern Sahara creating a long ribbon of rupture. The quake hit Old Cairo some 90 seconds later.

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