"Hatzinikolaou, Leonidas - The Holy Pledge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hatzinikolaou Leonidas)

various relics and monuments of St. Catherine's. For almost two
hours they wandered all over the place, trigger-ready with their
cameras, seizing on every opportunity to draft the passing monks as
temporary tour guides.
At last the comforting stillness of the night had arrived, but he
could not rest just yet. Later. And he was looking forward only to a
few hours of sleep before the simantron, the wooden-bell, roused his
brethren for the Matins.
Father Gregorios shook his head ruefully as he continued with
his work. He brought out from a drawer a thick sheaf of priceless
Byzantine manuscripts and placed them carefully on his desktop.
Then he parted the linen curtain of the front window to let in some
fresh air. He lingered for a few moments there, taking the opportu-
nity to open up himself to the coolness of the desert. He knew that
a few of minutes of quiet contemplation were enough to renew his
spirit.
The deep, all encompassing silence, had laid siege to the
monastery, with the friars of St. Catherine's entrenched in their
religious keep, their few hours of sleep a short pause between the
Compline and the Matins prayers. They followed faithfully the
Orthodox monastic tradition, a way of religious life virtually
unchanged since the sixth century AD.
Father Gregorios left the window in a better mood and turned his
attention to the work at hand. Professor Cyrus Schulman of the
American University in Cairo, a good friend of his, had phoned him
last month to ask a favor. He needed facsimiles of certain unpub-
lished Byzantine parchments for the paper he was working on,
which were kept at St. Catherine's library. This particular set had
been accidentally discovered in 1975 during a renovation project
and had been identified as supplementary to the famous Codex
Sinaiticus, once possessed by the monastery but now part of the
manuscript collection of the British Museum.
The Codex Sinaiticus had attracted world attention when
Konstantin von Tischendorf, a renowned nineteenth-century
German scholar, had brought it to light in 1844 after a five-month
research effort in the archives of St. Catherine's Old Library. He
studied it in depth and left the monastery taking with him a sample,
as he called it, of forty-three parchment sheets.
Several years later von Tischendorf returned to the monastery,
this time as a middleman, and after an extended period of negoti-
ating he finally bought it on behalf of the Czar Alexander II. The
agreed upon price was seven thousand dollars. Finally, in 1933 the
irreplaceable Codex Sinaiticus, which dated back to the fourth
century AD and contained the largest part of the Old Testament and
the entire text of the New Testament, was sold by the Soviet govern-
ment to the British Museum for half a million dollars.
Father Gregorios had scheduled the copying of the parchments
for this morning. However, the early arrival of the monthly supplies
had put him between a rock and a hard place, because Fahad, the
Egyptian truck driver, was the only person he'd trust for the delivery