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Johann Luigi was therefore entertained by the absent master's pleasant young wife. After dinner a wild
storm broke over the castle and the young woman invited him to view the lightning from her bedroom.
Torrential rains lashed the castle the rest of the night.
By morning the storm had blown itself out. With bright smiles for the young wife, Johann Luigi shouldered
his pack to continue his journey, unaware he had planted in his hostess the seed of a pious future hermit,
a man whose stupendous forgery of the original Bible four decades later would be universally accepted
as authentic, the renegade Trappist and linguistic genius who would be the last of the Skanderbeg
Wallensteins.
Johann Luigi traveled briefly in the Levant and liked what he saw. By the beginning of the following year
he had walked back as far as Budapest, where he decided to enter medical school, again chopping
firewood to support himself. He received his medical degree and set himself up in private practice,
specializing in cases of hysteria. Before long he converted to Judaism in order to marry one of his former
patients, a young Jewish woman of Khasarian extraction whose family had been engaged in petty local
trade in Budapest since the ninth century.
A son was born to the couple and named Munk, a curious tradition his wife's forebears had brought with
them from Transcaucasia before they were converted to Judaism in the eighth century, a custom requiring
the first male in every generation to be given the same name. In Sarah's family the traditional name was
Munk, although no one could remember its significance. As for Johann Luigi, he was more than pleased
with the name since it appealed to his own rather monkish tendencies.
About the same time Johann Luigi began planning another brief trip to the Levant. He would travel
overland to Aleppo, he told his wife, and spend a few weeks there improving his Arabic. Then he would
journey down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf, find a ship bound for Egypt and so back to Europe. In all he
would be gone three months, he said, and he promised to write every day, not explaining how his letters
could possibly arrive in Budapest before he did, nor how the distances proposed could be covered so
quickly.
But little was known of Middle Eastern geography in those days, and perhaps nothing at all in a Budapest
family engaged in petty local trade.
Nevertheless, Sarah and her family must have suspected more was involved when they saw how the
young doctor went about preparing himself for his trip. Instead of writing to shipping agents, Johann Luigi
disappeared into the Hungarian countryside for a full year, walking barefoot in all kinds of weather and
sleeping in the open without a blanket, feeding himself exclusively on grasses and returning to Budapest
only once, to be with his wife when their daughter Sarah was born midway through the year.
Yet no one mentioned this odd behavior. The women in Sarah's family had always loved their men well
and Sarah wanted Johann Luigi to do whatever would make him happy, even if it meant he would be
away from home for a while.
On a brisk autumn day in 1809, then, Johann Luigi lovingly embraced his wife and two children and left
on a brief journey to the Levant, to be traced by daily letters sent home to Sarah.
That much was true. Johann Luigi did write letters home every day, often five or six times a day.
And given his passion for details, it wasn't surprising his letters also contained long reports on everything
he observed, down to the smallest items. Thus mixed in with the lyrical passages describing his love for
Sarah, there was interminable information on crops and trade, lists of cottage industries and analyses of
local customs, all strung together in what was in effect an exhaustive diary of his travels.
For two years the heavy packets of letters arrived regularly from Aleppo. By then the inquisitive young
Swiss had grown a long beard and learned the one hundred and fifty Arabic words for wine, having
become to all appearances an erudite Arab merchant, well dressed in the Turkish manner, who went by
the name of Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun and explained his merry blue eyes by saying he had Circassian
blood.
So skillful was his grasp of the Arab imagination that before he left his headquarters in Syria, to amuse
himself, he transposed an episode from Gargantua into Arabic and inserted it in a privately published
edition of the Thousand and One Nights, the tale so cleverly done it was immediately acclaimed as a
lost Baghdad original.
During the next two years Johann Luigi's letters arrived erratically in Budapest. Nothing would be heard
from him for months, then hundreds of letters would descend on Sarah in a single day. Now he was in
Egypt, having arrived there by way of Petra, probably the first European to have seen that deserted stone
city since the Middle Ages.
Pink, my love, he wrote of Petra to Sarah. And half as old as time.
In Cairo he established a reputation as an expert in Islamic law. He was urged to take a high position in
the Islamic courts but gently refused, saying he had urgent business up the Nile. He was next heard from
in Nubia eating dates, marching ten hours a day, covering nine hundred miles in a month.
But in 1813, in Nubia, there were also a few quiet weeks for the restless Johann Luigi. There, in a village
on the fringe of the desert, he fell in love and lived briefly with the proud young woman who would one
day become the great-grandmother of the Egyptian slave, Cairo Martyr.
Next he pushed south from Shendi down to the Red Sea and across to Jidda, where he disappeared.
Only for Sarah to find a procession of carts drawing up in front of her house a year later, heaped with
thousands of envelopes and packets. In his guise as Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun, it turned out, Johann Luigi
had penetrated both Medina and Mecca during the missing year and actually kissed the black meteorite
in the Kaaba.
He was the first explorer to see Abu Simbel, then mostly buried by sand, and wrote that Rameses' ear
was three feet, four inches long, his shoulders twenty-one feet across, estimating correctly that the
pharaoh must have been between sixty-five and seventy feet tall despite his notoriously self-indulgent life.
Once more Johann Luigi went to Cairo intending to lecture on Islamic law, but the plague struck the city
and he went to St Catherine's monastery in the Sinai to escape it. There in 1817, two years before the
great English explorer, Strongbow was born in southern England, Johann Luigi Szondi abruptly
succumbled to dysentery and was buried without ceremony in an unmarked Moslem grave at the foot of
Mt Sinai, within sight of the cave where the Albanian son unknown to him, the last of the Skanderbeg
Wallensteins, would eventually produce his spectacular forgery of the original Bible.
Johann Luigi was only thirty-three when he died and he had visited Mecca fully half a century before
Strongbow, who would be the next European to do so. It was true Strongbow's vast explorations would [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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