The Sisters of Sinai by Janet Soskice

Author:Janet Soskice [Soskice, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27234-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The cook was expected to produce three good meals a day, suited to the Western palate, from his portable kitchen. Here he emerges from a travelling tent.

They had some time to wait before “hasty steps, a fall, a cry” announced the arrival of Galaktéon, who appeared before them with “a bleeding face and dishevelled hair.” He had slipped on the stairs, but nonetheless insisted on taking them to the library without delay. As they were leaving from this first inspection, Galaktéon took Agnes aside and told her that he would be guided by her advice in everything, “and that as four of the party were as yet strangers to him” he would prefer that all requests for books, etc., should come to him through her. After that, since he and his brethren must turn once again to their prayers, the Cambridge visitors were politely taken outside the monastic walls to the monastic gardens. The sun had disappeared behind the wall of mountains before the travellers, huddled against the cold awaiting their caravan, were heartened by the growls of kneeling camels, the clatter of tent poles and then, soon afterwards, cups of thick, sweet Arab coffee.

The next day the men had their first close look at the palimpsest. It was smaller than they had expected from the photographs—its pages only eight and five-eighths by six and a quarter inches—and the whole bound within boards. The yellowish-red underwriting of the Gospel was easily distinguished from the clear, black letters of the lives of women saints that overlay it, but this underwriting, if readily distinguishable, was not easily deciphered—in fact, almost illegible in many places. Rendel Harris, the palaeographer, declared the palimpsest not overwhelmingly difficult; he had seen worse. Nevertheless, the task that lay before them would require immense skill, labour and united effort.

The transcription of even a well-preserved manuscript is more than a mechanical matter. It involves the sort of educated guess that is only possible for someone steeped in the language and comparable ancient texts. Even the ambitious Agnes, who at one stage hoped to help in the copying, had to cede this task wholly to Bensly, Burkitt and Harris.

Before journeying to Sinai, Agnes had already given the photo graphs of the first 100 or so pages of the palimpsest to Rendel Harris, a similar amount to Burkitt and the final eighty-four to the slower and more meticulous Professor Bensly. This division determined the section of the manuscript that each would work upon. Since the palimpsest was a tiny book and bound, only one reader at a time could work on it. Professor Bensly went first and, finding the light in the transcription room very poor, pushed the rickety table out onto the gallery outside. There each transcriber sat in turn, an icy wind fluttering the pages on which he wrote, and chilling him to the bone. At “eleven,” according to the monks (five o’clock in the afternoon according to the Cambridge party), work was cut short when a monk informed them that it was time to stop and lock up the convent for the night.

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