The Secret Gospel by Dan Eaton

Author:Dan Eaton [Eaton, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2015-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

36

St. Catherine’s Monastery

Monday, 13 July 2009

During his nineteen years in the desert, Father Julian never wore a watch. His days began two hours before dawn with the ringing of a wooden bell, calling the monks to prayer. They ended long after sunset, when his eyes were too tired to focus. The spaces between were calibrated by meals and the angle of the sun on the rocky desert landscape.

At St. Catherine’s, time in the way most people understood it meant little. Alex struggled not to smile when, over lunch, the monk described his last visit to Cairo three years earlier, referring to the trip as recent.

After eating, Father Julian insisted on explaining in painstaking detail a project he was engaged in, cataloguing and photographing the monastery’s vast archive to make it more accessible to scholars around the world. The library at St. Catherine’s received thousands of emails each year, requests from researchers seeking access to its priceless collection of documents. The monk proudly showed them a room off the main library with several computer terminals and a complicated-looking digital camera mounted on a purpose-built metal frame. Requested documents were photographed and compressed into computer files before being emailed out. The room was the only one in the monastery with air conditioning, a necessity to prevent the sensitive computer equipment from overheating.

“Eventually, we hope to have this whole library stored safely in a digital archive. As you can see it’s an extremely slow process, but you have to start somewhere,” Father Julian said.

“At the rate we are going, I estimate it will take another fifty to seventy years.”

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