The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer Page B

subtler going on beyond all this: he knew what it was to animate a dialogue, quivering and uncertain, connecting the two worlds he moved between, each notknowing how much to distrust or be fascinated by the other. He knew how to keep alive the demands and intensity of faith, by not really being part of any congregation, yet refusing to stake out the easy ground of a nonbeliever. He saw that he was in part the schoolmaster whose face he surely recognized whenever he caught his blurred features in a train window—and a boy committed to forging his own way in opposition to that schoolmaster, his father. Life would and could be spent in movement, in process, not settling to any fixity or doctrine, but sensing that the human challenge was something much more profound and unassimilable. So much so, in fact, that even saints might despair of figuring out the riddle and the ache.



CHAPTER 6
    W e were driving—well, to make a critical distinction, “being driven”—down unpaved roads across the highlands of Ethiopia, and we were being told that the eleven rock-cut churches of Lalibela were not far away, just an hour or a day or two. We had come here, Louis and I, to experience Christmas in the ancient country and we wanted to get to Lalibela on New Year’s Eve, six days before the Orthodox Christmas was observed, on Epiphany. Along the road there were rusted tanks and all the debris of a recently concluded civil war; when we arrived at a village just before night fell, we were told that bandits were all around and sure to attack if we continued. Behind us in the aging white Toyota were two cans of kerosene, guaranteed to asphyxiate us if somehow we survived the road itself.
    After another long day of driving, we slipped into tiny rooms in the pitch dark and fell into a deep sleep. When I walked out next morning at dawn, it was to see dozens, hundreds of believing souls, all in white, gathered on a hilltop, while below them thickly bearded priests, in purple raiment, carrying leatheryBibles the size of a human hand, moaned and chanted from their holy books. The bright winter sun rose from behind the faraway mountains; light began to stream through the cross-shaped openings in the churches; grave, piercing faces from the Book of Kings held our own, impossible to ignore. Hundreds of pilgrims looked back at them, burning-eyed, no sign of fatigue or weakness after walking three weeks or more to be in the holy site.
    “This is Golgotha,” a deacon said, walking us round the site as the morning freshened. “This is Nazareth. We call this the River Jordan.” The New Jerusalem had been built here, in the stronghold of Ethiopia’s high mountains, to give sustenance to those who could not hope to get to the Old Jerusalem after it had been taken over by invaders.
    We walked and walked and I, who had suffered through years of having to read the Gospel of Matthew in Greek and writing essays about the trial of Jesus, felt, almost for the first time, what lay behind all the symbols and the pitiful reductions; faith itself could be a solace, an exaltation, regardless of the everyday terms and icons with which we tried to encourage (or ensnare) it. This country was as bare as any I had seen, beyond the point of poverty, trying to surface again after seventeen years of dictatorship, and all it seemed to have was the hope in the priests’ intense chanting, the light in the eyes of the people who had come here, as to Heaven. To stand on the hillside in the dawn and join in the thronged prayers was to step out of the moment, for a second, and disappear inside what the poets we had read at school had taught us to call “Eternity.”

    M y upbringing had left me at a little distance from both the wisdom of the East, as I heard it in my parents’ home, and from the secret black book that Louis pulled out every morning and evening; like most little boys, I loved to define myself by everything I thought I could see through. Yet it was impossible