Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

Bell found his forgotten corner of empire on a journey east one blustery winter day when he set out from the heights of Jerusalem to walk down through the wilderness of the Judean hills, down and down through the dry barren wastes. And then he caught sight of Jericho deep in the Jordan rift. With its flaring tropical flowers overhanging silent dusty lanes, its tall stately date-palms and cascading jasmine and tumbling walls of bougainvillea, its waterways and gurgling springs and fiery flamboyants bursting against a sun-washed sky, the little Arab village seemed no less than a miracle on the lifeless plain north of the Dead Sea. So small and intensely green in the haze, the lush oasis of Jericho struck Bell as the very mirage of his dreams, truly the Prophet's vision of paradise in a desert of eternal summer. From the lookout claimed by tradition to be the Mount of Temptation on which the devil had spread before Jesus the good things of the earth, Bell feasted his single eye upon Jericho. Later that same week, with an excitement unknown to him since the loss of his face, he moved his few belongings down the cold windy mountain from Jerusalem.

***

In Jericho Bell walked and read and kept to himself, sipped arak and learned about orange trees. He also learned more about the town.

Presented long ago as a love-token to Cleopatra, as a gift from Mark Antony to his Egyptian queen of infinite variety who had then turned around and rented it to Herod for a good price, famous in antiquity for its balsam and henna and myrrh and saffron and balm of Gilead, the town of palms of the ancients was fed by water that went underground on the ridge of Jerusalem and found its way down beneath the desolate sweep of the Judean wilderness to gush forth in springs, miraculously, on the spot where Jericho had existed for ten thousand years, far longer than any other town ever built by man.

Because of the heat Bell got into the habit of always wearing white in Jericho, white cotton trousers and loose white blouses which he washed out every day and hung beside his grape arbor. As a foreigner he was an object of curiosity, but not overly so. With the Mount of Temptation standing nearby, and also the stretch of the Jordan River where John the Baptist had wandered and listened to God — and taken up the ancient Eastern practice of purifying his friends and others by dunking them in the tepid river water, including his cousin Jesus — there had been Christian monks around Jericho for the last two millennia, desert outcroppings of poor Greeks and Copts and Syrians and Ethiopians tending their holy concerns.

Bell was different because of his face, and at first the villagers shunned him out of fear of his single eye — the evil eye to them — turning away when he passed and hiding their children and refusing to look at him. But he was used to this and made no effort to impose himself, having long ago acquired a profound inner solitude. In fact he went out of his way to shield the villagers from the ruin of his face and the single eye, always wearing a drooping straw hat when he left his orange grove and keeping his head down when he walked in town, even addressing the floor in shops so that his face would remain covered.

These were the ways of a humble man, people realized, and in time the villagers came to accept Bell as part of their shade and sunlight and flowers — the foreign hermit with the terrible God-inflicted face, thin and silent and withdrawn, an apparition in white quietly passing the days behind his orange trees.

***

Bell had been in Jericho about a dozen years when his dramatic transfiguration took place. Before that time he had gradually become part of the unfathomable landscape of life, but then all at once a startling revelation gripped the villagers: Bell hadn't aged a day in twelve years. The austere one-eyed hermit looked exactly the same as when he first set foot in Jericho.

It took some time to grasp the magnitude of this discovery in a place where eternal summer caused all things to age more quickly than elsewhere. The flowers never stopped blooming in Jericho and the fruit trees never stopped bearing, but it was also true that the fierce sun took what it gave and decay was every bit as rampant as growth. In a matter of months a new house or a new dusty lane looked as if it had already been standing in neglect for half a century. And people, burning dark and wrinkled in the desert sun, moved rapidly through the stages of life to become slow-moving ancients at an early age, retiring to sit in the shade of memory while directing their grandchildren to open the water channels and flood the fruit trees, when the time was right and memory spoke.

But unlike every other thing in Jericho, Bell didn't age. His erect thin body was still the same and his drooping straw hat was the same and he still went for the same long walks in the desert at dawn and at twilight, a silent white figure off in the distance, alone with his thoughts. Above all, what everyone now talked about was the unchanging state of Bell's terrible face.

Bell's face couldn't change because the shattered bone and muscle had long ago been worked into a rigid mask by surgeons. Those were the medical facts of the matter. But the villagers understood growth and decay much better than surgery, and to them Bell's face never changed because it bore the special mark of God, a sign of that profound inner peace which was the ultimate treasure of every man's soul.

Thus subtly, in time, horror was transformed into beauty and Bell's monstrous affliction became a cause for reverence in Jericho. The idea shaped itself slowly in the shade of the village but eventually everyone sensed the unmistakable truth. The austere foreign hermit was touched by God and immutable, beyond the fingers of decay that turned even the rocks of the desert to dust. The white he wore signified purity of heart and his round single eye, once feared as evil, was now recognized as a sign of the divine presence that penetrated men's souls, the all-seeing eye of heaven.

In the minds of the villagers Bell had become a holy man, in other words, and from then on his gaze and his greeting were revered as blessings.

Beyond Jericho the myth of the one-eyed English hermit continued to acquire ever more fantastic dimensions through the years. No rumor was too extreme to find its way into the fanciful legends that foreign travelers heard repeated with awe in Amman, the desert capital of Jordan.

Nor was official interest in Bell at an end. Two decades after the world war an officer from the British embassy in Amman still journeyed down to Jericho once a year to spend a day at Bell's cottage, ostensibly to inquire after his welfare but in fact to write a detailed report on his state of mind and his habits. For it seemed there were still those in London who were curious about the recluse who had once been the brilliant leader of the anonymous Monks in Egypt.

Bell accepted these official intrusions gracefully, answering questions as best as he could and withholding nothing he felt might be of interest. As the years passed these visits were made by younger men who were unaware of Bell's role in the world war and knew only the mythical Bell of the stories told in Amman — the eccentric English recluse with the appalling wreckage of a face who lived a life of asceticism and alcohol eight hundred feet below sea level, in a town that was ten thousand years old, reading and drinking and refining his soul in the heavy sun of Jericho. So perhaps it was only to be expected that these young officials occasionally let slip some wild piece of hearsay while eliciting information on Bell's front porch, blurting out the latest rumor then making the rounds in the capital of Jordan: And is it also true, sir, that you've existed on nothing but mangoes and arak for the last ten years?