The Medusa Stone

Monastery of Debre Amlak Northern Eritrea

The monastery’s closest source of electricity was more than a hundred miles due east, in the city of Nacfa, so any illumination after sundown came from either candles or oil lamps, and both were expensive and hard to obtain. With the exception of Midnight Mass, they were used sparingly, and thus life in the monastery was dictated by the rising and setting of the sun. Other than the late-night service, it was rare to find a monk up and about in the darkness of night.

On the day following Dawit’s outburst, another monk only a few years younger than Dawit had spoken privately with Ephraim, verifying what the older brother had said. There were secrets here in the monastery and maybe now the time was at hand for them to be revealed. Since returning from his private retreat, Brother Ephraim spent his nights praying and meditating deep into the dead hours, a single candle burning in his room. He had taken no food since returning from his desert walk and precious little water. His eyes were glazed with exhaustion, and his beard had become wild and unkempt. He did not notice the stale smell of sweat on his body nor the pebbled layer of grime on his normally well-cleaned teeth.

A milky-white shaft of moonlight shone through the single window of Ephraim’s cell and fell unerringly on the ancient book set on his rough wooden desk. Ephraim’s hands rested next to the book, just out of the circle of light, a string of rosaries twined between his long fingers, almost binding them together. The book was leather-bound, its two covers locked together with a tarnished brass clasp. The pages were so old that they had swollen, giving the book a tattered appearance even though it had been lovingly protected for eight hundred years.

Ephraim had been given the book during the final confession of his predecessor, just hours before the man had died during their exile from Eritrea. Ephraim had sworn to the dying abbot on the sacred vows of the confessional that he would guard the book and turn it over to the next head brother when his time came. Under no circumstances, he promised, would he ever open it. Never would his eyes rest on the handwritten parchment within its covers. Even as Ephraim agreed to these last requests, he read the book’s title. It was written in Ge’ez, one of Ethiopia’s ancient languages. He translated the arabesque-looking script easily.

The Shame of Kings.

His hands had begun to tremble, and the text had almost slipped from his grasp. He felt like Adam in the Garden holding the ill-gotten apple, the luscious fruit poised at his lips. Ephraim knew immediately that the book contained an evil as deadly as original sin. At that moment, he began to finally understand the man dying before him. He turned his gaze to the frail figure lying on the simple cot so far away from their home, knowing the answer but unable to prevent his eyes from asking the question.

“Yes,” came the breathless answer. “I read it and God damned me for it, he damned us all. I could not help myself. At the time, I felt as if it was God’s will that I read the words and break the silence. It was only when I finished, on the night of November 13, 1962, that I realized it was Satan himself who seduced me into reading the book.”

Ephraim stared at him.

“Don’t you recognize the date? The day after I finished the Shame of Kings, Ethiopia officially annexed Eritrea. It was the beginning of the end for our country, Ephraim: the Ethiopian occupation, the pogroms, the immeasurable suffering under the Dergue. And it was I who caused the war. My hubris brought about God’s wrath! He punished me for reading this book by destroying our homes, laying waste to our lands, and killing hundreds of thousands of our people. All because I could not refuse to read what is written in that accursed book, the dark companion to our greatest religious texts.”

Within the faith there were two ancient books, Kebra Nagast: The Glory of Kings and Fetha Nagast: The Justice of Kings. While largely unknown in the Western world, these two books predated most notable Christian writings by many hundreds of years, coming first from Egyptian Copts at least a thousand years ago. The works chronicled the visit of Makeda, The Queen of the South, to the land of Israel, and the life of her son Menyelek, who was fathered by the King of Israel. They told of Menyelek, spiriting the Tabernacle of the Law of God from Jerusalem, transferring His terrestrial seat to Aksum in what is now northern Ethiopia. The books attested that the rightful kings of Ethiopia from those far-off days until the reign of Haile Selassie were thus the direct descendants of Noah and Abraham and Moses, the chosen Children of God.

Being a Christian, Ephraim possessed a faith grounded in the teachings of Jesus and his Apostles and Disciples, yet his beliefs were based on a much older faith, that of the Jews, the first believers in the one true God, blessed even if they did not see Christ as His son. While unfamiliar with later Jewish works like the Talmud, Ephraim knew well the earlier teachings, believing strongly in the Old Testament and the Kebra Nagast and the Fetha Nagast.

The validity of what was written in the Kebra Nagast had been a point of contention among religious scholars soon after its discovery. But in the nineteenth century, Western missionaries returned from Africa with tales of black-skinned Jews living in Ethiopia who practiced a much older, and some said purer version of the faith. The question of whether these people, called Falashas—Outsiders—were really Jewish was answered in 1984 when Israel executed Operation Moses, a secret program run by the Mossad to bring as many Falashas as possible to Israel at a time when the Ethiopian famine was at its worst.

How it came to pass that this unknown third book, The Shame of Kings, fell into the hands of the Christian monastery, Ephraim could not say. Yet he sat at the bedside of the dying abbot holding the volume in one hand, his other resting on the withered shoulder of the priest.

“Swear to me, Ephraim, that you will not read it. There are things within those pages that were never meant for man’s eyes.” The old abbot’s voice had the strength of a guttering candle. “I lost my faith that night. It was too much for me to believe that a god, our God, could allow such an outrage, such an abomination.”

“I swear it to you,” Ephraim readily agreed, wishing he had not even touched the unclean work. “On the sanctity of your confession in the eyes of God, I will never again look at this book.”

It now lay just inches from his hands, bathed in eerie moonlight. Ephraim knew he had to read it. A cold wind rattled the fragile windowpane and flickered the nearly spent candle sitting in a pool of its own wax. The weak flame cast bizarre shadows on the raw stone walls, familiar shapes in the room taking on ominous dimensions. He felt a chill run the length of his spine.

Why do you test me so, Lord? Am I to be like Job, forced to endure hardships so you can prove to Lucifer that man’s love for you can not be corrupted? I fear that I am not strong enough. Is my test not to read this book? Is it Your will that these words are never again seen by the eyes of man? Or is your mission for me to read it and bring its truths to light?

The night wore on, Ephraim lighting another candle from the embers of the last, filling his room with fresh light. The moon tracked across the sky so that it no longer beamed onto the table but instead rested on the simple crucifix hanging over Ephraim’s bed. He stared at the image intently, feeling His suffering on the cross, and for the first time in days, Ephraim felt a lightness in his chest. The answer to his dilemma was before him. Christ had died for our failures and to knowingly fail Him was sinful, but it was still to be forgiven, the deed condemned, not the man.

At almost the same instant he turned back to his desk and undid the book’s clasp, Brother Dawit cried out in his sleep and died in his own room. But by the time Ephraim learned of this the following morning, he had read the book, and the death of the aged monk was no longer such a tremendous concern.