First of all, he set himself what Achim the psalmist called ‘the Task ofNot’, the discipline ofwanting nothing from the world. Seek wakefulness instead of sleep, the psalmist said, and pain instead of comfort. If you are offered apricots or gals, then put your fingers in the bitter dish. And look only for the peace that’s found in wretchedness and not the peace that’s found in love. There were hermits even in the Galilee that lived to Achim’s recipe: they put ashes in their mouths; they would not let themselves sit down, even at night; they broke their finger-bones with rocks; they stripped themselves of clothes and walked about like animals. Jesus had seen such men himself. He’d watched them hardly flinch when they were stoned by villagers.

Jesus, then, would be an achimite. He had to look for peace in wretchedness. He took a youngman’s pleasure in the prospects of his suffering. There was no other choice but to embrace discomfort as a friend. The scrub had offered him few hospitalities, little sleep, no love, but it could readily provide all the suffering that he might seek along its paths, and show him torments in a thousand shapes. He could not bring himself to smash his hands, not yet. He would not break his fast, even with dust or ashes. But he could at least be naked like an animal. Angels go naked, he reminded himself He hardly wore any clothes, and only those for modesty, but he removed the few that he had — a tunic, and a cloth, the prescribed undergarment of the Jews — and took them to his rocky perch and set them free like doves, the poor man’s sacrifice, to wing their way down to the valley floor where Musa’s donkey lay without a shroud. The words of Achim cailed to him again: Come for me now, come for me in a thousand days, for I am naked, I am yours, and all I had is thrown to the wind.

Jesus — naked on the precipice, his garments irretrievable — felt both foolish and triumphant all at once, and even briefly aroused by his own nakedness. What would his parents say? What would his neighbours make of him? Look at their Gaily now. He had reduced himself to flesh, when he had expected and boasted that the fast would subjugate his flesh and cause his spirit to be clothed in gold. Butjesus really felt no shame. There were no witnesses. The air and sun were satisfying on his skin. He was a child again, and he had entered into Eden.

It was not long before his body grew too hot to stay for long in Eden, and the first of many headaches started. He withdrew into the cave where the borrowed light and temperatures were more forgiving, at least by day. He leaned against the inside wall, the perfect achimite, until his arm went numb, and then he squatted on his heels. Not sitting, quite. It was a compromise. He muttered resolutions to himself, rocking with each word, although his feet were cut and painful. He bore the cramp and deadness in his legs as if they were a blessing. But he gave up on Achim within a day, although — too late — his clothes were gone for good. The darkness undermined his appetite for wretchedness, and he had reached the point in his fast when he was vulnerable.

Now he made himself more comfortable, and did his best to drive al thoughts ofAchimfromhis mind, although the psalmist’s songs were thumpingly insistent. He devised a second strategy for himself, to deal with quarantine, to conquer thirst. It was more kindly and more homely than the Task ofNot. He would not embrace discomfort, after al. That was a vanity. Instead he’d be a resting camel, aimless and unthinking, and with no memory or hope to complicate his life. Every boy in the Galilee who’d ever run out of his yard at dusk to watch the caravans arrive knew that a camel could travel with its panniers full without water for ten or twelve days before its hump began to hang. A resting camel with no pack to carry could stay for twenty days at camp with nothing in its mouth but teeth and tongue and stil be fit enough to canter with the herd. A fatted camel, if it kept out of the sun and stayed down on its haunches, could survive a quarantine without water. It would, like Moses, have just enough strength to carry a stone tablet from the mountain-top to the water-hole, where it could be refreshed. Was not a man a finer and a stronger creature than a camel? Could a man not go as far and further without water and last the forty days, unthinkingly, like a beast? Jesus nodded to himself He’d be a resting camel, yes, and not go anywhere. He’d stay down on his haunches. He’d not expose himself to heat or sun. He’d not explore the precipice or even sit out on the rock to feast on Moab and the sea. He’d stay inside the shaded halo of the cave by day, seeking out the coolest air and asking nothing of the thriving sunlit, moonlit world beyond, except that it should rescue him from memory and hope.

That did not last. Jesus had another strategy. I’m like the canker thorn, he told himself at other times. I have no need of sap. I’ll spread my skeleton across the rock and root myselfinto

this marl. Sometimes he was a camel and a thorn at once.

Again, particularly at night when he was cold and desperate for voices, Jesus turned back to his prayers. Old friends. He’d force himself to be more disciplined with them. No matter that his friends were fickle. He was not fickle, nor was god. He prayed out loud without fear ofoffending any ofhis family with his fervour. If he could not excel at prayers, then no one could. But no one — not a priest, a saint, a prophet from the hills — could pass the countless moments of the day engaged by prayer alone. There always came a time when the repetitions made his chin drop on his chest, so that he woke with a falling shudder after just a moment’s sleep. At other times he simply could not concentrate. His worshipping became more conscientious than spontaneous. The prayers lost weight, like ashes in a fire, and floated off. Sometimes he stopped the verses halt\.vay through and caught himself paying more attention to the dirt beneath his nails or an old woodworking scar across his hand than to the holy words. Sometimes a prayer became a conversation that he halfrecalled. He calied on god to answer him, but all the voices that he heard were from the Galilee, a cousin’s voice, a neighbour talking harshly to his wife, a peddler caliing out his wares.

Most ofall Jesus was disrupted by the silence of the cave, the depth ofnight beyond the entry, the scrub’s indifference. Perhaps this silence was another test, he thought. Like hunger was a test. And boredom, too, and fear. Instead of prayers, he tried to concentrate on god in other ways, by listing all the prophets that he knew, the holy books, the laws. He repeated all the aliiterating finger songs he’d learnt when he was small, each joint an attribute of god, the wise, the merciful, the generous, the enemy of sin. . He took to marking patterns and holy signs on rocks and on the ground and touring them each day to run his fingers round their shapes, so that these dusty journeys ofthe fingertips became his wordless prayers. And that was comforting. He took it on himself to pass the time by marking rocks with all the words he knew.

He had taught himself at home to recognize a few words in written Greek script, more words than anyone else in his fa^mily. He could read and write his own name, and the name of god. He could roughly translate the inscription on the local temple stone which promised death to gentiles if they strayed into the inner court. He knew the meaning ofTI.CAES.DIVI, the truncated Latin on the tribute coins. It designated Tiberius to be an Emperor and God. A blasphemy, the priest had said. The priest had little sympathy for Rome, although when it came to coilecting tithes he much preferred their silver blasphemies to the copper ones.

Jesus also knew the scripts for a dozen or so words in Aramaic. He liked their timber squareness. They were shorter and less angled than the Greek or Latin; no vowels. The marks were simpler and more cheerful, doing all they could to bend in natural shapes. They’d been designed by holy carpenters, not masons. Their comers had a little curve to them, the work of planes.