12
Two days later, Leila brought someone to his chamber. The visitor was a woman older than most of the others, with a brown, lined, whiskery face and kindly eyes folded into deep sockets. Her brown garment was threadbare and patched here and there with fragments of other material. If he’d seen her on a Cairo street, he’d have taken her for a mendicant. The tattoo on her wrist was so blurred and faded it might have been the remnants of a bruise. Though she was ancient and rocked on arthritic hips as she approached his cot, there was something in her eyes that was lively and mischievous; something that reminded him, in fact, of Omar.
“This is Sister Maryam,” Leila told him. “She is not the oldest of the inhabitants of the monastery, but she is the oldest who is still able to walk around.
