Jon Clinch’s Belzoni Dreams of Egypt is being serialized in six ebook installments. This is the start of Part Two. Details and links follow.

Those who know my life story better than I do would have me arrive among the Capuchins with a dream of studying for the priesthood. This may have been my dear mother’s plan, but I can assure you that it was never mine. Oh, better to be a priest than a barber, that much is certain. But better still to be a plundering hero—freeing captive children by means of cunning hydraulics, astonishing the masses with feats of strength and daring, unearthing the treasures of the dead past by sheer will and brute force. I realized even then, midway between twelve years and twenty, that no school on earth would teach me these skills and that I would therefore need to assemble them on my own—as I have assembled myself, as I have indeed assembled this life of mine that I spill out to you night after night upon the rocking deck of this warship sailing beneath the Southern Cross —out of whole cloth. The Capuchin monastery, that little cluster of low buildings just off the Piazza Barbieri, seemed as good a starting place as any.

Father Mullooly accompanied me there on my first day, each of us carrying half of my meager belongings in a sack. The sack that he bore would have looked to you much larger than mine, had you been there to watch us go, because at that point I was already a head taller than he was and at least twice as wide. “We’ll miss you at San Clemente, John the Baptist,” he said as we approached the Capuchins’ gate.

“Keep your eyes open, Father, for I could appear behind you at any time. I might even have a shovel over my shoulder and be ready for work.” I spoke in a voice that had dropped two or three octaves over the last year, but the words themselves still carried the exuberance of youth.

Father Mullooly stopped, studied me from head to toe, and laughed his rickety laugh. “If you think you’ll be getting free of the brothers for even an hour, you’d better think again. They’ll have you busy from the Matins to the Nocturns, either on your knees in the chapel or scratching your head in the library. And when your brain is worn out, they’ll set you to work in the garden.”

This prospect didn’t trouble me, for I knew that I had an infinite capacity for work of all kinds. Time, however, would prove Father Mullooly correct: As long as I stayed among the Capuchins I would never get far from that walled compound, not even for a minute. But it wasn’t prayer and study that would keep me imprisoned, and it wasn’t even the oversight of Brother Silvestro, that black-eyed conundrum whose acquaintance I was about to make.

It was the captivating power of love.