For the first time in Russian - the introductory novel of the “Jerusalem Quartet” by Edward Whitmore, an impeccably clear stylist who, nevertheless, was compared to the “number one postmodernist” Thomas Pynchon and the South American magical realists. Another difference is that, having worked for 15 years as a CIA agent in the Far and Middle East, Whitmore knew what he was writing about, and his “secret history of the world” has a special, if not factual, then psychological, authenticity. Among the characters in The Sinai Tapestry are a two-meter-tall deaf British aristocrat who wrote a treatise on Levantine sex and destroyed the British Empire; the curator of the antique shop, Haj Haroun, is an Arab who is almost three thousand years old; an Irish fisherman who is predicted to become king of Jerusalem; a hermit who forged the Codex Sinaiticus, and a dozen other equally fantastic personalities... The main plot core around which the novel revolves is the story of a monk from Albania who discovered the original Bible, which refutes all religious values. A monk decides to write a fake Bible so that no one can doubt the truth of Christianity. He works for many years, almost dies during his great feat and eventually goes crazy. And then he hides the real Bible in the outskirts of the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem. It is this original that almost all the heroes of the novel are looking for. But it seems impossible to find him, because he is a myth, a symbol, the very secret of life. Whether this search will end successfully can only be found out in the finale.