“So you have already ‘crossed over’?” probed the Trappist tentatively of his bardic friend, eyeing him sideways as the pewter tankard was refilled with another litre of the dark, foaming Czech brew.

“So to speak,” said the Elderly Sage, lifting his head and contentedly puffing smoke rings towards the ceiling from his familiar clay pipe. All around, a gentle hum of voices provided the requisite cloak of secrecy to their deliberations in the somewhat murky confines of the basement bar, their retreat from exposure to the harsher realities of daylight in the streets above. “And yourself?”

“Giants in the land!” muttered the Trappist, shaking his head. “Besides, I belong to the doomed generation. A quiet grave on Mount Nebo will be my lot, the pay-off for too many strikings of the postmodern theological rock. But I’m surprised you were allowed in. As the ringleader of unbelief, and perpetrator-general of grumblings in the tent, I’d have thought at the very least the Jordan would have risen up to overwhelm you.”

The eyes of the Sage sparkled for a moment, signifying the plot he had been mentally hatching, but which had yet to be divulged.

“Disguise, my friend, disguise!” uttered the Sage. “I slipped in as one of the spies, exploring the land, on the lookout for grapes, visions of valleys and mountains, milk and honey, all that sort of thing. A second reconnaissance, before the main party. Get in before the crowds, that was always my motto.”

“I see,” pondered the Trappist. “So your preliminary colloquy is a sort of laying down of a marker, a display of credentials, a quiet establishment of squatter’s rights, as it were, before your true motives are unmasked, and your place as a paid-up bona fide member of this, this - - - ”

” ‘New Creation’?” suggested the Sage, as the Trappist spluttered for words.

“Precisely!” said the Trappist. “Until you are exposed as the unreformed, unregenerate, unreconstructed modernist that you are, without a postmodern bone in your body, belonging well to the far side of the theological river!”

“Shhhh!” whispered the Sage, gesturing fiercely. “Not a word! Once I’ve got my foot in the door, others will follow where angels have feared to tread!”

“You mean to sully the virtuous purity of Canaan by masquerading as an Israelite?” said the Trappist, taken aback at the audacity of the thought.

“Exactly,” whispered the Sage. “Under a pretence of disinterested theological inquiry, a cloak of subterfuge may be woven around our devices, until at the auspicious moment we can turn the situation to our advantage, and thus by indirections find directions out.”

The Trappist groaned inwardly at the inevitable intrusion of literary allusion to the Stratford One. “But surely then he will simply transfer himself, bag and baggage to yet another land beyond another Jordan,” said the Trappist, “another House of David separating itself from the House of Saul, and on and on, until we are all worn out with our own deviousness and his constant reinvention and shape-shifting.”

“Patience my friend,” said the Sage, lifting his tankard to drain the last dregs of the Dacicky.

And not for the first time did the Trappist feel that he was being drawn into another exploit with his colleague, the full extent of which was as yet concealed behind his tergiversification, and waited to be revealed.