by Frank Felton
I re-adjusted to life outside the military. It was a welcome respite to have a roof over my head, clean clothes, and the comforts of civilized life. The nation had a renewed sense of pride. People had a feeling of hope, a stark contrast to the decade of Great Depression, and another half decade of world war.
It was a good time in the nation’s history, but it was also a time when the country mourned the fallen. It settled into an era of relative peace. Nevertheless, I was restless, and I prepared for only a short stay in Brady.
When I left Brady four years earlier, part of me felt I would never return except as a visitor. In many respects, that is all I would ever be to this small town. I was beginning to think I’d never actually have a home of my own. My mission in life was elsewhere, and Brady just a temporary stop on the path. I said goodbye to my mentor, Colonel Rudder. He would soon become mayor of the town. He tried to convince me to stay around. I think he just wanted a kindred spirit; someone to reminisce with about the war. He was a great man who went on to great things far beyond Brady.
Teaching the fundamentals to school kids was no longer in my heart. I wanted to learn. I wanted to immerse myself in study and piece together this puzzle I’d found. I planned to enroll at the University of Texas in that pursuit. I packed up my belongings and headed east, towards the more economically prosperous city of Austin. Here, I would narrow my search for the remaining piece of the Jewel of Hiram. I was prepared for an arduous task, but I attacked it with aplomb.
Austin was the state Capitol. It was beginning to emerge as one of the major metropolitan centers of Texas. Despite being in the intellectual center of the state, I struggled to find a suitable course of study which would prove useful. College is rigid in many respects. If you don’t have a defined purpose, you are quite likely wasting your time. Surely enough, there did not exist a graduate program in finding lost treasure. After one semester, I discontinued my studies.
Back in Germany, I had managed to find the first piece of the Jewel rather quickly. In retrospect it was not as tall an order as you might suspect. The Nazis had compiled all the artifacts of Europe into central locations, which made the quest much less difficult. Rather than the needle in a haystack, it was more of a needle in a five-gallon bucket. This next piece could be anywhere on the planet. That’s a needle in a hay field.
I had to narrow the search area, and I was fairly certain the item I sought was no longer on the European continent. Call it a hunch. Marcus Aurelius sent the missing piece to southern Spain, the far western edge of the Roman Empire. From there, hallmarks of the Jewel can be inferred through a close examination of history. The Jewel could be tracked by certain unnatural occurrences which it throws up in its wake.
The missing fragment of the Jewel of Hiram had been used by forces of the Reconquista to overtake the Iberian Peninsula. The guardian of the Jewel tracked it down, and the mighty archangel appeared in Spain in the early 16th century to search for it. The apparition was seen by many in Cordova, and to this day is celebrated by the Catholic Church. It was the appearance of the archangel Raphael.
Raphael arrived too late. The Jewel had already departed Spain in the era of the conquistadors. It arrived on the shores of a land thousands of miles away. It sailed the ocean on a Spanish galleon in 1504 at the hands of a young mariner bent on conquering the New World. Its power led to the overthrow of a great civilization, and would continue to assert influence as the European conquest of the Americas took hold.
Great victories were taken at the hands of tactical and strategic geniuses, by men who were just ordinary, but suddenly gifted with supernatural wisdom and insight. The Jewel has spawned greater warriors than any institution of man has, or ever will. Such rationale leads me to believe the Jewel now exists in the southern United States.
The hallmarks I would discover point to this region plagued by centuries of warfare from the time of conquistadors to the final battles of the American Civil War. At that point, around 1836, the Jewel vanishes from the historical record. I would refine my search to this period, and what better place to start than in the land which saw the confluence of the two great conquering powers of America; the Lone Star State.
As luck would have it, I was already here.
~~~
After I dropped out of the university, I took my research to the Texas State Library. I rummaged through archives from the most tumultuous time in the state’s history, looking for any telltale sign or oddity. The archives were remarkably complete. I found the history of the early 1830’s intriguing, yet I found few promising leads. There were not even vague mentions of anything remotely resembling what I was looking for.
I turned my inward reflection to my original postulation that I could find the Jewel based on its inferences in the physical world. Most notably, I examined major battles. I searched for displays of tactical ingenuity on the battlefield. There were many. The surprising victory of the Texan rebels against a vastly superior Mexican Army was very telling; something was out of place and unnatural.
In fact, some historians believe that Texas’ existence as its own Republic is an historic anomaly of epic proportions. This did not bode well for my theory. The Jewel is more adept at shaping the outcome of battle through military genius, not random acts or force majeure. But the Lord, well, he does work in mysterious ways.
I was so deep in reading ancient records that I’d become lost in a forest. I had to balance my bouts with the minutiae by instead noting such macro data as the various dates and locations of the Archive-stamped documents. There were many documents whose location varied from Austin, which seemed to imply the Archive repository was somewhat mobile. I dug deeper. I soon realized that the Archives had been moved from town to town by the wagonload ahead of major battles during the Texas Revolution.
Alas, I had my epiphany. This was the act of a tactical genius I’d searched for. While it might not have been material to the war effort, it was crucial to preserve these documents to a leader who believed in forming a republic. That leader understood centers of gravity, and the power of information 150 years before the Internet.
Who was this man?
His name was Sam Houston. In 1842, Sam Houston fought to have the Archives moved east, from Austin. He was known as a politician, at least by me, because he was president of the republic and governor of the state. He was also a U.S. senator. Less known to me at that time is that he had been a military general. He led the Texans in a miraculous victory over the vastly superior Mexican Army. This came on the heels of the Revolution, after the Mexican Army was bogged down in a sea of mud while the Texans retreated from defeat at the Alamo. Days later, Sam Houston would lead a surprise attack, culminating in victory.
Houston not only was a statesman and warrior, he was one of Texas’ earliest Freemasons. The first Lodge in Texas, Holland #1, was chartered months before outbreak of the Texas Revolution. Soon after the Revolution ended, he presided over the convention which gave birth to the Grand Lodge of Texas. The fraternal order of the Masons had grown quite large in the past 500 years, and the network of Masons within early Texas was extensive.
I hearkened back to the square and compass on the chest I found at Eagle’s Nest. Markings of the symbol of the Masons adorned the outside of the rustic chest I had found, but perhaps it was just coincidence. It could be the Jewel was placed there for safekeeping and had no real meaning. Regardless, those coincidences were becoming too great to ignore.
Now, I also learned that Santa Anna, the great Mexican President and war general, lost the battle to Sam Houston at San Jacinto. He too, was a Mason. In fact, it is said that Santa Anna’s life was spared on the battlefield, at least a first, because he displayed the Masonic sign of distress which the Texans honored. The sign only saved him from being killed outright. Once he was captured, he became far more valuable to Sam Houston alive, primarily for political reasons as a bargaining chip with Mexico.
What intrigued me even more is that when the Jewel disappeared from
the record in 1836, its last known location was in Mexico.
As they say, even a blind hog can find an acorn, yet this information was nothing but speculation at this point. There was nothing irrefutable that told me I was heading in the right direction of finding my Jewel. If Sam Houston did, in fact, know the whereabouts of the Jewel, then his death in 1863 would be a good place to start looking. This was the only lead I had of any promise.
I took my search for information to the Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. This just and legally constituted body was a society full of mysteries and secrets of its own accord. It is a brotherhood that models its formal Lodges in the manner of King Solomon’s Temple, even to this day.
The Lodge reaches back to the same period of time and place as the creation of this Jewel, the sanctum sanctorum. Even the physical structure of each Lodge building is aligned in an East-West direction, so as the sun is in the south at meridian height at the beauty and glory of the day, to better observe the time, to call the Craft from labor to refreshment at the will and pleasure of the Worshipful Master.
I could not put my finger on it, but there was something about the Lodge that began to draw me in. I could not truly understand the history from the outside. I submitted my petition to join the Masonic Lodge and became an Entered Apprentice. After my initiation, the real work to become a Mason began. I spent most of my days going over the memory assignments required to be elevated in status to a Master Mason.
Masonic tradition is passed on in spoken word. It is forbidden to be written down, except in coded symbols. As such, the exercise in learning Masonic lore is much more time consuming. Conversing with fellow brethren is the only way this wisdom is passed on.
I became quite knowledgeable in the esoteric history and word of the Craft. I grew to become quite enamored of the idea that the Lodge paid homage to Hiram. He was respected as the eponymous master craftsman because he brought forth the grand designs of the First Temple from knowledge passed on to him from King David, and to King David from the Lord.
David had blood on his hands, as such, he was not worthy to build the Temple for the Lord. Solomon was wise, as was Hiram. According to the word, he was an architect and master craftsman.
Nevertheless, my pursuit was not to become an expert in Masonic tradition. It was specifically to find the lost piece of the Jewel. After nine months, my foray into Masonry produced no answers as to the Jewel’s location. I could not find even the slightest hint of anything remotely resembling an ancient Jewel. Sam Houston left no evidence of any type of magnificent object. Even the archives from the Grand Lodge of Texas were a complete dead end.
As far as Masonry was concerned, this object did not exist. My hopes began to dim that I was chasing fool’s gold. I often pondered starting over from scratch, and going back to church to ask for Divine inspiration. Just as a man who refuses to ask directions, I stubbornly continued my search.
I did go back to start from scratch, at least a bit. I re-read all of the papers in the chest. Their brittle and yellowed condition testified to their age. A museum would kill for such treasures, but I wasn’t interested in preserving such items for posterity. I needed them to decipher the mystery. These priceless pages held the secret to the riddle I had to solve.
I sent myself in circles, tracing and re-tracing the path I knew the Jewel had taken, looking for something, anything, that might yield a clue. I could readily ascertain the history of the Jewel in my hands up the early 19th Century, as it departed Syria en route to France at the hands of Napoleon. This did me absolutely no good, of course, because I had already found this Jewel.
The other piece was split apart in 180 A.D., and the next known location was Iberia in the 16th Century. From there, it is known that it was buried with Cortez in 1836. Aside from leaving an indelible mark on the course of warfare, there is a distinct yet fleeting trademark of a physical glow, an effervescence of energy that spills out into the natural world. This was first noted by Hannibal.
The faint remembrance of that last clue is what led me to a moment of eureka while being told a story over lunch one day.
It is a story that exists only in folklore. It sounds downright preposterous. It is a ghost story, one of countless to spring from the fancied thoughts of the human mind. Yet, even far-fetched tales often have some element of truth. The occurrence of this story fits, strikingly, with my timeline. It is the legend of a floating lantern in Milam County. It occurs on land that Sam Houston had ready access to, and even perhaps ownership of, during the early days of the Republic.
It was the Legend of Snively; a legend with many unknowns.
There is only one way to find out for certain.
I must go to Milam County and find out for myself.
10. The Conquest
I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy. –Deuteronomy 32:42
Recall that Marcus Aurelius split the Jewel of Hiram into two pieces and cast them asunder, to the opposite ends of the known world. The piece which I now sought had been sent to the Western half of the Roman Empire. At that time, it meant the artifact would end up in Hispaniola, or modern-day southern Spain. This part of the Iberian Peninsula reminded me of Texas, with its pastoral landscape and arid climate. It’s no wonder the descendants of the Spaniards have prospered in the Lone Star State.
The Jewel’s location at this juncture was unknown, until it reappeared in the New World 1,400 years later. Whoever was charged with its safekeeping in the 2nd Century A.D. took their secret to the grave, or perhaps they were never even aware of it. Hiram’s Jewel would disappear into the countryside on the hills east of Granada. Eventually it would become restless, as conflict surrounded and nigh consumed it.
Across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Moors gradually moved northward into Spain from Morocco in the early 8th Century. They inhabited the Iberian Peninsula, and over time the Muslims built the magnificent and expansive Alhambra citadel in the city of Granada. Only 10 years after the Muslims arrived began the Reconquista, an 800-year struggle culminating with the fall of Granada in 1492. It was a year which also marked the discovery of a New World, and the beginning of colonial empires.
Subtle indications within this hall of man lead me to believe the Jewel came forth from hibernation to inspire the Alhambra. Aware of the coming conflict, the Jewel would compel the building of a fortress upon itself, inspiring the Craft to build a massive complex of protective walls to keep it hidden. Master craftsmen of the Islamic faith descended on Granada to build the epic structure beginning in 889.
Over time, it grew to be more expansive even than King Solomon’s Temple. Poets describe this beautiful masterpiece of masonry as a “pearl set in emeralds”. Major expansions in the 11th and 14th century evolved the Alhambra into a luxurious seat of royalty. Washington Irving described it as “a most picturesque and beautiful city, situated in one of the loveliest landscapes that I have ever seen.”
Just over a century after this architectural treasure was completed, the Alhambra would be the last Muslim stronghold in Hispaniola during Reconquista. It would fall, and be subjugated during Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquest. This victory marked the end of a tragic period that saw ethnic and religious genocide, and hundreds of thousands displaced or killed for their religious beliefs.
The Jewel was never found by either side.
In that same year, a young adventurer met with Ferdinand and Isabella. He sought funding for a voyage to the Far East and dreamed of bringing the Crown treasures from afar. His name was Christopher Columbus. While he was given many promises by the Crown, the country was financially destitute, and could ill afford to finance his ambitious venture across the seas. Columbus would ultimately be credited with discovering the New World, but it was another young man who would find the Jewel.
One day, a young man named Fernando made a fateful visit to the Alhambra. He was born in M
edellin, and spent two years in Salamanca at the university. Thereafter he worked in Seville. He was a mischievous teenager, who’d sought more in life than his parents of lesser nobility could offer. Frustrated in his schooling, he’d taken to traveling across southern Spain, hearing the tales of brave voyagers sailing off for the New World.
During his visit, as he slept, a strange vision appeared before him in a dream. He awoke, and was met with a strange light. It led him to the interior of the Puerta de la Justicia. This was the original entrance tower to the Alhambra. The glowing light disappeared into the base of the tower. He fell asleep. The next morning he again awoke, and saw a shiny object perturbed from the wall. He peeled away the masonry, and beheld a Jewel of consummate splendor.
He had been searching for a place in life, unsure of what profession he would pursue. This find instantly re-invigorated him and granted him a clear vision. He knew this was his destiny. Combined with the word of Christopher Columbus reaching the New World, it inspired the lanky Spaniard and gave him a mission.
The boy today is better known as Hernando Cortez. With the Jewel at his side, he first traveled to the Americas in 1504. Later, in 1518, he would arrive in Mexico, and realize his destiny as he overtook the Aztecs and established himself as one of the greatest Conquistadors in history.
Cortez was buried with the Jewel in 1547 in a mausoleum in Sevilla. In a bizarre twist, his body was moved numerous times; three years after his death, and then again seven years later. It would be moved five more times in total, finally ending up in an unknown location. The Jewel, once again, seemed to have been lost.
His final resting place was eventually discovered in 1947. Suspiciously, the Jewel was not with his remains. A secret document would be found which contained an inquisition into the sordid tale of Cortez’ body. It was written by Lucas Alcaman, and indicated the bones were actually buried in their final resting place in 1836; more than a hundred years prior.
