Street thugs, Professor Cross thought, no sense of decorum. “If you’re here for a snack,” he said, “I’m going to retire.” He turned for the bedroom.
“We need you to look at something,” Robson told him. “A new set of hieroglyphics.”
The professor stopped in his tracks. “New set? From where?”
“They come from the red tablet,” Robson said. “The part that’s never been seen.”
Slowly, the professor’s eyes widened. “You’ve found more fragments?”
Robson nodded. “Found them all, I’d say. Out in the old plane. Right where the logbook said they’d be.”
Suddenly, the professor understood Robson’s newfound confidence, his cock-of-the-walk attitude. No doubt Barlow had heaped praise and money on him for finding what no one else had been able to. “Do you have them here?”
“Of course not,” Robson said, popping another grape into his mouth. “Barlow isn’t going to let them out of his sight. But I have this.”
He pulled the architect’s tube off his shoulder, popped the cap off one end and removed a rolled-up poster-sized sheet of paper.
“This is a computer-enhanced drawing,” he said. “One of Barlow’s people took pictures of all the broken bits of stone and had the computer match them together. Then he slotted in the photos MI5 was nice enough to give us. Altogether, it produced this. A full image of the stone to look at instead of a hundred pieces. Care to take a gander?”
Professor Cross took it without hesitating. Unrolling it slowly, he found a white page with grayscale images on it. It looked like a photographic negative. He carefully spread it out on his kitchen table, placing various items at the corners to keep it from curling up.
He reached for the overhead light, pausing with his fingers on the chain.
A nervous glance out through the kitchen window reminded him how dark it had grown. Night had come on while they spoke. Any light would let the world see in through his windows. He turned to Robson. “Close the blinds.”
The blinds came down tight and Professor Cross switched on the overhead light to see the masterpiece before him.
Looking at the images, he was rapidly consumed. He studied the poster as if it were a scroll from an ancient century. It didn’t matter that it was ink and paper. What mattered was the information.
Running a finger across the glyphs, the professor racked his brain for translations. “Incredible,” he whispered, his eyes darting from spot to spot. “This is a message sent three thousand years ago. One only now being received.”
“All Barlow cares about is what it says.”
“It tells us of a fleet that traveled the Nile without stopping,” the professor said. “They sailed through the night and passed Memphis under the light of the quarter moon.”
“Memphis?”
“Think Cairo,” the professor explained. “Alexandria. The ancient capital of Egypt.” He read on. “They left the world behind the next day.”
“The world?” Robson said.
“It’s a euphemism,” Professor Cross said. “A figure of speech.”
“I know what a euphemism is,” Robson snapped. “What’s it supposed to mean?”
“It means they left the Land of the Ancients. They left Egypt itself.”
Robson seemed satisfied. He popped another grape in his mouth and sat back. “To go where?”
Professor Cross turned back to the computer-generated poster. Continuing on down, he took notes and explained what he was finding. “On the Day of the Long Sun—that would be the summer solstice—Pharaoh Herihor, Ruler of the Great House, unfurled a new banner to be flown by all ships in the great fleet. The Mark of Aten is upon the banner.”
“And what does that tell us? What, exactly, is the Mark of Aten?”
The professor went back to make sure he’d read that correctly. “Aten was the name of the Sun God,” he said quietly. “Now, that is surprising.”
“I thought the Egyptian’s worshipped the sun,” Robson said. “Ra and all that.”
“The Egyptians worshipped many gods,” the professor explained. “They had a pantheon like the Greeks and the Romans. But during one brief part of their history a Pharaoh named Akhenaten took over and tried to force everyone to worship only the sun. He tried to turn the whole empire away from their many gods to just the one. From a multitheistic religion to a monotheistic one. Ra became Aten. And believing in the other gods became heresy, a crime punishable by death. The name Akhenaten literally means Worshipper of Aten and he spent his time constructing monuments dedicated to the sun. He even moved some of the entombed Pharaohs from old burial places to new graves where they would be illuminated by the first rays of the sunrise.”
“And . . .”
“And, Mr. Robson, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Akhenaten’s decrees brought about a backlash. Followers of the old gods met in secret and plotted against him. He was poisoned, went blind, then died.”
“Too bad for him.”
“Yes, it was,” the professor said. “The next Pharaoh, the famous Tutankhamen, spent years undoing everything Akhenaten had done, setting the religious order back to the way it had been. The old gods were restored, Akhenaten was labeled a heretic and things returned to normal. But if Herihor built himself a fleet and sailed it under the banner of Aten two hundred years later”—the professor looked up at Robson—“that means all of history is changed and we may now have a different understanding of why he took the treasures to begin with.”
Professor Cross all but swooned for a moment. If this small tablet could reveal so much, he only dared to imagine what finding Herihor’s tomb would bring.
“What’s so different?” Robson asked. “Are you telling me he’s not a thief?”
“Herihor was no thief,” the professor said sternly, “he was a king. He was surrounded by wealth. Drowning in it. He had all the gold and luxuries and delicacies one man could possess. Not to mention power, armies, servants and wives. To call him a commonplace grave robber is a disservice. And, quite frankly, unimaginative.”
The professor saw a look of surprise appear on Robson’s face, but he wasn’t finished. “If Herihor just wanted to be richer than he already was, then he could have plundered the tombs, taken the gold for himself and left the Pharaohs’ decaying bodies behind. If it was greed and avarice, he could have stolen everything piecemeal, melted it down and claimed it as newly discovered gold and freshly mined jewels. Trust me, there was no one in the Valley of the Kings to stop him.”
“No need to get angry,” Robson said. “It’s not like he was your brother or something.”
The professor adjusted his glasses and continued. “I’m not angry, I’m passionate. You must understand that what Herihor did he did out of a religious fervor, not greed. He valued preserving the past of his ancestors more than wealth, power and even glory. He gave up a kingdom to do it. Not only that, he risked his life on a journey into the unknown to make it happen. In truth, I would be honored to be called his brother.”
Robson held up his hands almost defensively. “All right, all right, fine. Whatever you say. Just finish the translation. If any of us are going to get a piece of this treasure, we need to know where he went.”
The professor sighed and turned back to the hieroglyphics. “The Worshippers of Aten had a singular obsession,” he explained, “and that was to dwell with the sun always. Like all religions, the ultimate desire was to reunite with their god. Their search for Heaven meant finding the place where the Sun God rested during the night.”
“Something tells me they’re going to be sorely disappointed when they figure out there’s no such place,” Robson said.
“Indeed,” the professor remarked. He went back to the paper and continued translating. “They followed the sun for twenty days as it led them across the sea. On the twenty-first day a storm
hit. Several ships were lost as they tried to shelter in a rocky cove.” He paused. “This must be where DeMars found the wrecked boats, the ones that made him think Egyptians had colonized France.”
“So DeMars was right. The treasure is somewhere in France.”
“No,” the professor said. “The fleet did not stay there.” He resumed translating. “The fleet traveled past the Great Rock That Guards Eternity. Out beyond all things. They go as Aten guides them, searching from his Resting Realm.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the fleet continued following the setting sun, traveling west.”
Here, for the first time, Professor Cross found a set of glyphs that he could not make sense of. He’d never seen their like before. He skipped them and said nothing to Robson. “Great beasts of the water were spotted, spouting steam—he must mean whales.”
“Go on.”
“Nets of fish . . . Some men weakening . . . Third full moon . . . Lack of wind and the oarsmen grow tired . . .” The professor paused. “They were getting their food from the sea as they traveled. Quite ingenious. But men weakening suggests scurvy. That and the third full moon suggests they’d been at sea for eight weeks, probably more.”
“And the oarsmen,” Robson said. “Are you telling me they were rowing all this time?”
“Not all the time,” the professor said. “Lack of wind and tired oarsmen. They must have used sails when they could and rowed when there was no breeze. Extended time without wind makes me think they were in the doldrums. An area of the Atlantic Ocean where winds can slack for weeks at a time. The great European sailing ships often ended up stranded that way. If caught there too long, the men did what they could to spark the winds, including tossing horses overboard, which is why some call that area the Horse Latitudes.”
Robson stood up. “Hold on, Professor. You’re telling me this lot went halfway across the Atlantic Ocean?”
The professor nodded. “We know they were off the coast of France heading in a westerly direction. We know they passed the Great Rock That Guards Eternity—that has to mean Gibraltar. From there, they followed the setting sun for weeks, tracking it day after day after day. That would take them west and south. At some point the wind stopped and they rowed. Lucky for them, their ships were much smaller and lighter than those of the Spaniards centuries later. But based on this, they could hardly be anywhere but the mid-Atlantic.”
Robson’s eyes narrowed as if trying to detect a lie. “Don’t play games with me, Professor. You might wear fancy clothes and use big words, but I know who you are. A con knows a con.”
“I’m not playing with you,” the professor insisted. “I’m trying to enlighten you.”
He looked back at the paper one more time. He was two-thirds of the way to the bottom. He returned to reading and explaining. “After a sacrifice, the winds returned. On the day of the fourth moon, they made landfall. Here, there are crocodiles like those of the Nile. Herihor has declared this a poisoned land as these creatures are the Servants of Sobek.”
The professor interrupted himself before Robson could. “Sobek was a crocodile god and an enemy of Aten.” He continued on, paraphrasing now. “They made landfall in a drier place and Herihor ordered them to burn their ships—just like Cortés.”
For the second time, Professor Cross came upon a set of glyphs he’d never seen. This time he admitted it. “These must be printed incorrectly.”
“They’re not,” Robson said. “It’s a digital copy.”
“I’ll have to do more research, then,” Professor Cross said. “I certainly don’t recognize them. And yet, I think that tells us something in and of itself.”
“Such as?”
“All languages change over time,” he explained. “If these glyphs were some new creation of this offshoot band and there is no record of them in the classic Egyptian writings, then it proves that there was no further contact between the two groups. It tells us that once Herihor’s fleet left Egypt, they never returned.”
Robson was losing patience. “Cut to the chase, Professor. Where did they end up?”
Professor Cross read further. Much of the next section was about men of bronze who traded with them, animals not known in Egypt, including great woolen beasts whose skins were used as clothing when the sky turned white and fell with bitterness, and strange foods. And it was about losses.
As he read, Professor Cross could not help but see these Egyptians traveling through North America, encountering Native Americans, herds of buffalo, snow falling from a white sky—things they would have never known in Egypt.
He read tales of the ground turning to stone and imagined it was frost. They set up camps and scouted. They hunted and traded. Still, they continued to follow the sun. Still, they continued to seek the Resting Place of Aten.
He pitied them now, thinking how they would follow the sun forever, like a child searching for the end of the rainbow. Perhaps that was why these tablets were written by Qsn, the Sparrow, the Creature of Sadness.
He wondered if their fanaticism would end in disaster or would it bring them all the way around the earth to cross the Pacific, taking them through Asia, India and eventually back to the Middle East and familiar ground. His heart raced as he considered he might have been reading about the very first circumnavigation of the world twenty-five hundred years before Magellan.
And then he read of their joyous final discovery, a canyon whose walls were steep and red and angled in such a way as to cradle the setting sun. There they could watch Aten rise, see him light up the world and cross the sky. There they could watch him descend back to earth. It was described as a majestic canyon unlike any in the known world.
“In a vision,” the professor said, reading again, “Herihor was told he had found the place of rest.”
He wondered if it was a decision to stave off a mutiny or if Herihor himself had fallen ill and could go no farther. Perhaps it was a compromise, a valley reminiscent of the Valley of the Kings but aligned with the path of Aten up above. It must have seemed as close to Heaven as those mortal men would ever get.
“The last glyphs tell of them carving tombs out of the rock to rival those of Egypt. But that these tombs were designed to remain hidden from all the world, keeping the Pharaohs and their belongings safe from grave robbers.”
“Too bad they didn’t count on us,” Robson said. “Now, tell me where they are. I won’t ask again.”
“It has to be America,” the professor whispered. “They found Aten’s sanctuary and buried the Pharaoh’s treasure in America.”
Robson appeared doubtful. “Come on, Professor. Even I know that’s not possible.”
“Not only is it possible,” Cross said, “it makes perfect sense. These were fanatics, leaving civilization behind and chasing their god. Nothing stopped them—not storms, not lack of wind, not months at sea, not scurvy. When they arrived on land, they didn’t declare victory. They went on foot and traveled by wheeled cart, carrying their treasure, domesticating beasts along the way. They endured winter, crossed a continent and continued going. They weren’t simply going to pick a random place and stop. They were looking for Heaven, for the spectacular.”
He looked back at the text. “But upon discovering a canyon as deep as a mountain, with walls of different colors and a narrow river flowing through it, they’d found a place so majestic they knew they’d reached their destination, the Sanctuary of Aten. Seeing the sun cradled in its arms as it set in the west was the final proof.”
Robson continued to look on suspiciously, but the professor knew he was beginning to see.
“Where do you think that is?” the professor asked. “After everything they went through, what vision of their god’s splendor would be enough to make them stop and declare victory?”
Robson thought hard. Finally, he spoke. “The Grand Canyon,” he said, half guessing, half st
ating. “In America.”
The professor couldn’t have been prouder if the answer had come from one of his best students at Cambridge. “That’s right,” he said. “They laid the Pharaohs of Egypt to rest in the Grand Canyon—in America.”
Chapter 43
MV Tunisian Wind, somewhere on the North Sea
Solomon Barlow was in his stateroom on the Tunisian Wind when Robson called in on the encrypted satellite phone.
Barlow answered immediately and paced the well-appointed cabin as Robson explained the professor’s theory that the Egyptian treasures had been shipped to America. It seemed astounding to him—too astounding to be true. “The whole idea is absurd,” he said. “The professor must be lying.”
“Why would he lie?” Robson said. “He wants to see this treasure unearthed as badly as we do.”
Barlow thought about their long relationship with the professor, how it had grown from a simple deal of cash-for-information to a partnership where the respected university scholar keyed them in on things that few others knew about. The professor had been easy to corrupt—in fact, he’d all but done it to himself. As Barlow recalled, it was Professor Cross who’d first floated the idea of finding the lost Pharaohs and their missing treasure, it was he who’d fed them clues along the way. Despite all that, Cross remained a man of society and was unlikely to side with Barlow and his criminals in the end.
“He could be trying to throw us off the track,” Barlow said. “Make us waste our time running around in America while he talks to MI5, tells them the truth, then directs them to the treasure. That way, he could immunize himself from guilt and end up acting as the lead expert in studying everything that’s found.”
“You’re misreading him,” Robson insisted. “The professor isn’t a fool. He knows we’d kill him if he steered us wrong. Besides, if he was going to lie to us, don’t you think he’d have come up with a location that was easier to believe? A spot in southern Egypt or central Africa? The number one rule of a good lie is to bend it as close as possible to the truth. This is so far off the mark, it has to be true.”
Journey of the Pharaohs Page 21
