Other than the clatter of bone on the stone floor, the silence was deafening. As they worked, the light coming through the high windows began to dim and take on a pale mauve cast as the sun approached the horizon.
It was as they were reaching the end of the interminable pile of skulls that Essie caught a glimpse of something that was pure, crystalline white between the bones. Her heartbeat quickened as she gently pushed the last skulls aside.
‘Have you found it?’ asked Garvé, who’d noticed her change of pace.
Sitting on the stone floor was a piece of glittering quartz that had been shaped into a sharp-ended crescent. Essie picked it up, feeling its cold weight in her palm. ‘Yes.’ She could scarcely believe it herself.
‘That?’ Penney asked incredulously, peering over her shoulder. ‘That’s what we’re looking for?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That’s to say, it’s the key we need to get us into the cave.’
‘Hmm,’ the Englishman mumbled with eyebrows raised, clearly unimpressed.
‘So, what now?’ Garvé asked.
Essie looked up at the softening sky outside. ‘Now? We wait.’
33
Negev Desert, Israel
‘So,’ said Ilhan, hands on hips. ‘What do we do now that we’ve found this? Is the tablet going to be in there, somewhere?’
‘Not the tablet,’ Ben replied. ‘Something else.’
‘What?’
‘We’ll know it when we see it,’ he said. ‘I hope. Now, let’s get these stones out of the way.’
Fact was, Ben had no clue. He’d interpreted the symbols on the map to mean there was something hidden beneath the pile of stones that he needed to access Balinas’ tomb. But what that might be, other than something shaped like a crescent moon, he had no idea. All he could do was hope that it would become clear once he found it. As always, he was flying by the seat of his very shabby pants.
Even before Ari had arrived back down on ground level, skidding and leaping nimbly down the sheer slope like a mountain goat, Ben and Ilhan had cleared away almost a third of the stones piled on top of the tumulus. Each one of them was engraved with the four symbols.
Breathing heavily, Ari hailed Ben as he ran up towards where the two men were working. ‘Ben! Ben! Something . . . Up there! . . . I found . . .!’ He squatted down and dropped his head between his knees as Ben jogged over to him.
‘You OK, Ari?’ he asked.
Ari gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Yes . . . Fine. Thank you. Long way up . . . Long way down. And . . . it’s hot . . . too damned hot.’
‘No kidding.’ Ben wiped the sweat from his own brow. ‘So – what’ve you found? Is it the cave?’ He clenched his jaw, anticipating disappointment. If the Emerald Tablet’s hiding place was already exposed, they were too late.
‘On one mountain, nothing . . . Or nothing I could see.’ He took a deep breath and composed himself. ‘But on the other – well, this might sound crazy. I don’t think I was imagining it. Still, the heat . . .’
‘What? Tell me,’ Ben said impatiently.
‘It’s a column. A tall rock. But it’s been carved into a shape. A shape like a . . . ah . . .’ He hesitated. ‘A man’s . . .’ Ari pointed coyly at his groin.
‘A phallus?’ Ben asked.
‘A what?’
‘Phallus. Penis.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Israeli said, blushing. ‘One of those.’
Ben grabbed his satchel from where it sat on a rock and pulled out his notebook. ‘Like this?’ he asked, pointing at the drawing he’d made of the hidden map in the Topkapı manuscript. On the right, beneath the stylised stars and death’s head was the vulva-like cave. On the left, an upright phallus.
‘Yes!’ Ari exclaimed, pointing at the erection on the mountaintop. ‘That’s exactly it!’
‘If the phallus is on the eastern summit, then we should find the cave on the western peak.’ Ben smiled. Each new thing they found fuelled a glimmer of hope. He was beginning to allow himself to believe they were on the right path.
With Ari’s assistance, they picked up pace, and within a relatively short period of time, Ben found himself standing on a circular platform made up of the small stones and measuring about a foot high and twelve feet in circumference. Around its perimeter was a chaotic scatter of stones that lay where the three men had tossed them.
And somewhere beneath this, Ben thought, his heart pounding as much from excitement as from the labour expended, is something we need to find the tablet.
Ari and Ilhan were concentrating on the outer edges of the mound, and Ben focused on its centre. As he bent down and continued to shift the petroglyphs from the pile, he felt the sun burning his skin through his shirt, which was stuck to his back with a muddy paste of dust and sweat. Perspiration dripped from his brow into his eyes and ran down his nose to spatter in black drops on the stones, only to evaporate instantly in the scorching heat.
His hands were red raw from handling the rocks; not even the callouses earned from years of excavation were enough to protect his skin from the abrading heat stored in the stones. He shifted another handful aside and glimpsed bare earth beneath. He stood up and put his hands on his hips. ‘I’ve bottomed out here,’ he said to the other two men. ‘Nothing yet. But I’ll keep clearing from the centre, outward.’
He stood on the patch of dirt and squatted down, tossing the stones aside a handful at a time. As the petroglyphs were cleared and the bare space at the centre of the circle began to expand with nothing to show for it, Ben’s excitement began to mutate into a black dread.
‘Ari,’ he called as he continued to clear the rocks. ‘How long would it take for us to drive to Mt Sinai . . . I mean, the other Mt Sinai, Jebel Musa?’
The Israeli stood up. ‘Jebel Musa? As I told you before, that will be difficult, Ben. From here, we’d have to go back to the track we were on before, then swing south and approach the mountain from there. And we’d be crossing the Egyptian border into the Sinai.’ He shook his head. ‘It would take a long time, even if things were normal. But there’s going to be military action around the border tomorrow . . . it may have started already. It’d be very dangerous. Particularly for me. I’m an Israeli officer. The Egyptians will shoot me on sight.’
Christ, Ben cursed. He shifted forward onto his knees. That was when he felt it.
Where before he’d been kneeling on packed, gravelly sand, he now felt a different surface beneath his knees. He scuttled back and brushed at the earth with the side of his hand.
There . . . Bloody hell! he thought, scarcely believing what he was seeing.
Embedded in the soil was a perfectly formed crescent carved from a white stone whose crystalline matrix reflected glittering light back at him.
‘Here! Here!’ he called out. ‘I’ve got it!’
The other two men dropped the stones they’d been holding and ran to where Ben knelt in the dirt.
Ben took his trowel out of his back pocket and scraped the packed soil away from the crescent’s edges, avoiding the temptation to lever it out of its resting place until he’d loosened the dirt around it. Despite the excitement that gnawed away at his insides, he’d seen enough damage caused to fragile artefacts over the years from overenthusiastic and impatient excavation to risk doing the same thing himself. Whatever it was that the stone was supposed to do, he doubted it would work if it was broken.
At last, he felt it ease free of the soil. He coaxed it out of the ground with his fingers. It was a beautiful object; cold and heavy in his hand with its edges ground down into a perfect arc.
There was no doubt at all that it had been placed there deliberately.
As the three men waited for night to fall, they shared an unpalatable meal of reconstituted army rations washed down with tepid water.
The hazy, mauve glow of dusk washed over the horizon as Ben set up the surveying equipment on the spot where he’d uncovered the white stone. Night fell and overhead the desert sky was an immense, midnight-blue
cupola punctured by a billion pinpricks of light. Ari tossed Ben a rough woollen blanket to throw about his shoulders and ward off the night’s chilly air as he waited for the constellation of Orion to rise above the horizon.
As Ben watched the outstretched arms and bow of the hunter appear above Har Karkom, a distant sound made him flinch. ‘Was that thunder?’
‘Out here? At this time of year? No,’ responded Ari. ‘Sounded like an explosion.’
‘Really? We’ve got to be a hundred miles from Suez.’
‘Nothing else around to stop the sound.’ By the light of the gasoline lantern, Ari set up the radio. ‘I’ll check.’
A harried conversation in Hebrew followed – none of which Ben understood. When Ari ended the call, he explained. ‘It’s Nasser. The British air force attacked, and he’s been sinking the ships in the canal.’
‘Jesus!’ Ben exclaimed. ‘What a bloody mess.’
Ari laughed. ‘Welcome to the Middle East.’
Ari and Ilhan were fast asleep, curled up in the foetal position under their blankets and huddled around the coals of the fire when Ben saw the three stars of Orion’s Belt align in a position perpendicular to the horizon. Ben peered through the theodolite at the three gleaming astral bodies – Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. The Three Sisters.
Against the glittering night sky, the summit of Har Karkom loomed like a spill of Indian ink on blotting paper. With a torch clamped beneath his chin, Ben adjusted the theodolite and recorded the linear measurement that would exist if he were to draw a line through the three stars until it met the earth.
Somewhere there. That’s where you are.
As his two companions snored and mumbled to themselves in their sleep, Ben dared to hope.
34
Sinai Peninsula, Egypt
After finding the keystone buried beneath the pile of skulls in the monastery’s ossuary, Essie, Garvé and Penney had returned to the helicopter to get the equipment they needed for the next stage of the search. When they arrived there, they found that Captain Knight had gathered brush and started a small campfire at a safe distance from the aircraft. With the rapid approach of what Essie knew would be a bone-chilling desert night, she was glad to see its flickering flames.
Knight had refused to leave the aircraft when they’d first landed and he saw the gathering of curious Bedouin who’d assembled at the sound of the helicopter’s approach. Initially keeping their distance, the Arab men had gradually overcome their fear and ducked reflexively as they stepped beneath the now stationary rotors to inspect the strange new arrival in the valley. Running their hands over the fuselage, they’d rapped at the metal and tugged at the door handles, ignoring Knight’s entreaties that they leave it alone.
Knight explained to his passengers that he had seen how quickly curiosity morphed into covetousness when people living in primitive conditions encountered high-technology military equipment. And because the group’s retreat from the desert required a functional vehicle, he’d decided to stay with it to make sure the Bedouin didn’t begin dismantling it to souvenir its working parts.
Dusk darkened to night as Adam stretched out on the floor of the helicopter in an attempt to sleep, with a blanket rolled up beneath his head as a pillow, and Garvé made use of the radio Captain Knight had set up to contact military headquarters.
Garvé had offered to assist Essie to retrieve the surveying equipment and take it back into the ossuary in preparation for the anticipated appearance of Orion’s Belt in the sky above Mt Sinai. Desperate to hijack a moment of solitude, she declined his offer.
Hefting the equipment onto her back, she returned to the monastery, where she set it up on the spot where she’d found the white stone. The light of the kerosene lamp cast long shadows in the deathly quiet charnel-house and flickered on the jumble of skulls they’d tossed onto the floor. Essie attempted to stifle her guilt at the thought of the monks emerging from the tunnels only to find that this sacred place had been desecrated.
A sudden sound from outside made her start – the hollow clash of rock on rock. Calm, girl. Calm, she reassured herself. You know what that is . . . it’s nothing . . . just a rockfall. Still, it made her feel uneasy. She liked to think she didn’t have a superstitious bone in her body, but her heart was racing and her breath came in raggedy gasps as she finished setting up the theodolite. It took a supreme effort to stop herself running out of the chapel. She knew she had to return later to make her measurements, most likely in the loneliest hours just after midnight, and she didn’t relish the thought one little bit.
‘Did y’hear that?’ asked Knight as Essie returned to the fire where he was stirring baked beans in a small saucepan. ‘Rock slide. Common around these parts, I’d imagine.’
‘Where’s Garvé?’
‘Still playing with that damned radio. With everything we’ve got going on in Port Said, the frequencies’ll be pretty jammed up.’
A movement in the shadows caught Essie’s eye.
‘Speaking of common,’ Knight said, looking up.
A Bedouin woman dressed in a striped robe hanging to the ground approached them tentatively. A black headdress fell over her shoulders like a bride in mourning, and the lower part of her face below her eyes was also covered in a veil embroidered with colourful thread and small silver coins that jangled as she walked. In her hands, she held a battered metal dish over which sat a large round of unleavened bread. She sidled up to Essie and, eyes averted, handed her the tray.
‘Shukran,’ Essie said. ‘Teslam iidak. Health be on your hands.’
The woman’s eyes widened in surprise that the strange woman knew Arabic. ‘Wa-iidak,’ she responded, before turning and disappearing back into the night.
‘Speak wog, do you?’ scoffed Knight. ‘You’re quite the bundle of surprises, aren’t you?’
Penney, who’d roused from his slumber, wandered over and joined the other two at the fire. ‘So, what have you got there, Mrs Peters?’
Essie lifted the still-warm disc of bread and inhaled the fragrant steam, shutting her eyes as the smell carried her back to her own childhood. An indeterminate red meat – either goat or camel, she guessed – had been cooked slowly over charcoal till the meat fell off the bones, then scattered on a bed of pilav rice with chopped almonds and lentils stirred through it.
‘Meat and rice,’ she answered. ‘Smells delicious. Do you want some?’
‘Me?’ Penney asked incredulously. ‘Eat that muck? You can’t be serious! It’s likely to give me the raging trots, if it doesn’t kill me first!’
Essie tore off a piece of bread and used it to scoop up some of the meat. It was, as she’d anticipated, absolutely delicious. ‘Are you sure? It really is very good. What about you, Captain Knight?’
‘Not on your life, missy!’ He raised the unappetising pannikin of orange beans. ‘Good old English grub’ll suit me just fine. Hate to think where the hands have been that made that. Damned if I’m letting it anywhere near these chompers!’
‘Enough beans to share with me, captain?’ Penney asked.
‘More than enough,’ he replied.
Essie scooped up another handful of the Bedouin pilav. ‘Your loss,’ she said, secretly pleased that she could keep it all to herself.
In the heavy silence of the night as the three men slept by the warmth of the fire, Essie lit the kerosene lamp and found her way across the desert floor to the stone walls that surrounded the monastery’s garden. Her footsteps echoed off the mountain’s naked rocks and her passage was marked by the small pool of light shining from the hissing lantern. Beneath the vast dome of the night sky, she felt utterly insignificant. For some reason, she liked it.
Inside the ossuary, shafts of moonlight shining through the small windows cast a chequerboard pattern of pale blue light on the paving stones. She found her way to the alcove where they’d uncovered the keystone. The theodolite now stood an alien sentinel at the centre of the small space. She looked up to where the nearest window was se
t high in the wall. It took her a moment to believe what she was seeing. Visible against the velvety black night sky were the three stars of Orion’s Belt running in a row that was perpendicular to the earth’s surface.
Her heart began to beat faster. This is it. This really is happening.
THE TIMES
1 November 1956
BRITISH AND FRENCH TROOPS ATTACK AS NASSER BLOCKADES SUEZ CANAL
LONDON, Thursday (Reuters)
An Israeli Government representative announced today that an Israeli plane has been shot down over the Sinai as troops cross the peninsula and British and French bombers launch an airborne operation against the Egyptian air force.
In an unequivocal response to British, French and Israeli action in Egypt, President Nasser ordered the sinking of the forty ships currently at anchor in the Suez Canal.
British Government sources have stated that the damage done to international shipping will have serious repercussions for the economies of all European nations whose trade relies upon access to the Indian Ocean through the canal.
Nasser claimed the orders were provoked by the appearance of British Valiant bombers over the skies of Cairo. It is thought the aeroplanes, which are stationed on the Mediterranean island of Malta, were destined for the city’s airport where the Egyptian air force is based. But upon hearing of the evacuation of American civilians through Cairo airport, orders were revised and the British planes instead attacked the Almaza air base on the outskirts of the city.
Meanwhile, an official army spokesman said that Israeli forces had overrun Egyptian frontier posts and crossed the desert to occupy positions within eighteen miles of the canal. Their actions came in response to Egyptian land and sea attacks on Israeli communications. An Israeli Army spokesman has said that Israeli units in the Negev and Sinai Deserts were machine-gunned by Egyptian planes.
Israel’s military assault – which signalled the end of an unsettled seven years’ truce between the two countries – has caused great shock around the world. Egypt announced that by launching a full-scale military invasion, Israel had, in effect, signed its own death warrant.
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