by James Becker
‘This is my business, Farooq, and I have been waiting for something like this to be discovered somewhere in this area for the last two decades. I know that we can’t read the inscription – yet – but the fact that the inscription exists at all, and in such close proximity to that face’ – he pointed at the carving above the altar at the other end of the room – ‘tells me that I’m right.’
He reached into his pocket and took out a compact but high-resolution camera. He aimed it at the carved inscription and snapped about a dozen photographs, checking each image in the camera’s viewing screen after he had taken it.
Then he and Farooq climbed up the aluminium ladder back to the surface. Khaled strode over to the jeep in which he’d arrived, opened the rear door and sat down on the seat. Positioned right in the middle of the rear bench seat was a leather computer case, which he unzipped. He took out a slim laptop computer, opened it and pressed the power button. While he was waiting for the operating system to load, he slid open the memory card slot on the camera and pulled out the data card. He slid the card into the card reader on the laptop and examined the photographs that he had taken. He was only interested in the clarity of the images, and checked each one carefully to make sure that every piece, every single letter, of the inscription was clearly visible.
He copied the images on to the laptop’s hard disk, but didn’t delete them from the camera’s data card, and then made a further backup copy on to a separate memory stick that he put in one of the pockets of his jacket. That gave him three separate and identical copies of the images, so even if some catastrophe resulted in both the computer and the camera being lost or destroyed, he would still have one copy left.
He shut the lid of the laptop and slid it back into the case, then climbed back out of the jeep and rejoined Farooq by the ladder.
‘The pictures are good enough?’ the younger man asked.
‘They’re very clear. So now we just need to get rid of it. This is our information, and I’m not willing to risk sharing it.’
Farooq nodded, and waved to one of his men, who immediately jogged over. Farooq murmured his instructions, and the man pulled a broad-bladed cold steel chisel and a hammer from a fabric bag he had slung over his shoulder.
The man glanced at Khaled, apparently seeking final confirmation for what he was going to do and then, as Khaled nodded, he strode over to the aluminium ladder and descended into the underground temple.
Farooq issued another instruction, and the generator sprang back into life, illuminating the lights inside the chamber.
Within seconds, the sound of steel on stone became clearly audible as Farooq’s man began carefully chipping every last vestige of the inscription off the wall. It wasn’t a particularly long inscription, and within about a quarter of an hour he had completed the task and emerged from the temple.
Both Khaled and Farooq climbed down again to inspect what he had done. The section of the wall where the letters had been carved was now completely blank and featureless, with no indication at all – apart from a few barely visible chisel marks – that there had ever been anything displayed there.
Khaled glanced down at the small pile of stone chippings that lay on the floor of the temple underneath that section of the wall.
‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Get somebody to sweep up all those and then dump them.’
‘You really think that’s necessary?’ Farooq asked. ‘I doubt anybody could reconstruct the carving from those few bits of stone.’
‘It’s not worth taking the chance. I want the evidence gone. And have your men go through every tent in this camp to collect all the computers, cameras, disks and memory sticks, just in case any of the archaeologists took photographs in the underground chamber. Tell them to put them all in the back of my jeep.’
Ten minutes later, the stone chippings had been collected and then scattered at random around the site, joining a myriad other small pieces of stone, and every piece of electronic equipment in the place had been collected. Now they were all ready to leave. Farooq ordered his men to climb up into their trucks, and then those two vehicles started up and drove slowly away from the encampment.
Khaled waited until his driver started the engine – and hence the air-conditioning – of his 4x4 vehicle before he climbed into the back. Once seated, and with the temperature inside the vehicle dropping steadily, he opened the computer bag, took out the laptop and began studying the pictures that he had taken.
The driver turned the jeep around and drove back out of the encampment the same way they had arrived. He looked incuriously at the bullet-ridden corpses, their clothes blotched with starlet stains, that lay scattered about the area.
But Khaled, sitting in the back seat, didn’t so much as glance at the bodies. He was entirely focused on the images on his computer screen.
5
Western Kuwait
‘I see where you’re going with this idea,’ Angela said, ‘but I just don’t know whether or not you’re right.’
They were now well clear of Kuwait City and were driving out into the largely empty desert, heading south-west along the Atraf Road, Highway 70. Traffic was even lighter, with only a few cars; the majority of vehicles on the road were lorries of one size or another. The sun was blazing down from an entirely cloudless sky, and Bronson was not looking forward to the moment when they would finally come to a stop and he would have to get out of the Toyota.
‘Look, I’m no archaeologist,’ he said, ‘but this doesn’t really seem to me to be an archaeological matter. We have a situation where the residents of the village, and probably everybody else within a few hundred miles of that location, all spoke Arabic, or perhaps a similar but related language. In fact, whatever language they spoke, we can be sure that it wasn’t Latin.’
‘Yes, that is a fact,’ Stephen agreed.
‘Right. So that inscription couldn’t have been read by, or meant for, any of the locals. It must have been aimed at somebody else. The big question, obviously, is who.’
‘Any ideas?’ Angela asked.
‘Not a clue,’ Bronson said. ‘That’s very definitely your field, my dear, not mine. What I know about this area is basically what you’ve told me since I got into this car. I have no idea what other tribes or peoples were wandering about round here five hundred years ago or even earlier. But I did have another idea that might help explain the inscription, although you might think it’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘Try me,’ she said.
Bronson turned slightly in his seat so that he could see both Angela and Stephen.
‘For people who have religious faith it’s based on belief: they believe what they’re told and accept, or turn a blind eye to, all the obvious inconsistencies. And they sometimes take on rights and traditions without asking what they mean. Take an obvious example: saying grace. People do it because it’s something they do before eating a meal, but I’m prepared to lay you money that almost none of them know why they do it, or where the practice comes from.’
‘Did you know Chris was an atheist, Stephen?’ Angela asked, with a wide smile.
‘I think I might have guessed that, actually. Do carry on.’
‘Right. So if we take it as a given that most people will just accept all the various trappings of their religion without questioning their relevance, then perhaps that carving on the wall of the temple might be a symbol of what they believe. A kind of carved relic that their priests told them dated from the earliest times. If that were the case, then they might not only accept it, but also worship it. It would be a kind of inscribed reminder of something that happened centuries earlier, maybe. Perhaps the followers of this religion had a copy of that inscription in all their temples, just as every Christian church displays a cross, a symbol of execution. Maybe it was some kind of an ancient talisman that they absorbed into their religion over the centuries and worshipped without having any idea at all about what it was or what it was supposed to mean.’
Both Angela
and Stephen looked somewhat doubtful at this suggestion.
‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Stephen said, ‘but it’s rather improbable. We do know a bit about the likely religion the people of this area would have followed. They were almost certainly Mandaeans, and we don’t know too much about the origins of this particular belief system. It was a gnostic sect, and some researchers believe that it most probably originated in Palestine or Syria in about the first or second century ad, and then migrated to southern Iraq and parts of Iran, more or less the area that used to be called Mesopotamia. There’s another theory that it began in Mesopotamia itself but, whichever is true, we do know that it was an established religion by the third century. In fact, it’s still followed by about sixty-five thousand people worldwide, and today it’s an important religion here in south-west Iraq.’
‘I know Stephen won’t necessarily agree with me, but I’m fairly certain that the temple we found was Mandaean.’
‘I’m not saying that you’re wrong, Angela, but I am saying that your case is really not proven. Your evidence is circumstantial at best, and liable to other interpretations.’
‘What evidence is that?’ Bronson asked.
‘Three things,’ she replied, ‘and I do agree that not one of them is actually compelling. But I just think that the obvious thing to do is follow William of Occam and apply Occam’s Razor, so we should assume that the simplest explanation is the correct one until we find information that proves it isn’t. So, first, the Mandaean religion was the dominant faith in this area at the time we think the temple was probably in use, which is basically the Middle Ages, so on the basis of probability it’s most likely to have been used by people following this faith.
‘Second, Mandaeans followed the Johannite heresy, meaning that they revered John the Baptist and rejected Jesus Christ, because of an obvious logical inconsistency in the Bible. If Jesus genuinely was the son of God, then how could John have baptized him? By what authority could he have done that? So if John did baptize Him, then almost by definition John had to be his superior. So the Mandaeans claimed that John the Baptist should be worshipped, and that Christ was a usurper. And,’ she finished, ‘that carving on the wall of the temple could represent John the Baptist. It’s not that dissimilar to some early representations of him.’
‘Yes,’ Stephen replied, ‘and it could also be a representation of Jesus Christ, of any one of the apostles, of the local priest who officiated in the temple, or the local water seller. Okay, the last is a slight exaggeration, but you take my point. It’s unattributed, generic in concept and primitive in its execution, and realistically could be almost anybody. Well, any adult male, at any rate.’
‘I don’t dispute that,’ Angela said. ‘I just think that if the temple was used by the Mandaeans, there’s at least a possibility that the face they carved on the wall might have been intended to represent the person they worshipped. To me, that makes sense.’
‘And to me,’ Bronson said.
‘The third point is rather less convincing. We know that the Mandaeans were very keen on baptism as a way of absolving themselves of their sins. In one corner of that room is a fairly shallow depression in the stone floor. To me, it doesn’t look natural, and I think you can see chisel marks in it. If so, if it was a deliberately created structure, it could have been a bath. Obviously it wasn’t a bath you could lie down in because it’s only about three or four inches deep, but bearing in mind how precious water is, especially in this part of the world, that might have been their baptismal font or whatever they called it. They could have put a couple of pints of water in there, and then used a cup or something to pour it over the head of a member of the congregation standing in it. That would have worked.’
She glanced at Stephen’s sceptical expression in the rear-view mirror.
‘I know you’re not convinced, Stephen,’ she said, ‘but I hope you’ll agree that it’s at least a possibility.’
He nodded, perhaps a trifle reluctantly.
‘It is possible, I’ll give you that, but I think we’re an awfully long way from being able to prove it one way or the other.’
‘I agree,’ Bronson said. ‘I’d love to think you were right, Angela, but it all sounds a bit too circumstantial and interpretive for my liking. You might simply be seeing what you want to see.’
‘There’s also the negative evidence, the evidence that isn’t there,’ Stephen said. ‘A few abandoned Mandaean temples have been excavated in the past, and as far as I can recall none of them ever had anything like this strange inscription inside them. So either this isn’t a Mandaean temple at all, which is in itself quite an exciting prospect, or if it is a temple, then perhaps this inscription is unique and something never seen before.’
‘And I suppose the only other possibility,’ Bronson suggested, as another thought struck him, ‘is that the inscription was nothing whatever to do with the worshippers or the religion they followed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean maybe when the Marsh Arabs or the Mandaeans or whoever found this cave and opened it up, the inscription was already carved on the wall. Or it could have been put there by somebody else after the temple had finally been abandoned. The bottom line, really, is that until you’ve deciphered it, all we’ll be doing is speculating, which is just a polite way of saying we’ll be guessing.’
A few minutes later, Angela reduced speed as they approached a junction and then steered the Toyota off the main road and down a ramp. The new road was narrow, barely wide enough in some places for two vehicles to pass each other, and the surface was comparatively poor.
‘It gets a lot worse than this once we’re in the desert,’ she said grimly, steering the Land Cruiser around a pothole.
The jarring ride wasn’t conducive to conversation, and Bronson contented himself with staring out of the windows at the terrain around them, not that there was a great deal to see.
When most people think about a desert, their mental picture is of rolling sand dunes sculpted by the wind and the occasional palm tree or oasis. In reality, most deserts are not like this at all, and certainly that particular bit of Kuwait did not conform to this image. As far as he could see, the surface was rocky rather than sandy, and there seemed to be a complete absence of palm trees, though there were a few scrubby bushes dotted about the place.
‘Here we go,’ Angela said, about a quarter of an hour later, as she steered the Toyota off the road and on to the craggy surface of the desert. ‘The satnav is almost useless to us now,’ she added, turning it off. ‘I’m just using the GPS.’
She pointed to the unit positioned in its sucker mount on the windscreen.
In a number of places there were tyre tracks showing that other vehicles had passed that way before, presumably other 4x4s and trucks belonging to the expedition. They saw no border guards or police, or indeed any signs of life at all, and a short time after they had left the road Angela announced that they were now in Iraq.
‘We’ve only got about another fifteen clicks – kilometres – to go,’ she said. ‘Just under ten miles.’
They couldn’t drive in a straight line because of the terrain. Angela had to keep weaving around hummocks and dips in the ground, and even then the Toyota pitched and rolled quite a bit. She also had to keep the speed right down, and it was almost half an hour later before she took one hand off the wheel for a brief second or two to point ahead of the vehicle.
‘There we are,’ she said. ‘That’s our home. Temporarily, of course.’
Bronson stared keenly through the windscreen at the tents – a dozen or so of them – that were just coming into view about a quarter of a mile in front. There were also a couple of smaller tents some distance away from the encampment – he assumed they were the toilets or wash rooms – and two longer lengths of material supported on poles over to one side, presumably shades erected over the excavation itself.
‘It looks virtually deserted,’ he said, a sudden sense of disquie
t striking him. ‘Where is everybody?’
Angela glanced at the dashboard clock.
‘It’s just after midday,’ she said. ‘They might be having lunch or taking an early siesta.’
‘That makes sense,’ Stephen remarked.
But Bronson stiffened, leaned forward in his seat and then turned to Angela.
‘Stop the car,’ he said, the tone of his voice making it perfectly clear that it was an order, not a subject for discussion.
Angela hit the brakes and the Toyota shuddered to an almost immediate halt.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Bronson pointed through the windscreen.
‘What’s wrong is those birds,’ he said, gesturing towards a large bird with dark plumage and lighter coloured feathers on its head and neck that had just flapped a few feet up into the air before settling back down again on the ground.
‘I don’t know much about birds,’ he went on, ‘but even I can recognize a vulture when I see one. There are an awful lot of them on the ground near those tents. I also don’t know much about archaeology, but I do know that there shouldn’t be a dozen vultures in the middle of a working archaeological camp. Something must be dead over there, something substantial, and I think it would be a really good idea to find out what it is before we go blundering in.’
6
South-eastern Iraq
For the first hour or so after they’d driven away from the encampment, Khaled had tried to study the pictures of the inscription on his laptop computer, and had transcribed the text, letter by letter, on to a sheet of paper. He knew that the next step would be a case of trial and error, until he worked out exactly what encryption system the originator had employed. To do that would take some time, and ideally he would need to be in a quiet room where he could concentrate, not bouncing around in the back of a jeep travelling across the Iraqi desert.
