Exodus (9 page)

“In 1904, the Petrie expedition, sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Fund, was sent to survey the region and they found this temple. Petrie postulated that this was the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments and built the Ark of the Covenant. But the official word was that the site was at St Catherine’s Monastery and Jebel Musa to the east, even though it doesn’t correspond with the Bible’s geographical references. So the records of the expedition were suppressed and only a few copies remained extant.”
 

Morgan could see Khal’s excitement.
 

“So …” she prompted.
 

“So Abasi found a copy of the suppressed manuscript and that’s what the last four pages of the notebook are about. If Moses was indeed an Egyptian priest escaping from those who would bring down the monotheism of Akhenaten’s reign, then this would be the place he would have fled to. The biblical reference to the golden calf is considered a reference to the goddess Hathor, depicted with cow ears. The temple here is dedicated to her.” He paused.
 

“But there’s something else. There are indications that this was a site of ritual alchemy, where the Egyptians transformed gold into a miraculous powder. That’s really why we’re here, because it may explain some of the mysteries of the Ark, and because Abasi had some question marks in his journal about it.”

Morgan leaned back as they drove the last few kilometers to the temple, wondering how strange this search could become. The Ark was surrounded by myth and legend, but there was a kernel of truth there somewhere. Certainly enough that it was worth pursuing the clues in the time that they had. She had sworn to Jake that she would bring Natasha down, and if she found the Ark first, Morgan would go to her. But if she and Khal found it, Natasha would come to them. Either way, there would be a reckoning, and within the next few days, because the Peace Summit wasn’t far away.
 

Khal pulled into what could be called a car park, but was really just a wider area on the badly maintained road. A man in a dusty jacket and trainers over his traditional dress squatted by the side of the road, sipping from a glass bottle of Coke. Khal raised his hand in greeting and the man slowly stood, watching as they got out the car.
 

“Salaam alaikum,” Khal said, in the traditional Arabic greeting.
 

“Alaikum as-salaam,” the guide responded. He accepted the envelope of money that Khal held out, then nodded at Morgan and headed up towards the ridge and the temple grounds beyond.
 

“Friendly guy,” Morgan said.
 

“The locals are charged with stopping looters but so few people come here, their main job is just to take some money for the nearby villages. He’ll hang back and we can explore on our own.”
 

There were no paved roads up the mountain, so it was a vigorous walk to the top. The place was a ruin with little attention from the tourist trade and they picked their way through the rubble-strewn landscape towards the cave of Hathor. Ancient stele and obelisks poked up through the field of stones and Morgan stopped to trace the letters on one of them.
 

“It looks like some kind of hieratic script.” She turned to Khal. “Do you know what it means?”
 

“There’s still controversy, even after a hundred years after Petrie came here. The language is unknown and the hieroglyphs are not from any known dialect, so this place is quite the mystery. The deepest knowledge of the ancients is still hidden from view, protected from those who would cheapen it for a few dollars.”
 

His voice was passionate and Morgan wondered what else this handsome academic was keeping to himself. They rounded a rocky corner and the full expanse of the temple came into view. Above ground, the temple was constructed from sandstone quarried from the mountain itself, blending into the landscape using natural rocky features as part of the building. A series of adjoining halls, shrines, courts and chambers were all set within the main enclosure.
 

“It’s this way to the cave of Hathor,” Khal pointed, “which is where Abasi’s notebook says the alchemical symbols can be found.”
 

They walked into the entrance and immediately the temperature cooled. Feeling the chill on her skin, Morgan breathed in the air and let her senses widen. If Khal was right, this was where the ancient Egyptians sacrificed to their gods and where Moses ran to after the expulsion from Egypt. It felt reminiscent of the great tombs of the Valley of the Kings, where the bodies of royalty lay with their battalions of slaves for the afterlife. There was a sense of belief embedded in the walls here, even though those who practiced the divine arts were now long gone. Khal moved further into the cave system and they passed an upright pillar, then a limestone stela of Pharaoh Rameses I.
 

“These were clearly too big to be removed by the Brits,” Khal joked again, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “Abasi postulated that Flinders Petrie actually found the alchemical workshop of Akhenaten and the earlier Pharaohs. There were finds down here that were baffling to the discoverers, wands of an unidentified hard material, what seemed to be a metallurgist’s crucible and a considerable amount of pure white powder concealed beneath carefully laid flagstones.”

“What was the white powder?” Morgan asked. “Some kind of drug?”

“That’s the big question. It was known to the Egyptians as
mufkuzt
. Abasi’s notes link it to mono-atomic gold that was made here in a laboratory workshop under the guise of turquoise mining.”
 

“What was so special about the powder?” Morgan asked.
 

“It was shown in tomb paintings as being presented to the Pharoahs as a white conical shape and is known in the ancient writings as ‘white bread’ or ‘Bread of the Presence.’”

Morgan turned from the carvings she was studying. “Bread of the Presence? That’s mentioned in Exodus along with the Ark, also known as shewbread. It’s meant to be offered to God in the temple. That can’t be a coincidence.”

“Exactly,” Khal said. “But there’s more. Recent experiments with mono-atomic gold have shown that it has remarkable properties. When heated it weighs less than zero and the pan it sits in weighs less than it did at the start. So the weightlessness effect is transferred to the receptacle which is, in effect, levitating. It’s also a superconductor and could pave the way to perpetual motion energy and environmentally friendly fuel cells. It seems there is a great deal more at stake than an ancient relic. This powder could even have been the alchemists’ fabled Philosopher’s Stone …”

“Whoa, hold on there.” Morgan stopped Khal in midflow. “You’re saying this material can levitate?”

“It can cause the material on which it rests to levitate. Remind you of anything?”
 

Morgan was amazed, her mind reeling with possibilities and questions.
 

“Scripture says that the Ark is said to have that power. But what about the rays of light that are supposed to radiate out from it?”
 

Khal traced a finger down a groove in the temple wall.
 

“There are carvings in the Egyptian tombs which link the mufkuzt with a device that causes a ray of light to shoot out of it, like a kind of primitive laser.”

“But that technology is way too advanced for that time, surely?”

“Not necessarily. There are other examples of what we’d consider advanced technology. For example, the Iraq Museum contains the Baghdad Battery, dated at over 2000 years old, showing that the ancients had an understanding of electric cells and energy storage. Five such batteries were discovered and actually, the description of the Ark of the Covenant is similar to an electrical capacitor.”

“What do you mean?” asked Morgan.

Khal crouched down, took out a pen and scratched in the dirt floor with the tip. He sketched a simple drawing of the Ark.
 

 
“The Ark of shittim wood was described as having gold within and gold without - essentially two plate layers of gold, a conductor, sandwiching a non-conductive insulator of acacia wood - here and here,” he pointed to the edges of the Ark. “The two cherubim of gold on the top could have acted as outer electrodes. Even with low electrical potential, it would have become charged over time, and the discharge would arc from the cherubim with enough stored energy to kill. So perhaps the Ark was a weapon or a place to store this precious substance that physically changed the properties of the box in which it sat.”

Morgan sat down on a rock, astonished by what he was saying. She felt the cool stone through her clothes and concentrated on that sensation for a moment. It was difficult to reconcile an ancient idea that was so fundamental to her father’s faith with a scientific element that had only just been rediscovered. Khal paced backwards and forwards. Morgan could tell that he was still holding something back.
 

“Go on, tell me everything,” she said. “I need to know what we’re up against.”
 

Khal looked at her. “I want you to know that Abasi was a rational man, that he was a man of science. He was my dear friend, but even I find it hard to understand the final words of the notebook.”

“Seriously, I want to know.”
 

Khal pulled out the folded pages of the notebook.

“I have to read it to you because it doesn’t make much sense to me either. It’s a quote from a professor of quantum physics. ‘Mono-atomic gold, or the fabled mufkuzt, has a gravitational attraction of less than zero and because gravity determines space-time, the white powder is capable of bending space-time.’”
 

“Seriously?” Morgan said, incredulity clear on her face. “People believe that stuff?”

Khal nodded, a serious look on his face. “There’s even one theory that the Ark still exists at Chartres Cathedral in France, but that it sits in a parallel dimension owing to the elements of monoatomic gold contained within it.”
 

Morgan laughed, the sound echoing around the chamber.
 

“I’m pretty sure that an Ark in another space-time dimension doesn’t pose much threat to the Jerusalem peace accords, so let’s just focus on possibilities for the physical Ark, shall we?”
 

Khal looked relieved.
 

“I just wanted you to know everything about the research, but that side of things is getting a little extreme, even for me.” He moved towards the back of the cave. “Anyway, this is what we came to see. The most important thing here is this carving, which ties this place to Akhenaten and the period of the Exodus. These pictures were suppressed along with Petrie’s manuscript.”
 

Morgan stood and went to look at the carving. It was a beautiful outline of a queen, a cartouche set in her crown.
 

“It’s Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiye,” Khal explained. “It’s similar in style to the Amarna period carvings. There’s nothing like this at St Catherine’s Monastery but even so, we have to go there next, because Abasi found something there that he didn’t record in detail. We have to see it for ourselves.”
 

***

They drove on, and as the sky darkened and night crept over the horizon, Morgan began to feel the magic of the landscape. The rugged mountains stretched as far as she could see, primordial granite ravaged by wind and rain, the exposed rocks open to sand blown from the deserts of Arabia. It was a place made for demons, for the spirits of a stark wilderness. This was a place to die of thirst and exposure as the sun beat down on your back and the scorpions crawled over your writhing body. How had the wandering Hebrews survived those years, Morgan wondered, as darkening clouds cast shadows on the jagged peaks that fell off into deep ravines. The angles of the rocks would make climbing them an impossibility and they could hide anything, perhaps even the Ark.
 

“Look,” Khal said, pointing through the side window down over a ravine. “You can just see St Catherine’s.”

Morgan had read that the official name of the world’s oldest working monastery was the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God Trodden Mount of Sinai. The Eastern Orthodox monastery was now a UNESCO World Heritage site and protected by the United Nations, but its beginnings were gruesome indeed. Catherine of Alexandria was a Christian martyr sentenced to death on the breaking wheel, crushed by bludgeoning blows while chained to a spoked wheel. When she didn’t die from the torture, she was beheaded, and legend says that angels took her remains to Sinai where they were found in 800AD by monks.
 

Even from this distance, Morgan could see that the monastery was fortified, until recent times only accessible through a door high in the outer walls. It was integrated into the rock from which it was quarried, blending into the landscape, a stone fortress. Behind it, Jebel Musa, or the biblical Mount Horeb, rose majestically above the desert floor, the granite mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments, one of the highest peaks in the region. Morgan felt a thrill of excitement as she gazed upon it, for these monks hid many secrets. Perhaps here they would find a clue to the Ark’s whereabouts.
 

Zimbabwe, 9.28pm
 

Natasha watched the last light of the day touch the hills and then fade behind them. The dusty road stretched across the savannah towards the mountains in the east, where green foothills could be seen, an oasis in the parched grey. The road twisted towards the outskirts of the
Gonarezhou
National Park, where a guide would meet them. They had been driving in silence for hours, an easy quiet made simple by the years that she had spent with Isac, but now she broke the silence.
 

“Tell me about this guide, Isac. I want to be sure we haven’t missed anything. We don’t have time to waste here and the clock in Jerusalem is ticking.”