The Exodus Quest (2 page)

‘It’s okay.’

‘It’s just, everyone keeps asking, you know?’

‘That’s because we like her so much. Because we like you both.’

‘Thanks,’ said Knox. He began working his way through the database, colour and black-and-white photos of cups, plates, figurines, funerary lamps. Mostly, he flipped past them without a second glance, the old computer groaning and sighing as it strained to keep up. But every so often an image would catch his eye. Yet nothing quite matched. Ancient artefacts were like this. The closer you looked, the more potential points of difference you found.

Omar came back in with a jug of water and two glasses on a tray. ‘Any luck?’

‘Not yet.’ He finished the database. ‘Is that it?’

‘Of local provenance, yes.’

‘And non local?’

Omar sighed. ‘I wrote to a number of museums and universities when I was setting this up. I didn’t get much of a response at the time. Since my recent appointment, however …’

Knox laughed. ‘What a surprise.’

‘But we haven’t entered the data yet. All we have are CDs and paperwork.’

‘May I see?’

Omar opened the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, pulled out a cardboard box of CDs. ‘They’re not in any order,’ he warned.

‘That’s okay,’ said Knox. He slid one into the computer. The chuntering grew louder. A page of thumbnails appeared. Fragments of papyrus and linen cloth. He clicked to the next page, and then the third. The ceramics, when he found them, were colourful and patterned, nothing like what he was looking for.

‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said Omar.

‘Thanks.’ The second CD was of Roman-era statuary, the third of jewellery, the fourth corrupt. Knox’s mind began to wander, triggered perhaps by Omar’s earlier question. A sudden memory of Gaille, taking breakfast one morning on the Nile Corniche in Minya: the way she licked her upper lip free of the slight glaze from her pastry, her dark hair spilled forwards, her smile as she caught him watching.

The eighth CD was an anatomy lecture demonstrating how to distinguish manual labourers from the idle rich by bone thickness and spine curvature.

Gaille’s mobile had rung that morning in Minya. She’d checked the number, shifted in her seat, turning herself away from him to hold a stilted conversation that she’d quickly ended by promising to call back later.

‘Who was that?’ he’d asked.

‘No one.’

‘You want to get on to your service provider, if you keep getting calls from people who don’t exist.’

A reluctant sigh. ‘Fatima.’

‘Fatima?’ An unexpected stab of jealousy. Fatima was
his
friend. He’d introduced the two of them barely a week before. ‘What did she want?’

‘I guess she’d heard about Siwa being postponed.’

‘You guess?’

‘Fine. She’d heard about it.’

‘And she rang to commiserate, did she?’

‘You remember how interested she was in my image software?’

The eleventh CD was of Islamic artefacts. The twelfth was of silver and golden coins.

‘She wants you to go and work for her?’

‘Siwa’s not exactly about to happen, is it?’ Gaille had said. ‘And I hate doing nothing, especially on a salary. I hate being a drain.’

‘You’re not a drain,’ he’d said bleakly. ‘How could you think yourself a drain?’

‘It’s how I feel.’

The thirteenth CD was of pre-dynastic tomb paintings. He started checking the fourteenth on autopilot. He’d got halfway through when he sensed he’d missed something. He paged back to the previous screen, then the one before. And there it was, top right, the twin of the bowl he’d seen, only upside down, resting on its rim. Same shape, same colour, same texture, same patterning. But there was no description of it, only reference numbers.

He fetched Omar, who pulled a ring binder from the filing cabinet. Knox read out the reference numbers while he flipped through the pages, ran his finger down the entries, came to the right one, frowned in puzzlement. ‘But that can’t be right,’ he said. ‘It’s not even a bowl.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘A lid. A storage jar lid.’

Knox grunted. Obvious, now that Omar pointed it out. Not that it helped much. Egypt had been the breadbasket of the ancient world. Huge quantities of produce had passed through Alexandria’s multiple harbours. Making jars to store and transport it had been a vast industry. ‘My mistake,’ he agreed.

His admission did little to mollify Omar. ‘But it’s not from anywhere near here,’ he said. ‘It’s not even from Egypt.’

‘Where, then?’

He squinted at Knox, as though he suspected himself the victim of a bad joke. ‘Qumran,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s what the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in.’

TWO

I

Assiut Railway Station, Middle Egypt

Gaille Bonnard was beginning to regret coming inside the station to meet Charles Stafford and his party. She usually enjoyed crowds, the clamour and camaraderie, especially here in Middle Egypt, with its effusively friendly people, not yet soured by overexposure to tourists. But tensions had grown palpably over recent weeks. A protest march was even taking place that afternoon elsewhere in the city, which presumably explained why she could see only three men from the Central Security Forces on the platform, as opposed to the usual flood of uniforms. To make matters worse, an earlier train had broken down, so twice the usual number of passengers were waiting to board, all girding themselves for the inevitable squabbles over seats.

The tracks started to rattle. Vermin scurried. People manoeuvred for position. The ancient train rolled in, windows already being lowered, doors crashing open, passengers spilling out, laden with belongings, fighting through the scrum. Hawkers walked along the line of windows offering translucent bags of
baladi
bread, paper cones packed with seeds, sesame bars, sweets and drinks.

Away down the platform, a strikingly good-looking thirty-something man emerged from the first-class carriage. Charles Stafford. Despite his two-day stubble, she recognized him at once from the jacket photographs on the books Fatima had lent her the night before. She’d skimmed through them out of courtesy, though they were the kind of populist history she deplored – wild speculation backed by outrageously selective use of the evidence. Conspiracies everywhere, secret societies, lost treasures waiting beneath every mound; and never a dissenting voice to be heard, unless it could be ridiculed and dismissed.

Stafford paused to put on a pair of mirror shades, then hoisted a black leather laptop case to his shoulder and descended onto the platform. A stumpy young woman in a navy-blue suit came after him, tucking wilful strands of bright-red hair back beneath her floral headscarf. And an Egyptian porter followed behind, struggling beneath mounds of matching brown-leather luggage.

An elderly woman stumbled against Stafford as he pushed his way through the crowd. His laptop swung and clipped a young boy around the ear. The boy saw instantly how wealthy Stafford looked and promptly started bawling. A man in dirty-brown robes said something curt to Stafford, who waved him arrogantly away. The boy bawled even more loudly. Stafford sighed heavily and glanced around at the redhead, evidently expecting her to sort it out. She stooped, examined the boy’s ear, clucked sympathetically, slipped him a banknote. He couldn’t suppress his grin as he danced off. But the man in the brown robes was still feeling stung from Stafford’s dismissal, and the transaction only irritated him further. He declared loudly that foreigners evidently now thought they could batter Egyptian children at will, then pay their way out of it.

The redhead gave an uncertain smile and tried to back away, but the man’s words struck a chord with the crowd, and a cordon formed, trapping them inside, the atmosphere turning ugly. Stafford tried to barge his way out, but someone jolted him hard enough that his shades came off. He grabbed for them but they fell to the ground. A moment later Gaille heard the crunch of glass as they went underfoot. A scornful laugh rang out.

Gaille glanced anxiously over at the three CSF men, but they were walking away into the ticket hall, heads ducked, wanting nothing to do with this. Fear flared hot in her chest as she debated what to do. This wasn’t her problem. No one even knew she was here. Her 4x4 was parked directly outside. She hesitated just a moment longer, then turned and hurried out.

II

‘But it’s just a lid,’ protested Omar, as he hurried down the SCA’s front steps after Knox. ‘There must have been thousands like it. How can you be so certain it came from Qumran?’

Knox unlocked his Jeep, climbed in. ‘Because it’s the only place Dead Sea Scroll jars have ever been found,’ he told Omar. ‘At least, there was one other found in Jericho, just a few miles north, and maybe another at Masada, also close by. Other than that …’

‘But it looked perfectly ordinary.’

‘It may have looked it,’ replied Knox, waiting for a van to pass before pulling out. ‘But you have to understand something. Two thousand years ago, jars were used either for transporting goods or for storing them. Transportation jars were typically amphorae, with big handles to make them easier to heft about, and robust, because they had to withstand a lot of knocks, and cylindrical, because that made them more efficient to stack.’ He turned right at the end of the street, then sharp left. ‘But once the goods reached their final destination, they were decanted into storage jars with rounded bottoms that bedded into sandy floors and were easy to tip whenever people needed to pour out their contents. They also had long necks and narrow mouths so that they could be corked and their contents kept fresh. But the Dead Sea Scroll jars weren’t like that. They had flat bottoms and stubby necks and fat mouths, and there was a very good reason for that.’

‘Which was?’

His brakes sang as he slowed for a tram clanking across the junction ahead. ‘How much do you know about Qumran?’ he asked.

‘It was occupied by the Essenes, wasn’t it?’ said Omar. ‘That Jewish sect. Though haven’t I heard people claim that it was a villa or a fort or something?’

‘They’ve suggested it,’ agreed Knox, who’d been fascinated by the place since a family holiday there as a child. ‘I think they’re wrong, though. I mean, Pliny said that the Essenes lived on the northwest of the Dead Sea. If not Qumran itself, then very close to it, and no one has found a convincing alternative. One expert put it very succinctly: Either Qumran and the scrolls were both Essene, or we have a quite astonishing coincidence: Two major religious communities living almost on top of each other, sharing similar views and rituals, one of which was described by ancient authors yet left no physical traces; while the other was somehow ignored by all our sources but left extensive ruins and documents.’

‘So Qumran was occupied by the Essenes,’ agreed Omar. ‘That doesn’t explain why their jars are unique.’

‘The Essenes were fanatical about ritual purity,’ said Knox. ‘The slightest thing could render a pure receptacle impure. A drop of rain, a tumbling insect, an inappropriate spillage. And if it did, it was a major headache. I mean, if a receptacle became tainted, then obviously anything in it was immediately tainted too, and had to be chucked. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Liquids and grain are poured in a stream, you see, so the real issue was whether the impurity climbed back up that stream and infected the storage jar too. The Pharisees and other Jewish sects took a relaxed view, but the Essenes believed that everything would be contaminated, so they couldn’t risk pouring out contents in a stream. Instead, they’d lift the lid a little, dip in a measuring cup and transfer it that way. And because they no longer had to tip their storage jars, they could have flat bottoms, which made them much more stable; and short necks and fat mouths, too, to make them easier to dip into.’

‘And jars with fat mouths need bowls for lids,’ grinned Omar.

‘Exactly,’ nodded Knox. They were nearing the Desert Road Junction. He hunkered down in his seat to scan the road-signs. A quick review of the records in Omar’s office had shown just four foreign-run sites in the vicinity of Lake Mariut, but there was nothing currently happening at Philoxinite, Taposiris Magna or Abu Mina; which left only one worthwhile candidate: a group called the Texas Society of Biblical Archaeology excavating out near Borg el-Arab.

‘So what would the lid be doing here?’ asked Omar, once Knox had navigated them onto the right road.

‘It may well have come centuries ago,’ shrugged Knox. ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls were known about in antiquity. We have reports from the second, third and fourth centuries of texts being found in Qumran caves. Origen even used them to write his
Hexapla
.’

‘His what?’

‘The Bible written out six times in parallel columns. The first in Hebrew, the second in Greek, and then a series of edited versions. It helped other scholars compare and contrast the various versions. But the point is, he relied heavily on Dead Sea Scrolls.’

‘And you think they might have been brought here in this jar of yours?’

‘It’s got to be a possibility.’

Omar swallowed audibly. ‘You don’t think we might actually find …
scrolls
, do you?’

Knox laughed. ‘Don’t get your hopes up. One of the scrolls was inscribed on copper – a treasure map, would you believe? But all the rest were on parchment or papyrus. Alexandria’s climate would have chewed those up centuries ago. Besides, there’s another explanation. A more intriguing one. To me, at least.’

‘Go on.’

‘We’re pretty sure the Essenes didn’t live only in Qumran,’ said Knox. ‘Josephus mentions an Essene Gate in Jerusalem, for example, and several scrolls laid down rules for how Essenes should live outside Qumran. Besides, we know there were several thousand Essenes, whereas Qumran could only hold a few hundred. So obviously there were other communities.’

‘You mean here? In Alexandria?’

Knox grinned. ‘Have you ever heard of the Therapeutae?’ he asked.

III

The Reverend Ernest Peterson surreptitiously dabbed his brow. He didn’t like being seen to sweat. He didn’t like showing any sign of weakness. Fifty-two years old, ramrod straight, grizzled hair, fierce eyes, a hawk’s nose. Never without his copy of the King James Version. Never without his preacher’s livery. A man proud to show through his own unyielding purpose a faint glimmer of the irresistible strength of God. Yet the sweat kept coming. It wasn’t just the humidity in this cramped, dark underground labyrinth. It was the vertiginous sense of what he was on the verge of achieving.

Thirty-odd years before, Peterson had been a punk – a petty thief, always in trouble with the law. Under arrest one night, dozing on a police bench, glancing up at a Heinrich Hofmann print of Christ hanging high up on the wall, his heart suddenly starting to race crazily, like the most violent panic attack, but which suddenly dissolved into the most intense and serene vision of his life, a blinding white light, an epiphany. He’d stumbled from the bench after it was done, searching for a reflective surface in which to see what imprint it had left upon him: bleached hair, charred skin, albino irises. To his astonishment, there’d been no physical change whatsoever. Yet it had changed him, all right. It had
transformed
him from within. For no man could look upon the face of Christ and remain untouched.

He dabbed his forehead once more, turned to Griffin. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then do it.’

He stood back as Griffin and Michael heaved a first block of stone from the false wall to reveal the open space behind that had been indicated by their probes. Griffin reached in his torch, twisted it this way and that, illuminating a large chamber that flickered with shadow and colour, provoking murmurs and gasps from his young students. But Peterson only nodded at Nathan and Michael to continue dismantling the wall.

It said in the Good Book:
The Lord seeth not
as man seeth; for man looketh upon outward
appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart
. The Lord had looked upon
his
heart that night in custody. The Lord had seen something in him that even he hadn’t realized was there.

A sufficient gap had been created for Griffin to step through, but Peterson put a hand on his shoulder. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going first.’

‘It should be an archaeologist.’

‘I’m going first,’ repeated Peterson. He rested his palm on the rough crumbled mortar, stepped through into the new chamber.

He’d not merely been transformed that night; he’d been given purpose. Of all God’s gifts, perhaps the greatest. It hadn’t been easy. He’d wasted years on the medieval make-believe of the Turin Shroud and the Veil of Veronica. Yet he’d never once doubted or contemplated giving in. The Lord didn’t hand out such missions on a whim. And finally he’d found the right lead, had followed it relentlessly, was now within touching distance. He felt it. He
knew
it. The time of the light was coming, certain as sunrise.

He shone his torch around the chamber. Thirty paces long, ten wide. Everything covered in dust. A deep bath embedded in the floor, a wide flight of steps leading down into it, divided by a low stone wall, so that community members could descend unclean down one side and emerge purified from the other. Walls plastered and painted in antiquity; pigments dulled by neglect, cobwebs, dirt and wormcasts. He brushed an area with his hand, shone his torch obliquely at the revealed scene. A woman in blue with a child on her lap. He had to blink away tears.

‘Reverend! Look!’

He glanced around to see Marcia shining her torch up at the domed ceiling, painted to represent the sky, a glowing orange sun near its apex, constellations of yellow stars, a creamy full moon, red coals of planets. Day and night together. Joy effervesced in his heart as Peterson stared up. He fell to his knees in gratitude and adoration. ‘Let us give thanks,’ he said. He gazed around until all his young students had fallen to their knees. And then even Griffin had to follow, compelled by the power of the group.

‘I know that my redeemer liveth,’ cried Peterson, his voice reverberating loudly around the chamber. ‘And that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’

Yes
, he exulted.
In my flesh shall I see God
.

IV

Naguib Hussein was on his way back to the Mallawi police station to make his report when he decided it might be as well to make a detour to Amarna, ask the people there if they’d heard anything about a missing young girl, if only to take the opportunity of introducing himself.