came wandering down the alley. They saw her and began barking. Cass did not like dogs all that much, and disliked being barked at even more. She tried to hush them and made shooing motions with her hands to drive them away. While she was doing this, one of the alley doors opened and a man put his head out to see what had stirred up the pack. He saw her and started towards her, calling out in a language Cass could not identify, and Cass, to avoid an explanation or a confrontation, shouldered her pack, gave him a cheery wave, and hurried away, leading her doggy escort.
Back on the street once more, she decided that she might as well make the best of it and at least explore the place while she was here. She had taken but a few steps from the alley entrance when she heard a shout and spun around in time to avoid a man on a motor scooter bearing down on her. Balanced on the handlebars was a tray of pomegranates. Cass scrambled out of the way as the scooter spurted past, the man still shouting and weaving wildly, narrowly missing a donkey cart carrying crates of live chickens stacked in a high, unsteady tower. The dogs followed the cart, yapping at the donkey, and Cass proceeded on her way down the street, looking for any hints that might tell her where in the world she was.
The signs she saw on the shops and in windows, or hanging over the streets on wires, were all in some form of Arabic-which did not entirely square with her scant knowledge of Turkey. The snatches of language she caught as she passed-from those nearby and the street sellers who called out to her-sounded to her like Arabic too. So, not Turkey then, but somewhere in the Middle East. This impression was immediately strengthened when a group of women emerged from a side street, each wearing a black veil and carrying a parcel on her head-bags bulging with fruit or neatly folded sheets of flat bread.
One of the women saw Cass, nudged her neighbour, and pointed. The group stopped, turned towards her, and stared.
My clothes! Cass suddenly felt very conspicuous and vulnerable. Her first thought was to buy something from one of the street merchants, but realised she had only a handful of loose change in a foreign currency. Ducking behind one of the marble pillars lining the street, she hastily readjusted her wardrobe; buttoning her floppy shirt to the top and pulling out the shirttails, she put her belt around the outside to make it look like some sort of short tunic. She could not do much about the trousers, but unfolded the cuffs and pulled them down over her boots. Then, taking her scarf, she arranged it to cover her hair, roughly in the manner of the other women. In all, this thin disguise was not the best way to pass unnoticed by the locals, but it would have to do.
When she ventured into public view once more, she kept to the shadows and tried to remain inconspicuous. Carrying her backpack like a parcel under her arm rather than wearing it, she slowly made her way along, pausing now and again to take surreptitious photos of the place-for future reference, if nothing else. For some reason, she was especially drawn to doors and doorways-these, and even some of the walls of surrounding buildings, were of a distinctive blackand-white stone in wide alternating bands. Basalt for the black, Cass decided, and pale limestone or marble for the white.
On closer inspection, there were traces of other periods of architecture mixed in here and there, a melange of styles, each distinctive of an empire past-Greek and Roman from the classical period, Byzantine, Arabic, and, though Cass was no expert, what looked to her like Ottoman. She passed beneath a ruined Roman arch, still standing, with distinctive Acacia-topped columns on either side, and a few yards or so farther on another arch in the characteristic Arab onion shape framing a Byzantine bronze door.
She walked on, eventually coming to the city wall set with a huge triple gate-two smaller doors flanking a large central portal; all three doors were open wide, and through them she could see a wide boulevard of palm trees with traffic passing to and fro outside the wall. Oddly, for a busy city there were few vehicles plying this thoroughfare- Cass would have expected more-and all of them appeared as if they belonged in a museum for vintage motors. With low-slung chassis and small windows, and fat, white-walled tires below wide, rounded fenders that swooped into running boards, these automobiles and small trucks were definitely from another era. Cassandra had the sensation of having wandered onto a movie set of a film about the 1930s.
So, as well as moving through space, she had also travelled in time. The scientist in her rose up in a cry of Impossible! Even as this thought entered her head, another voice asked, More impossible than travelling from one place to another in a pretty good imitation of “Beam-me-up-Scotty”?
The possibility of chronological migration had simply never occurred to her, and it took her a moment to adjust to yet another radical new paradigm shift. Clearly, everything she knew was wrong. A new theory would have to be created to account for this new reality. Cass turned and gazed back down the street. Nothing she saw contradicted the time-travel premise; neither did anything readily confirm it. The architecture certainly was archaic-but that was true of most places throughout the region. The people were dressed in simple garb that might belong to any decade in the last two hundred years or more-again, that was inconclusive. The vehicles alone gave her a clue; one or two might be explained away, but every single one of them belonging to the same era? No. So, taken together, these clues led to the conclusion that, in addition to moving through space, she had somehow slipped backward in time.
Reluctant to wander any farther from the one street she knew, Cass turned around and started back the way she had come, walking along, taking in the simple brick-and-timber style construction mingled with more substantial stone structures. She passed a church behind a gate of iron filigree and, across the street from it, a mosque with a green dome topped with a crescent moon in brass. She walked beneath the Roman arch once more and noticed, immediately on the other side, a generous gated doorway contained within an arch of alternating black-and-white stone. The huge wooden doors were open, revealing the entrance to a covered marketplace. Veiled and shrouded women were congregating around the entrance chatting to one another; they darted glances at her but did not stare, and for that Cass was grateful. Beyond them she could see merchants selling vegetables and cloth from stalls either side of a long aisle that disappeared into the dark interior of the bazaar. She moved towards the entrance, keeping to the edge of the milling throng. As she neared the archway wall, her eye fell upon a sign-a single sheet of orange paper printed in neat black letters-written in English and pasted to the plaster of the wall. She stopped automatically and read:
Lost? Lonely?
Looking for Something to Believe In?
We Can Help
For Information Ring
Damascus 88-66-44
Or Come to 22 Hanania Street nr.
Beit Hanania
The Zetetic Society
She read the words again with the uncanny feeling that in some inexplicable and wholly improbable way the message on the sign was meant for her. She stood, transfixed by the simple orange sign as by the dancing flame of a fire, while the conviction hardened within her that she must go to this place at once, and that if she could only find the Zetetic Society, all her questions would all be answered.
Already one question had been answered: she now knew that she was not in Turkey but in Syria. What else could this mysterious society tell her?
PART THREE
CHAPTER 14
The Nile flowed on without so much as a ripple beneath the barges carrying the priests of Amun back to Niwet-Amun and the temple. Though the sun blazed high in the clear Egyptian sky and life along the river continued
