morning’s heat, the tiny granules began to emit light, glistening like snowflakes in the full gaze of the sun. Like nails drawn to a magnet, the light specks settled upon the mysterious metal doorway.
‘So far so good.’ Hamilton came to stand beside me and bear witness to what eventuated.
The metal of the doorway did react with the particles, but not in the way we’d expected. Instead of lifting the door out of its frame the powder began eating into the metal, reducing it to pure light, until nothing was left inside the black circle of hieroglyphs that marked the perimeter of the entrance.
At this point our guides begged us not to enter, and requested that we all leave at once.
Hamilton refused to leave; the guides refused to stay.
‘I know the way to the Suez Canal blindfolded.’ Hamilton insisted that if they wanted to leave they should do so. ‘I release you from your duties…go, with my blessing.’ He looked at me, and I know I did not appear as confident at being left without a guide as he would have liked. ‘You trust me, don’t you, Mrs Hamilton?’
If I had answered in the negative, I would have found myself on one of those camels, accompanying our guides home. ‘I married you, didn’t I?’ was my reply. The way I saw it, I should give my husband confidence in our relationship or I would defeat the point of my staying. If I was going to die out here, at least I would meet my death in the arms of the man I loved. Deep down, I knew Hamilton would get us home as he promised, for it was not in his nature to fail. ‘Besides,’ I pointed out, ‘the inscription around the door did specify that a woman had to enter this shrine first, so for a change, Mr Hamilton, you cannot do without me.’
The love and admiration on his face filled me with such joy of being! ‘I should never be able to do without you, my dear.’ He took my hands in his and kissed them both. ‘You are a once-in-a-lifetime partner. Praise god I didn’t allow you to pass me by.’
My husband was far too charming and handsome for my own good; my family had always said so. He could talk me into anything, and I had followed him to the ends of the earth just for the pleasure of his company.
I had to take a break from reading; I couldn’t see for the tears streaming down my face. ‘This is
But it wasn’t Lord Hamilton who had me in tears—it was Clarissa, loving her husband so much that she would stay in a barren wilderness with him. It can’t have been easy for a woman in her day and age to adjust to life in the Sinai, and then to accompany Hamilton into an unknown ancient shrine showed exceptional courage. The Egyptians went to great lengths not to have their sacred places looted or defiled. Going through that doorway could be fraught with danger and possibly booby traps.
I blew my nose again and attempted to steady my breathing.
It had been very interesting to read that the powder found on-site had opened the entrance without needing to be blended with other ingredients, which seemed to indicate that the substance had already been transmuted into the Bread of Life. And perhaps it had still been glowing and levitating things when Petrie uncovered the site in the early twentieth century, but the information might have been deliberately omitted from the record of Petrie’s excavation.
‘I was right about how the powder affects the door though.’
I was also thankful to discover that the foul-smelling insect repellent I’d found in the back of the red book, along with Albray’s stone, was not meant to be applied to one’s body. Still, I wondered why it was important enough to include in the family inheritance. Surely modern insect repellents would prove more effective than the smoke from a roughly-made torch?
I carried the tissues with me back to the desk in case I needed them, and having made a fresh cup of tea, I continued reading the Hamiltons’ account of Serabit el-Khadim. FROM THE JOURNAL OF LADY CLARISSA HAMILTON
So, there we were—two little people on a big mountain, in the middle of a huge desert, and we were about to enter a place that had not been open to the world in god knows how long.
Torches lit, we approached the opening, and drew a deep breath.
A steep path of red gold, the like of which we had never seen before—or since—provided a walkway down a tunnel leading into the mountain. We descended slowly, in awe, as it was all perfectly preserved. The entire length of the passageway was lined with gold into which hieroglyphs were inscribed in straight lines that passed overhead from one side of the tunnel path to the other.
The silence inside the tunnel was unnerving, as was the smell of stale air that became increasingly overwhelming the further down we travelled. The entrance into the mountain was still within our sight when the tunnel ended, although the daylight fell well short of being any aid to us. Here, the skeletal remains of a warrior greeted us. The bones sprawled across our path were clad in chain mail and still clutched the weapons that had failed to save his life.
‘Well, it would seem this tunnel has been opened in the last six hundred years at least,’ commented Hamilton, having looked over the body to assess the era to which it belonged. ‘This fellow belonged to a breakaway French faction of the Templar Knights…he bears the emblem of the Order de Sion.’
‘Why did these knights split from the original chapter of the Templars?’ I thought this might have some relevance as to how the knight had come to meet his end in this place.
Hamilton explained to me that the purpose of the Crusades was to seek the sacred relics of the Holy Land on behalf of the church and to protect them from the infidels who were not of the faith. The Templar Knights were a breakaway faction formed from within the upper echelons of the crusading knights; for the discoveries and contacts they made in the Holy Land caused this elite group of knights to think twice about surrendering the relics and secret doctrine they discovered there to the church. The Templars took measures to hide their discoveries, including the formation of an inner order of the Templars, known as the Order of Sion, whose existence was kept a secret. The Templars became the public face of the order, that by all appearances still supported the church’s cause in the Holy Land, whilst the Order of Sion saw to the concealment and protection of ancient relics, places and doctrine. Many of this secret order of knights belonged to the disinherited Judaic line of kings who had settled in the Languedoc area at the time of Jesus Christ. When the church began the Albigensian Crusade and sent crusading knights to wipe out the Cathar heretics who were suspected to be hiding the Templars’ treasures, the Templar Knights’ loyalties were tested, for they could not stop the slaughter for fear of having their loyalty to the church come into question and a charge of heresy brought against their entire order—still, the following century that was exactly what happened. Thus the Sion knights were called in to retrieve the sacred relics and spirit them away to safekeeping. It was speculated that some of the treasures were returned to their shrines in the Holy Land.
