‘And was the cause of death violence or injury?’ asked Daniel.
‘No.’
‘Were there any other tests you could do to determine cause of death?’
‘We took a couple of tooth and gum samples for toxicology and came up negative. But that doesn’t rule out poisoning, of course. Not all poisons would show.’
‘I was wondering why nothing has been published about those bones?’
‘It wasn’t all that interesting.’
‘But Sheikh Ibrahim told us that last time he asked you about it you didn’t even want to discuss the subject.’
‘Come on now, Professor Klein. You know how cagey we academics can be before we publish our results.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t publish your results. I could understand if that was the silence before publication of a paper discussing the subject, but you said yourself it wasn’t that interesting.’
‘Look…’ he was very nervous, ‘there are some things that are better not to talk about.’
Gabrielle stepped in. ‘Could I ask you point-blank, Professor Fikri: is there any chance that these are the bones of the biblical figure Moses?’
‘I think you may be getting a little carried away, Miss Gusack.’
Daniel expected her to quibble over her title. But this time she ignored it completely.
‘We were told that there are local traditions linking Petra to the encampment of the Israelites before they entered the land of Canaan. Pharaoh’s Column, the Valley of Moses, Mount Aaron.’
‘I know that,’ he said stiffly, ‘but you’re serious scholars. Those local legends are based on a somewhat literalistic interpretation of the Bible – not to mention a desire to pander to Western tourists.’
Daniel was hoping that Gabrielle would resist the temptation to mention The Book of the Wars of the Lord.
‘But even if you don’t take it literally,’ said Gabrielle, ‘there still must have been a kernel of truth in it. In the ancient times people made up stories as stylized accounts of real events. And that includes the possibility of a biblical character called Moses, or with some similar name.’
Fikri squirmed. ‘Well, I suppose they could be the bones of the biblical Moses, but the only way we could know for sure is by doing a DNA comparison between them and a known relative of Moses. And when I last checked there weren’t any.’
It was a crude attempt to use sarcasm to brush off their probing questions. But Daniel wasn’t convinced. And he knew that neither was Gabrielle. He decided to leave it to her.
‘No, but you could have compared the DNA to various ethnic groups – including Jews.’
Fikri seemed to grow bolder at this. ‘As a matter of fact, we did. And the DNA didn’t match the genetic types that we normally associate with Jews. It was actually more like the genotype we associate with Egyptians. Maybe it was a refugee from Egypt.’
Fikri was smiling at his own sarcasm. Daniel was not. Gabrielle however was smiling, because of the full implications of what Fikri had intended as a brush-off.
‘And what about the age?’ asked Daniel.
‘It was an old man,’ Fikri responded. ‘Surprisingly old, considering that human lifespan was shorter in those days. But that still doesn’t make it Moses.’
‘Sorry, that wasn’t what I meant. I was asking about the age of the bones. How long ago are they from?’
‘Well, we-’
Fikri broke off, realizing that he was doing the very thing that he had tried so hard not to do: talk about it. But the looks on their faces made it clear that he had passed the point of no return. He had already implied that the bones were old by using the phrase ‘in those days’.
‘We carbon dated them to around 1200 BC.’
Daniel decided to summarize. ‘So let me get this straight. You found the bones of someone of probable Egyptian origin-’
‘ Possible Egyptian origin. Probable is too strong a word.’
‘ Possible Egyptian origin… in a cave in Petra in an area associated with the Israelites. And the bones date back to the late Bronze Age – exactly the time associated with the biblical Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.’
‘Yes. But I wasn’t going to make an ass of myself by publishing a paper saying we’ve found Moses.’
Daniel decided to back off slightly. He was in a foreign country, sitting in the office of a leading professor of medical pathology who had been kind enough to give him time at very short notice. It was not Daniel’s place to question the probity or veracity of his host, but he hadn’t come all this way just to draw a blank. Over the last few weeks, he had been locked in a cave, shot at, threatened by an oversized lunatic and now he was on the verge of making a major discovery. He had to find out the rest – especially considering how high the stakes were.
‘Could I ask you about the cause of death?’
‘As I said, we conducted various tests, but there are no guarantees that one can find the cause of death in three-thousand-year-old bones.’
Daniel’s alertness was highly tuned by now and he picked up on a curious omission in Fikri’s statement: he hadn’t actually said that he had failed to establish the cause of death. He had merely alluded to the difficulty of the task.
But Daniel also remembered something he had read from the clay tablets…we were afflicted with boils on our skin that looked like fiery snakes.
He decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘We believe that he may have died of some disease… possibly a disease that produced red elongated lesions.’
Fikri froze. ‘How could you possibly know that?’
Daniel knew that he had him. Now he had to press home his advantage. ‘Suffice it to say that we do.’
‘Then you’ll also know that the last thing we need is to encourage tourists to start swarming over the area.’
‘I don’t quite follow your logic, Professor.’
‘We found spores in the linen shroud that the bones were wrapped in. We studied them under the microscope and they were in stasis – but we know that spores can remain in stasis for tens or even hundreds of years.’
Daniel was not a doctor, but as a bit of a renaissance man he had some medical knowledge and he knew that stasis was a kind of state of suspended animation that spores and certain other biological matter could stay in for a long time.
‘We’d already carbon dated the bones and we’ve never seen cases of spores remaining in stasis for three thousand years. But we couldn’t rule out the possibility. So we tested them in controlled conditions and discovered that there were two factors that kept them in stasis: heat and dryness. The hot, dry conditions of Petra made it ideal for keeping the spores in stasis. But if their temperature was lowered and they were exposed to water – fresh water, that is, or even just humidity – they could be reactivated and turned into the pathogenic bacilli.’
‘The disease-causing bacteria,’ Daniel said to Gabrielle, much to her annoyance. He had to know more. ‘How virulent was it?’
‘Well, we could hardly test it on people. But we did some toxicity tests on rhesus monkeys and it was fatal in the cases of the old, the young and the frail.’
‘So it wasn’t fatal in healthy adults,’ said Gabrielle.
‘In some cases them too.’
‘And how contagious was it?’
‘We didn’t do any epidemiology trials. But any disease spread by spores is going to be highly contagious. We knew enough and so we froze a few samples and then destroyed the shroud.’
‘And the bones?’
‘What about them?’
‘Did you destroy them?’
‘We considered them important enough to preserve… so we irradiated them.’
‘And where are they now?’
