Chapter 35
I followed Hermogenes into the inner parts of the Library. In these corridors, narrowed in places to just a few feet by jumbled racks and cupboards, his predecessors had arranged what fragments were suffered to remain of the old stock. There was no access here for the public. Few visitors to the public areas could have known this place existed. Only those who knew their way by heart through the often unlit galleries and seams of this book mine would venture alone through the little door set into the wall a few yards down from the statues of Ptolemy and his friend Alexander.
Hermogenes strained to lift the door to his office out of its hinges. It was a heavy door, and his strength was long into its decline. But he managed to lift it high enough to open without too much scraping of the floor. It would have been a large room, but for yet more of the book racks. One of these had collapsed, spilling its contents on to the floor. From the dust covering the jumbled mass of papyrus, I could see it hadn’t been touched in years. There was a small glazed window behind his desk that drew light from another room that had a skylight. Otherwise, it was an array of six lamps on a bronze stand beside the desk.
The smell of old papyrus was so overpowering, I sneezed a few of the lamps out. While Hermogenes fussed over relighting them, I squinted to try to see the titles of the book rolls he saw fit to keep around him.
‘You will forgive me, My Lord, if I bring you here,’ he repeated for the third time, ‘but all the relevant information is now concentrated in this room.’ He gave a nervous look at the ruined white silk of my tunic.
I made what I hoped was a careless grunt and continued looking at the parchment tag on one of the more visible book sheaths. It was what must have been a very old edition of Sappho, with a commentary by what may have been the Callimachus. Impressive! I thought, taking my place on the chair Hermogenes had finished dusting for me.
‘I must thank – and, indeed, commend – you for the amount of effort you’ve put into this,’ I opened. ‘But you really will need to persuade me that I was at any time, on my journey through the desert, within several miles of Soteropolis. We know that the town was only abandoned in the time of Diocletian, three hundred years ago. I have some evidence, confirmed by the tax records, that it was a flourishing municipality in the time of Augustus, six hundred years ago. Yet almost exactly between these two reigns, Hadrian turned up and caused to be inscribed on what you tell me was its most famous monument a poem indicating that the whole area was desert. It doesn’t fit together.’
‘That is, My Lord, because you have assumed that there was just one town called Soteropolis, or that it remained throughout its history in the same place.’ Hermogenes smiled and opened one of the files that lay on his desk. He’d done his work since our last meeting, and was feeling obviously pleased with himself. ‘We both thought, from its name, that Soteropolis was likely to be a foundation of the early Ptolemies. What I have found is that it predates not merely the Greek settlement of Egypt, but also the native kingdom.
‘Manetho was not the only native who, under the various Ptolemies wrote the history of his land. A much longer, if less popular, work was produced by one Archilochus, a priest of Horus, who turned Greek and was made Chancellor of the University of Naucratis. I have only been able to locate fragments of the first seven books. But what I have gives our fullest information about the early times.’
He paused as he unrolled a book. It was the skilled movement of one who hadn’t been brought up on the more convenient modern books of bound parchment, and the aged papyrus bent in his hands without cracking. His finger hovered over one of the columns of text. I leaned forward and tried to see upside down what he was showing. The columns were only two inches wide, and the ancient semi-shorthand would have been hard in any light. Hermogenes moved his watery eyes close to the text. Then he gave up on citation and gathered his thoughts.
‘The earliest mention of Soteropolis comes during the reign of the first King of all Egypt, whose name is rendered in Greek as Menes. This was many thousands of years ago. Soteropolis then was already very old. Its inhabitants were of conspicuously lighter appearance than the Egyptians, and they spoke a different language. No one knows their origin, but they were noted for their warlike pride and technical ingenuity, and it was only with much effort that they were reconciled to external authority.
‘Menes besieged Soteropolis for seven years, during which every effort to subdue its inhabitants was made in vain. Only after a pestilence that destroyed most of them, without communicating itself to the besiegers, did they agree to terms. These terms were that they would abandon their town and take up service directly under the King and his successors.
‘Settled by Egyptians, its name translated to their own language as ‘‘City of Salvation”, Soteropolis continued to be a place of troubles. It was said that the ghosts of the original inhabitants would venture forth when the Nile flood was below its normal level. At those times, there would be further outbreaks of pestilence. The Greeks, for whom the town was emptied of natives in the time of the third Ptolemy and renamed again, coined the phrase: “When the Nile is low, death will walk the streets of Soteropolis”.
‘The most deadly attack of pestilence occurred in the reign of Nero, when the Nile failed to rise properly for two years together. Then the people of Soteropolis, together with all their household goods, were transferred to a new foundation about five miles to the south. That was the Soteropolis that was finally abandoned in the time of Diocletian, when it was clear that the pestilence had followed the inhabitants.’
‘If it was that deadly,’ I asked, ‘why hold the Library’s reserve stock there?’
‘It was the decision,’ Hermogenes said with a shrug, ‘of Eratosthenes, the third in the line of Head Librarians. He specialised in natural philosophy, and was noted for his calculations to establish the size of the earth and to attempt to fix the distance from us of the heavenly bodies. He said an oracle had assured him that Soteropolis was a propitious location for his continued researches. It is reported that he went mad in extreme old age after digging in the foundations of a ruined temple there. To be sure, his claim that the sun is ninety-three million miles distant from us can be taken as the product of a disordered mind.
‘Whether he died of his illness, or returned to Alexandria, I cannot say. But he spent the entire annual budget of the Library seven times over in Soteropolis, and it was never thought financially possible thereafter to undo his establishment there of the reserve stock holding.’
I’d come across how Eratosthenes measured the earth a few months earlier in the writings of another mathematician. It was a brilliantly simple application of Euclid. The data from which he’d reasoned might be questioned. But the method itself was beyond dispute. The claim about the sun was another matter. A few hundred miles made more sense. Still, I decided I’d like to go myself through the man’s no doubt voluminous writings. If they rested beneath the desert I’d seen around Soteropolis, that was another reason for getting back there as soon as possible with my little army of diggers.
‘All this being so,’ Hermogenes continued, ‘the Emperor would have seen nothing on his visit but the monument that you saw some way off, whatever lavish buildings housed the reserve stock. Assuming that his poem had been written for that occasion, and not reused from somewhere else, his words about the desolation around him were not wholly inaccurate.’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I can have everything ready within ten days. Would you care to accompany me on the excavation?’
‘No, My Lord,’ came the answer with a sad smile. ‘I am an old man. I have never yet left Alexandria for a journey into Egypt. I do not think now is the time to travel anywhere. Nevertheless, I think I can provide you with a better map than the one I gave you on your last visit.’
He’d given me a map? I looked blankly at him.
‘You will, My Lord, surely remember the package of documents I prepared just before you left for the south?’ He raised his eyebrows and looked slightly hurt that the days of work he’d put in hadn’t been appreciated.
I did remember them now. I’d skimmed a few of them and left the others for my return. After my adventures with Lucas, they’d slipped my mind. They were still somewhere in my office.
‘You gave me a map of Soteropolis?’ I asked.
‘Not a good one,’ he conceded. ‘It gave a few of the main locations. But I think I can turn up a much better map that will give the location of the reserve stock. I hope the distances will all be relative from the monument. This being so, you will know roughly where to dig.’
‘Then I do ask for your best efforts in finding this map,’ I said. I’d have liked to spend the entire day in and
