And found nothing.
I felt with my hand in all directions and touched only slick gold lining. I snorted. ‘So much for wisdom.’
‘It’s not there?’
‘The Egyptians had no more answers than we do. It’s all a myth, Astiza.’
She was stunned. ‘Then why this temple? Why this box? Why those legends?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe the library was the easy part. It was the book they never got around to writing.’
She looked around suspiciously. ‘No. It’s been stolen.’
‘I think it was never here.’
She shook her head. ‘No. They would not have built that granite-and-gold vault for nothing. Somebody’s been here before. Somebody high-ranking, with the knowledge of how to enter this place and yet the rage and pride not to respect the pyramid.’
‘And not take all this gold?’
‘This prophet didn’t care for gold. He was interested in the next world, not this one. Beside, gold is dross compared to the power of this book.’
‘A book of magic.’
‘Of power, wisdom, grace, serenity. A book of death and rebirth. A book of happiness. A book that inspired Egypt to become the world’s greatest nation, and then inspired another people to influence the world.’
‘What other people? Who took it?’
She pointed. ‘He left his identity behind.’
There, propped in one corner of the marble temple, was a shepherd’s crook, or staff. It had the practically curved end to snare a sheep’s neck. Its wood seemed marvellously preserved, and unlike a normal crook it was remarkable in its polish and tasteful carving, with a winged angel at the curved end and the blunt head of a serpent at the other. Midway down were two golden cherubim with wings extended to each other, a bracket holding them to the staff. Yet it was still a modest object in the midst of a pharaoh’s horde.
‘What the devil is that?’
‘The rod of the most famous magician in history,’ Astiza said.
‘Magician?’
‘The prince of Egypt who became a liberator.’
I stared at her. ‘You’re saying Moses was down here?’
‘Doesn’t that make sense?’
‘No. It’s impossible.’
‘Is it? A fugitive criminal, spoken to by God, comes out of the desert with the extraordinary demand to lead Hebrew slaves to freedom, and suddenly he has the power to work miracles – a skill he’s never shown before?’
‘Power given by God.’
‘Really? Or by the gods, under the guise of the one great God?’
‘He was fighting the Egyptian gods, the false idols.’
‘Ethan, it was men fighting with men.’
She sounded like a bloody French revolutionary. Or Ben Franklin.
‘The saviour of his people did not just take the enslaved Hebrews and destroy Pharaoh’s army,’ Astiza went on. ‘He took the most powerful talisman in all the world, so mighty that migrant slaves had the power to conquer the Promised Land.’
‘A book.’
‘A repository of wisdom. Recipes of power. When the Jews reached their Promised Land their armies swept all before them. Moses found food, healed the sick, and struck down the blasphemers. He lived past a normal span. Something kept the Hebrews alive in a wilderness for forty years. It was this book.’
Once more I tried to remember the old Bible stories. Moses had been a Hebrew slave baby rescued by a princess, raised as a prince, who killed a slave overseer in a fit of rage. He fled, came back decades later, and when Pharaoh refused to let his people go, Moses called down ten plagues upon Egypt. When Pharaoh lost his oldest son in the tenth and worst calamity, he gave up at last, releasing the Hebrew slaves from bondage. And that should have been the end of it except Pharaoh changed his mind yet again and chased Moses and the Hebrews with six hundred chariots. Why? Because he discovered that Moses had taken more than just the enslaved Hebrews. He had taken the core of Egypt’s power, its greatest secret, its most feared possession. He had taken it and…
Parted the sea.
Had they carried this book of power to Solomon’s temple, supposedly raised by the ancestors of my Freemasons?
‘This can’t be. How could he get in here and back out?’
‘He came to Pharaoh shortly before the Nile was at its height,’ Astiza said. ‘Don’t you see, Ethan? Moses had been an Egyptian prince. He knew sacred secrets. He knew how to get in here and back out, something no one else had dared. That year Egypt lost not just a nation of slaves, a pharaoh, and an army. It lost its heart, its soul, its wisdom. Its essence was taken by a nomadic tribe that after forty years transported it…’
‘To Israel.’ I sat on the empty pedestal, my mind reeling.
‘And Moses, thief as well as prophet, was never allowed by his own God to enter the Promised Land. Maybe he felt guilt at unleashing what was meant to remain hidden.’
I stared at nothing. This book, or scroll, had been missing for three thousand years. And here were Silano and me, chasing an empty vault.
‘We’ve been looking in the wrong place.’
‘It may have become part of the Ark of the Covenant,’ she said excitedly, ‘like the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The same knowledge and power that had raised the pyramids passed to the Jews, who rose from an obscure people to tribes whose traditions became the source of three great religions! It may have helped bring down the walls of Jericho!’
My mind was tumbling over itself. Heresy! ‘But why would the Egyptians bury such a book?’
‘Because knowledge always carries risk as well as reward. It can be used for evil as well as good. Our legends say the secrets of Egypt came from across the sea, from a people forgotten even when the pyramids were raised, and that Thoth realised such knowledge had to be safeguarded. People are creatures of emotion, cleverer than they are wise. Maybe the Hebrews realised that too, since the book has disappeared. Perhaps they learnt that to use the Book of Thoth was dangerous folly.’
I didn’t believe any of it, of course. This mixture of gods was patent blasphemy. And I’m a modern man, a man of science, an American sceptic in the Franklin mould. And yet was there some divine force that worked through all the wonders of the world? Was there a chapter to humankind’s story that our revolutionary age had forgotten?
And then there came an echoing boom, a long roll of thunder, stirring the air with distant wind. The rocky cavern quivered and rumbled. An explosion.
Silano had found his gunpowder.
As the sound reverberated through the subterranean chamber, I got up off the pedestal. ‘You didn’t answer my other question. How did Moses get back out?’
She smiled. ‘Maybe he never closed the door that we entered, and got out the way he came in. Or, more likely, there is more than one entrance. The medallion suggests there is more than one shaft – one west and one east – and he closed the western door behind him but exited the east. Certainly the good news is that we know he did. We found our way in, Ethan. We’ll find our way out, too. First step is to get off this island.’
‘Not until I help myself.’
‘We have no time for that!’
‘A pittance of this treasure, and we can buy all the time in the world.’
I had no proper sack or backpack. How can I describe the king’s ransom I tried to wear? I draped enough necklaces on my chest to give myself a backache and jammed on bracelets enough for a Babylonian whore. I belted gold around my waist, fastened anklets above my feet, and even took off Moses’ cherubim and jammed them in my drawers. Yet I barely scratched the treasure trove that lay under the Great Pyramid. Astiza, in contrast, touched nothing.
‘Stealing from the dead is no different than stealing from the living,’ she warned.
