Down I went another inch, and another. Oh, the fun my captors were having!
“If you kill me, you’ll lose the greatest treasure on earth!” I warned.
“So tell me where it is.” Down a few more inches.
“I can only lead you to it if you spare my life!” I was eyeing the shovel and the snakes, swinging myself by twisting my torso so I would pass over its wooden handle.
“And what is this treasure?”
Another snake struck toward me, I yelped, and there was another chorus of laughter. If only I could be so amusing to Paris courtesans.
“It’s . . .” The rope dropped more, I reached, fingers straining, the snakes rose in readiness, and then as they jerked I seized the shovel and swung desperately. It caught two of the reptiles and threw them against the sand walls, starting a small cascade. They thrashed in fury as they fell back into the pit.
“Up, up, please, by the grace of God, get me
“What is it, Monsieur Gage? What is the treasure?” I could think of nothing else to do. I took the shovel in both hands, t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
1 1 1
bent myself as far upward as I painfully could, took careful aim, and then dropped back down, letting my weight drive the crude shovel’s wooden beak against the clay pipe. It shattered!
Liquid gushed into the pit.
No one was more surprised than I was.
The rope fell another foot as the men above cried out in surprise, and my hair was in effluent stinking of sewage and seawater. Was this some wretched outfall from Jaffa? I squeezed my eyes tight, ready for the bite of fangs on my nose or ears or eyelids. Instead, the angry hissing was receding.
I blinked open. The snakes had crawled to the sides of the pit to get away from the gushing stink. They were desert serpents, as unhappy about all this as I was.
My head dropped again, and now my forehead dragged in the greasy cesspool. By Hamilton’s dollar, was I to escape the venom only to drown head down?
“The Grail!” I roared. “It’s the Grail!” And with that Najac snapped an order and they began to hoist me.
The Arabs were in an uproar, declaring I was a sorcerer who’d performed some electric miracle by bringing water out of sand. Najac was looking at the shovel in my hands with disbelief. Below, the pit kept filling, the snakes trying to climb away and dropping back down.
And then my head was above ground level, my ankles still bound, my torso swaying like a hooked side of beef.
“
“The Grail,” I grasped weakly. “The Holy Grail. Now, will you please just shoot me?”
And of course he’d like to. But what if my claim proved important to Bonaparte? And then an angry mutter, growing to an indignant roar, began to rise from the entire besieging army.
c h a p t e r
1 1
Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. Bonaparte’s troops had been struggling with disillusion since landing in Egypt last summer.
The heat, the poverty, and the enmity of the population had all come as shocks. The French had expected to be welcomed as republican saviors, bringing the gifts of the Enlightenment. Instead they’d been resisted, viewed as infidels and atheists, the remnants of the Mameluke armies raiding from the desert. Garrisons in villages lived under the constant threat of poisoning or a knife in the dark. Napoleon’s answer was to march on.
There had been unexpectedly fierce resistance at Gaza. Turkish prisoners had been paroled on the promise not to fight again, but officers with telescopes had spied the same units now manning the walls of Jaffa. This was a breach of a fundamental rule of European warfare! Yet even this might not have ignited the massacres to follow.
What caused the thunder roll of outrage was the decision by Ottoman commander Aga Abdalla to answer Napoleon’s offer of surrender terms by killing the two French emissaries and mounting their heads on poles.
t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
1 1 3
It was rashness by a proud Muslim outnumbered three to one. The French army roared in protest, like a provoked lion.
Now there could be no mercy. Within minutes, the bombardment began. There would be a bark, a sizzle as a cannonball cut through the air, and then an eruption of dust and flying fragments as it struck the town’s masonry. With each hit the troops cheered, until the pounding extended hour into hour and became monotonous in its steady erosion of Jaffa’s defenses. On the east and north sides, each gun fired every six minutes. On the south, where cannon pointed across a thickly vegetated ravine that would give good cover to attacking troops, the guns roared every three minutes, slowly smashing a breech. Ottoman artillery replied, but with old ordnance and rusty aim.
Najac took the time to watch his snakes drown and then chained me to an orange tree while he watched the bombardment and considered what I’d said. The battle was mayhem he preferred not to miss, but I assume he found a minute to inform Bonaparte of my babbling about the Holy Grail. Night came, fires pulsing in Jaffa, but I got no food or water, just the monotonous thud of artillery. I fell asleep to its drums.
