The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  ‘Personally I’m more interested in how often he washes and who does his laundry,’ Angela replied. ‘A single man, living on his own, who can’t leave the premises? The mind boggles. Still, at least we know he’s now up and about.’

  About ten minutes later, the guardian reappeared and walked out into the small area enclosed by the boundary fence around the chapel. He appeared to be in no hurry, which was unsurprising, as by definition he had almost nothing to do apart from praying beside the Ark, and all day to do it.

  ‘God, he must be bored,’ Angela said, watching him slowly walk over to where a man who looked like a local was standing, leaning on the boundary fence. ‘He probably looks forward to a chat because otherwise his life would be like solitary confinement.’

  The two men appeared to exchange greetings and then began a conversation together.

  ‘Should you do it now, maybe?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ Bronson replied. ‘They’re standing between us and the open door and there’s still a chance they might hear or see it. I’d rather he was further away and ideally down the side of the chapel somewhere. I’ll wait. We’ve got plenty of time.’

  Without making it obvious, they watched as the guardian talked to his visitor, the conversation apparently friendly and at times animated.

  ‘Perhaps he’s catching up on all the latest gossip,’ Angela suggested. ‘The other man isn’t a monk as far as I can tell. He’s not wearing a yellow robe, just the loose white clothes that most men wear here, so they’re probably not in a deep religious discussion.’

  Whatever they had been talking about, after about a quarter of an hour they separated, the visitor walking away from the chapel while the guardian slowly retraced his steps and vanished through the doorway.

  ‘Coffee break? An early lunch? Another prayer session with the Ark, or just a visit to whatever kind of lavatory I hope he’s got inside?’

  ‘No idea,’ Bronson responded, still watching the open door.

  It might have been the last option Angela had suggested, because less than five minutes later the guardian was back, again walking slowly around the enclosed ground within the perimeter fence. There was another man, this one probably a monk because of the yellow robe he was wearing, standing beside the boundary fence over to the right-hand side of the chapel, and the guardian made his way over to him.

  ‘We’ll give them a few minutes,’ Bronson said, reaching into the bag to pick up the controller and the nano-drone. ‘Just in case that bloke’s only come to deliver a short message or give him something.’

  But it was soon clear that it was going to be a longer conversation. There was nobody between Bronson and the perimeter fence in front of him, and the grounds around the two cathedrals were largely empty. He doubted they would have a better opportunity.

  He stood up and tried to look as if he was watching something on the screen of his mobile, his hand concealing as much of the drone controller as possible. He held the nano-drone in his other hand. It was so small it was completely invisible.

  He wandered towards the fence, not directly, but as if he was heading towards the new cathedral, which took him away from the guardian and the other man but kept him close to the chapel. When he reached the corner, he opened his left hand and activated the controller. With a faint buzzing sound, the nano-drone lifted straight up off his palm and climbed to about twenty feet above the ground.

  The limiting factor was battery power, and Bronson knew it. He took a quick glance around but nobody seemed to be paying him the slightest attention. He looked down at the screen of his smartphone, which was displaying a very clear image of the front of the chapel. He adjusted the controls. He was using the wireless controller rather than his phone because that was easier and gave him better range, and he’d selected the slower of the two speed options because that made the device easier to control. The open doorway seemed to accelerate towards him as the nano-drone approached it at a slight angle. He straightened it up just before it moved from the sunlight into the darkness beyond the doorway, and flew it straight into the chapel.

  He hadn’t known what to expect. The word ‘chapel’ suggested an open space, but the interior was more like that of a dwelling house. There were windows all round, so although it had looked dark from the outside, it was actually quite light in there. He brought the drone to a hover. The camera showed that it was in a hallway with two open doors on each side. He turned the drone to the right and steered it through the first doorway. That was a storeroom, probably for food judging by the look of the boxes and packets he could see. He reversed course back into the hall and steered the drone down the corridor towards the next doorway, but then changed his mind and again brought it to a hover. The image through the camera was very clear, and he thought he could detect something like smoke in the air. He rotated the drone through a complete circle, searching for the source. It seemed to be coming from the far end of the hallway, and he could only assume – and hope – that what he was seeing was incense and not, say, smoke from the guardian’s burning lunch.

  ‘Chris!’

  Angela’s voice was sharp and clear, and he looked up from the screen of his smartphone to see that the guardian monk had finished his conversation at the fence and was making his way slowly back in the direction of the chapel door.

  He’d hoped to have several minutes to explore, but now he had only a few seconds.

  He steered the drone through another doorway. He saw a simple, basic room equipped with a single bed, the sheets and pillows neatly stacked on it ready for it to be made later, a crucifix on the wall above the head of the bed and a small wardrobe at the other end of the room. It all looked clean and strictly functional.

  He quickly reversed direction, and as he did so, he saw a wisp of smoke coming from a half-closed door at the far end of the hall.

  He glanced sideways. The guardian was only a few yards from the door. At that moment, Angela trotted forward and called out to him. The monk stopped and turned to look at her. She was holding her phone in front of her, very obviously wanting to take a picture of the guardian, and calling out to him in English, which she knew he probably wouldn’t understand, to ask if she was allowed to do so.

  Bronson knew he had maybe twenty seconds left. He steered the nano-drone through the gap and into the room where the smoke tendrils were coming from.

  He found himself – albeit only virtually – in a very different place. The light level was much lower because heavy curtains had been pulled across the tall windows, and he could see burning incense sticks positioned around the perimeter and beside what looked like an altar at the far end of the room. He flew the drone directly towards it, brought it to a hover a few feet away and made sure that his smartphone was recording what he was seeing.

  In the semi-darkness, it was difficult to estimate dimensions, but there was a kind of low plinth that he guessed was about six feet long, four feet wide and perhaps a foot high positioned centrally at that end of the room. On it was an oblong shape. He couldn’t tell what it was because it was covered in a heavy, rich-looking material that appeared in the half-light to be a deep red in colour but shot through with threads of gold. It was obviously the focus of the room, in fact of the whole building, but what he couldn’t tell was whether or not he was looking at the Ark of the Covenant.

  What he needed was a measure of some sort, something he and Angela could use to estimate its actual size. He turned the drone on its own axis in the room, looking for something, anything, with dimensions he could use.

  He glanced again at the guardian, who was standing in the same spot, looking angrily at Angela and scolding her in what was probably high-speed and irritated Amharic for being too close to the chapel, for daring to address him and, quite probably, for being a woman. Then he turned away from her and began walking steadily towards the half-dozen wide stone steps that led up to the door of the Chapel of the Tablet.

  Bronson dipped the nano-drone and rotated it to see the
floor of the room. There was a rectangular carpet directly in front of the shrouded object, which was presumably where the guardian spent most of his time when he was in the building, on his knees and praying. Other than that, the room was devoid of furnishings.

  He looked back at the alleged Ark and moved the drone closer, focusing not on the wrapped rectangular object but on the incense sticks smouldering in front of it and on both sides. Each stick was in a separate small brass or bronze holder. That might be all he needed.

  He looked towards the guardian. He’d almost reached the top of the flight of wide steps directly in front of the chapel door. Even at the slow pace he was moving, he’d be walking into the building in less than ten seconds.

  Chapter 3

  Bronson steered the nano-drone out of the room and back into the hallway, turning it towards the open door, keeping it about ten feet above the floor. The hallway had a high ceiling and the door itself was probably ten or eleven feet in height. As the guardian monk stepped in through the doorway, he flew the drone through the open space directly above his head and out of the building. The man looked up, a puzzled expression on his face – he had obviously heard the buzzing of the rotors – then ducked down, perhaps thinking that it was an insect, and turned his head to follow the sound.

  The moment the drone cleared the doorway, Bronson climbed it to about thirty feet, where it would be completely inaudible to anyone on the ground and invisible against the blue of the sky, and steered it away from the chapel towards the spot where he and Angela had been sitting earlier.

  The guardian had turned around in the doorway and was looking up into the sky. After a few seconds he seemed to give a slight shrug, then turned away and stepped back into the chapel.

  Bronson made his way back towards Angela, shutting down the drone as he did so.

  ‘Did you get it?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘I think so, yes,’ he replied quietly. ‘We’ll talk later when we can watch the footage. Now I think we need to make ourselves scarce before the guardian starts to wonder if that really was a sodding great wasp or something else that passed him in the doorway.’

  He put the controller and the drone back into Angela’s bag and they made their way towards the new cathedral and then out into the street beyond. On their way back to the hotel, Bronson managed to lose the quadcopter, the control unit and the box in separate piles of rubbish, and then for safety he sent copies of the footage he’d captured to his and Angela’s email addresses from his phone.

  He didn’t think they were under any suspicion, because the actions of the guardian monk suggested that he thought he’d been passed by an unusually large insect that he hadn’t seen clearly and couldn’t identify. But it was important to behave normally, so he and Angela walked back to the hotel after their morning’s ‘sightseeing’, sat in the bar for a few minutes having a drink and then went into the dining room for lunch. Only after they’d finished and had their coffee did they head upstairs to their room.

  Bronson connected his smartphone to Angela’s laptop and they sat side by side on the bed to watch what he’d recorded.

  ‘That’s really not a bad picture,’ she said as the video began playing, showing the view as the drone accelerated towards the chapel.

  They watched in silence as the drone’s camera showed the interiors of two of the rooms and then headed towards the third door.

  ‘This is the one,’ Bronson said.

  The difference in ambient light was immediately obvious, but the pictures from the camera were still clear enough.

  ‘That’s the relic,’ Angela said as the drone came to a hover near the shrouded shape on the plinth. ‘We need scale, something to measure it.’

  ‘I know. The only other thing in there, apart from that prayer mat, are these incense sticks and the brass holders.’ He pointed at the laptop’s screen, where the incense and holders appeared in sharp focus. ‘We’ve seen pots like these in some of the shops here, and we know how long most incense sticks are, so maybe that will be enough.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Angela sounded doubtful. ‘But the one thing that’s really obvious to me is the shape. That looks like a fairly heavy material covering it, but if that is the Ark, then where’s the lid? What we’re seeing looks more like a regular box, but the lid should have the two raised figures of the cherubim on it. And that hasn’t. You can see that even with the cloth over it. And they wouldn’t separate the Ark and the lid. It comes as a piece.’

  ‘Look, let’s try measuring it, just to be sure.’

  Bronson ran the video backwards and then stopped it when he reached a particular image. He pointed at the screen.

  ‘That brass incense holder beside the box is probably no more than four inches tall, but let’s say three to give a margin of error. It won’t be what you might call high-tech, but it will give us an estimate of the size of the box.’

  He took a piece of paper and a pencil, held the paper against the image of the incense holder on the screen and made two faint pencil marks to indicate its height.

  ‘Right,’ he said, resting the paper on a magazine and using the pencil to thicken the two marks. He reached over to Angela’s laptop bag, took out a plastic six-inch ruler and proceeded to produce a very simple scale on the paper, marking it every three-inch equivalent, four for a foot and so on. In less than a minute he had the equivalent of six feet marked out on the edge of the paper.

  ‘Can you just remind me what the dimensions of the Ark were supposed to be,’ he said.

  ‘Burned into my brain,’ Angela replied. ‘It was fifty-two inches long, thirty-one inches high and the same wide.’

  ‘Right.’

  Bronson held the edge of the paper against the frozen image on the screen, measuring its length. He jotted a figure down and turned the paper through ninety degrees to estimate the height of the object.

  ‘You’re sure those figures are accurate?’ he asked.

  ‘As accurate as anything else in the Bible, yes. The dimensions come from the Book of Exodus and are given in cubits, obviously, along with very detailed instructions on how the Ark is to be made. In fact, the same dimensions are given twice in Exodus.’

  ‘Then that isn’t the Ark of the Covenant. We’ve probably underestimated the size of that incense holder, but if it was three inches in height, the length of the object, including the cloth that’s covering it, is no more than forty-three inches. Take away the cloth and you could probably knock at least a couple of inches off that because of the folds in the material, so we’re looking at something about forty inches long. That’s a foot too short for it to be the Ark. And the height’s wrong as well. That works out at no more than two feet.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Angela said, a note of triumph in her voice.

  Bronson ran the video forward a few frames, then backwards until he found a good shot of the top of the shrouded object and froze the image again.

  ‘This won’t be as accurate because the drone has moved,’ he said, using his paper measure again, ‘but the depth is wrong as well. I reckon that’s about eighteen inches, and it should be almost double that.’

  ‘The other thing you can see in this shot,’ Angela said, ‘is that the aspect ratio is wrong. The Ark was supposed to be two and a half cubits long, one and a half cubits high – thirty-one inches – and the same wide, which is a square cross-section. Without doing any measuring at all, you can see that this box is taller than it’s deep. The cross-section is oblong, not square. It’s not the Ark.’

  Bronson scrunched up the sheet of paper and lobbed it into the waste basket on the other side of the bedroom.

  ‘Good. I’m glad that’s out of the way. Can we go home now?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Angela said. ‘This afternoon we’re going to do the tourist bit and visit Lalibela. We’ve flown halfway across the world, so let’s do some sightseeing.’

  * * *

  Tens of thousands of pilgrims visit Lalibela every year. What draws them is a collection of monoli
thic churches constructed in an entirely unique way. At the ancient site of Petra in Jordan the ancient Nabataean people carved tombs and dwellings out of the rock cliffs, producing spectacular buildings as fine as anything found in ancient Greece or Rome, each one an architectural wonder in its own right.

  The ancient Ethiopians obviously decided to substantially increase the degree of difficulty in constructing their places of worship. Instead of building churches out of rocks or stones, or even hacking them out of cliff faces like the Nabataeans, they decided to construct their churches starting at the top. They carved them out of the bedrock, working vertically downwards. And as the buildings dated from about the twelfth century, their only tools would have been hammers and chisels.

  Each church is set within an open shaft carved straight down into the rock to form what is effectively an underground cathedral, a type of church found nowhere else in the world. It would be remarkable enough if they had constructed one such place of worship, but there are eleven of them, linked by tunnels and passages. The complex is named after the Ethiopian king Lalibela, and it’s been theorised that he was trying to replicate Jerusalem, albeit in a rather unusual way.

  ‘This is a weird, weird place,’ Bronson said as he looked across at a square opening in the rock in which sat Biete Giyorgis, the Church of St George, the flat top of the cruciform monolith marked by three crosses, nestling one inside the other and carved into the solid rock. And it wasn’t just a roughly cut lump of stone. The church gave every impression of having been constructed from below in the traditional manner, with decorations on the walls, carved windows and impressive doorways, the whole standing on a shaped plinth. But it hadn’t been.

  ‘You got that right,’ Angela said. ‘Let’s explore.’

  They wandered through the complex, down stone staircases and along narrow passageways, marvelling at the skill of the masons who’d done the work.

  ‘These may be churches,’ Bronson remarked. ‘Well, they are churches, but they could also be fortresses. They’d be really easy for just a small group of people to defend because the passages are so narrow and they’re the only way in.’