The Rosetta Key

by William Dietrich

  “On the contrary, learned doctors in France and Germany believe electric shocks may be able to cure illness or madness.” But since everyone knows physicians kill more than they cure, Jericho’s neighbors were hardly impressed by this promise.

  Miriam also remained dubious. “It seems like a lot of trouble just to sting someone.”

  “But why does it sting? That’s what Ben Franklin wanted to understand.”

  “It comes from your cranking, does it not?”

  “But why? If you churn milk or hoist a well bucket, do you get electricity? No, there is something special here, which Franklin thought might be the force that animates the universe. Perhaps electricity animates our souls.”

  “That is blasphemous!”

  “Electricity is in our bodies. Electricians have tried to animate dead criminals with electricity.”

  “Ugh!”

  “And their muscles actually moved, though their spirits had departed. Is electricity what gives us life? What if we could harness that force the way we harness fire, or the muscles of a horse? What if the ancient Egyptians did? The person who knew how might have unimaginable power.”

  “And is that what you seek, Ethan Gage? Unimaginable power?”

  “When you’ve seen the pyramids, you wonder if men didn’t have such power in the past. Why can’t we relearn it today?”

  “Perhaps because it caused more harm than good.”

  Meanwhile, Jerusalem worked its own spell. I don’t know if human history can soak into soil like winter rain, but the places I visited had a palpable, haunting sense of time. Every wall held a memory, every lane a story. Here Jesus fell, there Solomon welcomed Sheba, into this square the Crusaders charged, and across that wall Saladin took the city back. Most extraordinary was the southeastern corner of the city, consisting of a vast artificial plateau built atop the mount where Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac: the Temple Mount. Built by Herod the Great, it’s a paved platform a quarter mile long and three hundred yards wide that covers, I was told, thirty-five acres. To hold a mere temple? Why did it have to be so big? Was it covering something— hiding something—more critical? I was reminded of our endless speculation about the true purpose of the pyramids.

  Solomon’s Temple was on this mount until first the Babylonians and then the Romans destroyed it. And then the Muslims built their golden mosque on the same spot. On the south end was another mosque, El-Aqsa, its form distorted by Crusader additions. Each faith had tried to leave its stamp, but the overall result was a serene emptiness, elevated above the commercial city like heaven itself. Children played and sheep grazed. I’d stride up sometimes through the Chain Gate and stroll its perimeter, viewing the surrounding hills with my little spyglass. The Muslims left me alone, whispering that I was a genie who tapped dark powers.

  Despite my reputation, or perhaps because of it, I’d occasionally be allowed to enter the blue-tiled Dome of the Rock itself, taking off my boots before stepping on its red and green carpet. Perhaps they hoped I’d convert to Islam. The dome was held up by four massive piers and twelve columns, its interior decorated with mosaics and Islamic script. Beneath it was the sacred rock, Kubbet es-Sakhra, root stone of the world, where Abraham had offered to sacrifice his son, and where Muhammad had ascended for a tour of heaven. There was a well on one side of the rock, and reportedly a small cave underneath it. Was anything hidden there? If this was where Solomon’s Temple once stood, wouldn’t any Hebrew treasures have been secreted in the same place? But none were allowed to descend to the cave, and when I lingered too long, a Muslim caretaker would shoo me away.

  So I speculated, and labored with Jericho to beat out horseshoes, sickles, fire tongs, hinges, and all the sundry hardware of everyday life.

  I had ample opportunity to interrogate my host.

  “Are there any underground places in this city where something valuable might be hidden for a long time?”

  Jericho barked a laugh. “Underground places in Jerusalem? Every cellar leads to a maze of abandoned tunnels and forgotten streets. Don’t forget that this city has been sacked by half the world’s nations, including your own Crusaders. So many throats have been cut that the groundwater should be blood. It is ruin built atop ruin atop ruin, not to mention a honeycomb of caves and quarries. Underground? There may be more Jerusalem down there than up here!”

  “This thing I’m looking for was brought by the ancient Israelites.”

  He groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re looking for the Ark of the Covenant! That’s a lunatic’s myth. It may have been in Solomon’s Temple once, but there’s been no mention of it since Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Jews into exile in 586 b.c .”

  “No, no, I don’t mean that. ” But I did mean it, or at least hope that the ark could lead me to the Book, or that they were one and the same.

  “Ark” means “box,” and the Ark of the Covenant was supposedly the gold-plated acacia wood box where the Hebrews who escaped from Egypt kept the Ten Commandments. By reputation it had mysterious powers and was a help in defeating their enemies. Naturally I wondered if the Book of Thoth was in the container as well, since Astiza believed Moses had taken it. But I said none of this, yet.

  “Good. It would take you all of eternity to dig up Jerusalem, and I suspect in the end you’d have no more than when you started. Crawl down holes if you will, but all you’ll find are pot shards and rat bones.”

  Miriam was a quiet woman, but gradually I realized that this quiet was a veil over a keen intelligence, with intense curiosity about the past. As different as she and Astiza were in personality, in intellect they were twins. In the early days of my stay she cooked and served our meals but ate apart. It wasn’t until I’d worked awhile with Jericho at his forge, winning some small measure of trust, that I was able to cajole the two of them into letting her join us at the table. We weren’t Muslims bound to segregate the sexes, after all, and their reluctance was curious. At first she spoke only when spoken to—she was again the opposite of Astiza in that way—and seemed to have little in need of saying. As I’d suspected, she was truly lovely—a beauty that always put me in mind of fruit and cream—but only with reluctance did she shed her scarf at table. When she did, her hair was a golden waterfall, as light as Astiza’s was dark, her neck high, her cheeks lovely. I continued to pride myself on my chastity (since trying to find an adventuress in Jerusalem was like trying to find a virgin in the card cozies of Paris, I might as well take satisfaction in my enforced virtue) but I was astonished that this beauty hadn’t already been swept off by some persistent swain. At night I could hear the sounds of her splashing as she carefully bathed while standing in a wooden tub, and I couldn’t help but wonder about her breasts and belly, the roundness of her rump, and the slim strong legs that my all-too-frustrated brain imagined, runnels of soapy water cascading down the perfect topography of her thighs and calves and ankles. And then I’d groan, try to think about electricity, and finally resort to my fist.

  At supper Miriam enjoyed our talk, her eyes quick and lively.

  Brother and sister were people who’d seen some of the world, and so they enjoyed my own stories of life in Paris, growing up in America, my early fur-trading forays on the Great Lakes, and my journeys down the Mississippi to New Orleans and to the Caribbean Sugar Isles. They were curious about Egypt as well. I didn’t tell them about the secrets of the Great Pyramid, but I described the Nile, the great land and sea battles of the year before, and the Temple of Dendara that I’d visited far to the south. Jericho told me more of Palestine, of Galilee where Jesus walked, and of the Christian sites I might visit on the Mount of Olives. After some hesitation, Miriam began to make shy suggestions as well, hinting that she knew a great deal more about historic Jerusalem than I would have guessed—more, in fact, than her brother. Not only could she read—rare enough for a woman in Muslim lands—but she did read, avidly, and spent much of her quiet days, shielded from men and free from children, in study of books she bought
in the market or borrowed from the nunneries.

  “What are you reading?” I’d ask her.

  “The past.”

  Jerusalem was a place pregnant with the past. I roamed the hills outside the walls in chilly winter, when the light cast long shadows across anonymous ruins. Once the bitter wind brought light snow, the white coverlet followed by pale blue skies, and a sun as heatless as a kite. It lit the landscape into sugar.

  Meanwhile work on the rifle proceeded, and I could tell Jericho was enjoying the craftsmanship required. When the barrel was completely forged we drilled it out to the correct diameter, I turned the hand crank while he fed the clamped barrel toward me. It’s hard work.

  When that was done he stretched a line through its bore, drawing it tight with a bent bow, and then sighted down its middle for shadows and ridges that would signal imperfections. Adept heating and hammering made the tube even straighter.

  The grooved rifling that would spin the bullet was painstaking.

  There were seven grooves, each cut by a bit rotated through the barrel.

  Since it could not cut deeply, the bit had to be hand-twisted through the gun two hundred times per groove.

  That was only the beginning. There was polishing, the bluing of the metal, and then the myriad metal parts for the flintlock, trigger, patch box, ramrod, and so on. My hands helped, but the skill was pure Jericho, his meaty paws able to produce results worthy of a maiden with a needle. He was happiest when silently working.

  Maid Miriam surprised me one day by asking to measure my arm and shoulder. She, it turned out, would shape the rifle’s stock, which has to be fitted to the rifleman’s size like a coat. She’d volunteered for the job. “She has an artist’s eye,” Jericho explained. “Show her the drop and offset you want in the stock.” There was no maple in Palestine, so she used desert acacia, the same wood used in the ark: heavier than I preferred, but hard and tight-grained. After I’d roughly sketched how I wanted the wood to differ from the design of Arab firearms, she translated my suggestion into graceful curves, reminiscent of Pennsylvania. When she measured my size to get the dimensions of the butt right, I trembled like a schoolboy at the touch of her fingers.

  That’s how chaste I’d become.

  So I existed, sending vague political and military assessments to Smith that would have confused any strategist foolish enough to pay attention to them, until finally one evening our supper was interrupted by a hammering at Jericho’s door. The blacksmith went to check, and came back with a dusty, bearded traveler from the day’s market caravan. “I bring the American word from Egypt,” the visitor announced.

  My heart hammered in my breast.

  We sat him at the plain wood trestle table, gave him some water—he was Muslim, and refused any wine—and some olives and bread.

  While he gave uneasy thanks for our hospitality and ate like a wolf, I waited apprehensively, surprised at the flood of emotion rushing through my veins. Astiza had shrunken in memory during these weeks with Miriam. Now feelings buried for months pounded in my head as if I were still holding Astiza, or watching her desperately dangle on a rope below. I flushed impatiently, feeling the prickle of sweat. Miriam watched me.

  There were the obligatory greetings, wishes for prosperity, thanks to the divine, a report on health—”How are you?” is one of the most profound queries of my age, given the prevalence of gout, ague, dropsy, chilblains, ophthalmia, aches, and faints—and recitation of the hardships of the journey.

  Finally, “What news of this man’s woman friend?”

  The messenger swallowed, flicking bread crumbs from his beard.

  “There are reports of a French balloon lost during the October revolt in Cairo,” he began. “Nothing about the American aboard; he is said to have simply disappeared, or deserted from the French army. There are a number of stories placing him at this location or that, but no agreement about what happened to him.” He glanced at me, then down at the table. “No one confirms his story.”

  “But surely there are reports of the fate of Count Silano,” I said.

  “Count Alessandro Silano has similarly disappeared. He was reported investigating the Great Pyramid, and then vanished. Some suspect he may have been killed in the pyramid. Others think that he returned to Europe. The credulous think he disappeared by magic.”

  “No, no!” I objected. “He fell from the balloon!”

  “There is no report of that, effendi. I am only telling you what is being said.”

  “And Astiza?”

  “We could find no trace of her at all.”

  My heart sank. “No trace?”

  “The house of Qelab Almani, the man you call Enoch, where you claimed to have stayed, was empty after his murder and has since been requisitioned as a French barracks. Yusuf al-Beni, who you said hosted this woman in his harem, denies that she ever stayed there. There was rumor of a beautiful woman accompanying General Desaix’s expe-ditionary force to Upper Egypt, but if so, she too vanished. Of the wounded Mameluke Ashraf that you mentioned, we heard no word.

  No one remembers Astiza’s presence in either Cairo or Alexandria.

  There is soldier talk of an attractive woman, yes, but no one claims to have seen her, or known her. It is almost as if she never existed.”

  “But she fell into the Nile too! An entire platoon saw it!”

  “If so, my friend, she must never have emerged. Her memory is like a mirage.”

  I was stunned. Her death, the burial of her drowned body, I had braced for. Her survival, even if she was imprisoned, I had hoped for.

  But her complete disappearance? Had the river carried her away, never to be seen again or decently buried? What kind of answer was that?

  Silano gone too? That was even more suspicious. Had she somehow survived and gone with him? That was even greater agony!

  “You must know something more than that! My God, the entire army knew her! Napoleon remarked on her! Key savants took her on their boat! Now there’s no word at all?”

  He looked at me with sympathy. “I am sorry, effendi. Sometimes God leaves more questions than answers, does he not?”

  Humans can adapt to anything but uncertainty. The worst monsters are the ones we haven’t yet encountered. Yet here I was, hearing her last words that rang in my head, “Find it!” and then her cutting the rope, falling away with Silano, the screams, the blinding sun as the balloon soared away … was it all just a nightmare? No! It had been as real as this table.

  Jericho was looking at me gloomily. Sympathy, yes, but also the knowledge that the Egyptian woman had kept me at a distance from his sister. Miriam’s gaze was more direct than it ever had been before, and in her eyes I read sorrowful understanding. In that instant I realized she’d lost someone too. This was why no suitors were encouraged, and why her brother remained her closest companion. We were all bonded by grief.

  “I just wanted a clear answer,” I whispered.

  “Your answer is, what is past is past.” Our visitor stood. “I am sorry that I could not bring better news, but I am only the messenger. Jericho’s friends will keep their ears open, of course. But do not hope. She is gone.”

  And with that, he, too, left.

  CHAPTER 6

  M y first reaction was to depart Jerusalem, and the cursed East, immediately and forever.

  The bizarre odyssey with Bonaparte—escaping Paris, sailing from Toulon, the assault on Alexandria, meeting Astiza, and on and on through horrific battles, the loss of my friend Antoine Talma, and the bitter secret of the Great Pyramid—was like a mouthful of ashes.

  Nothing had come of it—no riches, no pardon for a crime in Paris I’d never committed, no permanent membership with the esteemed savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s expedition, and no lasting love with the woman who’d entranced and bewitched me. I’d even lost my rifle! My only real reason for coming to Palestine was to learn Astiza’s fate, and now that word was that there was no word (could any message be crueler?) my mission seemed f
utile. I didn’t care about the coming invasion of Syria, the fate of Djezzar the Butcher, the career of Sir Sidney Smith, or the political calculations of Druze, Matuwelli, Jew, and all the rest trapped in their endless cycles of revenge and envy. How had I found myself in such a crazy necropolis of hatred? It was time to go home to America and start a normal life.

  And yet … my resolution to get out and be done was paralyzed by the very fact of not knowing. If Astiza seemed not alive, neither was she definitely dead. There was no body. If I sailed away I’d be haunted the rest of my life. I had too many memories of her—of her showing me the star Sirius as we sailed up the Nile, her help in wrestling down Ashraf during the fury of the Battle of the Pyramids, her beauty when seated in Enoch’s courtyard, or her vulnerability and eroticism when chained at the Temple of Dendara. And then possessing her body by the banks of the Nile! With a century or two to spare you might get over memories like that—but you wouldn’t forget them. She haunted me.

  As for the Book of Thoth, it might well be a myth—all we’d found in the pyramid, after all, was an empty repository for it, and perhaps Moses’ taunting staff—and yet what if it wasn’t, and really rested somewhere under my feet? Jericho was nearing completion on a rifle that I’d had a hand in building, and which seemed likely to be superior to the one I’d lost. And then there was Miriam, who I guessed had suffered a tragic loss before mine, and who was a partner in sorrow.

  With Astiza vanished, the woman whose house I shared, whose food I ate, and whose hands were shaping the wood of my own weapon, suddenly seemed more wondrous. Who did I have to return to in America? No one. So despite my frustration I found myself deciding to stay a little longer, at least until the gun was completed. I was a gambler, who waited for a turn of the cards. Maybe a new card would come now.

  And I was curious who Miriam had lost.

  She treated me with proper reserve as she had before, and yet our eye contact lingered longer now. When she set my plate she stood perceptibly closer, and the tone of her voice—was it my imagination?—was softer, more sympathetic. Jericho was watching both of us more closely, and would sometimes interrupt our conversations with gruff interjections. How could I blame him? She was a beautiful helpmate, loyal as a hound, and I was a shiftless foreigner, a treasure hunter with an uncertain future. I couldn’t help but dream of having her, and Jericho was a man too: he knew what any man would wish.