“Catch what?” Ned asked dubiously.
“Gage, I understand you have succeeded in using electricity as a weapon against Bonaparte’s troops.”
“As a necessity of war.”
“I think we’re going to need Franklin’s expertise when we near the Book of Thoth. Are you electrician enough?”
“I’m a man of science, but I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“It’s why we need the seraphim, Ethan,” Astiza broke in, more softly. “We think that somehow they’re going to point to a final hiding point the Knights Templar used after destruction of their order. They brought what they’d found beneath Jerusalem to the desert and concealed it in the City of Ghosts. The documents are enigmatic, but Alessandro and I believe that Thoth, too, knew of electricity, and that the Templars set that as a test to find the book. We need to draw down the lightning like Franklin did.”
“So I agree with Mohammad. You’re both mad.”
“In the vaults beneath Jerusalem,” Silano said, “you found a curious floor, with a lightning design. And a strange door. Did you not?”
“How do you know that?” Najac, I was certain, had never penetrated to the rooms we’d explored, and had not seen Miriam’s oddly decorated door.
“I’ve been studying, as you said. And upon this Templar door you saw a Jewish pattern, did you not? The ten sefiroth of the kabbalah?”
“What has that to do with lightning?”
“Watch.” Bending to the dust on the floor by our fire, he drew two circles, their edges joined.
“All things are dual,” Astiza murmured.
“And yet united,” the count said. He drew another circle, as big as the first two, overlapping both. Then circles upon those circles, more upon more, the pattern becoming ever more intricate. “The prophets knew this,” he said. “Perhaps Jesus did as well. The Templars relearned it.” Then where circles intersected he began drawing lines, forming patterns: both a five-sided and a six-sided star. “The one is Egyptian and the other Jewish,” he said. “Both are equally sacred. The Egyptian star you use for your nation’s new flag. Do you not think this was the intent of the Freemasons who helped found your country?” And finally, at the interstices, he jabbed out ten points, which made the same peculiar pattern we’d seen in the Templar Hall under the Temple Mount. The sefiroth, Haim Farhi had called them.
Once again, everyone seemed to be speaking ancient tongues I wasn’t privy too, and finding import in what I would have assumed was mere decoration.
“Recognize it?” Silano asked.
“What of it?” I said guardedly.
“The Templars drew another pattern from this design,” he said.
From dot to dot he drew a zigzagging, overlapping line. “There. A lightning bolt. Eerie, is it not?”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Their clues tell us to harness the sky if we wish to find where the book is. The lightning symbol is in the map we found here, and then there is the poem.”
“Poem?”
“Couplets. They’re quite eloquent.” He recited:
Aether cum radiis solis fulgore relucet
Angelus et pinnis indicat ore Dei,
Cum region deserta bibens ex murice torto
Siccatis labris arida sorbet aquas
Tum demum partem quandam lux clara revelat Quae prius ignota est nec repute tibi
Opperiens cunctatur eum dea candida Veri
Floribus insanum qui furit atque fide
“That’s Greek to me, Silano.”
“Latin. Do they not teach the classics on the frontier, Monsieur Gage?”
“On the frontier, the classics make good fire starter.”
“The translation of this document, which I found in my travels, explains why I was anxious to make your reacquaintance:”
When heaven blazes with the lightning of the sun’s rays
And with his feathers the angel points out at God ‘s command
When the desert, drinking from the twisted snail shell
Thirstily sucks up water with dried-out lips
Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part
Which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation
Lingering, divine bright Truth awaits him
The fool crazy for flowers, who also trusts with faith
What the devil did that mean? The world could avoid a great deal of confusion if everyone just said things straight out, but that doesn’t seem to be our habit, does it? And yet there was something about this phrasing that jarred a memory, a memory I’d never shared with either Astiza or Silano. I felt a chill of recognition.
“We must go to a special place within the City of Ghosts,” Silano said, “and call down the flames of the storm, the lightning, just as your mentor Franklin did in Philadelphia. Call it to the seraphim, and see which part they point to.”
“The part of what?”
“A building or cave, I’m guessing. It will become apparent if this works.”
“The desert drinks from a snail shell?”
“From the thunderstorm’s rain. A reference to a sacred drinking vessel, I suspect.”
Or something else, I thought to myself. “And the flowers and faith?”
“My theory is that is a reference to the Templars themselves and the Order of the Rose and Cross, or Rosicrucians. Theories of the origin of the Rosy Cross vary, but one is that the Alexandrian sage Ormus was converted to Christianity by the disciple Mark in 46 a.d. and fused its teachings with that of ancient Egypt, creating a Gnostic creed, or belief in knowledge.” He looked hard at me to make sure I’d make the connection with the Book of Thoth. “Movements fade in and out of history, but the symbol of the cross and the rose is a very old one, symbolizing death and life, or despair and hope. The Resurrection, if you will.”
“And male and female,” Astiza added, “the phallic cross and the yonic flower.”
“Flower and faith symbolize the character required of those who would find the secret,” Silano said.
“A woman?”
“Perhaps, which is one reason we have a woman along.”
I decided to keep my own suspicions to myself. “So you want to draw lightning down to my seraphim and see what happens?”
“In the place prescribed by the documents we’ve found, yes.”
I considered. “What you’re talking about is a lightning rod, or rather two, since we have two seraphim. We need metal to bring the energy down to the ground, I think.”
“Which is why our tent poles are metal, to mount your angels on. I’ve been planning this for months. You need our help to find the city, and we need your help to find the hiding place within it.”
“And then what? We cut the book in half?”
“No,” Silano said. “We don’t need Solomon to resolve our rivalry. We use it together, for mankind’s good, just as the ancients did.”
“Together!”
“Why not, when we have the power to do unlimited good? If the world’s true form is gossamer, it can be spun and shifted. That’s what this book apparently tells us how to do. And when all things are possible, stones can be shifted, lives lengthened, enemies reconciled, and wounds healed.” His eyes gleamed.
I looked at his hip. “Made young again.”
“Exactly, and in charge of a world finally run on reason.”
“Bonaparte’s reason?”
Silano glanced at Najac. “I am loyal to the government that commissioned me. And yet politicians and generals only understand so much. It is scholars who will rule the future, Ethan. The old world was the plaything of princes and priests. The new will be the responsibility of scientists. When reason and the occult are joined, a golden age will begin. Priests played that role in Egypt. We will be the priests of the future.”
“But we’re on opposite sides!”
“No, we’re not. All things are dual. And we are linked by Astiza.”
His smile was meant to be sedu
ctive.
What an unholy trinity. Yet how could I accomplish anything without playing along? I looked at her. She was sitting at Silano’s side, not mine.
“She hasn’t even forgiven me,” I lied.
“I will if you help us, Ethan,” she replied. “We need you to call down fire from the sky. We need you to harness heaven, like your Benjamin Franklin.”
CHAPTER 18
T he entrance to the City of Ghosts was a slit of sandstone canyon, tight and pink as a virgin.
The sinuous passageway was no wider than a room at its base, the sky a distant blue line above. The walls rose as high as six hundred feet, at times leaning in like a roof, as if closing like a crack in an earthquake. The embrace was disquieting as we walked with packs down its shadowed floor. Yet if rock can be voluptuous, this rose and blue barbican was a seraglio of rolling flesh, carved by water into a thousand sensuous forms as pleasing to the eye as a sultan’s favorite.
Much of it was banded into layers of coral, gray, white, and lavender. Here rock dripped down like frozen syrup, there it puffed like frosting, and in yet another place it was a lace curtain. The sand and rock wadi formed a crude road that dipped downward toward our destination, like a causeway to some underworld in a satyr’s dream.
And nature wasn’t the only sculptor here, I saw when I looked closely.
This had been a caravan gate, and a channel had been carved into the canyon wall, its dark stain making clear that it had once been an aqueduct for the ancient city. We passed beneath a worn Roman arch that marked the canyon’s upper entrance and strode silently, in awe, past niches in its walls that held gods and geometric carvings.
Sandstone camels, twice life-size, sauntered with us as bas-relief on the sandstone walls. It was as if the dead had been turned to stone, and when we turned the canyon’s final corner this ghostly effect was redoubled. We gasped.
“Behold,” intoned Silano. “This is what is possible when men dream!”
Yes, here the book must reside.
We’d been traveling to this place several days from Nebo. Our party had followed the Jordanian highlands, skirting green pastures on the high plateau and passing by the brooding ruins of Crusader castles, as forsaken as the Templars. Occasionally we dipped down into deep and hot mountain canyons that opened to sandy yellow desert to the west. Tiny streams were swallowed by the dryness. Then we’d climb up the other side and continue south, hawks wheeling in the dry thermals and Bedouins shooing their goats into side wadis, watching silently from a safe distance until we passed. The siege at Acre seemed a planet away.
As we rode I had plenty of time to think about Silano’s Latin clue. The part about the angels pointing seemed somewhat plausible, though what forces were at play was beyond me. What had jarred my memory, however, were the words “snail shell” and “flower.” The same imagery had been used by the French savant, and my friend, Edme Francois Jomard when we climbed the Great Pyramid. He’d said the pyramid’s dimensions encoded a “golden number” or ratio—1.618, if I recalled—that was in turn a geometric representation of a progression of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical progression could be represented by an interconnected series of ever-growing squares, and an arc through the squares produced the kind of spiral seen in a nautilus shell, or, Jomard said, in the arrangement of flower petals. My comrade Talma had thought the young scientist half addled, but I was intrigued. Did the pyramid really stand for some fundamental truth about nature? And what, if anything, did that have to do with where we were going now?
I tried to think like Monge and Jomard, the mathematicians. “Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation,” the Templars had written. This seemed like nonsense, and yet it gave me a wild idea.
Did I have a clue that would allow me to snatch the Book of Thoth out from under Silano’s nose?
We camped in the most defensible places we could find, and one evening we climbed a hillock to spend the night in the limestone remains of a Crusader castle, its broken towers orbited by swallows.
The ruin was yellow in the low sun, weeds growing from the crevices between stones. We rode up through a meadow of wildflowers that waved in the spring wind. It was as if they were nodding at my sup-position. Fibonacci, they whispered.
As we bunched at the half-fallen gate to lead our horses into the abandoned courtyard, I managed a whisper to Astiza. “Meet me under the moon, on the battlements as far from where we sleep as possible,” I murmured.
Her nod was almost imperceptible and then, acting as if irritated, urged her horse ahead of mine to cut mine off. Yes, to the others we were bitter ex-lovers.
Our own trio had made a habit of sleeping a little apart from Najac’s gang of cutthroats, and when Ned was deep into his lusty snores I crept away and waited in the shadows. She came like a ghost, wrapped in white and luminous in the night. I rose and pulled her into a sentry post out of sight of any others, milky moonlight falling through the arrow slit. I kissed her for the first time since our reunion, her lips cold from the chill, her fingers knotting in mine to control my hands.
“We don’t have time,” she whispered. “Najac is awake and thinks I’ve gone to relieve myself. He’ll be counting the minutes.”
“Let the bastard count.” I tried to embrace her.
“Ethan, if we go too far it will spoil everything!”
“If we don’t I’ll burst.”
“No.” She thrust me away. “Patience! We’re close!”
Damnation, it had been hard to stay on keel since leaving Paris.
Too much exercise and too few women. I took a breath. “All right, listen. If this lightning trick really works, you need to help me separate from Silano. I need time to try something on my own, and then we must rendezvous later.”
“You know something you haven’t told us, don’t you?”
“Perhaps. It’s a gamble.”
“And you’re a gambler.” She thought. “After we harness the lightning, tell him you’ll trade your share in the book for me. Then I’ll pretend to betray you, and go with him. We’ll abandon you. Act frustrated.”
“That won’t be hard. Can I trust you?”
She smiled. “Trust has to come from within.”
And with that she slipped away. We took care that the rest of the time we were as prickly as porcupines. I hoped it was truly a ruse.
We followed the old caravan tracks and I feared Ottoman patrols, but it was as if the clash at Mount Tabor had temporarily made Turkish forces disappear. The world seemed empty, primeval. We were trailed once by native tribesmen, tough little men on camels, but our party looked tough too, and poor to boot, hardly worth robbing. Najac rode to talk with them with his toughs, and they disappeared.
By the time we reached the city of the Templar maps, no one followed us at all.
We turned west and dropped from the edge of the central plateau toward the distant desert. Between us and that waste, however, was the strangest geologic formation I’d ever seen. There was a range of moonlike mountains, jagged and stark, and in front of them a boil of brown sandstone, lumpy and rounded. It looked like a frozen brew of brown bubbles, or wildly risen bread. There seemed no way in or around this odd formation, but when we came near we saw caves on it like a pox, a hundred-eyed monster. The sandstone, I realized, was dotted with them. Carvings of pillars and steps began to appear in the outcrops. We camped in a dry wadi, the stars brilliant and cold.
Silano said the paths we would tread the next morning were too narrow and precipitous for horses, so when the sky lightened we left them picketed at the canyon’s entrance with some of Najac’s Arabs as guard. I noted the horses were oddly nervous, neighing and stamping, and they shied from a wagon that had appeared at the edge of our camp sometime in the night. It was boxy but covered with tarpaulins, and Silano said its supplies included meat that made the animals skittish. I wanted to investigate, but then the morning sun l
it the escarpment and picked out its cracklike canyon and welcoming Roman arch. We entered on foot and within yards could see nothing of the world behind. All sound disappeared, except the scuffle of our own feet as we descended the wadi.
“Storms have washed cobbles over what was once an ancient road,” Silano said. “The flash floods boil most frequently this time of year, records say, after thunder and lightning. The Templars knew this, and used it. So will we.”
And then, as I have described, we came after a mile to the canyon’s other end, and gaped. Before us was a new canyon, perpendicular to the first and just as imposing, but this is not what amazed us. Instead, on the wall opposite was the most unexpected monument I’d ever seen, the first thing to be on a par in glory with the immensity of the pyramids. It was a temple carved from living rock.
Imagine a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, pink as a maiden’s cheeks, and not on it but in it, carved into its face, an ornate pagan edifice of pillars and pediment and cupolas rearing higher than a Philadelphia church steeple. Sculpted eagles the size of buffalo crouched on its upper cornices, and the alcoves between its pillars held stone figures with angel wings. What drew my eye weren’t these cherubim or demons, however, but the central figure high above the temple’s dark door. It was a woman, breasts bare and eroded, her hips draped with Roman folds of stony cloth, and her head high and alert. I’d seen this form before in the sacred precincts of ancient Egypt. Cupped in her arm was a cornucopia, and on her head the remains of a crown made of a solar disc between bull’s horns. I felt a shiver at this weird recurrence of a goddess who’d haunted me since Paris, where the Romans had built a temple to this same goddess on what is now the site of Notre Dame.
“Isis!” Astiza cried. “She’s a star, guiding us to the book!”
The Rosetta Key Page 21