by D. J. Niko
To her relief, after a short descent, her feet touched terra firma. She looked about, establishing that she was indeed inside a cave. She ran her hand across the stone. It was unyielding and had coarse edges, consistent with the feel of granite.
“Everything all right down there?” Daniel’s voice sounded faint from the top of the chute.
“Something’s definitely odd,” she yelled. “The stone is very different. I think at one point this cave was sealed.”
As Daniel made his way down, she marveled at the natural undulations and striations, the evolution of the land over the eons. Observing changes in the earth’s crust was one thing she loved about her work. The stones spoke to her, telling her of order and conflict, light and shadow, life and death.
She inhaled. Definitely charred earth. She moved her light, stopping on a patch of rock blackened by fire. It wasn’t particularly unusual. Shepherds and nomads frequently started fires in caves to keep warm—but only when there was good ventilation. This was another clue that the cave had once been open and later intentionally sealed. Question was, why?
She scraped a bit of the singed rock into a bag and continued looking around.
Her gaze stopped on the corner of a wooden box, shuttered with thick iron nails that had oxidized over time.
Daniel detached from the rope. “What have you got?”
She shone her flashlight across the length of her find. “A coffin.” She looked up at him. “This isn’t a cave. It’s a tomb.”
“Makes sense. The symbol outside, the pile of rocks. Someone was obviously trying to protect something.”
“Or hide it.” She ran her hand over the rough wood. A splinter wedged into her palm, and she jerked her hand upward. “Acacia,” she said, ignoring the sting. In Aksumite tradition, only paupers and ascetics were buried in acacia coffins. Which of the two lay inside?
“There’s something etched on the lid.” Daniel kneeled for a closer look. “Say, how’s your Ge’ez?”
Sarah had studied the characters of the ancient Ethiopian language that predated Amharic but was by no means an expert. She made an attempt to translate. “I recognize a couple of the words. This means light. That is the verb to be.” She shook her head. “That’s all I know, I’m afraid. But it won’t be hard to translate.”
She pulled a digital camera out of her pocket and photographed the engraving as well as the coffin from several angles. The ghostly blue light of the camera flash bounced off the walls like a lightning storm. She took wide shots of the length and width of the box and zoomed in on every detail from the grain of the wood to the rusted nail heads sealing it shut. As she photographed the latter, she paused and lowered the camera. “This is very odd,” she said as much to herself as to Daniel, who was measuring the dimensions of the coffin. She leaned in with a halogen stylus to examine the nails under the light. “Come have a look at this.”
Daniel pocketed the tape measure and joined her. “There are holes next to the nails.” He sounded surprised.
“Right. Which means this coffin has been opened before.”
“Looters.”
“Maybe …” She was skeptical.
“What are you thinking?”
Her mind traveled to the symbol at the entrance to the cave. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the same person who’d opened the coffin had sealed the tomb and inscribed the ideogram into the stone. But the thought hadn’t gelled in her mind, so she opted not to mention it at all. Instead, she stated the obvious. “It’s just that this is clearly the coffin of someone poor. What’s there to loot?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Even paupers had some belongings. A knife, a simple metal cross. Even the most mundane object would be of value to these rogues.” He pointed his flashlight into the hollows behind the coffin. “I’ll bet there’s something …”
“What?” Sarah snapped to attention, turning her gaze to the spot Daniel’s light illuminated. Her jaw dropped, and for a few seconds she forgot to breathe. The entire inner wall was covered in characters carved into the stone. She went in for a closer look. The symbols were utterly unfamiliar and were haphazardly rendered, as if the author had been in a hurry. Though she couldn’t understand a word of the script, she could sense the angst. “I’ve not seen anything like this,” she whispered.
Daniel studied the characters. “This is a type of Semitic script. A dialect of some sort. I’ve seen similar graffiti in Arabia on grave markers.”
“Could it be a religious script?”
“Not likely. It’s very simplistic. Look at the way the characters bend down, almost forming a spiral. Religious scripts are usually more sophisticated than this, more formal.”
Sarah pulled some onionskin and charcoal out of her backpack and traced the characters.
Daniel laughed, questioning her technique and reminding her that photos would give them a more accurate image of the work, but she wanted a physical, tactile record of the engravings and not photographs alone. It felt more real to her, closer to the intent of the inscriber. It was one of her quirks, and she was unapologetic about it.
“We should get out of here. Air quality is diminishing.”
There wasn’t enough of an opening for air to circulate through the cave. They had used up most of what little oxygen there had been. It was indeed time to turn back, but Sarah wasn’t ready.
“You go ahead. I’m not finished here.” She adjusted the brim of her cap and pointed it toward the cave drawings, describing what she was seeing. “Inscriptions occupying eighty percent of inner vestibule wall on north side of cave. Characters possibly consistent with a Semitic script.”
“What are you doing?”
She put her index finger on her lips to beg his silence, then pointed to a penlight under the edge of her hat’s brim.
“A video camera,” he whispered. “Now that’s genius.”
She reached under the brim again, turning off the camera. “I got tired of lugging around a video camera, so I designed this and had our technology department make it. It’s really handy in tight spots or whenever you can’t afford the extra weight. It can actually transmit to the Cambridge intranet. Brilliant, isn’t it?”
“Do you have a patent on that thing? ‘Cause everybody in the business is going to want one. Consider my order placed.”
“Here’s another one you might like.” She raised her left wrist. “See this Timex? It takes a licking and keeps on recording.”
“Voice?”
“Yes, indeed. I’ve had this one forever. Now that I have the camera, I don’t use it as much. But I keep it because I never know when I’ll need it.” She clicked on the upper button three times to arrive at recording mode. The watch face showed a digital screen with the usual recorder options, and she pressed another button to demonstrate how it worked.
“You Brits have all the gadgets.” Daniel laughed. “And I thought James Bond was fiction.”
She shook her head and turned the camera back on, scanning the cave and its contents to create a visual record. Even as her breathing became labored, she continued working. She always finished what she started, regardless of the conditions. It was the nature of the business: you got what you could the first time because there was never a guarantee of another chance.
She stopped only when she felt light-headed and had to steady herself against the granite wall. If she didn’t get out now, she wouldn’t be able to muster the strength for the ascent.
“Time to go,” Daniel said, clipping her harness to the rope. “I’m not taking no for an answer.”
Sarah nodded and pulled herself up through the chute, deliberately hyperventilating to increase the flow of air to her lungs and expel carbon dioxide faster. Her chest felt like it was pinned under a fifty-pound weight as she crawled toward the exit. Though nothing excited her more than being inside a tomb, she was pining for the world outside.
When she finally reached the mouth of the cave, she gasped. Waiting for Daniel to emerge, she slipped the ban
dana off her head and used it to wipe her eyes, which stung from the sweat and grime.
When she reopened her eyes, she saw a figure on the escarpment—an old man with leathery black skin, robed in white with strips of white gauze wrapped several times around his head. His bare feet were calloused and gnarled, like the trunks of the ancient kosso trees. A plaited leather cross hung around his neck.
“Who are you?” Sarah asked.
The old man’s voice was shaky as he spoke in Amharic. “You should not be here. You bring evil to this place.”
“We are archaeologists,” she said in Amharic. “Scientists. We have permission to be here.” She reached in her pocket for a copy of the expedition permit.
“You do not have God’s permission. You must leave at once or suffer the consequences. He is watching.”
“I beg your pardon. Who is watching?”
But the man did not reward her question with a reply. He spat on the ground where she stood and with surprising agility climbed the cliff. It obviously wasn’t the first time he’d made the trek.
Daniel emerged from the opening. “Blasted Brits. Would it kill you to make this opening a little wider?”
Sarah didn’t even register what Daniel said. She stared at him vacantly.
”What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. There was a man …”
Daniel looked around. “What man? Where?”
“Looked like a monk, but I couldn’t be sure. He wore a cross and spoke of God.”
“What about God?”
“He said we don’t have God’s permission to be here. That we bring evil to this place and should leave at once.”
“Well, we have the permission of the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture. That’s as good as God, as far as I’m concerned.”
“All the same, I think we’ve done enough damage for one day. We should get out of here.”
At dinner, Sarah was unusually quiet. She had mixed emotions about the find. On the one hand, her veins pulsed with excitement about the sealed tomb and the secrets it potentially held. On the other, she had defied Dr. Simon and the rules of the hallowed institution that employed her. Though fully aware the professor would be outraged, she couldn’t stop herself from forging ahead. This was her find, the result of her own intuition and initiative rather than a directive from the establishment. There was value in that, even if the learned men of Cambridge couldn’t see it.
After they’d cleared the table and delivered the dishes to the mess tent, Daniel pulled Sarah aside. “I’ve got something for you.” He held up a pair of tweezers.
She rolled her eyes but offered her palm anyway.
He put on his headlamp as a joke and went to work on the splinter. “You haven’t said two words all night,” he said as he flaked off epidermis to excavate the piece of acacia beneath. “What’s on your mind?”
“Oh, nothing.” She jerked her hand. “Hey … that hurt.”
He grinned mischievously and shrugged. “Sorry. It was an accident.”
She had no reason not to tell him. If anything, she needed every ally she could get. Her gut told her Daniel was not one of the corporate yes-men but rather someone who genuinely loved the business; she just hoped she was right. “I translated the Ge’ez text from the lid of the coffin.”
He looked up, his golden-brown eyes sparkling under the lamplight. “And?”
“And … it was a warning. It said, ‘Cursed be he who brings these bones to light.’”
Four
The bones lay on the laboratory table, mocking Sarah. She’d been unable to leave the lab since the crew had excavated the coffin and delivered it four days prior. She had no appetite. She slept on a chair, in fits and starts, and then only when exhaustion was too much to bear. She was interested in nothing but studying the specimen, making some sense of the facts before her. The pelvis indicated the body was that of a man. By the long, narrow shape of the skull, the high cheek structure, the square mandible, the angular nose, and the length of the arm and leg bones, she deduced he was not African. She looked at the measurements again: six feet two inches from crown to heel. Caucasian. Definitely Caucasian. The bones were intact, save for two areas: a broken right wrist and a break in the lower left rib cage. Sarah ran a gloved finger over the wound. The severed bone was sharp, untempered by time or the forces of nature. He must have died in battle or in a conflict of some sort. She imagined a spear had delivered the deathblow, a violent thrust to the chest just below the heart.
Returning her attention to the skull, she touched the curves: the aristocratic cheekbones, the dark hollows where eyes once were, the chin. The state of the teeth disturbed her most. Straight and impossibly intact, they couldn’t possibly have belonged to a male of ancient vintage. She had no clue as to the age of the specimen—the radiocarbon dating, which could take weeks, would tell her that—but she deduced from the coffin construction that he dated to the early centuries of the Common Era. The facts contradicted themselves, at least for the time being, driving her mad with curiosity.
“My word, what are you doing here so early?” Daniel’s annoyingly chipper voice stirred Sarah from her reverie.
She looked at her watch: four in the morning. “I couldn’t sleep. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m a serial insomniac. Comes with the territory. Is that tea?”
“That makes two of us.” Sarah poured some tea into a mug for him. Her hand trembled, and some of the scalding liquid spilled onto her knuckle. Instinctively, she dropped the mug. She grimaced, more in disapproval of her clumsiness than in reaction to the pain.
“He’s not going anywhere, you know,” Daniel said, nodding toward the coffin. “You ought to get some sleep.”
“I’m quite fine.” She immediately regretted sounding so defensive.
He squatted to pick up the broken pieces. “You’re not fine. You’re exhausted. You couldn’t even pour the tea without shattering my favorite mug.”
She exhaled. “You’re right. It’s just that I’ve been obsessing about our friend. I’ve been chewing on the facts all night and can’t make it rhyme.” She walked to the coffin, eyeing the specimen. “What would a white guy be doing in Ethiopia that long ago?” she asked, not necessarily expecting an answer.
“I’m not convinced it was that long ago. The earliest recorded whites in Abyssinia were Roman missionaries traveling to spread the gospel of Christianity. That was, what, fourth or fifth century? The average height of Romans back then was maybe five feet seven. This guy is pretty tall, too tall to be of that era. Besides, look at the dentition.” He walked to the coffin and pointed out the upper molars. “See this? That’s a filling of some kind. Now, are you willing to tell me a fourth- or fifth-century man had dental work done?”
The observation took Sarah by surprise. The only things she had noticed about the teeth was that they were straight and, quite remarkably, all there. She felt embarrassed and a little annoyed that Daniel had picked up on this detail first.
“Obviously, we won’t know for sure until we get the labs back,” he continued, “but I’d bet the farm we’re looking at a modern man.”
“I don’t know. What about the warning carved into the coffin? Ge’ez is an ancient language.”
“Ah, but it’s used to this day by Ethiopian Orthodox holy men for liturgies and study. That inscription was probably carved by someone in the religious community. You said yourself a monk told you to get the hell out of there. That’s no coincidence.”
“Okay. So the church doesn’t want the tomb excavated or the bones exhumed. Why?”
He rubbed the stubbly growth on his jaw. “It wouldn’t be the first time the church hid something. My guess is that this is no ordinary tomb, that it holds some ancient secret the monks, including your creepy friend from the mountain, are keeping to themselves. We’re the infidels as far as they’re concerned. They don’t want their precious inscriptions to fall into our hands.”
Sarah studied Daniel’s face. His eyes glowed
amber in the low lamplight, betraying a fierce intelligence. She recognized in him the same zeal for the business that she herself possessed. It impressed her and made her drop her defenses enough to allow that he might just be on her side.
“Speaking of the inscriptions, did you figure out what language we’re looking at?”
“It’s definitely Semitic, but I can’t place the exact dialect. There were so many Semitic dialects spoken in different parts of Arabia over a time span of a thousand or more years. We could be looking at anything. But here’s the part I don’t get: how did an obscure Semitic language from the other side of the Red Sea end up here? The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced we need Rada Kabede.”
“Who’s that?”
“A linguistics scholar in Addis. I worked with him on a project in Egypt. Sharp guy. I don’t know if he can whip out a speedy translation, but he can at least steer us in the right direction.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Do you trust anyone in Africa?” Daniel winked. “I’ve known Rada for years. My gut says he’s one of the good guys.”
“Your gut.”
“We may be scientists, but there’s no substitute for instinct in this business. You know that as well as I do.”
Sarah nodded. She didn’t disagree; it was just that her instinct told her something else. Still, Daniel’s proposition made sense. Any clue would make the trip to Addis worthwhile. Besides, she needed a break from the scenery. “Okay, I’m in.”
Through her fog of exhaustion, the road to Addis Ababa looked like an endless ribbon of parched red earth. The monotony of the surroundings and the steady vibration of Daniel’s Cruiser had the effect of a sedative. As they drove past the northern shore of Lake Tana, the legendary source of the Blue Nile, she took in the scenery. The mist-cloaked islands floating on lilac-gray waters that stretched toward a liquid infinity reminded her of ethereal watercolor images painted on rice paper. A small fleet of reed boats carried provisions from one shore to another. A dogged fisherman stood on his boat’s bow and cast his net, disturbing the stillness of the lake. The serene scene cradled Sarah in beauty, and she surrendered to the weight of sleep.