They decided to consult the general catalogues of Alexandrian art, published by the museum for the city government and available in the database. There they had more luck. They found a bearded serpent wearing the pharonic crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt that closely resembled our drawing.
“Where was that work found, Professor?” The Rock asked, bent over the copy coming out of the printer.
“Oh, in… the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa.”
“Kom el-Shoqafa…? I think that I just saw something about that around here.” I retraced my steps to three wobbly stacks of back issues of National Geographic. I remember the article about Shoqafa because it sounded like konafa, the huge puff pastry with honey that Farag gobbled down.
“Don’t bother, Basileia. I don’t think Kom el-Shoqafa has anything to do with the test.”
“Why not, Professor?” the Rock asked coldly.
“Because I worked there, Kaspar. I was the director of excavations in 1998. I know the place quite well. If I’d seen that image from the Staurofilakes’ drawing, I’d have remembered it.”
“But it looked familiar to you,” I said, as I hunted for the magazine.
“Because of the mixture of styles, Basileia.”
Despite the late hour, they dove back into the catalogue of Alexandrian art from the last fourteen hundred years. They never seemed to get tired. Just as I came across the copy of National Geographic I was looking for, they’d come across a second important piece of information: a medallion with Medusa’s head on it. Judging from the captain’s exclamation—he’d just matched the crumpled, charcoal drawing with one on the screen—I knew they’d made a significant find.
“It’s identical, Professor,” he said. “See for yourself.”
“A Medusa from the late Hellenistic period? It is quite common, Kaspar!”
Yes, but this is exactly the same! Where is that relief?”
“Let me see… Hmmm…, in the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa,” he said very surprised. “How strange! I don’t remember it…”
“You don’t remember the god of wine’s thyrsus, either?” I asked, holding up the magazine, opened to the page with an enlarged reproduction. “Because it’s identical to the one on that disgusting animal’s rings and it’s in Kom el-Shoqafa.”
The captain shot out of his seat and grabbed the magazine out of my hand.
“It’s the same one, I have no doubt,” he pronounced.
“It’s Kom el-Shoqafa,” I confirmed.
“But that can’t be!” Farag objected indignantly. “The Staurofilakes’ test can’t be there. That funeral enclosure was totally unknown until 1900, when the ground sank suddenly out from under a poor donkey that happened to be walking down the street. Nobody knew the place existed, and there was no other entrance! It was lost and forgotten for more than fifteen centuries.”
“Like the mausoleum of Constantine, Farag,” I reminded him. He stared at me from across the monitor. He was sprawled back in his chair, gnawing on the end of a pen, an angry grimace on his face. He knew I was right, but he refused to admit he was wrong.
“What does Kom el-Shoqafa mean?” I asked.
“It’s the name it was given when it was discovered in 1900. It means ‘pile of rubble.’”
“That’s original!” I replied, smiling.
“Kom el-Shoqafa was a three-story, underground cemetery. The first floor was dedicated exclusively to funeral banquets. It was called that because thousands of fragments of drinking vessels and plates were found there.”
“Look, Professor,” the Rock pointed out, returning to his seat, still holding the National Geographic, “say what you will, but even the bit about the feasts and the dishes seems to be related to the test of gluttony.”
“True,” I said.
“I know those catacombs like the back of my hand. It can’t be the place we’re looking for. Bear in mind, they were excavated down to the rocky subsoil and have been explored completely. This overlap with certain details in the drawing is not significant. There are hundreds of sculptures, drawings, and reliefs throughout. On the second floor, for example, there are large drawings of the dead who are buried in the niches and sarcophagi. It’s impressive.”
“What about the third floor?” I asked, trying to suppress a yawn.
“It was also used for burials. The problem is, right now it’s partially flooded by underground waters. Anyway, I assure you it has been studied thoroughly and contains no surprises.”
The captain stood up and looked at his watch. “When are those catacombs open to visitors?”
“If I remember right, they open at nine thirty in the morning.”
“Okay, let’s get some rest. Let’s be there at nine thirty sharp.”
Farag looked at me, distressed. “Do you want to write those letters to your order now, Ottavia?”
I was really tired, no doubt on account of all the new emotions I’d been presented that first of June and the rest of my life. I looked at him sadly and shook my head.
“Tomorrow, Farag. Tomorrow we’ll write them, when we are on board the plane to Antioch.”
What I didn’t know was that we’d never get on the Westwind again.
At nine thirty on the dot, just as Glauser-Röist said, we were at the entrance to the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa. A bus full of Japanese tourists had pulled up in front of that strange, round house with a low ceiling. We were in Karmouz, an extremely poor neighborhood where numerous donkey carts drove down narrow streets. It wasn’t so strange that one of those poor animals had discovered such an outstanding archaeological monument. Flies flew over our heads in dense, noisy clouds and settled on our bare arms and faces with repulsive insistence. The Japanese didn’t seem to mind one bit the corporal visits of those insects, but they were getting on my nerves. I observed enviously as the donkeys shooed them away with effective switches of their tails.
Fifteen minutes after opening time, an elderly civil servant who must have been well past the age to be enjoying a well-deserved retirement, parsimoniously approached the door and opened it as if he didn’t see the fifty or sixty people waiting there. He sat in a little wicker chair behind a table that held several ticket books, muttered a gruff Ahlan wasahlan,* and gestured that we should approach in a single file. The guide for the Japanese group tried to cut in line, but the captain, who was half a meter taller than him, put his hand on the guide’s shoulder and stopped him cold with some well-chosen words in English.
Farag, being Egyptian, only had to pay fifty piasters. The civil servant didn’t recognize him, even though he’d worked there just two years before. Farag didn’t reveal his identity either. Glauser-Röist and I, being foreigners, paid twelve Egyptian pounds apiece.
Just inside the door, we came across a hole in the floor with a long spiral staircase excavated in the rock that left a dangerous hollow space in its center. We started our descent, treading carefully on the steps.
“At the end of the second century,” Farag explained, “when Kom el-Shoqafa was a very active cemetery, bodies were slid on cords through this opening.”
The first staircase ended at a sort of vestibule with a perfectly leveled limestone floor. There you could just make out, in the very bad light, two benches dug out of the wall and inlaid with seashells. This vestibule opened onto a great rotunda in whose center were six carved columns with capitals in the shape of papyrus. As Farag had said, everywhere around us there were strange reliefs in which the mixture of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman motifs bore an amazing similarity to the strange women in the Mona Lisa paintings by Duchamp, Warhol, or Botero. There were so many funeral banquet rooms that they formed a labyrinth of galleries. I could imagine a typical day in that place, around the first century of our era, when all those rooms would have been full of families and friends, seated on cushions placed on the stone seats, celebrating feasts in honor of their dead by torchlight. It’s amazing how different the pagan mentality was from the Christian one.
“In the begin
ning,” Farag went on to say, “these catacombs must have belonged to a single family. With time, some corporation must have acquired it and turned it into a place of massive burial. That would explain why there are so many funeral chambers and so many banquet rooms.”
On one side was an enormous crevice opened by a cave-in.
“On the other side is what’s called Caracalla Hall. In it we found human bones mixed with horses’ bones.” He ran his palm along the edge of the breach as if he were the owner of it all. “In 215 Emperor Caracalla was in Alexandria and for no apparent reason, he decreed a draft of strong, young men. After reviewing the new troops, he commanded that men and horses be assassinated.” *
From the rotunda, a new spiral staircase descended to the second level. If we thought the light on the previous level was bad, on this level we couldn’t make out anything except the scary silhouettes of life-size statues of the dead. The Rock automatically dug out his flashlight and switched it on. We were completely alone; the throng of Japanese tourists had stayed above. In this vestibule, two enormous pillars, crowned by capitals decorated with papyruses and lotuses, flanked a frieze in which two hawks escorted a winged sun. Carved in the wall, two figures, a man and a woman also life-size, observed us with empty eyes. The body of the man was identical to the figures in ancient Egypt: hieratic, with two left feet; but his head was in Hellenistic Greek style, with a very beautiful, extremely expressive face. The woman, on the other hand, wore an affected Roman hairdo on another passive Egyptian body.
“We believe they were the occupants of those two niches,” Farag explained, pointing down a long corridor.
The size of the chambers was impressive; their luxury and strange decoration surprised us. On one side of a door was the god Anubis, with the head of a jackal; on the other side was the crocodile-god, Sobek, also the god of the Nile, both adorned with loricas of the Roman Legion, short swords, lances, and shields. We found the medallion with Medusa’s head inside a chamber that contained three gigantic sarcophagi, along with Dionysus’s staff carved into one side. Around this chamber was a passageway full of niches; each one, according to Farag, had enough space to hold up to three mummies.
“They aren’t still inside there, are they?” I asked apprehensively.
“No, Basileia. Almost all the niches were stripped of their contents before 1900. As you know, in Europe, mummy dust was considered an excellent medicine for all types of illnesses, until well into the fourteenth century. Worth its weight in gold.”
“Then you can’t be sure there wasn’t another entrance in addition to the main one,” the Rock commented.
“It has never been found,” Farag replied, annoyed.
“A fortuitous cave-in,” the Rock persisted, “revealed the Caracalla Hall. Why couldn’t there have been another undiscovered chamber?”
“Here’s something!” I said, looking at a nook in the wall. I’d found our famous bearded serpent.
“Good, now all we need is Hermes’s kerykeion,” * Farag said, coming over.
“The caduceus, right?” the captain asked. “It reminds me more of doctors and pharmacies than messengers.”
“Because Asclepio, the Greek god of medicine, carried a similar staff but his had only one serpent. In a mix-up, doctors adopted the symbol of Hermes.”
“We’re going to have to go down to the third level,” I said, heading for the spiral staircase, “I’m afraid we’re not going to find anything else here.”
“The third level is closed, Basileia. The galleries are flooded. When I worked here it was already very difficult to study that last floor.”
“So what we are waiting for?” the Rock declared, following me.
The stairs going down to the deepest part of the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa were, indeed, closed off by a small chain with a metal sign saying no entry in Arabic and English. The captain, brave explorer that he was, never let convention stop him. He ripped the chain out of the wall and started down the stairway with Farag Boswell’s grumbling as background music. Above our heads, an advance team of Japanese tourists was excited about reaching the second level.
Right then, poised on the last step of the staircase, I noticed I’d stepped in a pool of lukewarm liquid.
“He who warns is not a traitor,” Farag joked.
The vestibule on that floor was a lot bigger than both of the upper vestibules and the water came up to our waists. I was starting to think maybe Farag was right.
“Do you gentlemen know what this reminds me of?” I asked in a joking tone.
“Surely it’s the same thing I’m thinking,” Farag shot back. “It’s as if we’re back in the cistern in Constantinople, right?”
“Actually that wasn’t it,” I answered. “I was thinking we never read the text of Dante’s sixth circle.”
“You two may not have read it,” Glauser-Röist rushed to answer contemptuously, “but I certainly did.”
Casanova and I gave each other a guilty look.
“So, tell us about it, Kaspar, so we know what’s going on.”
“The test in the sixth circle is much simpler than the previous ones,” the Rock began, as we entered the galleries. There was an intense stench of decomposition, and the water was as cloudy as the cistern in Constantinople. Fortunately, this time, its off-white color was due to the limestone, not the sweat of hundreds of fervent feet. “Dante utilizes the cone shape of Purgatory Mountain to reduce the size of the cornices and the magnitude of the punishments.”
“May God be listening to you!” I exclaimed, hopeful.
The reliefs on this level were as strange as those on the first and second levels. The Alexandrians of the Golden Age did not have religious problems or limiting beliefs. They left their remains in catacombs under Osiris’s watchful eye, yet decorated with reliefs of Dionysus. That well-developed eclecticism was the basis of Alexandria’s prosperous society. Sadly, all that ended when primitive Christianity, which violently rejected other religions, became the official religion of the Byzantine Empire.
“The sixth circle includes Cantos XXII, XXIII, and XXIV,” the Rock continued. “The souls of the gluttonous go around the cornice incessantly. On opposite ends of this cornice are two apple trees whose treetops are in the shape of an upside down cone.”
“That closely resembles the Egyptian papyrus plant,” Farag pointed out.
“Certainly, Professor. You could take that as a veiled reference to Alexandria. In any case, from those treetops hang abundant, mouthwatering fruits the penitents can’t reach. Plus, an exquisite liquor drips from them and they can’t drink it either. So they go around and around the cornice, their eyes sunken and their faces pale due to their hunger and thirst.”
“Dante must run into tons of old friends and acquaintances, as usual, right?” I asked. At the same time I thought I spotted the figure of the caduceus on the back wall of a chamber. “Let’s go that way. I think I saw something.”
“But how does he complete the test?” Farag insisted.
“An angel in red, flickering like fire,” the Rock concluded, “shows them the way up to the seventh and last cornice, and then erases the mark of gluttony from Dante’s forehead.”
“That’s it?” I asked, fighting against the water to advance more quickly to the wall where I clearly saw a large caduceus of Hermes.
“That’s it. Things are getting simpler and simpler, Doctor.”
“I’d give anything, Captain, for that to be true.”
“So would I.”
“The kerykeion!” Farag blurted out, putting his hands on the image the way a devout Jew puts his hand on the Wailing Wall. “I swear this wasn’t here two years ago.”
“Come, come, Professor…,” the Rock rebuked him. “Don’t be so proud. Admit you might have forgotten it.”
“No, Kaspar, no! There are too many chambers to remember them all, it’s true, but a symbol like that would have caught my attention.”
“They must have put it there for us,” I said i
ronically.
“Doesn’t it seem odd that we found the reproductions of the Medusa, the serpent, and thyrsus on the second floor and the one of the caduceus on the third floor, far from the rest?”
The Rock and I thought that over.
“Just a moment! What did I tell you?” said Farag, showing us the palms of his hands. They were covered in mud.
“The wall is crumbling,” the Rock added perplexedly, poking his hand in and drawing out a handful of doughy mortar.
“It’s a false partition! I knew it!” Farag said. He started to tear it down with such fury that he was soon covered in mud up to his eyebrows, like a little boy. By the time he was out of breath and sweaty, he had opened a big hole in the wall. I wiped my wet hand over his face several times to clean him off a little. He looked so happy.
“We’re so smart, Basileia!” he repeated, wiping plaster off his chin.
“Come see this,” the Rock’s voice said from the other side of the partition.
Glauser-Röist’s powerful flashlight lit up a spectacular sight. Below where we were standing was an enormous hypostyle room with numerous Byzantine columns forming long, vaulted tunnels. It was half submerged in a calm, black lake that gleamed in the captain’s beam like a moonlit ocean.
“Don’t just stand there,” the Rock said. “Get in this oil deposit with me.”
Luckily, it was just water collected in a dark tank. The off-white spot of water seeping smoothly from the catacombs stood out against the water in the tank. We squeezed around what was left of the mortar wall and climbed down four big steps.
“There is a door at the back of the room,” the captain said. “Let’s go over there.”
With the water up to our necks, we advanced silently down one of those corridors. You could have sailed a fishing boat down it without any problem. Clearly we’d come to the city’s old cistern. The Alexandrians stored drinkable water so they could survive the annual drought when the water level in the Nile dropped all the way to the delta, dragging along red soil from the south, the famous plague of blood that Yahweh sent to free the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.
The Last Cato Page 43