by Andrew Linke
The first three columns were merely a refinement of the translation that Diana had produced yesterday, working from the photographs supplied by the Senator’s contacts at the American Embassy. A few minor details had been filled in, especially at the bottom of each column where the text had been cut off in the photos, but the overall story remained the same.
From the fourth column onward the translated narrative was entirely fresh to Oliver, and the story revealed in Diana’s translation certainly captured Oliver’s attention.
According to the scroll, Pharaoh’s army had advanced across the desert in bronze chariots pulled by the strongest horses in the entire land. Led by the Pharaoh’s most trusted general, Sephor, the army stormed through the lands that had been conquered by the Hittite raiders, utterly destroying the forces left behind by the heathen invaders. Every Hittite man they encountered was killed and hundreds of woman and children were taken as slaves to be set to work rebuilding the ravaged lands.
All of this was described in such a triumphant tone that Oliver couldn’t help wondering if the campaign had actually been a terrifying slog of bloody battles and high casualties for the army of Egypt. He looked up to ask Diana if Egyptian historians were as prone to rhetorical spin as their European counterparts, but her chin had fallen on her chest and she was snoring softly. Oliver went back to reading her translation.
The Egyptian army’s advance was unchecked for nearly a month until one day they came to rest at the western ridge of a deep valley. Encamped across from them, arrayed in a line that stretched as far as the eye could see, was a vast army of Hittites, come to recapture the lands they had stolen and sweep into the Egyptian homelands. Throughout the night, messengers ran back and forth between these armies, the generals of each demanding that the other surrender and offer up a tenth of their troops as a sacrifice to the god of the opposing forces before delivering the remainder of their men to be slaves.
The battle began as the sun rose, sending its first beams of light coursing down the floor of the valley. The Egyptian chariots led the charge. So brightly was the bronze of their chariots polished that the sun reflected back off it with renewed brilliance, blinding the first wave of Hittites that they encountered. These were trampled under the feet of the horses and the Egyptian soldiers, emboldened by this obvious sign of Ra’s blessing on their cause, fought with a bravery unequaled in the world since that day.
Throughout the day the armies of Egypt and the Hittites continued to clash in that valley of glorious death. Not only were the Egyptians outnumbered more than ten to one, but the Hittite sorcerers continually rained down death upon them in the form of bloody rain, hail, and flies.
General Sephor knew this to be the work of the unholy relic that the great priest Amneth had uncovered and he feared for the fate of his army. He therefore kept one eye out for the source of these plagues, even as he led his men from the heart of the battle. Late in the day he discovered it in a group of three Hittite sorcerers, all standing around a staff of carved olive wood, which hovered in the air between them. These men dared not touch the staff itself, but continually made gestures and prayers towards it, as if the staff could hear them and be bent to their will.
The sorcerers were protected by a force of thirty men ringed about them, but Sephor, the Pharaoh’s most worthy general, took it upon himself to charge the group and capture this powerful relic for the glory of his Pharaoh and the salvation of his army. Single handedly, he slew each of the thirty guards, though swarms of flies surrounded him and bloody hail pounded down upon his head. Boils broke out upon his flesh, but that did not prevent him from slaying the first of the three sorcerers. Fleas sprang from the ground and covered his flesh, but he slew the second of the sorcerers without hesitation. And though he fought blindly through a sudden and complete darkness, while still beset by all of the previous afflictions, Sephor slew the third and final sorcerer with a mighty thrust from his sword. He then turned and took the staff in his own hands and commanded it to turn back every plague it had unleashed upon his men.
Liberated from the afflictions of the staff, the Egyptian army quickly annihilated what remained of the Hittite forces and turned back to Egypt to deliver the newly captured staff to the Pharaoh.
Upon receiving the staff from his most trusted general, the Pharaoh recognized it as that which had afflicted his benighted predecessor in the hands of the Hebrew Moses. He rejoiced at its capture and praised his most worthy general above all others in the land. The Pharaoh then ordered that a temple be constructed to the west of his capital in which the staff would be kept under the guard of Amneth, the priest who had scried the source of the Hittites’ unholy power. In that place the gods of Egypt would be perpetually worshipped in thanksgiving for granting Sephor victory over the foreign gods. He further ordered that Sephor be granted a vast tract of land upriver of the capitol, on which to build his estate.
The final lines of the scroll described how the Pharaoh, in his wisdom and mercy, sent messengers to the Hittites and their heathen king and offered a treaty of peace between the two nations. He would retain possession of the staff and all liberated lands, and, as an offering of life to the gods, the Pharaoh would spare the Hittites the death and humiliation of being enslaved. This offer was accepted and still stood as one of the many accomplishments of his, the greatest of all the Pharaohs.
Diana’s translation might have been rough, but Oliver was impressed at how quickly she had completed it. The story of Sephor’s victory over the Hittites was replete with hyperbolic descriptions, honorifics, and metaphors, but she had managed to not only translate the essential meaning of it in a mere few hours, but make it intelligible to someone like Oliver, who had purposefully neglected his Egyptian studies in favor of steeping himself in the legends of lands that had been less picked over by the first wave of professional archaeologists over a hundred years before he was born. He was familiar with the broad outlines of the land’s history, but couldn’t have told you the difference between Seth and Horus or where exactly one dynasty ended and another began. Despite his professed ignorance, Oliver had no difficulty following the narrative of the scroll.
Now that he knew the legend, Oliver would need to begin piecing it together with the known history of Egypt to determine what truth might exist behind the fantastical story. Many historians he knew would begin by discounting the magical elements of the scroll’s narrative and instead focus on clues that they considered more “reliable”, such as the names of the trusted priest and worthy general, description of the battlefield, and numbers of troops. Oliver, however, was more interested in the elements of the story that related seemingly magical events. In this case he was especially pleased because they were not merely random events that occurred to the hero of the story, but specific plagues ascribed to the manipulation of a magical object. Moreover, these events matched with the Biblical account of the plagues that the Hebrew god had rained down the the Egyptians.
The remarkable similarities between the magic of the staff described in the scroll and the events in the book of Exodus were exactly the sort of convergence of myths that Oliver looked for when tracking down a relic. The obvious explanation was that the scroll was a forgery, written to take advantage of the Exodus story, but Rais Karim had sworn that the scroll had been reliably dated by his agency while it was in their possession. This assertion, when combined with the clearly unnatural lack of aging of the material, served to make Oliver fairly confident that the scroll was as old as the legend seemed to indicate.
Oliver stood and stretched, then stepped over to Diana and shook her awake. She came around slowly, but responded enthusiastically to Oliver’s suggestion of a late dinner. They pulled on shoes and rode the elevator in silence, Diana still rubbing her eyes to wake up and Oliver contemplating what he had read. After they had settled into their seats in the hotel restaurant and ordered dinner, Oliver summarized his thoughts on why the story in the scroll seemed reliable. Diana listened to him, occasionally int
erjecting comments on how the linguistic makeup of the narrative supported Oliver’s theory.
Their main courses arrived and Diana and Oliver both fell silent again for a few minutes as they focused on eating. Neither of them had eaten a proper meal since breakfast, so Oliver was content to wait until after dinner to continue their conversation.
After several minutes Diana got a quizzical expression on her face and began tapping her fork gently against her plate. She took a sip of wine and asked, “How would the Hittites have gained control of the staff?”
Oliver looked up from his plate and chewed his food thoughtfully, nodding a little.
“Think of it,” Diana continued. “The staff was an important relic for the Hebrews as they came out of Egypt and began conquering Canaan. Wouldn’t they have preserved it?”
“You know Egyptian and Biblical archaeology better than I,” Oliver replied.
“Yes. I’m just thinking out loud here.” Diana paused to chew a mouthful of her dinner, her face contemplative. After a moment she said, “Now that I think about it, there is no actual mention of Moses’s staff in the Bible after his death. Some commentaries claim that it was passed down through kings of Israel, but there is no clear description of its fate until the staff supposedly surfaced in the possession of Sultan Selim I in the sixteenth century.”
“I know. I mentioned that to Senator Wheeler when he hired me, but we both agreed that it was unlikely that the Sultan’s staff was the genuine article. Egypt and the Holy Land had already been raked over by Christian and Muslim armies several times over by then, so something as significant as a genuine relic of Moses would probably have been carted off to the Vatican or a sultan’s palace long before then.”
“Exactly. So what would cause the genuine staff to disappear from the Biblical account and never again surface?”
“I’ve got a theory on that,” Oliver responded. He chewed a couple mouthfuls and sipped his wine before continuing. “The narrative you translated indicated that the staff was in the possession of a massive Hittite army, which used the staff to rain down plagues on the Egyptians.”
“Yes, but remember that the narrative is almost certainly embellished. There is no archaeological evidence for such an event occurring and the descriptions in the text are so overwhelmingly heroic that I’d wager that the scribe charged with writing down the official account made some rather drastic changes.”
“Of course. He had to make the Pharaoh’s army look good. It happened all the time in official histories, but there is usually some kernel of truth behind it all.” Oliver paused dramatically and waited for Diana to sigh and wave for him to go on. He grinned and continued, “Here’s my theory: There are mentions of the Hittites throughout the Old Testament. They are described as being one of the few civilizations that the nation of Israel was unable to conquer and there are also mentions of Hittite generals serving alongside the army of Israel under various kings. So what if the army described in the scroll consisted of a joint Hittite and Israelite force, and the ‘Hittite sorcerers’ were actually Hebrew priests?”
Diana pondered this for a moment before replying, “It would explain the presence of the staff at the battle.”
“And its disappearance from history.”
“But this is all conjecture, Oliver. How does it help us actually track down the location of the staff?”
“That’s where my speciality comes into play. I’ve got a hunch that if we cross reference the narrative in the scroll with what you were telling me in Paris about that painter’s brother...”
“Gabriel de Pujul.”
“Gabriel, right. What if his army unit somehow stumbled onto the trail of the staff? The scroll makes reference to the staff being placed in a temple that will be ‘eternally guarded’ against all invaders. Some of the horrors that Gabriel described to his brother might have been those guardians.”
“Or merely the ravings of a lunatic, driven mad by the desert, or war, or syphilis.”
Oliver smiled crookedly at Diana and leaned back in his chair, waiting for her to get his point.
“Okay. I get it. You’re pointedly not saying that I accepted a scroll being magically preserved for thousands of years just this afternoon, so why not take another step and believe that the monsters Gabriel encountered might be real.”
Oliver nodded.
“So what’s our next step?”
Oliver leaned forward and picked up his fork. “Let’s finish our dinner and get a good night’s sleep. In the morning we’ll go over the translation some more and compare it to your notes on Pujul’s letters and journal.”
---
Oliver woke the next morning to find Diana already hunched over her laptop at the table in his room. After a quick shower and a call to room service for some breakfast he joined her and together they dug into the mountain of reading that lay before them. Diana had brought scans of the entirety of Pujul’s published letters, as well as his journals and that of his brother, on her laptop. Oliver transferred a copy to his own computer and together they worked throughout the morning and late into the night, stopping only to rest their eyes and enjoy lunch and dinner at restaurants in the hotel.
As he pulled up yet another scanned letter, written in a precise but old fashioned French script, Oliver reflected that this was the element of relic hunting that you never saw in movies: The tedious slog through hundreds of pages of documents written in multiple languages. The dozens of pages of notes, half of them scratched out after being contradicted or surpassed by later discoveries. The careful comparisons of maps produced at various points throughout history. All of this had been made far easier by computers, which allowed Oliver and Diana to keep hundreds of reference works on their laptops as PDFs, to say nothing of online access to the collections of entire libraries. Still, this particular adventure didn’t come with a convenient treasure map, but with a series of vague clues and coincidences.
They continued in this fashion for several more days. Oliver was relieved that Diana didn’t complain about the work, but wasn’t especially surprised. She was, in fact, even more accustomed to the slog of academic research than Oliver, who had admittedly grown sloppy in the decade since his fall from academia. She still carefully documented every source and kept neat notes, as if she was preparing to write a thesis. Oliver hadn’t even tried to publish anything in years, so he tended to let his ideas run together and mix in his mind, on the theory that he would recognize patterns and connection in the sheer mass of data pouring into his mind.
Midway through the afternoon of the fourth day, Oliver stood up, cracked his knuckles, and pushed the lid of Diana’s laptop shut on her fingers. She jumped back in her chair and glared at Oliver.
“What gives?”
“It’s time to go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think I’ve got the location of Sephor’s estate.”
Oliver spun his own laptop around and showed Diana an annotated image of a map, with a small red circle located in the desert south of a large lake.
“What’s that?”
“Gabriel’s last few entries before the journal breaks off describe his army unit moving along the west bank of a large freshwater lake. They go fishing every night and enjoy eating their catch as, how did he put it, ‘the heavenly orb poured out its blood upon the waters.’ No shock that there was an artist in his family.”
Diana rubbed her eyes and yawned, then stood and went over to look out the window. She spoke while gazing out across the river. “I’ve read that passage before. It’s the last entry before he stopped writing for nearly a month. The next one comes around the same time that he sent a letter to his brother in France, describing his services to Napoleon.”
“And it’s also the last entry that doesn’t have at least some reference to his recurring nightmares or the terrors of the desert.”
“So you think that you’ve found where he was when he wrote this?”
Oliver nodded and tapp
ed the red circle on the screen of his laptop. “Yep. I compared the pace they seemed to be keeping, according to the journal entries, with the description of the property with which Sephor was rewarded for capturing the staff. There is an ancient estate there that was explored by archaeologists about twenty years ago, but they abandoned it when their leader and one of the crew disappeared without a trace.”
“So why didn’t your predecessors find any clues to the staff?”
“I don’t know, but if this isn’t Sephor’s estate, we might as well pack up and head home. It’s the closest match we have to the location that Gabriel Pujul may have explored, so I say we give it a shot.”
Diana appeared to ponder this for a moment. She stepped away from the window and pulled Oliver’s computer over in front of her, then began examining his notes.
Oliver waited quietly. He was certain she would be happy to go along with him, but knew better than to press her. He figured that Diana would probably be sulky about him finding the correlation between Gabriel’s journal, the scroll, and the archaeological dig maps first, but soon enough the thrill of exploring an ancient ruin would overcome that. She was just as accustomed to working alone as he was and, to be honest, he would have been a little jealous too if she had made the connection first.
After several minutes of double-checking his work, Diana nodded and leaned back in her seat. “Alright, it makes sense. When do we leave?”
Chapter Ten
That afternoon, Oliver secured a single small room at an inexpensive tourist hotel down the street from the Sofitel and stashed what supplies they weren’t bringing along in a locked case in the closet. He booked the hotel room for a week and scattered several bits of laundry and surplus camera gear about the room to make it appear to all but the most observant maid that they were occupying the room. If all went well, Oliver expected them to be back within four or five days. They spent one last night enjoying the fine food and comfortable lodgings of the Hotel Sofitel, then checked out early the next morning.