The local taxis did not run after nightfall, Islamic custom not allowing them to work through the night unless contracted in advance. With nothing further to do that night, the group found a hotel on the edge of the airport and tried to get some rest.
Carl did not sleep well, waking many times. His mind continued to play the events of the past few days repeatedly, as he attempted to find a calming thought that would allow him relaxation. After hours of listlessness, he gave up and went downstairs. He drank coffee to pass time, as he flipped the note of paper he carried. His thoughts raced with everything transpired. The artefacts they still carried, walking into the Talpyiot tomb, seeing the ossuaries of the early Christians, and now preparing to enter the final resting place of the Ark.
Carl thought about how finding it would be the greatest archaeological moment in history. Not the pitiable, religiously inspired, token copy created to placate the Israelite priests, but the real one. He thought about the people who created it and about what may have happened to them. His gut instinct was to call them Philistines; the name used in the Bible for the ancient race of seafarers Abraham, Moses, and the other patriarchs of the Old Testament encountered on their travels.
Carl knew many scholars would challenge him on that belief, but they would be wrong. There were two sets of Philistines mentioned in the Bible, not one. The second group most likely stole the name from the first, as one civilisation existed nearly eight hundred years before the founding of the other.
Carl knew there was but one man in the Bible who could conceivably be the source of the information for these people. Ophiuchus could logically be just one man, and he could still be alive. He was close to not only finding the Ark, but also shaking hands with one of its creators. The world’s only immortal; a living, breathing member of a lost civilisation.
Carl’s mind continued to wander, as time drifted lazily by, coffee after coffee imbibed in the complete stillness of enraptured reasoning.
Carl was so lost to his thoughts he never noticed Justin and Louisa join him at the table until after their breakfasts arrived.
“That smells good.” said Carl, snapping out of his thought induced coma.
“Back with us, are you?” said Justin, tucking into his Eggs Benedict.
“Sorry, I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah, we know.” said Louisa, pouring herself a large glass of fresh orange juice. “I’ve said hello twice and we’ve been at the table five minutes.”
“Oh, really sorry. Obviously musing a little too much.”
Chris walked down and looked at his watch. “This has to be a first. Quarter to five in the morning and I’m the last one up.”
Carl laughed heartily, as a server took his breakfast order. “I was always last up at reveille. I’ve done more sit-ups in my time for not being able to get my fanny out of bed than I can count!”
The group shared small talk as they ate, their once dour mood lightened. Justin looked refreshed are raring to go, and Louisa’s clean skin and neatly tied hair belied her enjoyment of the bath she had craved so long.
After they finished eating, Carl bought enough water for their trip. Paying their tab, he made sure they had everything they needed and walked out to a waiting taxi.
“Ihnasiyyah al-Madinah, Faiyum.” said Carl, settling into the front seat with the stolen tube of electronics across his lap. “Min fadlek.”
“Where are we heading?” asked Chris.
“The Faiyum oasis and Crocodilopolis. You might want to keep your eyes out as we travel through Cairo. On our way to the oasis, we’ll pass through the city and also near the pyramids at Giza. If you haven’t seen Egypt’s tourist attractions before now’s your chance.”
The taxi travelled through the heaving throngs of cars that drove frantically, and dangerously, through the centre of the city. Every now and again, an ancient obelisk or portion of temple reared up out of the ground between the densely packed, partially finished, breezeblock apartments, which lined every available inch of space. As the houses became newer and better constructed, a strange phenomenon began to appear. It was possible to see portions of unimaginably old, intricately carved, granite pillars used as lintels or as slabs for pathways; this seemingly innocuous act of disrespect for antiquity reminding Carl of why so little remained of the truly, remarkably ancient.
As they finally made their way to the far side of Cairo and the view cleared, Carl pointed into the distance. All around them on the horizon, as they came over the brow of the hill on which the mosque of Muhammad Ali was built, were pyramids. Tens of them lined the view, dusty piles on the edge of the world.
“How many pyramids are there in Egypt?” asked Louisa, looking out at the vista.
“Hundreds at least. People assume the Giza Pyramids are it, but they are just the most well-known.” said Carl. “By where we are heading is one supposedly built after the Great Pyramids; nearly eight hundred years later in fact. Think about the technological advances that would have been made during that time. Then realise the Pharaoh who built it tried multiple times to construct a pyramid and his best, at Hawara, is little more than a pile of boulders now. The Egyptians supposedly built trash pyramids for a hundred years, then suddenly got good at it for just three examples; then went right back to building trash. That story makes no sense at all! Get rid of the Giza Pyramids and you get a different story. Egyptians were always bad at building, or copying, pyramids. Now that’s a story that makes a lot more sense.”
Turning onto a large carriageway, they sped alongside the Giza plateau. The palatial houses of Egypt’s rich and famous lined the road, spreading out far into the desert, and gold sellers, which infected the nation by their number, nestled in every available inch of free space between them.
Leaving the well-tended road behind, they traversed a barely driveable road meandering by the side of a filthy irrigation trough. Rats shuffled up and down the bank, drinking from the limpid waters as children played just a few feet away. Carl could see it made Louisa feel sick to contemplate the infections they must carry, sharing their only water source with such vermin.
After another fifteen minutes, the road began to widen and soon they found themselves back on a busy street, heading into a crowded town.
“The obelisk over there,” said Carl, pointing to a black granite spire rising from a marble plinth, “indicates where the centre of the old city of Crocodilopolis was located. We’ll head through the new town and its farmlands to the ancient edge of the river. I’ll take you to where Petrie made his dig. Hopefully we’ll find what he couldn’t.”
Before long, they were leaving the verdant fields behind and driving up a slight incline, which led to a dusty plateau with a crumbling pyramid visible in the distance.
The driver pulled in and pointed to a collection of stones on the ground. “Ihnasiyyah al-Madinah.” he said, smiling a toothless smile and holding out his filthy hand for payment.
Carl stifled a grimace, placed a crisp fifty-dollar bill in the man’s hand, and stepped from the taxi. It was at least twice as much as the fare should cost, but he was not willing to accept change from someone who had never even considered washing.
“So, you’ve brought us to an empty field of rocks.” said Chris, sarcastically. “Nice.”
“Just go find yourself a spot in the shade over there somewhere.” said Carl, pointing to a copse of trees. “You up for some hard work, kid?”
“Sure am.” said Justin, eagerly.
Carl dug around in his pocket and dragged out his last, unused SIM card. “I’ve been saving this. Hopefully it’ll still get signal here, because I need you to look up some info on the web.”
Justin started the laptop. When it booted, the phone was connected, and FireFox launched. “What are we searching for?”
“I need the diagrams made by Petrie in the summer of eighteen eighty-eight; specifically around this area.”
Justin searched through the web, even on the limited connection the phone provided at breakneck sp
eed. He found the diagrams requested and looked at his screen in amazement. “You said there was nothing left of this.”
“There isn’t above ground. However, Petrie didn’t have the equipment we have. I also think Strabo and Herodotus did what they usually did when they were given a story; embellished ones already circulating. I’ve no doubt they honestly believed everything they were saying, but I’m also pretty certain they were just regurgitating other scholars’ work.”
“So the only eyewitnesses to the place we’re trying to locate, never actually laid eyes on it?”
“That’s right, kid.” said Carl, realising how stupid his original comment now sounded. “Nevertheless, we do have Petrie, and in him I’d stake a great deal.”
The two joked and giggled their way through most of the morning, Carl happy to spend some time in peace with Justin, even if the slowly heating desert was beginning to roast them both. Tired and in need of more water, he was glad when their labours ended and he could get into the shade near Chris just before eleven.
“We’ll need a while to process the data.” said Carl, wiping his brow. “There’s no way we can keep working out there, it’s hotter than hell.”
“So what have you been doing for five hours?” asked Chris.
“We’ve been using the geophysics scanner to make an accurate map of what lies underneath the plateau. Hopefully we’ll be able to get back some results that could show us where there is an opening.” said Justin, gulping down half a litre of water and pouring yet more over his head.
“To what?” asked Louisa, interested.
“To the labyrinth.” said Carl. “It’s the only logical place the Ark could have been stored, once I’d eliminated the obvious.”
“And how did you reach this conclusion may I ask?” said Chris, raising an eyebrow in exasperation. “Should I guess perhaps?”
Carl was tired, hot, and sweating profusely. He knew explanations were needed, but Chris’ challenging manner was not helping his ability to express his thoughts clearly. He quashed his desire to respond irritably, realising he needed to keep everyone informed. “Dave said God took him.” he said, calming his laboured breathing. “I didn’t really get my head round that until yesterday, but it’s a remark about the fact that there’s only one person in the Bible who never dies; a man called Enoch. The Bible clearly states ‘God took him’. I couldn’t get anything about the Ark to fit the reference, so I ignored it, but I was forgetting that we were talking about Moses.”
“God took him too?” asked Louisa.
“No, but the story is the only other time God gets involved in someone’s death; other than all the smiting and plaguing he does. The Bible says God buries Moses personally. Dave was pointing out that nobody knows where Moses was buried. The Bible only details the events that led up to his death, and then suddenly gets ambiguous when it describes God’s involvement in his burial. I think what happened to the Ark of Ra and to Moses after that moment was purposefully left hazy, because nobody knew what happened. Therefore, we have to assume someone other than the Israelites selected the hidden place that contains his sepulchre. The only thing we do know for sure is that Moses was planning to do something on that mountain, because in the Biblical story he gets prepared to leave the Israelites long before his supposed passing.”
“So how does that lead us here?” said Chris, emphasising his disappointment that the original question remained unanswered.
“Because the best hiding place of them all is an impenetrable maze, and this one was built for the worship of a God related to the serpent and sits on the edge of the old path of the Nile!” said Carl, suddenly aware no one else knew anything about where they were. He paused, trying to find a way of condensing twenty years of study into a single dialogue. “Kom Ombo was too easy from the text in the tomb. This is the place, I am certain. A Roman village sprang up here in about one hundred AD. Most Egyptologists argue it was workers from that village who cannibalised the site, leaving it as we find it today. There are some who even suggest they tore it down for some as yet undiscovered reason. However, after what we saw in the Yeshua tomb, we should consider the possibility they were Roman Christians, probably following the same trail we followed from Israel, searching for the Ark. Who knows? I’ll wager, when they got here, they found the site pretty much as we have, a shell. It’s just history has them as being here and that translated into them being the destroyers of the site, which they were not.”
“So you think the subterranean levels still exist?” asked Chris.
“That’s my guess. I bet the maze is hewn out of the bedrock itself, like Petra in Jordan. All we need to do is trawl through what we’ve found.” said Carl, as he began to unpack the data.
A few seconds of processing later, the first images began to display, hazy white blocks appearing one by one.
“The denser the white colour, the denser the material we have scanned. So, under our feet at the time of doing this area was solid rock. We’re looking for definite shapes of black or much lighter grey.” said Justin, as the process continued.
Block after block of solid white began to resolve on the screen. Some showed lines or swirls, but the edges were not regular and Carl dismissed them as not part of the original structure.
Eventually, when the screen was over half full, something of interest finally appeared. In one corner of the map, nearly six hundred meters from their current location, a perfect square of dark grey stood out from its surroundings.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Chris.
“We’ll have to check it out.” said Justin, eagerly. “You want to go take a look?”
Ignoring the sweltering heat, the group left the comfort of the shade and followed Justin as he led them over to where the square was located. As they walked, they crossed a shallow irrigation channel to fields lined with corn and approached a series of ramshackle abodes.
Checking the map against Google Earth, Justin stopped a few yards from a disintegrating boundary wall made of un-tooled lumps of rock. “We’re on top of it, guys. Whatever that mark is, it’s directly beneath us.”
Chapter 49