“Saint Frumentius, who brought Christianity to the ancient Kingdom of Aksum, is buried on Tana Qirqos,” Mateos told them, as the boat chugged along. “And there is an altar containing a stone upon which the Virgin Mary rested during her journey back from Egypt.”
“Is that really true?” Carter asked.
“There are many such stories in all faiths,” Abuna Mateos admitted. “Whether they are true does not diminish their symbolic value. The Lord taught in parables when he walked on the Earth. These places serve to remind us that the foundation of our faith reaches back many thousands of years.”
Carter’s lips curled into a mischievous smile. “In 1974, about two hundred miles west of here, anthropologists discovered the most complete skeleton ever of a female Australopithecus afarensis, who lived 3.2 million years ago. That’s my foundation.”
“Felice,” Lazarus murmured. “Play nice.”
Mateos laughed. “We are as proud of Dinkinesh — I believe you call her ‘Lucy’—as we are of our spiritual traditions. One need not preclude the other.”
“I can appreciate symbolic value,” Carter countered. “But I’m a scientist. Facts are the only thing that matter to me.”
“And yet you seek the Ark of the Covenant, a powerful religious symbol. And you look for it here, where all we have are our stories, which you do not believe. Curious.”
“What we seek,” she clarified, “is a powerful device once used by Moses and Joshua to trigger earthquakes and stop the sun in the sky. And we came here because millions of Ethiopians are convinced that you’ve got that device. The man we work for made a pretty convincing case for why it can’t be in Ethiopia. So whether I believe or not is irrelevant. Do you have the Ark? Are those stories true?”
Mateos sagged into one of the chairs bolted to the deck. “The story you know and that all my countrymen believe, the story recorded in the Kebra Nagast, the Glory of Kings, which we have told for hundreds of years, is almost certainly false. It is a story created by men to justify their right to rule over other men. I know this. All learned men know this. The Kingdom of Sheba was not in Ethiopia, and neither Solomon nor the Priests of the Holy Temple would have permitted anyone to remove the Ark. However, I also know that the one true Ark is here, and has been for more than two thousand years.
“This is what I believe happened: In the days of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, God sent the prophet Jeremiah to deliver a message of judgment. The king, angered by the prophecy, ordered Jeremiah to be cast into a cistern, where he would surely have died. But the king’s servant — his abdemelech—was a godly man. He rescued Jeremiah from the cistern. To repay his faith, God promised the abdemelech that he would be spared when the judgement came. Scripture says little else about that godly servant, except that he was an Ethiopian.”
“Pierce thinks Jeremiah hid the Ark,” Lazarus said. “But he could have had help from that Ethiopian.”
“I believe that is how the Ark came to be in my country, but it is only an idea I have. Perhaps there is another explanation, I do not know. I know only that the true Ark is there, at Tana Qirqos. You will see.”
Despite the man’s evident conviction, Lazarus remained skeptical. From what he could tell, the entire story of the Ark in Ethiopia was like one great big shell game. First the Ark was in the Chapel of the Tablets, but no one was allowed to see it. Then that Ark turned out to be bogus, but the real one was somewhere else. He couldn’t help but wonder if the Ark at Tana Qirqos would prove to be just one more deception.
In the early light, the island looked like a fortress rising from the surface of the lake. A solid mass of basalt, it looked at least four hundred yards long and a hundred feet high, surrounded by reedy shallows. The wall itself was sheer, impossible to climb, but the boat’s skipper seemed to know where to take them. They circled around the island and put ashore near the base of the wall. Mateos led them along a barely visible trail that reached a section of the island that could not be accessed by boat. There, they found a small compound of stone structures that looked like ancient ruins. In one small round building — little more than a hut — they met a group of wizened monks who smelled of roasted meat and incense. The monks regarded Carter with undisguised disdain — Mateos had explained that women were not permitted to enter the monastery — but they said nothing, deferring to the senior clergyman, who explained their purpose. The exchange happened so quickly, Lazarus did not even have time to contact Dourado and have her activate the babelfish system.
It occurred to him then that they had not checked in with Cerberus HQ since the previous afternoon, shortly after arriving in Axum. Dourado had not called, which probably meant that Pierce wasn’t having any better luck than they were.
One of the monks led them up a steep trail that rose to the top of the fortress-like rock, overgrown with scrubby brush and cactuses. The surface of the lake was more than a mile above sea level, but the two Ethiopians, despite their advanced age, moved up the path like a pair of mountain goats. Once atop the rock formation, the trail brought them to another structure, more modern than the monastery, but just as run down. The structure covered a natural rock formation, carved into an altar that looked like a tower of stone cubes.
Their guide muttered something in his native language, which Mateos translated. “This is the altar where sacrifices were made when the Ark was kept here many thousands of years ago.”
The monk stared at Lazarus for a moment and then beckoned him forward. Using gestures and pantomime, the monk explained that they needed to move the altar out of the way. Lazarus was a bit surprised at the request, since it appeared to be a solid mass, connected to the underlying rock, but as he braced his shoulder against it and started pushing, he saw a well-concealed seam.
The stone was heavy but not impossibly so, and after a couple of minutes of rocking and shoving, a small square opening was revealed. The monk pointed to the hole and said something that needed no translation.
In there.
Lazarus glanced at Carter, reading the doubt in her expression. Mateos must have sensed their shared skepticism. “The Ark was brought into this crypt through another entrance, which has been sealed to prevent it from being stolen.”
The explanation was plausible enough, but then so were all the other excuses Mateos and his Church had employed over the years to prevent anyone from verifying their claims about the Ark. Mateos seemed sincere enough, but if he intended treachery, there was no better place to disappear them than a hidden crypt on a remote island that no one even knew they were visiting.
Lazarus stuck his head through the opening and surveyed it in the beam of his flashlight. The floor was about five feet down and sloped away to form a descending passage that led away into the darkness. Satisfied that it was at least passable, he reversed position and lowered himself feet first into the passage. It was a tight fit, and his shoulders scraped against the stone walls as he pushed deeper into the hewn-out shaft. Carter came next, slipping through with considerably more ease.
The passage sloped, and after about thirty feet, it opened into a larger chamber. Before he reached it, Lazarus sensed a change in the air. Fingers of static electricity brushed his skin like the touch of butterfly wings. A whiff of ozone stung his nostrils, and the air hummed with a sound like an electrical transformer. As he emerged from the passage, his light fell upon on an object shrouded in heavy blankets, with long poles protruding out from beneath the coverings. It was bigger than he expected. The shape under the blankets was longer and taller than the replica he had seen in the Chapel of the Tablets in Axum, almost six feet long, and more than four feet high. Although the relic itself was not visible, the poles returned a metallic reflection — hammered gold.