Aysha nodded enthusiastically. “They brought surveying equipment and digging tools and went out into the synagogue precinct. They’d been led to the spot by another of the colorful characters in Egypt at the period, Riamo d’Hulst, a self-styled count and subject of Luxembourg who was probably a German deserter from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and something of a shape-shifter. In 1890 while the synagogue was being restored and refurbished, he took advantage of the construction work to dig around the precinct. Following his lead, the British officers discovered indisputable evidence of a silted-up river channel. That doesn’t prove the Moses story, of course, but they did also find the plinth of an ancient structure. According to Edmondson, it contained the worn remains of a hieroglyphic cartouche. Finding something of a Pharaonic date was enough to convince them that they were at the right spot. Edmondson himself might have been able to decipher the hieroglyphs with his archaeological background, but he wasn’t able to see the inscription because the stone block had been removed in secret to England for safekeeping by Lieutenant Howard.”
“By Howard?” Jack exclaimed. “By my great-great-grandfather?”
“Do you remember any Egyptian antiquities on the Howard estate?”
Jack was stunned. Of course. “Yes, I do. On the edge of the fireplace in the drawing room. My father found it in a storeroom and didn’t know what to do with it. Egyptian red granite?”
“That’s what Edmondson said.”
“Does Maurice know about this?”
“Not yet. He has enough on his plate for the time being.”
“Well, it might just cheer him up. When I first brought him home for holiday from boarding school, he became obsessed with that thing. He used to spend hours with it, staring at it, sketching it. It was what really spurred him into Egyptology. We thought it was a relic of someone’s grand tour of the nineteenth century with no known provenance, the kind of thing that wealthy Europeans brought back to adorn their stately homes. But Maurice constructed all kinds of theories for where it might have come from in Egypt. And of course he translated it.”
“And?”
“It was Akhenaten. The royal cartouche of Akhenaten. The pharaoh of the Old Testament. The pharaoh of the time of Moses.”
The shroud parted, and a slim, dark-haired woman of about forty stepped out, reading glasses dangling from her neck and a pair of conservator’s gloves in her hands. “Evening, Jack. You look a little flushed. Excited to see me?”
Jack stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ve just had a revelation, Maria. In fact, a really big revelation. Out of the blue.”
“Sounds like Jack Howard,” she said, her Spanish accent giving the words added emphasis. “You can tell me once we’ve finished in here.”
Jack nodded toward the shroud. “This brings it back, doesn’t it?” He turned to Aysha. “Maria and I first met in the coffee room of Cambridge University Library after discovering that we were both there to study the Geniza documents. We haven’t looked back, have we, Maria?”
“Or forward,” Aysha added, eyeing him.
Maria put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Well, Jack Howard just wouldn’t be the man I know and love if he wasn’t always disappearing on adventures, would he? But before you disappear yet again, you need to come in here and see what I’ve got.”
Jack was already staring past her into the gap beyond the shroud, seeing the ladder and hole at the top of the wall that he knew led to the geniza chamber. “You lead, Maria. I can’t wait.”
CHAPTER 10
Jack parted the hanging shroud and followed Maria and Aysha into the enclosed section they had created at the end of the gallery. Within the shroud the air was noticeably warmer, the heat emanating from two portable angle-poise lamps bent low over a wooden table set up in the center of the space. Two briefcases were open on the floor, and the table was covered with Maria’s tools of the trade as a paleographer: protective plastic sheeting for manuscript fragments, tweezers, a magnifying glass, gloves, and a laptop. Its screen showed a blown-up section of text that Jack recognized as Hebrew by the serifs on top of the letters. Beyond the table the stepladder that he had seen from outside rose to a rectangular opening in the wall some three meters above them just below the ceiling. An electrical extension cable snaked over the rim into the darkness beyond.
Jack leaned over and stared at a black-and-white photograph propped up on the table. “That’s Solomon Schechter,” he said, pointing at the bearded man in a black suit hunched over what looked like a pile of old rags. “I know the famous picture of him surrounded by the boxes and piles of Geniza fragments in Cambridge University Library, but I haven’t seen this one before.”
“That’s because Jeremy’s just unearthed it,” Maria said. “He’s become quite a sleuth, you know. For a long time it was thought that no photos survived of Schechter’s time here in the synagogue in 1896, when the full contents of the Geniza were pulled out of that hole above us and laid in piles all over the floor for him to inspect. In fact, the Scottish twin sisters who had led him here, the widows Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, had brought a box camera with them and took some snaps. Jeremy trawled through all the surviving family he could find in the search for old photo albums and eventually came up trumps. Geniza scholarship has for so long been a man’s world, but this photo really reinforces the role of those two women in setting the whole thing in train. It was their search in Egypt for old manuscripts that led them to show fragments from the Geniza to their friend Schechter in Cambridge.”
Jack glanced at her and at Aysha. “With you two here, it looks as if that role of women in Geniza scholarship has come full circle.”
“There at the beginning, and there at the end,” Maria said. “I feel as if we’re closing one of the most incredible chapters of historical discovery ever.”
Jack peered at the figure in the photo. “He looks a little overwhelmed.”
“You’d be too, faced with almost two hundred thousand fragments of manuscript. Overwhelmed, but overjoyed. It became his life’s work at Cambridge, where as you know the Geniza archive is one of the university’s prized collections, studied by scholars of Jewish history from around the world.”
Jack looked at her shrewdly. “I thought the Geniza chamber had been completely emptied. What exactly are you doing here, Maria?”
She glanced at Aysha. “Put it this way. One thing I learned years ago from your husband, Aysha, before you’d even met him. When I was a student I worked on one of Maurice’s projects in the Valley of the Kings. I was collecting papyrus debris still lying in a storage chamber that had not only been robbed in antiquity but also cleared out by Howard Carter’s team in the lead-up to the discovery of Tut’s tomb. That is, never assume that earlier archaeologists have picked up everything.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
“Do you remember our project in England a few years ago at Hereford Cathedral, where Jeremy and I found the Vinland map showing Viking exploration in the Americas? Everyone thought the famous chained library contained all there was to be found in the cathedral, but then we discovered that sealed-up stairwell with its trove of manuscripts.” She reached over and tapped the wall beside the desk below the opening, producing a hollow sound that evidently came from the Geniza chamber beyond. “It’s what Jeremy and I always tell our new students at the institute. Never forget to tap the walls. Sahirah al-Hadeen, one of Aysha’s friends who’s studying the architecture of the synagogue, a graduate student who spent a term with us in Oxford, got into the chamber and did what I just did, on the opposite wall that forms the exterior of the synagogue. As soon as she realized that there was some kind of space beyond, she contacted Aysha and then me.”