“Is she with us now?”
Aysha gave Jack a grim look. “Earlier this afternoon she was arrested and imprisoned. One of my contacts still employed in the antiquities service got a message through to Maria just before we arrived. That’s what we were talking about while you were waiting below in the synagogue. She’s in the Ministry of Culture, which now has a security wing with cells and interrogation rooms where there used to be conservation labs. She was arrested on a trumped-up charge of dealing in antiquities without a license, because when she was detained they found a fragment of manuscript in her briefcase that she was in fact taking to Alexandria for conservation in the institute, there no longer being any facility in Cairo. But the reality is far worse. Sahirah is from one of the oldest Cairo Jewish families, and the truth is that she’s a victim of anti-Semitism. Have you seen the extremists with the black headbands, Jack? They’re terrifying. We watched them beat up a man outside the synagogue last night just after I arrived, and it was like those images of SS thugs laying into Jews on the streets of Germany in the 1930s. Did you see the posters plastered all over the precinct wall? Some of them came and did that last night. They’re calling for all Jews to leave Egypt or face being asset-stripped and imprisoned. Even the worst of the caliphs didn’t go that far.”
“We should be getting her out,” Jack said. “Not digging around in here.”
Maria put her hand on his arm. “The best possible thing we can do for her is to finish up here. The manuscript she was carrying when she was arrested was a scrap she managed to reach in the hole she made in the wall of the chamber where she heard the hollow sound. If they torture her and threaten to arrest her family, she might reveal where she found it, and the last thing she’d want would be to provide the thugs with an excuse to descend on this place. She’d want us to be here now, getting out everything we can before that happens. It’s become personal for me too, Jack. When I lock up here later tonight, this synagogue will be empty and perhaps doomed to destruction, but we don’t want it to be as if a thousand years of history were closing down. Removing these last shreds of the Geniza is not an ending, but a thread of continuity. The history represented here has survived darkness before, and we must not let these people get their way. That’s why, when Sahirah contacted me, I wanted to come out here to help in any way I could, in the eye of yet another storm of ignorance and destruction.”
Jack paused thinking hard. “We didn’t bring a satellite phone from Alexandria in case we were searched at a checkpoint and had it confiscated, potentially compromising the IMU secure line.” He took out his cell phone and looked at the network indicator. “What’s mobile reception like?”
Aysha shook her head. “Pretty well nonexistent outside Cairo. I can’t raise the institute or Maurice, who’s in his Land Rover heading toward the Faiyum excavation as we speak. The extremists have been sabotaging the transmitters across the country.”
Jack pocketed his phone. “Okay. This is what I’m going to do. First thing tomorrow when I’m back on Seaquest, I’ll get the IMU board of directors to rescind our offer to return the sarcophagus of Menkaure to Egypt unless they release Sahirah, immediately. That should put some fire under the antiquities director while he still has any power. The return of the sarcophagus was going to be the big event of his probably very short career. We just have to hope that we can still play him before the extremists take over.”
Aysha nodded. “That might just work, Jack. It’s about the only leverage we’ve got.”
Jack thought hard for a moment longer. There was nothing else they could do, bar storming the ministry and demanding her release, something that would almost certainly get them arrested or worse. “All right. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Maria looked at him. “We enlarged the hole that Sahirah created as much as we could, but it’s still barely big enough to get your arm into. It’s a crack in the fabric of the wall that seems to have been overlooked when the synagogue was restored in 1890 and then again a few years ago, probably because the opening that had once existed had become bunged up centuries ago with congealed vellum and other organic matter. Countless generations of mice dragged bits of manuscript into the hole and shredded it to make their nests, so nothing of paper or papyrus has survived beyond a few tiny shreds. But what we do have is some larger pieces of vellum. It seems the mice didn’t like something about the vellum, perhaps the gum used to stabilize and dry the gall ink. In time those fragments became glued with mouse droppings to the interior of the hole, actually helping to insulate the nest. When Sahirah showed us the few postage-stamp-sized fragments that she managed to prize out, we got really excited because vellum generally was used for religious texts, so there was a chance of it being something really important. After I saw her photos in the email, I booked the first flight here.”
Jack pointed at a matte of tissue covering something on the table. “Have you got a fragment here?”
Maria sat down on the chair and raised the tissue. Beneath it was a piece of vellum about half the size of a standard book page. It was torn along one edge and filthy. “Partly the dirt is centuries of mouse droppings and body decay, a kind of congealed stickiness,” she said. “And partly it’s the spread of ambient ink from the lettering, as well as moisture stains that look almost like burning. After I’ve cleaned this back in the lab and put it under the electron microscope to check the gall ink stability, I’ll put it in a humidification chamber to give the leather back its suppleness, and then strengthen it with methycellulose and starch paper. But even without cleaning, you can still make out the words.”
Jack leaned closer, but then recoiled. “That’s a serious stench,” he said, crinkling his nose. “I think I need a gas mask.”
Maria gave him a rueful look. “Nice, isn’t it? Nine hundred years of mouse. Solomon Schechter was never the same after the months he spent in here. His health was broken. He took to wearing a mask when he studied the manuscripts in Cambridge, but it was probably too late, and ultimately that fetid exposure was what killed him.”
“Nine hundred years,” Jack murmured, staring again. “That makes it early- to mid-twelfth century. Have you managed to transcribe it?”
“Take a close look first. What do you see?”
Jack held his breath, stared closely, and then backed off again. “Hebrew letters, about seventeen lines, broken off at the bottom as if the lower part of the page is missing.” He held his breath again, and peered closely. “My God. I thought so. It’s a palimpsest. I can see older letters floating under the upper text, upside down. I can’t make out the words, but the letters have Hebrew-style serifs as well.”
Maria nodded. “At the moment I can’t translate the lower text. That’s a prize that awaits us back in the lab. I’m hoping against hope for more lines of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom, which is probably the greatest single treasure to come out of the Geniza.”
“Lanowski talked about that this afternoon. About the problem of translation and transmission in sacred texts, and the importance of finding the Hebrew originals.”
“I talked it through with him as well on the phone. He’s had some startling ideas. He follows many scholars in thinking that Joshua Ben Sira in the second century BC composed the book in Alexandria. But he’s taken it one step further and suggested that the great library of Alexandria, newly established at that time, would have allowed Ben Sira ready access to many of the surviving books of wisdom from Pharaonic Egypt, texts that mostly didn’t make it through the destruction of the library in late antiquity and are therefore unknown to us. Both he and Professor Dillen think there’s enough in what we know of the Ben Sira to suggest a Pharaonic link, though they need more original text to make a case for it. Maybe we’ve got it here; it’s tantalizing, but a brick wall at the moment. What I’m really interested in now, what I’ve got you here for, Jack, is the upper text. Has Aysha prepped you on this?”