“A few sentences, before the tear.” She carried on reading:
Now ben Netanel tells me this. His great-grandfather as a boy secretly followed Al-Hakim out into the desert that final night, a dare among the boys of Fustat to see where the caliph was really going. He watched from behind a dune as Al-Hakim hobbled his donkey with a knife, stripped off his clothes and slashed them with the bloody blade, and then stood there naked, raising his arms to the sky. His murder was a ruse. He wanted the world to think that he had died. He had indeed undergone a transmogrification, not from caliph to god, but from caliph to man. He did not die, but he disappeared down a hole in the ground into the underworld, never to be seen again. This is no fable; this is truth.
Jack waited in silence for a moment, coursing with excitement. “The underworld. Go on,” he urged.
Maria sat back. “That’s it.”
Jack closed his eyes. That’s it? “Are you sure?”
Maria glanced at Aysha. “Well, there might be more. Yesterday evening after I got set up here, Aysha and I climbed into the chamber and managed to see through the hole with our torches. We were able to prize free this fragment, but we saw another sheet compacted against the stone beyond it that could be the torn lower half of the page. We don’t have any extraction tools that wouldn’t damage it, and would probably tear it into shreds. Everything has to be done here the old-fashioned way, with bare hands. And Aysha and I are, well, both a little short on length.”
Jack stared at her. “You’re telling me you got me all the way here because I’ve got long arms?”
“The longest in Cairo. Probably the longest in Egypt. And fingers used to feeling around in the murk. Diving down holes is your specialty, isn’t it?”
Jack shook his head. “What you need is Little Joey. Costas’ miniature robot. His buddy. That’s the real reason he’s pining to get back to his engineering lab on Seaquest, not the problems of raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure.”
“We thought of asking him along too, but we didn’t think that mouse droppings were really his thing.”
“That’s probably wise. Underwater is fine, but holes in the ground full of decayed matter are not what he signed up for.”
“Of course, there’s the inevitable curse, as well,” Aysha said. “The Geniza was said to be guarded by a serpent who bedded down in the manuscripts like a dragon with its treasure. Anyone who went in was doomed. Look what happened to Solomon Schechter.”
“Snakes,” Jack muttered. “Definitely not Costas’ scene.”
“Then you’ll have to go it alone,” Maria said.
Jack stared at the filth on the fragment of vellum. “I’ll need protective clothing. Some kind of respirator.”
Aysha nodded at a large plastic crate beside the ladder. “We’re one step ahead of you. Full biological, chemical, and nuclear protection suits liberated from an army depot by a friend of mine.”
Maria glanced at him. “You good to go?”
Jack looked at his watch, and then up at the hole into the Geniza chamber above him, black and slightly forbidding. “Okay. There’s no time for dithering or, the gods protect me, for curses. Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 11
Alight came on, harsh, blinding, and the young woman in the center of the room turned her head away from it, shutting her eyes tight against the glare. She strained against the bindings that held her hands to the back of the chair, no longer feeling the pain where the rope had cut into her wrists. Even the slight movement of her head had brought back the sickening stench of the room, full of people bound like her who had lain in their own filth for days, and in the filth of others before them who had died or been dragged away for execution. She had been in here for only a few hours, but with their watches removed and no clock, she was already beginning to lose track of time. The only break in the sepulchral gloom was when the light cut in, when those who still had the energy moaned and whimpered with fear, when their captors came for another victim.
The first few times it had happened after she had recovered consciousness, she had managed to look around, above the terrified faces and twisted bodies, and had seen the cupboards filled with chemicals and the half-torn posters on the walls advertising forthcoming exhibitions in the museum. She had been here before. She knew she was in the archaeological conservation labs of the ministry, now used as detention cells by the extremists who had been the driving force behind the new regime. She was only a short walk away from the Old City and the synagogue where they had snatched her, only a stone’s throw from family and friends. Yet she knew she may as well be a world away, beyond rescue. Only a few weeks before, these labs had been a hive of activity, filled with colleagues of hers in the archaeological service. The people around her now had been smartly dressed politicians and civil servants. Those torn posters and soiled clothes might just as well be archaeological relics themselves of a time before Egypt had begun to fall before the forces of darkness and the people began to stare into the void.
The light shone hot against her face, and she knew it was her turn. A hand pulled her head and jerked it upright, the fingers smelling of khat. A man spoke harshly in English. “Open your eyes.”
“Turn away the light,” she said hoarsely. “And speak to me in Arabic.”
“You are a Jew. We will not speak to you in the language of the Prophet.”
“My family has lived in Cairo for two thousand years. Arabic is the language we speak.”
She heard the man talk to another in the distinctive dialect of Sudanese Arabic, and the light moved away. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two bearded men in front of her wearing black headbands, both with handguns and one carrying a powerful torch. The closest man waved a tattered piece of paper in front of her face. “What is this?” he said, still speaking in English.
She squinted at it. “It’s a twelfth-century document from the archive in the synagogue,” she said. “I was taking it away for study when I was brought here.”
The man leaned forward and spat a stream of khat juice into the face of a woman on the floor, and then turned back. “You’re a liar. Our informant told us you were stealing holy documents of Islam, and he was right. This is written in Arabic. Even the stupidest of my men can see that. This is a page of the holy Qur’ān.”
She looked at him defiantly. “It’s true that there are pages of the Qur’ān in the archive. They’re one of its greatest treasures. But there are also thousands of other documents in Arabic. If you and your fighters are as holy as you’d like to think you are, then you’d have memorized the Qur’ān and you’d see that this is not a holy page. In fact, it’s a letter from a wealthy Jewish matriarch to one of her three lovers, encouraging him to keep his Muslim faith because she knows that for him it is the true route to God.”
The man spat again, dropped the fragment of paper, and held her by the chin, coming close to her face. “We know who you work for. You are a spy for the Zionists. We have seen you go into the synagogue with that woman from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria.”
She said nothing. The man raised his pistol and cocked it beside her ear. “Answer one question, and I will make this easy for you. There is a man we want, a so-called archaeologist who spied in my country when he was supposedly hunting for relics, and who is now on the trail of something we want in Egypt.” He let go of her chin, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled page from a magazine. He straightened it and then held it in front of her. It showed a picture of two men in diving gear on the side of a boat, one of them tall with graying dark hair and the other shorter and stouter. He pointed with the butt of his pistol at the taller one. “Where is this man?” he demanded.