She pursed her lips defiantly, saying nothing. He rolled up the page, tossed it aside, and then aimed his pistol at the woman he had spat on. There was a deafening crack and her head exploded, brains and blood spraying their legs. He turned back to her, held her chin again, and brought the pistol close enough that she could smell the smoke. “I will ask only one more time,” he snarled. “Where is Jack Howard?”
She continued to say nothing, sitting as upright as she could and staring defiantly ahead. The man waited for a moment longer, raised his pistol, and then swung the butt at her head, hitting her and throwing her violently sideways. For a brief moment she saw the fragment of ancient text lying on the floor beside the dead woman, and then she saw a terrifying rushing blackness.
And then nothing.
Twenty minutes after leaving Maria, Jack was crouched at the bottom of the Geniza chamber looking up at the aperture in the wall leading back into the synagogue. The space was cramped, an arm’s breadth across each way and some six meters high; it was like being inside a large chimney well in a medieval castle. He watched Maria follow him carefully down the rope ladder they had dropped from the aperture, her white protective suit shimmering in the light from the single bulb they had suspended from the top of the chamber. Jack’s own suit felt strangely insubstantial after the countless hours he had spent underwater in a Kevlar-reinforced E-suit, and he had to move and hear the crinkle of the plastic to convince himself that he was wearing anything above his own clothes. He shifted the respirator and clear plastic visor to get a more comfortable view, and then looked at his exposed right hand, already smeared with dirt, where he had cut off the glove and sealed the wrist with a rubber band. They had brought mini Maglites with them, but what he was about to do was going to be a matter of touch and feel, with bare fingers essential for the sensitivity needed to prize out what might remain of the ancient vellum letter in the hole in the wall.
Maria landed beside him and looked at the smear on his hand. “Solomon Schechter called it Genizaschmutz,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her respirator. “Dust, insects, decayed manuscripts, flecks of whitewash from the ceiling, desert sand, the residue of all those human hands sweating and smudging as they wrote, and of course mouse goo, stuck together with a gummy ooze from the vellum. It’s like pine resin when you get it on your hands. Almost impossible to get off.”
Jack looked up at the aperture, lit by the single stark bulb, their route out. “So this was filled up to the brim with manuscripts?”
“Virtually overflowing. They say the opening is up there so that the holy words in Hebrew go directly to heaven, like the soul. In reality it was the only practical place they could put the opening, like a giant rubbish bin. Even though the manuscripts were removed over a century ago, I still feel as if I’m diving into a well of history when I come inside here. Aysha is only a few meters away on the other side of this wall, but it’s as if we’re halfway back to the world of the Geniza, in a kind of shadowy netherland with all those faces and voices about to spring to life. I’ve never felt quite like this before in a medieval manuscript repository. In most cases, like the Hereford Library, the manuscripts were part of a scholarly library, so in your mind’s eye you walk back into a candlelit scriptorium or a monk’s study. Here, you walk back into a bustling Cairo street scene of the eleventh or twelfth century, filled with all the color and vibrancy that life can offer.”
Jack spied a fleck of lighter colored material sticking to the wall beside his face and put his forefinger on it, peeling it away with his thumb. It was a tiny piece of paper with a letter on it, a serif just visible. Maria opened up a small plastic box that she had taken from a pouch on her belt and Jack gently flicked the fragment into it. She closed the box and replaced it carefully in her pocket. “This is real archaeology, Jack. Creating a huge mosaic from the tiniest of tiny details. That single letter may float through history by itself forever, or it might just form the crucial piece in a jigsaw puzzle. With the Geniza, you never know.”
“Let’s get the job done,” Jack said.
Maria pointed to a hole just above the floor of the chamber on the side opposite the synagogue balcony. It led into the outer wall of the building. It was even smaller than Jack had imagined, barely wide enough to fit his bicep. He eased himself down until he was lying on his right side, his hand poised to reach inside. He paused for a moment, eyeing Maria. “About that snake,” he said. “The venomous guardian of the Geniza. If there were mice living in there, then this hole isn’t going to have been his lair, is it?”
Maria looked thoughtful. “The last mouse died in there about five hundred years ago, trapped behind a congealed plug of resinous vellum. The snake could have burrowed its way in there after that. It could be waiting in there for you, Jack.”
“I’m so glad Costas isn’t here,” Jack muttered, flexing his fingers.
“There’s a great line from Ben Sira, words on a piece of parchment that was floating in that mass of manuscripts where we’re sitting now. It goes: ‘Concealed wisdom and hidden treasure, what’s the use of either?’ Whatever’s in there needs to come out, Jack. I don’t think the snake will bite.”
“Okay. I’ll trust you.”
“There’s something else I wanted to say to you, Jack, while we’re here together. Whatever we find in that hole, you’re going to want to leave here as soon as possible afterward and the opportunity will be lost.”
Jack rolled back and looked at her. “Maybe not the best time, Maria.”
She shook her head impatiently. “It’s not that. It’s about scholarship. It’s about the exhilaration of discovery. It’s about what drives people like Solomon Schechter, like Howard Carter, like you, Jack. At the time when the Geniza was discovered, there were many who felt that Jewish scholarship had turned in on itself, like the sophists of late antiquity or medieval Christianity, with too much intellect being wasted on trivia and obscurity, with piety becoming burdensome and negative. The Geniza gave a huge burst of vitality to all that, almost a cleansing. It allowed people to see afresh not just the fundaments of their religion but also the sheer vitality of the people who had lived by it. It was as if what had gone before was foam on the sea of scholarship. But the uncovering of the Geniza created a tidal wave in the sea itself, one that survived even the darkest days of the Holocaust. It drove some of them to a vision of the world that was not partisan, was not divided into separate communities, but was as cosmopolitan as the world they found in the Geniza, a world where peaceful coexistence across all the world’s great religions might be possible. It was idealism, but idealism based on an astonishing historical revelation. That’s what I wanted to say to you, Jack. Every time you make a great discovery, it gives that burst of vitality to the world, a rekindling of wonder and excitement. With another dark cloud hanging over us now, we need that more than ever. Don’t ever give up on the quest.”
Jack stared up at that aperture near the ceiling. He was utterly still for a moment, feeling his heartbeat slow, as it did when he was underwater. “It’s no longer just Jack Howard,” he replied quietly. “The quest is driven by all of us, by the team.” He rolled back, took a deep breath, and thought again. “But I know what you’re saying. It’s the bigger picture, isn’t it? Discovery isn’t just about the adrenaline rush, the thrill of the chase, the problem-solving. It’s about consequences, about what you find and how you present it to the world, about enrichment and uplifting, and sometimes, just sometimes, about improving the human condition. I’m with you on that, up to the hilt. And I’m humbled that you can think of me alongside scholars like Schechter and Carter. I’d say the same about you, as I would about Aysha and Maurice. And I’m not always the star. Sometimes,” he said, flashing her a smile and raising his right hand, “I’m just a long arm, aren’t I?”