Maria smiled back. “Time you put it into action.”
Jack bunched his fingers and pushed his hand into the hole, continuing until he was elbow deep. At first he felt only a void, but then his fingers brushed against the edges, against slippery stone and a sticky mass. He tried not to think about what he was touching and pressed in farther, reaching the middle of his bicep and already feeling the edges of the hole constricting his arm. “Still nothing,” he exclaimed, pushing in farther. “I can’t feel the end.”
“Another hand’s length, no more,” Maria said. “You can do it.”
He gave another shove, flinching in pain as his shoulder wedged into the hole. “Okay. I’ve got to the far end,” he said, his face pressed hard against the chamber wall above the hole. He closed his eyes, imagining what he was feeling — a smooth but undulating surface with edges that curled back from the underlying stone. “I think I’ve got the piece of vellum,” he said. “About twice the size of my hand? I’m prizing it away now.” He pulled gently at the edges, carefully forcing his fingers behind, working his way around until only the central part of the vellum remained attached to the masonry. Slowly, with infinite care, he pushed his fingers farther behind the flap, feeling it come away millimeter by millimeter until finally it broke free. “Okay. Got it.” He edged backward from the wall as he withdrew his hand, pulling out a blackened object that looked like a piece of leather caught in a fire. He handed it to Maria, who peered at it closely and put it in another lidded plastic box. Jack sat upright, his hand blackened with filth. “Could you see anything?”
“I could, Jack.” Her voice was taut with excitement. “Maybe twenty lines, and it’s in Halevi’s hand. The upper tear is exactly consistent with the tear we’ve got in the other piece. Let’s get out of here and see if I can read it.”
Five minutes later they were both outside on the balcony floor stripping off their suits, Jack quickly rubbing off the worst of the dirt from his hand with a pile of wet wipes. Aysha had already taken the box and opened it on the table, and Maria immediately went over and sat in front of it, pulling down one of the angle-poise lamps, and putting on a pair of conservator’s gloves. She carefully removed the vellum, placing it on a plastic sheet on the table, and picked up her magnifying glass and notebook, jotting down words in translation as she peered at the lines. Jack gave up trying to clean his hand and walked over. “Can you see more palimpsest?”
“Definitely. It’s even clearer than the other piece, but I’m just concentrating on the upper text.” She continued jotting down words, and after about another ten minutes stopped and sat back. She was silent for a moment, and then stripped off her gloves and put the notebook on the table. “You’re going to love this, Jack.”
“Go on.”
“You remember we left off where the boy had been following Al-Hakim into the desert, and had secretly watched him faking evidence of his own death?”
“Right.”
“Well, this tells what the boy saw next.” She read out from her notebook:
Now, according to my friend ben Netanel, his great-grandfather followed the caliph to a place where he disappeared beneath a sand dune, and where the boy hidden above saw a long tunnel leading to brilliant light. He tried to follow, but as he began to enter a stone door came crashing down, quickly to be swallowed by the desert. Before it vanished he saw on the door an ancient inscription of the disk with radiating arms that I have also seen in Fustat, at the place beside the synagogue where Moses was found in the reeds by Pharaoh. They say that the place where Al-Hakim left his donkey and his clothes was near the monastery of Qusayr, and the town of Hulwan, but if the boy indeed saw the pyramids, then the place where Al-Hakim disappeared must have been farther north, not far south of Fustat, where I write to you now from the precinct of the synagogue of Ben Ezra, surrounded by all the delights of fruit and wine and beautiful women that this wondrous country has to offer. If you pass this on to my friends the astronomer Ibn Yunus and the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, they may calculate the area within sight of the pyramids close to the Nile where this event took place. I myself would seek out the place in the desert, but I must travel while the sailing season is on us to the shores of the Holy Land and to Jerusalem, God protect it. God knows that I have love for both of you, my son Abraham and my daughter Ribca, and for my beautiful nieces and nephews, and I will pray for all of you in sight of the Temple Wall on the Mount of Olives, inshallah.
Jack looked at the vellum, his mind reeling. “Amazing,” he exclaimed. “That’s exactly what Costas and I saw from under the Pyramid of Menkaure, only this seems to be from another entrance in another direction, looking west toward the pyramids. What he’s describing is the sun symbol of Akhenaten, and the one he mentions in Fustat may well have been associated with the Akhenaten cartouche excavated by those British officers and taken back to England by my great-great-grandfather.” He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “It’s amazing, though it doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to another entrance that we might get into. The one he’s describing sounds as if it would require a major mechanical excavation to open up, and could be anywhere within a radius of several dozen square kilometers, probably beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo.”
“I’ll get one of my Hebrew experts back in Oxford to take a look at the translation,” Maria said. “Maybe there’s an alternative nuance to some of those words that might give a better clue.” She glanced at her watch. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get on here. There’s a cluster of smaller fragments of other manuscripts from the hole that need to be dealt with. The clock’s ticking.”
“Okay,” Aysha said, pulling out her phone. “I’m calling our driver in the Land Rover. He should be outside the main entrance to Fustat within fifteen minutes.”
Jack turned to Maria. “How did you guess there might be something like this in the second part of the letter? The first half left Al-Hakim’s fate wide open.”
“Call it instinct. A Jack Howard moment.”
“You have those?”
“Very occasionally.” She smiled at him. “Actually, it was something Jeremy found in his research into the Howard Carter papers. He gave me only the barest details in a text message after I’d boarded the plane yesterday for Cairo, but it seems as if Al-Hakim wasn’t the only one to disappear under the desert. And it seems as if there might be a connection with your Royal Engineers officers in the late nineteenth century. Jeremy was expecting his research to be finished by tomorrow and will contact you then.”
Jack glanced at his watch. There was something else he had wanted to do in Cairo, something he had planned since he and Costas had first laid eyes on the relief sculpture of the pharaoh and the Israelites inside the crocodile temple beside the Nile. There, he had seen the pharaoh in two dimensions; now he wanted to see him in three. He turned to Aysha. “Do we have time to go to the museum? I’d like to see the colossal statue of Akhenaten from Amarna that went with the travelling exhibition around the world a few years ago.”