“He knows who you are, and is up to speed on IMU,” Zaheed said. “He has a doctorate in theology from the Sorbonne and speaks English better than I do. He will quickly get down to business.”
Zaheed opened the hanging curtain at the entrance and ushered Jack in. Sitting on a low chair in the center of the church was an elderly Ethiopian wearing a white robe and skullcap, with an elaborate metal cross hanging from his neck. On his right side was a low table, and behind him stood another man in white, evidently his assistant. The Patriarch raised his hand and Jack strode over to shake it.
“Dr. Howard. I apologize for staying seated. I greatly relish doing the rounds of these remote churches once a year, but I am not the spring gazelle I once was.”
Jack sat on the stool that had been placed in front of the Patriarch, and Zaheed pulled up another and sat alongside. “This is a very peaceful church,” Jack said. “I like the simplicity.”
“It is not exactly Westminster Abbey. Most of what was once here is now gone. The original church was destroyed when the British took Magdala in 1868.”
“Before flying out here, Zaheed drove me past the Church of our Lady Mary of Zion, and the Chapel of the Tablet.”
“Are you going to ask me whether you can see the Ark of the Covenant? Is that really why you are here? Then you would disappoint me.”
Jack shook his head. “I have no justification for seeing the Ark. How could I, when for millions of believers the time of revelation is not yet here? To see it, to touch it with my hands, would be a marvelous thing, but to do so would be a travesty against those for whom the continuing concealment of the Ark, the mystery of it, is what gives them hope.”
The Patriarch’s eyes twinkled. “Then you are not like other archaeologists who have come asking me this question.”
“Because most of them are not archaeologists. Most are treasure-seekers, chancers, looking for a best-selling book and a media sensation. To be an archaeologist you have to see that artifacts such as the Ark have a transcendent quality, a meaning greater than their physical presence. And knowing that to reveal an artifact to the world might shatter that meaning, as an archaeologist you have to be able to stop, to draw a line in the sand.”
“And yet as an archaeologist you are driven by the quest.”
“The quest to find the truth, to discover what happened. My line in the sand stops in front of the Chapel of the Tablet.”
“Then I think we might have an understanding, Dr. Howard.”
“Zaheed has filled you in on the background of why I’m here, the diary of the British officer who was present at the siege of Magdala in 1868. I now wish to make a gift, to the Ethiopian Church and to the people of Ethiopia, of something that was taken from this place on that day.”
Jack nodded to Zaheed, who passed him the package. Jack withdrew a framed picture about two feet square and held it up for the Patriarch to see. “This was found with the officer’s diary. He made a note that he intended on his eventual return to England to pass it on to Richard Rivington Holmes, later Sir Richard, the British Museum curator who accompanied the Abyssinia expedition, and this would perhaps have happened had Wood not died suddenly of cholera in Bangalore in 1879. In the lower right corner is a note in his hand saying it was taken from the church at Magdala — this very church — on the day of the final assault, the thirteenth of April 1868.”
The Patriarch stared at the picture, and then gestured for his assistant to come over. The two men talked excitedly in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, gesturing at the frame, and then the Patriarch turned to Jack. “This is an astonishing rediscovery for us. Do you know what it is?”
“It’s a woven woolen tapestry. We were able to get a radiocarbon date in the IMU lab for a sample from one corner of the fourth century AD, the time of the Kingdom of Axum. But the image of the man with the braided beard looks much older, Sassanid perhaps, something that would fit more comfortably in Mesopotamian art of the early to mid-first millenium BC. And that doesn’t take into account the image of the two large black men ahead of him, and what they’re carrying. According to everything I now believe, that means that this image is drawn from an actual historical event of the early sixth century BC.”
“A memory of this tapestry has been passed down through the Church, but I hardly dared imagine that it might still exist,” the Patriarch said. “According to tradition, the man with the braided beard was Phoenician, and had brought the Ark by ship.”
Jack reached over and pointed at a cluster of riders shown behind the man, one of them clearly a woman, with long dark hair and swirling a whip. “Do you know who these people are?”
“They look as if they’re chasing him, but they’re not. They’re actually protecting him from the brigands of the coast, riding to his rescue. According to tradition, the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel had mandated a Judaic warlord of the coast to protect the Phoenician and escort him to the mountain cave with his cargo. She was Yusuk As’ar, meaning ‘she who takes vengeance.’ There were other Jewish female warriors like her throughout history — the mother of Dhu Nuwas of Yemen in the sixth century AD, the Berber Jewish Queen Dihya in North Africa a century later — but Yusuk As’ar may have been the fiercest of them all, a scourge of the Babylonians and the marauders of this coast.”
Zaheed nodded in agreement. “A colleague of mine who is an expert on these traditions thinks she might even be the model for the stories of Makeda, the legendary queen who married King Solomon of Judah. The traditions may contain a conflation of historical reality from those centuries.”
Jack passed the tapestry back to Zaheed, and leaned forward intently. “The looting that took place after the death of Theodore is well known. I’m also interested in another period when Ethiopia was desecrated by outsiders. Do you have any knowledge of the Nazi Ahnenerbe coming here on the hunt for artifacts?”
The Patriarch pursed his lips. “The period of fascist rule from 1936 to 1941 was a dark time for us. Some of the looting was brazen, such as the ancient obelisk from Axum that still stands in Rome. My predecessors did their best to conceal the treasures of the Ethiopian Church. You’ve seen the Chapel of the Tablet, so you see we have some experience in that regard. But many lesser items went missing.”
“Not just from the churches and monasteries, but also from the museums,” Zaheed added. “We attempted an inventory a few years ago. Much of the material never resurfaced, so we think it must have been cached somewhere and never recovered, perhaps because it hadn’t been removed before Mussolini’s soldiers were driven out of the country in 1941. By then it would have been difficult to get anything back to Italy or Germany.”
“You say Germany. So the Ahnenerbe were here?”
The Patriarch was quiet for a moment, and then nodded gravely. “I have never told anyone else this. But they were here, in this village on this plateau. The priest here now was a boy at the time and remembers it, but is still so stricken by what happened that I fear he would not talk to you. Three Germans came, two of them claiming to be archaeologists and the other some kind of thug from the SS, the sort Ethiopians had become used to under the fascist regime. They spent many days here, measuring, digging, going from hut to hut, interrogating. The priest, the boy, had been trained in his vocation by a German in Addis Ababa, so understood some of what they were saying. They appeared to be looking for anything that might have been left over when the British left in 1868. They had high hopes of treasure. They too were after the Ark of the Covenant.”