She turned the sheet of paper round so that Bronson could see what she’d written on it, and slid it across the table.
He scanned the lines Angela had written down. ‘I recognize some of it from what you told me before, the bit you found in the guidebook, I mean. But there’s no mention of Judea or a temple, which were the other two words you found on the Hillel fragment, if I remember rightly. So what do you think all this means?’
‘That’s the problem. I’m reasonably certain this is the whole thing, but it’s still not clear to me where — or even what — it refers to. It looks as if the first verse is a statement of intent, if you like. Then the second appears to be a general description of what the people involved did, and the third section looks as if it provides some details about the location they picked.’
Bronson looked down again at the text, and then read it aloud, his voice low-pitched and almost reverent as he spoke Angela’s translation of the two-millennia-old verses.
And then the son of Yus of the purified,
instructed that the light which had become
the treasure was to be taken from Mohalla
and returned from whence it came.
And Isaac journeyed long and far
with his trusted followers into the
valley of flowers and there fashioned
with their own hands a place of stone
where they together concealed and made
hidden the treasure of the world for all
eternity until the heavens shall be rent asunder
and all shall tremble in the face of judgement.
With their shadows ever before them
from the rising to the setting
beyond the meeting point where waters tumble
towards the mighty river that flows never.
Then turned to face the glory
between the pillars and beyond their shadows
into the silence and the darkness formed of man
to rest forever.
‘More information, but a whole bunch of new questions,’ Bronson muttered. ‘Why couldn’t it be easy for once?’
‘If it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun,’ Angela said, ‘though I wouldn’t mind trying “easy” just once in a while.’
‘Which are the two words that have multiple meanings?’ Bronson asked.
‘In the first line, “purified” seems to be the best meaning of the word, but it also has something to do with lepers, and I can’t quite pin that down. Then in the fourth line, “it” can also be translated as “he” or “she”, but in that context the word has to mean “it”.
‘What about the last two lines of the second paragraph — they’re a bit apocalyptic, aren’t they?’
Angela nodded. ‘Yes, but you quite often find that kind of thing in ancient writings. If the author of the text wanted to emphasize that he was talking about a really long time, he might well include some kind of reference to a day of judgement. Don’t forget, this idea of the world ending and the souls of all the living and dead being judged by some kind of god is very common in most civilizations. In the Bible it’s the Book of Revelations and in Islam-’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘All the dead are supposed to assemble in the Well of Souls on the Temple Mount to await judgement.’
‘Exactly. I think almost every civilization believes the world will end, one way or another, but most seem to think it’ll be with a bang, and with some sort of a creator god involved who’ll weed out the good from the bad. I’m not sure that passage is significant — it looks to me like it’s just a bit of poetic licence on the part of the author.’
Bronson looked again at the piece of text. ‘Well, it seems to me that there are at least three new clues worth following up,’ he said. ‘The three proper names — Yus, Isaac and Mohalla. And you’ve spelt “Mohalla” wrong. That should be “Moalla” or “el-Moalla”, shouldn’t it?’
‘That’s how it’s spelt in the Persian,’ she said, ‘with the “h”.’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe the original author of the text spelt the name wrongly, though I would have expected the “el” prefix to be included.’
‘Or perhaps he really didn’t mean “el-Moalla”, but somewhere completely different?’
‘That’s possible, I suppose.’
Bronson looked back at the translation. ‘Two of them are the names of people, obviously.’
‘And they’re the key to this whole mystery. Isaac is still used today, of course, and it was a fairly common name in biblical times, so it’s probably not even worth looking at that. There’ll be hundreds or maybe thousands of references. But I’m not familiar with the name “Yus”, so I’m hoping that’s sufficiently unusual to give us some kind of a lead.’
‘And do you still think this piece of text is referring to the Ark of the Covenant?’ Bronson asked.
‘Yes. In the early biblical accounts, the Israelites believed that the Ark was a lethal weapon as well as a treasure. They claimed it was so dangerous that simply touching it could kill you, and that the Ark emitted a powerful light that destroyed their enemies. That seems to me to be a reasonably good match for the early part of this text, where it says “the light which had become the treasure”.’
‘Yet it sounds as if it had changed somehow,’ Bronson suggested. ‘Could the Ark’s powers — always assuming it had any, of course — have waned? Could the dangerous weapon have become just a richly decorated box? Or do you think there’s another meaning?’
‘Well, there is one theory that suggests the Ark might have contained some unknown highly radioactive source, something so powerful that touching it could literally kill you — not within seconds or minutes, obviously, but within a few days.’
Bronson grinned at her. ‘I think that’s getting a bit too wacky for me, Angela, not to mention the questions it raises. Like where the source came from, how the Israelites managed to handle it, and what it was. The most dangerous radioactive elements are things like plutonium, and you can’t just find lumps of the stuff lying around. It has to be manufactured in a reactor. Take my word for it — there are no unknown radioactive elements out there that could exist in a stable form on Earth.’
‘OK,’ Angela said, sighing. ‘Scratch that idea. But maybe what the author of that text meant was that the Ark itself hadn’t changed, but what they were doing with it had. Suppose they no longer needed to use the Ark as a weapon. That would fit very well with that phrase “the light which had become the treasure”. They weren’t fighting wars any more, so they no longer needed the destructive power of the Ark — the “light” — but, of course, they would still recognize the value of the relic, so they would treasure it.’
‘But what about Mohalla?’
‘I think what’s important is that the relic — the treasure — was taken from Mohalla and “returned from whence it came”. So it’s not Mohalla we have to find, it’s wherever the Ark was taken after it left. And that phrase suggests it was transported back to wherever it was created.’
‘So where did it come from originally?’
‘According to the Bible, it was made by Moses following the orders of God, to act as a repository for the original Ten Commandments, so I suppose you could say that the place “from whence it came” was most likely Mount Sinai. That was where Moses was meant to have received the Covenant.’