Caleb snapped back into the present, trembling in Lydia’s arms. After he had related his vision, she exclaimed, “But that would have been amazing to include, assuming you accurately saw through Manetho’s eyes.”
“Right, but that’s just it. I can never be sure of the accuracy of what I see.” He was still shell-shocked, slow in getting to his feet. “And even if it is true, how could we have footnoted it, Psychic vision, Caleb Crowe?”
“You’re right.” Her smile broadened, then she frowned. “So, the ‘Golden Ones…’” She eyed the columns, picturing how the roof and the inscription would have appeared. “What do you think that means?”
Caleb sat and leaned against a pillar. He pictured the symbol again, remembered seeing it with a similar warning under the Pharos. He recalled what he had told Waxman four years earlier: “In the alchemist tradition, handed down from the surviving Hermetic writings, gold is the purest form of matter. So if you were to pass beyond the veil of Isis here, or beyond the doorway with a similar warning under the Pharos, I assume that you would have to first be somehow tested — purified and deemed worthy.”
Lydia laughed. “Oh, then we’re definitely not getting in, not after what we did last night.”
“Seriously, there are many early religions that expressed the world around us as a veil, a thin covering over the real world, which only initiates of the hidden mysteries could part.”
“What initiates?”
Caleb shrugged. “Egyptian mystery schools trained students in certain ways that elevated their spiritual essences, made them question the nature of the world and learn truths about reality.”
“Didn’t I read somewhere that Jesus might have spent time in Egypt?”
“That’s a theory,” Caleb said. “The Gospels are silent about the period of his life after the ‘kid in the temple’ incident and until he returns to Jerusalem and starts his ministry. Some occult sources claim he learned the backdrop of his teachings in the temples of Isis and Osiris, from the high priests of Delphi, that he had access to occult wisdom, and that he—”
“—passed beyond the veil,” Lydia finished.
Caleb slowly got to his feet. “Many of the Gospel verses are word-for-word translations of much earlier Egyptian sources. The first line of John is nearly verbatim from one of the Pyramid Texts, a hymn to Amun-Ra found in a two-thousand BC tomb. The Sermon on the Mount reads almost like a carbon copy of a speech Horus gave to his followers. And images inscribed on a temple wall in Luxor show Horus’s birth, surrounded by three solar deities who followed the star Sirius, with a previous panel depicting Thoth announcing the news to the virgin Isis.”
Lydia held up her hands and he stopped, unsure whether he should continue. She said, “Hey, don’t worry. I won’t hit you with charges of heresy. I haven’t been to Church in ten years.”
Caleb had never known that about her. In fact, he didn’t know much about her life before they’d met. They had been so caught up in researching ancient history that they’d had no time for investigating the more recent past. Every so often she would question his relationships with his mother or with Phoebe, and she would ask about the Morpheus Initiative. Every once in a while Caleb would get a letter from Phoebe inquiring about the book or just updating him on their fruitless attempts to break the Pharos Code, and Lydia would ask how their search was progressing. Thankfully, she had never asked about his father. And sadly, Caleb rarely thought about him.
At least that part of my past is over.
Caleb took a deep breath as a trio of buzzing gnats flew about his face. Lydia helped him up, and they walked out of the ruins toward the distant tourist area and the two cabs waiting patiently for fares.
“So, if your vision is true,” Lydia began, “then we have an even more tragic picture of what was lost at Alexandria.”
Caleb stopped. For a moment, the sunlight skipped like a dozen flat stones across the Nile and he had a flash of clarity, a moment of understanding, as if he had somehow restored a waking connection to the historical vision. A rush of faces passed before his mind’s eye, a tumultuous crowd of men and women. He had the certainty that they were all involved in a grand legacy, a noble plan, a cosmic secret. Plato’s words echoed in his mind: “… you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times.” Then it vanished as Caleb saw something out of the corner of his eye — a blurry figure in the distance. He squinted. There on the opposite bank stood a man. Out of place, looking like the stump of a diseased palm tree. He was so narrow, so motionless — until he lifted his arm, and pointed at Caleb.
The air shook, an invisible ripple extending out from that finger to Caleb’s heart. He jolted back, spun and Lydia just barely steadied him.
“Do you see him?” Caleb shouted, frantic, pushing away and running toward the river. “There!” But the far bank was empty. Only desolate shrubs and a jumble of rocks. Caleb turned to see Lydia giving him a frightened look.
She came to him, held his hands, kissed his sweaty forehead. “Let’s get you back to the hotel.”
6
Whatever had let loose his visions at Sais, whatever jolt had restored the sight, it was responsible for releasing a chain of successive dreams of such realism over the next week that Caleb and Lydia decided against returning to the States until they had sorted them out.
Caleb filled one sketchbook, then another. He tried to force daytime trances to get more clarity, and he again slept with a coffee cup full of sharpened pencils and a pad of paper next to the bed. Lydia would sit quietly by his side, run book errands, and bring him water and food. Watching and biting her nails from the shadows.
Finally, he gave up; the visions were not progressing past the point he had already reached. Lydia coaxed him into talking, and he described what he’d seen, the same rush of images he had been privy to back in the harbor in Alexandria. In an excited, breathless voice, as the song of cicadas drifted on Mediterranean breezes through their window, he said, “It starts on Pharos Island. Alexandria. I believe it’s two hundred and seventy-nine BC. Just before Dedication Day.”
“Dedication of what?” Lydia asked.
Caleb smiled and told her the story of what had come in pieces and jumbled images, like video clips in his mind. The story of Sostratus and Demetrius, the tour of the lighthouse, the cryptic words of its builder… all the way to the point where Sostratus had led his visitor down those stairs. But then it ended. And despite his attempts to go farther, to venture below through the vault door with Demetrius, the visions wouldn’t oblige.
“Maybe you need to give your mind a rest,” Lydia proposed. “A vacation.”
Before returning to Alexandria, where they’d hoped Caleb’s visions would continue and lead them to further answers, they took a month’s vacation on a cruise up the Nile, visiting the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Karnak, Abydos and other amazing sites he had only read about. Caleb’s dreams were filled with enormous pyramids, sprawling pillars, cyclopean roofs, rows of hieroglyphs and painted wall reliefs. Then they spent a week in Cairo, at the museum and in the markets and among the Pyramids. But before embarking on the last leg of the cruise and making their way to Alexandria, they went to Venice.
To get married.