The Rosetta Key

“Wait, wait!” I was beginning to truly panic. “Haul me up and I’ll 1 1 0

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tell you!” I’d think of something! A couple of the serpents were swaying upward, getting ready to strike at my head.

The sun had climbed, its illumination crawling across my grave. I saw the shovel again, snakes curling across it, and the scraped rock my grave excavators had stopped at. Except now I didn’t think it was a rock at all because it had the red clay color of a jar or a roof tile. It was also regular in shape I saw, cylindrical if the hump of covering sand was any indication. It looked almost like a pipe. No—it was a pipe.

A pipe, now that I thought about it, which extended toward the sea.

“I think you can tell me from down there,” Najac said, peering over the lip.

I extended my dangling arms downward as far as I could. I was still a foot too short to reach the abandoned shovel. My tormentors saw what I was trying to do and lowered me inches further. But then a snake struck toward my palm and I jerked my arms upward, half curling, a move that brought peals of laughter. Now they began betting on my ability to grab the shovel before I was bitten by crawling reptiles.

Down I went another inch, and another. Oh, the fun my captors were having!

“If you kill me, you’ll lose the greatest treasure on earth!” I warned.

“So tell me where it is.” Down a few more inches.

“I can only lead you to it if you spare my life!” I was eyeing the shovel and the snakes, swinging myself by twisting my torso so I would pass over its wooden handle.

“And what is this treasure?”

Another snake struck toward me, I yelped, and there was another chorus of laughter. If only I could be so amusing to Paris courtesans.

“It’s . . .” The rope dropped more, I reached, fingers straining, the snakes rose in readiness, and then as they jerked I seized the shovel and swung desperately. It caught two of the reptiles and threw them against the sand walls, starting a small cascade. They thrashed in fury as they fell back into the pit.

“Up, up, please, by the grace of God, get me up!”

“What is it, Monsieur Gage? What is the treasure?” I could think of nothing else to do. I took the shovel in both hands, t h e

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bent myself as far upward as I painfully could, took careful aim, and then dropped back down, letting my weight drive the crude shovel’s wooden beak against the clay pipe. It shattered!

Liquid gushed into the pit.

No one was more surprised than I was.

The rope fell another foot as the men above cried out in surprise, and my hair was in effluent stinking of sewage and seawater. Was this some wretched outfall from Jaffa? I squeezed my eyes tight, ready for the bite of fangs on my nose or ears or eyelids. Instead, the angry hissing was receding.

I blinked open. The snakes had crawled to the sides of the pit to get away from the gushing stink. They were desert serpents, as unhappy about all this as I was.

My head dropped again, and now my forehead dragged in the greasy cesspool. By Hamilton’s dollar, was I to escape the venom only to drown head down?

“The Grail!” I roared. “It’s the Grail!” And with that Najac snapped an order and they began to hoist me.

The Arabs were in an uproar, declaring I was a sorcerer who’d performed some electric miracle by bringing water out of sand. Najac was looking at the shovel in my hands with disbelief. Below, the pit kept filling, the snakes trying to climb away and dropping back down.

And then my head was above ground level, my ankles still bound, my torso swaying like a hooked side of beef.

“What did you say?” Najac demanded.

“The Grail,” I grasped weakly. “The Holy Grail. Now, will you please just shoot me?”

And of course he’d like to. But what if my claim proved important to Bonaparte? And then an angry mutter, growing to an indignant roar, began to rise from the entire besieging army.

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Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. Bonaparte’s troops had been struggling with disillusion since landing in Egypt last summer.

The heat, the poverty, and the enmity of the population had all come as shocks. The French had expected to be welcomed as republican saviors, bringing the gifts of the Enlightenment. Instead they’d been resisted, viewed as infidels and atheists, the remnants of the Mameluke armies raiding from the desert. Garrisons in villages lived under the constant threat of poisoning or a knife in the dark. Napoleon’s answer was to march on.

There had been unexpectedly fierce resistance at Gaza. Turkish prisoners had been paroled on the promise not to fight again, but officers with telescopes had spied the same units now manning the walls of Jaffa. This was a breach of a fundamental rule of European warfare! Yet even this might not have ignited the massacres to follow.