The Rosetta Key

“And you’re a gambler.” She thought. “After we harness the lightning, tell him you’ll trade your share in the book for me. Then I’ll pretend to betray you, and go with him. We’ll abandon you. Act frustrated.”

“That won’t be hard. Can I trust you?”

She smiled. “Trust has to come from within.” And with that she slipped away. We took care that the rest of the time we were as prickly as porcupines. I hoped it was truly a ruse.

We followed the old caravan tracks and I feared Ottoman patrols, but it was as if the clash at Mount Tabor had temporarily made Turkish forces disappear. The world seemed empty, primeval. We were trailed once by native tribesmen, tough little men on camels, but our party looked tough too, and poor to boot, hardly worth robbing. Najac rode to talk with them with his toughs, and they disappeared.

By the time we reached the city of the Templar maps, no one followed us at all.

We turned west and dropped from the edge of the central plateau toward the distant desert. Between us and that waste, however, was the strangest geologic formation I’d ever seen. There was a range of moonlike mountains, jagged and stark, and in front of them a boil of brown sandstone, lumpy and rounded. It looked like a frozen brew of brown bubbles, or wildly risen bread. There seemed no way in or around this odd formation, but when we came near we saw caves on it like a pox, a hundred-eyed monster. The sandstone, I realized, was dotted with them. Carvings of pillars and steps began to appear in the outcrops. We camped in a dry wadi, the stars brilliant and cold.

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Silano said the paths we would tread the next morning were too narrow and precipitous for horses, so when the sky lightened we left them picketed at the canyon’s entrance with some of Najac’s Arabs as guard. I noted the horses were oddly nervous, neighing and stamping, and they shied from a wagon that had appeared at the edge of our camp sometime in the night. It was boxy but covered with tarpaulins, and Silano said its supplies included meat that made the animals skittish. I wanted to investigate, but then the morning sun lit the escarpment and picked out its cracklike canyon and welcoming Roman arch. We entered on foot and within yards could see nothing of the world behind. All sound disappeared, except the scuffle of our own feet as we descended the wadi.

“Storms have washed cobbles over what was once an ancient road,” Silano said. “The flash floods boil most frequently this time of year, records say, after thunder and lightning. The Templars knew this, and used it. So will we.”

And then, as I have described, we came after a mile to the canyon’s other end, and gaped. Before us was a new canyon, perpendicular to the first and just as imposing, but this is not what amazed us. Instead, on the wall opposite was the most unexpected monument I’d ever seen, the first thing to be on a par in glory with the immensity of the pyramids. It was a temple carved from living rock.

Imagine a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, pink as a maiden’s cheeks, and not on it but in it, carved into its face, an ornate pagan edifice of pillars and pediment and cupolas rearing higher than a Philadelphia church steeple. Sculpted eagles the size of buffalo crouched on its upper cornices, and the alcoves between its pillars held stone figures with angel wings. What drew my eye weren’t these cherubim or demons, however, but the central figure high above the temple’s dark door. It was a woman, breasts bare and eroded, her hips draped with Roman folds of stony cloth, and her head high and alert. I’d seen this form before in the sacred precincts of ancient Egypt. Cupped in her arm was a cornucopia, and on her head the remains of a crown made of a solar disc between bull’s horns. I felt a shiver at this weird recurrence of a goddess who’d haunted me since Paris, where the 2 0 6

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Romans had built a temple to this same goddess on what is now the site of Notre Dame.

“Isis!” Astiza cried. “She’s a star, guiding us to the book!” Silano smiled. “The Arabs call this the Khazne, the Treasury, because their legends claim this is where Pharaoh hid his wealth.”

“You mean the book is in there?” I asked.

“No. The rooms are shallow and bare. It’s somewhere nearby.” We rode to the Khazne’s entrance, splashing across a small stream that ran down the center of this new chasm. The canyon twisted away to our right. A broad staircase led to the dark pillared entry. We stood a moment in the cool of the temple’s portico, looking out at the red rock, and then stepped into the room beyond.

As Silano said, it was disappointingly empty, as featureless as the room that had held the empty sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid.

The cliff had been hollowed into straight, sheer, boxlike inner chambers. A few minutes of inspection confirmed there were no hidden doors. It was plain as an empty warehouse.