The Rosetta Key

The coffin was made of acacia wood, remarkably preserved. While opening it gave me pause, I’d come too far. I jerked open the lid. Inside was a skeleton of a man, not terrifying but instead looking small and naked in this ultimate exposure. His flesh had long since decayed away to bone and his clothes were wisps. His warrior’s sword was a narrow, rusty tendril of its former might. But one skeletal hand gripped a marvel not corroded at all, but as bright and intricately decorated as t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

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the day it was forged. It was a golden cylinder, fat as an arrow quiver and long as a scroll. Its exterior was a riot of mythic figures, of bulls, hawks, fish, scarabs, and creatures so strange and unworldly that I’m at a loss to describe them, so different were they from anything I’d seen before. There were grooves and arabesque scrollwork, stars and geometric shapes, and the gold was so smooth and intricate that my fingertips stroked its sensuousness. The metal seemed warm. It was a life’s fortune in weight, and priceless in design.

The Book of Thoth must be inside. But when I pulled to lift it away, the skeleton pulled back!

I was so startled I let go and the cylinder shifted slightly, settling deeper into the bones. Then I realized I’d simply been surprised by the object’s weight. I lifted again and the cylinder came free like an anchor stone, supple, slick, and heavy. No lightning flashed. No thunder pealed. Without having realized I’d held it, I let loose pent-up breath. It was simply me in the gloom, holding what men had reportedly sought, fought, and died for over five thousand years. Was this, too, cursed? Of would it be my guidebook to a better world?

And how to open it?

As I studied the cylinder more carefully, recognition dawned. I’d seen some of these symbols before. Not all, but some had been on the ceiling at the Temple of Dendara, and others on the calendar device I’d studied in the hold of L’Orient before the French flagship blew up in the Battle of the Nile. There was a circle atop a line, just as on the calendar, and all the others: animals, stars, a pyramid, and Taurus the bull, the zodiacal age in which the Great Pyramid had been built. And not just a pyramid, but a small representation of a pillared temple. The cylinder, I saw, was jointed so that one could twist and align symbols, not unlike the circles of the calendar. So once more I tried what I knew: bull, five-sided star, and the symbol of the summer solstice, just as I’d done on the ship. But that was not enough, so I added pyramid and temple.

Perhaps I was smart. Perhaps I was lucky. Perhaps there were a hundred combinations that would open the cylinder. All I know is there was a click and it divided between pyramid and temple, like a 2 2 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

sausage cut in two. And when I pulled the golden halves apart, what I expected was inside: a scroll, the ancient form of the book.

I unrolled it, my fingers trembling in my excitement. The papy-rus, if that’s what it was, was unlike any I’d seen or felt before. It was slicker, stronger, more tensile, and oddly shimmering, but of a material that seemed neither hide, paper, or metal. What was it? The writing was even stranger. Instead of the pictorial script or hieroglyphics I’d seen in Egypt, this was more abstract. It was angular and faintly geometric, but odder than script I’d ever seen, a riot of shapes, slashes, squiggles, loops, and intricate characters. I had discovered the secret of life, the universe, or immortality, if the lunatics chasing this thing were to be believed. And I couldn’t read a word!

Somewhere, Thoth was laughing.

Well, I’d puzzled things out before. And even if the scroll proved indecipherable, its container was enough to pension a king of Prussia.

Once more, I was rich.

If I could get out of this mouse hole.

I considered. A swim back against the current would be impossible, and even if I could do it I’d only climb back up to a shaft we had no means of ascending. Yet going downstream would suck me into an underground pipe with no guarantee of air. I’d barely survived such a sluice under the Great Pyramid, and didn’t have the nerve to try it again. I’d seen no sign of this temporary river emerging anywhere.

What would Ben Franklin do?