“See,” said Dragut, as if reading my mind. “Your ships draw too much water to even come close.”
Midday heat and sun were dazzling, adding to the hallucinatory effect of what Napoleon’s savants had labeled “mirage.” The land scent was of sand and spices, excrement and oranges, the wool of piled carpets and stink of drying fish. Tripoli is on a green plain that gives way to desert waste, and in the shimmering light its flat-roofed houses are whitewashed ice blocks that gleam like snow. This glacier is crevassed with winding streets so narrow and confused that they seem more like natural channels than planned thoroughfares. The city’s flatness is punctuated by the bulbous domes of mosques and upright stalks of minarets, topped by conical green roofs like witches’ hats. At the city’s southeastern edge, near the harbor, is the squat, massive, crenellated castle of the bashaw, Yussef Karamanli. Beyond is a rocky outcrop with a fort that commands both city and sea: a fine place for a mirror.
Karamanli, Dragut told us with pride, was as ruthless a prince as Attila the Hun. “He came to power seven years ago when he drove out the pirate Ali Bourghal. Before that he murdered his brother Hassan in the palace harem, shooting off his mother’s fingers when she raised her arm to try to protect her eldest son. Yussef dragged Hassan’s pregnant wife off the dying body of her husband by her hair. Then he cut off Hassan’s privates and threw them to his dogs.”
“No wonder you joined up with him.”
“And yet he is also a pious man—he wears scripture from the Koran, written in strips, wound into his turban.”
“Now there’s a commitment.”
“When Yussef took the city from the pirate Bourghal, his other brother Hamet agreed to exile in Alexandria. However, Hamet’s wife and children remain as hostages. Yussef views Hamet with contempt, and controls him by terrorizing his family. Yussef himself has two wives, a fair-skinned Turk and an ebony black.”
The white Madonna and the black, I thought, remembering my adventures beneath Jerusalem with Miriam and my teachings from Astiza.
“Plus a harem of concubines. Yussef is a stallion. He also has a pet leopard, an Italian band to serenade him with music, and jewels the size of robin’s eggs.”
“I still can’t see him winning an election.”
“He doesn’t have to. He is loved and feared because his rule is Allah’s will. We Muslims are content with our lot because, as the Prophet said, ‘It is written.’ Christians are tormented because they don’t really believe in fate and are always trying to change things. We faithful are happy with oppression if it is God’s will. Tripoli is tranquil in tyranny.”
“So you put up with a lunatic who murders his brother, wounds his mother, and drags his pregnant sister-in-law by the hair?”
“All the world pays tribute to Yussef Karamanli.”
“By God, England and France don’t,” Smith put in.
“This is as it should be. The English and French keep other navies weak. Did not Nelson just destroy the Danish fleet at Copenhagen? We cannot fight their battleships, nor can they close in with our shallow coast. So we leave their flag alone and they leave ours alone, while allowing us to prey on the merchant ships of their commercial rivals. Shippers learn there is safety paying extra to sail under the English or French flag. Here again we see the wisdom of God, with each nation assigned to its rightful place. The only people who do not see reason are the Americans, but look—do you see their frigates? They bluster but hide.”
“It was Yussef who declared war on us.”
“Because your baby nation doesn’t understand the way of the world and pay rightful tribute! The United States should give us what we demand. It will be far cheaper than senseless defiance. You’ll see.”
“I can’t say we have faith in your advice, Dragut, given that you’ve lied, betrayed, and enslaved us.”
“Ah! You are lucky that Hamidou Dragut is the one who captured you, and not a truly hard man like Murad Reis!”
“The traitor Scot?” Smith asked.
“He took the turban, but is dour and gloomy like his homeland. I will put in a word for you but he is not merciful like me, Hamidou. Murad chose valor under the Crescent over slavery under the Cross. Now he is captain of all our corsairs, renowned for his courage, cleverness, and cruelty. Every slave has that opportunity! In your backward nations, slavery is a life’s torment, the work of Negroes you despise. In our enlightened nation it is but a step to wealth and even freedom for those who convert to Islam! Our Christian slaves live the life of the damned, but Muslim slaves can rise as high as their masters. Such is the wisdom of Allah.”
“Not one of us will ever become a Mussulman,” Cuvier vowed, “even we savants who question Scripture.”
“Then you must be ransomed to bankrupt your families, or sentenced to the quarries, or given over to Omar the Dungeon Master. Are you savants not men of reason? Listen to me welclass="underline" Only reason can save you now.”
Cannon fired salutes as we neared the city. Aurora’s flotilla answered in turn, each puff of smoke from the forts followed a second or two later by one from us, the bangs echoing across the lovely turquoise water. Swarms of dockworkers, slavers, soldiers, and veiled wives assembled on the quay as we glided between the reefs. Horns blew from the city walls and drums beat out a tattoo. Our ship tied up and great rattling chains, each set as heavy as two pails of water, were dragged aboard by starved-looking slaves and manacled around our ankles and wrists, the weight holding our arms down and our hands cupped as if we were trying to cover our privates. This forced pose was not entirely inappropriate because our clothes were ragged after the caves of Thira. Dirty, unshaven, and thin, we looked like the wretched slaves we’d become. My scientist companions gloomily surveyed the churning mob waiting to escort us to the slave markets. Reason! We had one card left, but didn’t dare play it. We thought we knew the place to which the palimpsest map referred.
It was Smith, with his love for geography, who’d figured it out. He told me when I’d been returned to the hold of Dragut’s ship after meeting Aurora. “We had it backward, Ethan,” he explained in a whisper as we made for the African coast. “This inlet here isn’t a bay, it’s a peninsula, as if the map is drawn in a mirror. And once I realized that, everything else became plain. I know of one harbor in this part of the world with that shaped protrusion, and it is Syracuse on Sicily, where Archimedes did his calculations and wielded his mirror. This curved line here is not drawn on land, but on the sea. Fulton suggested what that detail might represent.”
“I think that’s the limit of the mirror’s effectiveness,” the inventor said. “Within that line, the mirror’s rays were strong enough to set attacking Roman galleys on fire.”
“The symbols may refer to places on land the makers of this map wanted to record,” Smith went on. “The hiding place, perhaps, of the mirror of Archimedes. Caves, forts, a church.”
I looked. There was a cross on the peninsula, and a castlelike symbol a good distance from town. A line was drawn from cross to castle, but it angled at a horseshoe-shaped mark. Where the line bent, there was a wavy line like a symbol for a river. Nearby was an oval, little humps that could mark huts or caves, and arrows with odd symbols and meaningless numbers.
“I think the Templars drew this after they rediscovered the mirror,” Smith whispered, “and hid it on Thira in a place only they knew: some underground catacombs, perhaps.”
“So we have something to bargain with!” I exclaimed.