As the day waned, and the camels’ energy flagged, she knew that she must be close to reaching her goal. The scroll had said a full day’s ride, and now she had done it. The towering rocks cast deep and long shadows across the chalky ground. She was reminded of wandering through the Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford, back when she was at school there, and finding herself surrounded at dusk by the crumbling headstones and marble angels on every side. She had been visited not by a sensation of fear, or even dread, but of being a pilgrim in some alien landscape, somewhere altogether strange and unworldly. The surface of the moon, she felt certain, would bear a close resemblance to the place she was in now.
“It’s getting too dark to see,” her father said in a weary voice. “And the camels can go no farther.”
“Neither can I,” said Mustafa, pulling back on the reins, then sliding down from the saddle blanket to the ground. “We’ll have to look for this cobra in the morning.” He did not sound optimistic.
But Simone was reluctant to give up. Dismounting, she left the others to set up camp as she wandered across the rough and uneven terrain. Several times her boots slipped on the sand or chalk, and she fell to her knees. Each time, she got up, brushed the grit from her pants, and continued her search. The sun, as bright and round as a tangerine, slid below the horizon, and she removed the flashlight from her belt and aimed its beam at each configuration she came across.
So far, nothing looked remotely like a snake.
“Simone, where are you?” she heard her father call. “You’re going to get lost out there.”
She could smell the fire that Mustafa must have started, and hear the crackling of the wood. The sounds and scents were carried like gifts on the desert wind.
It was then, just as she was turning back toward the camp, that the light revealed an opening in the ground — the entrance to a cave, with jagged stones that looked like teeth, but big enough that a man could pass through it if he took the precaution of ducking his head. She slowly raised the beam of her flashlight, and even as she did so, she saw what resembled the coils of a giant snake and, rising above them, as if in keeping with the joy rising in her breast, a spindly neck topped with a broad, flat head shaped like a spade. Where there might have been a flicking tongue, there was even a sharp protuberance of stone.
If this was not the spitting cobra, nothing was.
She tried to cry out, but her throat was so parched that only a croak emerged. She took a swig from her canteen, wiped the dust from her face with another splash, then shouted, “Here! It’s here!”
But they must not have heard her.
She had to stumble back toward the camp, guided by the smell of the burning wood as much as by the flickering glow of the small fire. She dropped beside the tent in which her father was lighting the kerosene lamp.
“I found it!” she said. “I found it.”
“Where?” he asked, just as Mustafa came back from feeding the camels.
“She found it?” Mustafa exclaimed. “A girl? I don’t believe it.”
Simone nodded vigorously, and it was decided that they would eat some goat stew and drink some tea, get a good night’s sleep, and explore the cave first thing in the morning.
It was the longest night she had ever spent.
By dawn, Simone was dressed and ready, hurrying Mustafa and her father through their rudimentary breakfast, and leading them back to the gigantic cobra rock. In the first light of day, the white stone took on a golden hue, while the entrance at its base, still in shadow, remained as black as pitch. Crouching down, though she hardly needed to, Simone entered first, playing her flashlight beam around the immediate interior.
There was a narrow slope, easily navigable, leading down to a floor of smooth white sand. Mustafa followed right behind her, and her father, holding the lantern aloft, brought up the rear. Once they had all arrived at the bottom, Dr. Rashid held up the lamp, turning slowly in place, and the whole cavern suddenly resembled the mouth of some monstrous beast, with thousands upon thousands of stalactites, some small and needle-sharp, others blunt and wide, hanging like teeth from the ceiling.
“My God,” Simone said, “I feel like Jonah.”
“Allah be with us,” Mustafa murmured. For a kid more given to wisecracks than reverence, it was a testament to the power of their surroundings.
“More proof,” Dr. Rashid intoned, his words echoing around the limestone walls, “that an ocean was here many millions of years ago.”
Simone didn’t know where to look first — everywhere the stone had been carved into preposterous configurations, rippling waves and swirling spirals. The amber walls resembled folded draperies, in some places vertically lined and striated, and in others laid horizontally so that the flowstone looked like sheets stacked in a linen closet. But even a quick survey of the vast interior revealed one troubling thing: there was no sign of a proper sepulcher, much less a sarcophagus.
Could the genizah fragments have been right about so much, but wrong about this? Or was it possible that the tomb had been discovered, and plundered, a thousand years ago?
Simone made a grand circuit of the cavern, aiming her flashlight into every nook and cranny, in search of a passageway that might lead to a chamber beyond. She had just about given up, when a slight gust of air — cooler even than the air in the cave — brushed across her cheek. She stepped back, felt the breeze again ruffle the hair of her brow, and examined the spot more closely.
The countless ages of seepage and erosion had lent the wall the appearance of a waterfall, a veiled cascade behind which she could now see that there was a space, invisible from the front, but opening behind amply wide to admit passage. Best of all, she could see, at the very limit of the flashlight beam, traces of a figure incised against the far wall.
“It is very beautiful,” Mustafa was saying, “but I think we have come a long way on a fool’s errand. Ali Baba never lived here.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Simone said, waving them over. “Look at this!”
The two men joined her, Dr. Rashid extending the lantern into the tunnel. The walls here had been planed smooth, and either the stone had been exceptionally pale to begin with, or it had been whitewashed long ago. Simone dug a fingernail into it, and a flake of paint crumbled away. The stone beneath was more of a dull yellow.
Her heart sang.
Though the roof of the tunnel was low, it had been scoured almost entirely clean of the dangling stalactites — only a few had grown back to the length of daggers — and its width was more than sufficient to admit any kind of altar, sarcophagus, or ornament the builders of a tomb might have wanted to install. She moved carefully, stopping to examine the figure she had seen incised in the rock. Though much eroded by time, it was unmistakably a pig.
The saint’s patron animal.
If she had found a diamond necklace there, she could not have been any happier.
“Is there still any doubt?” she crowed, letting the flashlight linger on the image.
The tunnel made an elbow turn to the right, and then another, sharply to the left, before it debouched into a vaulted chamber with a high roof, carved like a cupola, and smooth, sloping walls, which had also been whitewashed. Though large patches of the paint had long since fallen away or discolored, there were pictures daubed all around the rim of the ceiling, in blue and gold, depicting in rudimentary fashion events from the life of the saint. In one, he led, with his distinctive staff, a herd of swine; in another, he appeared with a halo before a figure on a throne, no doubt depicting his intercession with the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in defense of the early Christian martyrs. Behind the emperor’s head, almost as if it were whispering in his ear, hovered a winged black insect. Simone had never seen an image quite so strange.