“The ancient Egyptians often used it for their canopic jars,” Simone said, “especially when the jars were being used to hold the vital organs of Pharaohs.”
“Are you saying that we have the ossuary of a Pharaoh?” Lucas asked.
“No,” Simone replied, “not at all,” though her tone suggested she knew more than she was saying. Delaney, meanwhile, charged ahead.
“This particular strain of alabaster,” he said, “was only quarried in certain regions of Egypt and Syria.”
“The region around the Sahara el Beyda,” Simone said. “Or White Desert.”
“Starting about three thousand years ago.”
“I can tell you right now,” Lucas said, glad at last to have something to contribute, “that the ossuary dates from no more than two thousand years ago. Probably a century or two less.”
“How do you know that?” Delaney asked.
“From the Latin inscriptions on its lid. One of them refers to a passage in the Scriptures.”
“Well, that would be your department,” he conceded.
“What about the other markings?” Simone said, readily falling into the role of colleague. “Have you made any progress with those?”
Despite the ease with which she had adapted, Lucas still found it hard to press on. This project had been delivered into his hands under such bonds of secrecy that he was hesitant to divulge his findings willy-nilly. “I’m working on them.”
“Perhaps I can help.”
Delaney nodded his head in encouragement, but Lucas ignored him.
“We really need to get back into the room with the sarcophagus,” Simone remarked. “I think we’ve done as much as we can with what Professor Delaney has on hand.”
“Call me Patrick,” Delaney said, and Simone smiled. “But I think she’s right,” he added, fixing his gaze on Lucas. “We can send all this geophysical data on to DC, but Macmillan won’t be satisfied for long.”
Lucas could sense Simone’s impatience, but he looked instead at the sliver of alabaster lying next to the microscope on the counter.
“What he really wants to know,” Delaney went on, “is what’s inside it.”
“Don’t you?” Simone said.
“And I can’t use my radio isotope research to put a date on bones that haven’t been removed yet,” Delaney complained. “If I don’t come through with some results soon, it could cost me my funding.”
Lucas felt like he was under a barrage.
“The box needs to be opened,” Delaney concluded.
“When it is,” Simone said, “I am now authorized to be there.”
“All right, all right,” Lucas said, giving up, “we’ll open it.”
“When?” Simone insisted.
“Tonight. After the museum closes at eight.”
Then, lest he be pushed any farther into a corner, he asked Delaney to write up his notes and slip a copy under his study door, turned around, and left the room. He knew that opening the ossuary was inevitable, but now that he had committed to doing it in a matter of hours, he felt a cold and numb sensation descending on his limbs. It had to be done, but he did not want to do it.
Lo and behold, Andy Brandt stood just across the hall, pretending to be absorbed in the flyers tacked to the Mineralogy and Geophysics Department’s bulletin board. How much had he been able to overhear, Lucas wondered?
“Say, who’s the looker in there with Professor Delaney?” Andy asked.
“No one you need to know,” Lucas replied as he headed downstairs, one hand on the railing to compensate for his partial vision. Around the Caithness Man’s display case, three grammar school kids stood holding spiral notebooks. True to what Brandt had said earlier, the smallest of them extended one trembling finger to the glass as another one urged him on. “Touch it — I dare you to! Touch it!”
The boy did, then fled out the door, screaming and waving his arms as if he’d poked a hornets’ nest. Lucas knew exactly how he felt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Emerging from the bowels of the collegiate library, Dr. Rashid was met by a cold wet wind and a sea of puddles. He tucked his scarf around his sore throat and pulled up the collar of his overcoat, but not before another coughing fit had overtaken him. Once it had subsided, he gingerly made his way down the leaf-strewn walkway, the tip of his ebony cane testing each step before he took it. Even so, he was tired and catching another chill by the time he came beneath the great brooding hulk of the university’s Gothic chapel. A splat of rain on his shoulder decided him, and he went up the steps to the massive doors.
He had already passed through these doors days before, and noticed their unusual motif — Christ surrounded by the four beasts from the Book of Revelation. Each of the creatures — a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a winged man — represented a Gospel, and their depiction here strongly reminded him, as had probably been intended, of the west tympanum of Chartres Cathedral.
Once inside the narthex, he also noted, with amusement, the stained-glass window devoted to medicine, featuring the Persian physician al-Razi. Indeed, the windows of the chapel were a distinctly eclectic collection that ran the gamut from biblical scenes and theological themes to tributes to science and philosophy. He could not remember seeing an ecclesiastical homage to Kant, Spinoza, Ptolemy, Descartes, or Louis Pasteur anywhere else in the world.
The long and gloomy nave stretched out before him, and it appeared that only one other person occupied the vast interior of the cathedral. Like Rashid, this man, hunched down low, had sought a quiet spot for reflection in the pews, as well as a refuge from the weather outside. Rashid sat down on the opposite side of the main aisle, several rows ahead of him, so that they both might maintain their privacy.
Above him, an indigo-blue-and-purple window, faintly illuminated by the late afternoon light outside, showed Christ holding a scroll, and beneath him, in Greek, the inscription “Who is worthy to open the scroll?”
Who indeed, Rashid thought, removing his handkerchief to dab at his nose.
Since coming to Princeton, he’d been absorbed in the papyri, or the fragments thereof, retrieved from the cave of Saint Anthony. General Rommel’s henchmen may have been able to make off with the ossuary, but the contents of the urns had been unknown to them, and with the help of his daughter, Rashid had managed to abscond with the trove intact. Although they had suffered a bit from being haphazardly stuffed in his luggage on the voyage over, he had now been allowed access to a private carrel in the library where he could lay them out properly. The library had also provided a host of rare and useful materials: The early presidents of Princeton had nearly all been men of the cloth, deep-thinking theologians and ministers — Dickinson, Edwards, Witherspoon — whose books and papers had been donated to Princeton upon their deaths. In some ways, he could not have wound up in a more congenial and conducive environment.
If only his discoveries had been as comforting.
Despite the short amount of time he had been ensconced at the library — courtesy, again, of his daughter’s clever maneuverings — everything he had gleaned so far had only exacerbated his fears and suspicions. Many of the papyri referred to a period, roughly three hundred years after the death of Christ, in which the barbarous Roman emperor Diocletian had initiated what was commonly known as the Great Persecution. It was from this era that most of the well-known stories of Christians martyred in the arena to ravenous beasts, of saints being roasted over slow fires, of endless roads lined with teetering crosses bearing the bodies of the crucified, sprang. Diocletian himself had come to Egypt on one of his triumphal tours, and in Alexandria had torn down all of the Christian churches and burned thousands of holy texts. Anyone who refused to renounce this new and traitorous faith had had his right eye put out with a sword, and the tendons on his left foot severed, before he was enslaved and shipped off to die in the copper mines. “In these conflicts,” according to a scroll Dr. Rashid attributed to the church polemicist Eusebius, “the noble martyrs of Christ shone illustrious over the entire world… and the evidences of the truly divine and unspeakable power of our Saviour were made manifest through them.”