‘So the quipu might be an ancient connection between cultures, and might also be the most recently used method of communication between them?’
‘Precisely,’ Lucy agreed. ‘The Inca represent the most recent civilization that has a connection to this iconography. That means that they may also be home to the most recent remains of individuals who carry what we’re looking for. If this Egyptian king might have had some connection to the remains we found in Israel, then perhaps the ancient Inca do too, and there may be remains of people there much fresher than those of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. The Inca were experts in the practice of mummification.’
‘So, we go to Peru now?’ Lopez asked.
Lucy shook her head and looked at Dr El-Wari. ‘Many of Peru’s ancient antiquities now reside in museums across the globe. They were scattered after the conquistadors conquered the Inca civilization in search of gold and other valuables that they plundered. Somewhere, we need to find a particular quipu, one is associated with the iconography we are seeing at all of these ancient sites.’
Dr El-Wari spoke softly.
‘The largest collection of ancient Peruvian artefacts associated with the Inca civilization is not held in South America.’
‘Where is it?’ Ethan asked.
‘In Germany,’ El-Wari replied. ‘At the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.’
Lucy turned to Ethan. ‘If there is a quipu that matches these icons, it may tell us everything we need to know to narrow down the location of the remains. We need to go to Germany, right now.’
XXIV
‘The flight plan was filed from Cambodia to Cairo.’
Yuri Polkov looked at the paperwork that his son Vladimir handed to him as their private Learjet soared through billowing banks of cloud illuminated a deep gold and orange by the rising sun. The file showed the registration number of a privately owned aircraft, a PBY Catalina, that was based in the Phillipines.
‘What have we been able to figure out from what happened in Cambodia?’
Vladimir sat in the seat opposite his father and glanced idly out of the window at the brilliant sunrise. The glow cast his face half into shadow, and for a moment Yuri was struck by the way the light contrasted Vladimir in much the same way as his personality did. He was his father’s son, and the darkness consumed them both far more easily than did the light.
‘They were looking for something deep in the jungles north of Angkor Wat,’ Vladimir replied. ‘I managed to get some men up there but they didn’t find much, at least nothing that we can make sense of.’
‘Show me,’ Yuri demanded.
Vladimir shrugged and tossed half a dozen small photographs onto the table top between them. ‘As near as we can make out, their interest was in an engraving at the top of a pyramid. Some sort of capstone.’
Yuri placed the photographs into a line before him on the table and scrutinized them carefully. The pictures were poorly taken, shot by imbeciles on their cell phones with crude flashes to illuminate the gloomy jungle. It was only by chance that one of the shots had been taken at an awkward angle that cast into sharp relief the engraving on the side of the capstone.
Yuri peered closely at the icon and nodded to himself with a hum of satisfaction.
‘What do you see?’ Vladimir asked.
Yuri reached into a folder beside him and from it produced an image taken by a diver at the Yonaguni monument in Japan. He positioned the images beside each other and turned them to face Vladimir. ‘What do you see?’ He challenged.
Vladimir glanced at the photos without interest. ‘Nothing but engraved rocks.’
‘Engraved rocks two thousand miles apart, created by civilizations that lived at different times and yet producing the precisely the same icon. Don’t you think that this image meant something to these people?’
‘These people painted faces on rocks and worshipped them,’ Vladimir replied with a disinterested smile.
Yuri shook his head and leaned back in his seat as he examined the images. ‘This icon, that of the disc of the sun with radiating beams of light emanating from it, has been a feature of ancient civilizations across the globe for thousands of years. That in itself is not surprising, considering that most ancient civilizations worshipped the sun and the life that it brings to our planet, and that worship forms the basis of every major religion to this day. Every religion owes its creation to our ancient ancestor’s worship of the sun.’
‘Fascinating,’ Vladimir murmured. ‘But it doesn’t bring them any closer to us. We still don’t know where Lucy Morgan and Ethan Warner have gone.’
‘No,’ Yuri agreed, ‘but these particular images give me a very good idea of where they might be thinking of going.’
Vladimir peered at his father, his interest suddenly peaked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘These icons,’ Yuri gestured to the photographs. ‘I might expect them to appear in widely separated civilizations from different eras of human development. What I would not expect is for them to be utterly identical in every feature, including the precise length of each of the beams of light radiating from them.’
Vladimir looked again at the images and noted that each of the beams was indeed the same length in each of the images, as though they had been carved by the same artist drawing from the same template.
‘Coincidence?’
‘I do not deal in coincidence, my son,’ Yuri rumbled as he tapped the image of the icon from Cambodia. ‘These icons actually mean something. They contain a message, something to be followed and understood.’
Vladimir shrugged again but said nothing. Yuri felt a desperate tug of melancholy for his son’s lack of understanding, his inability to comprehend the magnitude of what it was they were actually doing and the knowledge that they sought.
‘Every single ancient civilization worshipped the sun because it brought light and life to our planet. They understood that without the sun, there would be no life.’
‘It doesn’t take inherent genius to figure that out, father,’ Vladimir replied.
‘No, but it does require a respectable degree of intelligence to understand what that means for the present-day worship of gods of so many names by so many nations.’
‘They don’t worship suns, they worship deities.’
‘And how did those deities come to be worshipped in the first place?’ Yuri challenged. ‘The world’s holy books would have it that their words were transcribed from the voice of those very gods themselves, but they are so full of errors and inconsistencies that we know that cannot be true. Think about the words used to describe the gods themselves: that they are the light of the world, that they come upon clouds. Think about the legends and stories associated with them. The birth stories of the messiahs of so many religious icons match the dates and times of winter and summer solstices, the resurrection legends matching the dates of the coming of spring. Successive religions changed the names of the icons being worshipped in order to eradicate the memory of proceeding religions, condemning them as heresy and dogma. How do you think it is that the legend of Christ’s resurrection comes at Easter, which was originally the Roman festival Eostara and had nothing to do with resurrections at all but with the coming of spring? Or that his birth is celebrated at Christmas, which was originally a celebration of the end of the winter where the sun was at its lowest point for three days before being miraculously resurrected three days later as it rose earlier day by day in the eastern sky?’
Vladimir shrugged. ‘It’s all fascinating I agree, but it doesn’t solve this problem.’
Yuri shoulders sagged. ‘It does if you know where to look.’