“The walls are blank and solid,” her brother said.
I remembered my experience at Dendara in Egypt and glanced at t h e
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the floor. The black-and-white tiles formed diagonals that radiated out from the altar. “I think Big Ned should push on this stone table here,” I said. “Hard!”
At first nothing happened. Then Jericho joined him, and finally Little Tom, Potts, and me, all of us grunting. Finally there was a scrape and the altar began to rotate on a pivot set at one corner. As it slid sideways across the floor, a hole was revealed underneath. Stairs led down into darkness.
“This is more like it, then,” Ned said, panting.
We descended, crowding into an anteroom below the main chamber. At its end was a great iron door, red and black with rust. It was marked by ten brass disks the size of dinner plates, green with age.
There was one disk at the top, then two rows of three each descending. Between them but lower was a vertical column of three more. In the center of each was a latch.
“Ten doorknobs?” Tentwhistle asked.
“Or ten locks,” Jericho said. “Each of these latches might turn a bar into this jamb of iron.” He tried one handle but it didn’t move. “We’ve no tools to dent this.”
“Which means that maybe it ain’t been opened and ain’t been robbed,” Ned reasoned, more shrewdly than I would have given him credit for. “That’s good news, it seems to me. The guv’nor may have found something after all. What would you have that’s so precious that you’d put a door like this in front of it, eh, and down at the bottom of a rabbit hole to boot?”
“Ten locks? There are no keyholes,” I pointed out.
And as Jericho and Ned pulled and pushed on the massive door, it didn’t quiver. “It’s frozen in place,” the blacksmith said. “Maybe it’s not a door after all.”
“And time is growing short,” Farhi warned. “It will be dawn on the platform above, and Muslims will be coming to pray. If we start pounding on that iron, someone is bound to hear us.”
“Wait,” I said, remembering the mystery of the medallion in Egypt.
“It’s a pattern, don’t you think? Ten discs, shaped like the sun . . . ten is a sacred number. This meant something to the Templars, I’m guessing.” 8 6
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“But what?”
“Sefiroth,” Miriam said slowly. “It’s the tree.”
“A tree?”
Farhi suddenly stepped back. “Yes, yes, I see it now! The Etz Hayim, the Tree of Life!”
“The kabbalah,” Miriam confirmed. “Jewish mysticism and numerology.”
“The Knights Templar were Jews?”
“Certainly not, but ecumenical when it came to searching for ancient secrets,” Farhi reasoned. “They’d have studied the Jewish texts for clues for where to dig in the mount. Muslim too, and any other. They would have been interested in all symbols aiding their quest for knowledge. This is the pattern of the ten sefiroth, with keter, the crown, at the top, and then binah, intuition, opposite chokhmah, wisdom—and so on.”
“Greatness, mercy, strength, glory, victory, majesty, foundation, and sovereignty, or kingdom,” Miriam recited. “All aspects of a God that is beyond understanding. We cannot grasp him, but only these manifestations of his being.”
“But what does it mean on this door?”
“It’s a puzzle, I think,” Farhi said. He had brought his lantern closer. “Yes, I can see the Jewish names engraved in Hebrew. Chesed, tiferet, netzach . . .”
“The Egyptians believed words were magic,” I remembered. “That reciting them could summon a god or powers . . .” Big Ned crossed himself. “By our Lord, heathen blasphemy! These knights of yours adopted the works of the Jew? No wonder they were burned at the stake!”
“They didn’t adopt, they used,” Jericho said patiently. “Here in Jerusalem we respect other faiths, even when we quarrel with them.
The Templars meant something by this. Perhaps the latches are to be turned in the correct succession.”
“The crown first,” I offered. “Keter there, at the top.”
“I’ll try it.” Yet that latch budged no more than the others.
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“Wait, think,” Farhi said. “If we make a mistake perhaps none will work.”
“Or we’ll trigger some trap,” I said, remembering the descending stone monoliths that almost pinned me in the pyramid. “This might be a test to keep out the unworthy.”
“What would a Templar choose first?” Farhi asked. “Victory? They were warriors. Glory? They found fame. Wisdom? If the treasure were a book. Intuition?”
“Thought,” Miriam said. “Thought, like Thoth, like the book Ethan is seeking.”
“Thought?”
“If you draw lines from disc to disc they intersect here in the center,” she pointed. “Does not that center represent to the kabbalistic Jews the unknowable mind of God? Is not that center thought itself?
Essence? What we Christians might call soul?”
“You’re right,” Farhi said, “but there is no latch there.”
“Yes, the only place without a latch is the heart.” She traced lines from the ten disks to this central point. “But here is a small engraved circle.” And before anyone could stop her, she took the pry bar she had poked Little Tom with and rammed the end of the barrel against the iron at precisely that point. There was a dull, echoing boom that made us all jump. Then the engraved circle sank, there was a click, and suddenly all ten latches on all ten brass disks began to turn in unison.
“Get ready!” I raised my rifle. Tentwhistle and Potts held up their naval pistols. Ned and Tom unsheathed their cutlasses.
“We’re all going to be rich,” Ned breathed.
When the latches stopped turning Jericho gave a shove and, with a grinding rattle, the great door pivoted inward and down like a draw-bridge, its top held by chains, ponderously lowering until it landed with a soft whump on a floor of dust beyond. A gray puff flew upward, momentarily obscuring what lie beyond, and then we saw the door had bridged a crevice in the floor. The chasm extended downward into blackness.
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“Some fundamental fault in the earth,” Farhi guessed, peering down. “This has been a sacred mountain since time began, a rock that addresses heaven, but perhaps it has roots to the underworld as well.”
“All things are dual,” Miriam said again.
Cool air wafted upward from the stone crevasse. All of us were uneasy, and I for one remembered that pit of hell in the pyramid. Our greed made us step across anyway.
This chamber was much smaller than the Templar hall above, not much bigger than a drawing room, with a low, domed ceiling. The dome was painted with a riot of stars, zodiacal signs, and weird creatures from some primordial time, a swirl of symbolism that reminded me of the ceiling I’d seen in Egypt at Dendara. At its apex was a seemingly gilded orb that likely represented the sun. In the center of the room was a waist-high stone pedestal, like the base for a statue or a display stand, but it was empty. The walls bore writing in an alphabet I’d never seen before, neither Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, nor Latin. It was different than what I’d seen in Egypt, too. Many characters were geometrical in shape, squares and triangles and circles, but others were twisting worms or tiny mazes. Wood and brass chests were heaped around the room’s periphery, dry and corroded from age.
And inside them there was . . .
Nothing.
Again, I was reminded of the Great Pyramid, where the book’s depository was empty. Cruelty upon cruelty. First the book gone, then Astiza, and now this joke. . . .