By the time we reached the city of the Templar maps, no one followed us at all.
We turned west and dropped from the edge of the central plateau toward the distant desert. Between us and that waste, however, was the strangest geologic formation I’d ever seen. There was a range of moonlike mountains, jagged and stark, and in front of them a boil of brown sandstone, lumpy and rounded. It looked like a frozen brew of brown bubbles, or wildly risen bread. There seemed no way in or around this odd formation, but when we came near we saw caves on it like a pox, a hundred-eyed monster. The sandstone, I realized, was dotted with them. Carvings of pillars and steps began to appear in the outcrops. We camped in a dry wadi, the stars brilliant and cold.
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Silano said the paths we would tread the next morning were too narrow and precipitous for horses, so when the sky lightened we left them picketed at the canyon’s entrance with some of Najac’s Arabs as guard. I noted the horses were oddly nervous, neighing and stamping, and they shied from a wagon that had appeared at the edge of our camp sometime in the night. It was boxy but covered with tarpaulins, and Silano said its supplies included meat that made the animals skittish. I wanted to investigate, but then the morning sun lit the escarpment and picked out its cracklike canyon and welcoming Roman arch. We entered on foot and within yards could see nothing of the world behind. All sound disappeared, except the scuffle of our own feet as we descended the wadi.
“Storms have washed cobbles over what was once an ancient road,” Silano said. “The flash floods boil most frequently this time of year, records say, after thunder and lightning. The Templars knew this, and used it. So will we.”
And then, as I have described, we came after a mile to the canyon’s other end, and gaped. Before us was a new canyon, perpendicular to the first and just as imposing, but this is not what amazed us. Instead, on the wall opposite was the most unexpected monument I’d ever seen, the first thing to be on a par in glory with the immensity of the pyramids. It was a temple carved from living rock.
Imagine a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, pink as a maiden’s cheeks, and not on it but in it, carved into its face, an ornate pagan edifice of pillars and pediment and cupolas rearing higher than a Philadelphia church steeple. Sculpted eagles the size of buffalo crouched on its upper cornices, and the alcoves between its pillars held stone figures with angel wings. What drew my eye weren’t these cherubim or demons, however, but the central figure high above the temple’s dark door. It was a woman, breasts bare and eroded, her hips draped with Roman folds of stony cloth, and her head high and alert. I’d seen this form before in the sacred precincts of ancient Egypt. Cupped in her arm was a cornucopia, and on her head the remains of a crown made of a solar disc between bull’s horns. I felt a shiver at this weird recurrence of a goddess who’d haunted me since Paris, where the 2 0 6
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Romans had built a temple to this same goddess on what is now the site of Notre Dame.
“Isis!” Astiza cried. “She’s a star, guiding us to the book!” Silano smiled. “The Arabs call this the Khazne, the Treasury, because their legends claim this is where Pharaoh hid his wealth.”
“You mean the book is in there?” I asked.
“No. The rooms are shallow and bare. It’s somewhere nearby.” We rode to the Khazne’s entrance, splashing across a small stream that ran down the center of this new chasm. The canyon twisted away to our right. A broad staircase led to the dark pillared entry. We stood a moment in the cool of the temple’s portico, looking out at the red rock, and then stepped into the room beyond.
As Silano said, it was disappointingly empty, as featureless as the room that had held the empty sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid.
The cliff had been hollowed into straight, sheer, boxlike inner chambers. A few minutes of inspection confirmed there were no hidden doors. It was plain as an empty warehouse.
“Unless there’s a trick to this place, like its mathematical dimensions, there’s nothing here,” I said. “What’s it for?” It seemed too large to live in and yet not big and luminous enough for a temple.
Silano shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We are to find the Place of High Sacrifice. If there’s one thing we can confirm about this, it isn’t high.”
“Glorious, however,” Astiza murmured.
“Illusion, like all else,” Silano said. “Only the mind is real. That’s why cruelty is no sin.”
We came back outside, the canyon half in sunlight, half in shadow.
The day was hazing. “We’re lucky,” Silano said. “The air is heavy and smells like storm. We won’t need to wait, but must act before the tempest breaks.”
This new canyon slowly broadened as we followed it, allowing us ever better glimpses of the maze of mountains we’d entered. Rock shot skyward like layer cakes, rounded loaves, and doughy castles.
Oleander bloomed to reflect the strange rock. Everywhere the cliff walls were pierced with caves, but not natural ones. They had the t h e
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rectangular shape of human doors, indicating people had once carved them. It was a city not built on the earth, but of it. We passed a grand semicircular Roman theater, its tiers of seats again carved from the cliff itself, and finally passed out to a broad bowl enclosed by steep mountains, like a vast courtyard surrounded by walls. It was a perfect hiding place for a city, accessible only by narrow and easily defended canyons. Yet it had room enough for a Boston. Pillars, no longer holding anything up, reared from the dirt. Roofless temples rose from rubble.
“By the grace of Isis,” Astiza murmured. “Who dreamed here?” One cliff wall was a spectacle to rival the earlier Khazne. It had been carved into the façade of a fabulous city, a riot of staircases, pillars, pediments, platforms, windows, and doors, leading to a bee-hive of chambers within. I began counting the entrances and gave up.
There were hundreds. No, thousands.
“This place is huge,” I said. “We’re to find a book in this? It makes the pyramids look like a postbox.”
“You’re to find it. You and your seraphim.” Silano had pulled out his Templar map and was studying it. Then he pointed. “From up there.”
A mountain behind us that rose above the ancient theater was carved into battlements but appeared flat on top. Goat tracks led upward. “Up there? Where?”
“To the High Place of Sacrifice.”
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Anarrow footpath had been built from crude steps chiseled out of sandstone. It was muggy and we sweated, but as we climbed our view broadened, and more and more cliffs came into view that were pockmarked with doorways and windows. Nowhere did we see people. The abandoned city was silent, without the keening of ghosts.
The light was purpling.
At the top we came out to a flat plateau of sandstone with a magnificent view. Far below was the dusty bowl of ruined walls and toppled pillars, enclosed by cliffs. Beyond were more jagged mountains 2 0 8
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without a scrap of green, as stripped as a skeleton. The sun was sink-ing toward looming thunderheads that scudded toward us like black men-o’-war. There was a hot, humid breeze that picked up funnels of dust and spun them like tops. The rock shelf itself had been precisely flattened by ancient chisels. At the center was an incised rectangle the size of a ballroom, like a very shallow and dry pool. Silano consulted a compass. “It’s oriented north and south, all right,” he pronounced, as if expecting this. To the west, where the storm was coming from, four steps led to a raised platform that appeared to be some kind of altar.