‘Second, Mandaeans followed the Johannite heresy, meaning that they revered John the Baptist and rejected Jesus Christ, because of an obvious logical inconsistency in the Bible. If Jesus genuinely was the son of God, then how could John have baptized him? By what authority could he have done that? So if John did baptize Him, then almost by definition John had to be his superior. So the Mandaeans claimed that John the Baptist should be worshipped, and that Christ was a usurper. And,’ she finished, ‘that carving on the wall of the temple could represent John the Baptist. It’s not that dissimilar to some early representations of him.’
‘Yes,’ Stephen replied, ‘and it could also be a representation of Jesus Christ, of any one of the apostles, of the local priest who officiated in the temple, or the local water seller. Okay, the last is a slight exaggeration, but you take my point. It’s unattributed, generic in concept and primitive in its execution, and realistically could be almost anybody. Well, any adult male, at any rate.’
‘I don’t dispute that,’ Angela said. ‘I just think that if the temple was used by the Mandaeans, there’s at least a possibility that the face they carved on the wall might have been intended to represent the person they worshipped. To me, that makes sense.’
‘And to me,’ Bronson said.
‘The third point is rather less convincing. We know that the Mandaeans were very keen on baptism as a way of absolving themselves of their sins. In one corner of that room is a fairly shallow depression in the stone floor. To me, it doesn’t look natural, and I think you can see chisel marks in it. If so, if it was a deliberately created structure, it could have been a bath. Obviously it wasn’t a bath you could lie down in because it’s only about three or four inches deep, but bearing in mind how precious water is, especially in this part of the world, that might have been their baptismal font or whatever they called it. They could have put a couple of pints of water in there, and then used a cup or something to pour it over the head of a member of the congregation standing in it. That would have worked.’
She glanced at Stephen’s sceptical expression in the rear-view mirror.
‘I know you’re not convinced, Stephen,’ she said, ‘but I hope you’ll agree that it’s at least a possibility.’
He nodded, perhaps a trifle reluctantly.
‘It is possible, I’ll give you that, but I think we’re an awfully long way from being able to prove it one way or the other.’
‘I agree,’ Bronson said. ‘I’d love to think you were right, Angela, but it all sounds a bit too circumstantial and interpretive for my liking. You might simply be seeing what you want to see.’
‘There’s also the negative evidence, the evidence that isn’t there,’ Stephen said. ‘A few abandoned Mandaean temples have been excavated in the past, and as far as I can recall none of them ever had anything like this strange inscription inside them. So either this isn’t a Mandaean temple at all, which is in itself quite an exciting prospect, or if it is a temple, then perhaps this inscription is unique and something never seen before.’
‘And I suppose the only other possibility,’ Bronson suggested, as another thought struck him, ‘is that the inscription was nothing whatever to do with the worshippers or the religion they followed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean maybe when the Marsh Arabs or the Mandaeans or whoever found this cave and opened it up, the inscription was already carved on the wall. Or it could have been put there by somebody else after the temple had finally been abandoned. The bottom line, really, is that until you’ve deciphered it, all we’ll be doing is speculating, which is just a polite way of saying we’ll be guessing.’
A few minutes later, Angela reduced speed as they approached a junction and then steered the Toyota off the main road and down a ramp. The new road was narrow, barely wide enough in some places for two vehicles to pass each other, and the surface was comparatively poor.
‘It gets a lot worse than this once we’re in the desert,’ she said grimly, steering the Land Cruiser around a pothole.
The jarring ride wasn’t conducive to conversation, and Bronson contented himself with staring out of the windows at the terrain around them, not that there was a great deal to see.
When most people think about a desert, their mental picture is of rolling sand dunes sculpted by the wind and the occasional palm tree or oasis. In reality, most deserts are not like this at all, and certainly that particular bit of Kuwait did not conform to this image. As far as he could see, the surface was rocky rather than sandy, and there seemed to be a complete absence of palm trees, though there were a few scrubby bushes dotted about the place.
‘Here we go,’ Angela said, about a quarter of an hour later, as she steered the Toyota off the road and on to the craggy surface of the desert. ‘The satnav is almost useless to us now,’ she added, turning it off. ‘I’m just using the GPS.’
She pointed to the unit positioned in its sucker mount on the windscreen.
In a number of places there were tyre tracks showing that other vehicles had passed that way before, presumably other 4x4s and trucks belonging to the expedition. They saw no border guards or police, or indeed any signs of life at all, and a short time after they had left the road Angela announced that they were now in Iraq.
‘We’ve only got about another fifteen clicks — kilometres — to go,’ she said. ‘Just under ten miles.’
They couldn’t drive in a straight line because of the terrain. Angela had to keep weaving around hummocks and dips in the ground, and even then the Toyota pitched and rolled quite a bit. She also had to keep the speed right down, and it was almost half an hour later before she took one hand off the wheel for a brief second or two to point ahead of the vehicle.
‘There we are,’ she said. ‘That’s our home. Temporarily, of course.’
Bronson stared keenly through the windscreen at the tents — a dozen or so of them — that were just coming into view about a quarter of a mile in front. There were also a couple of smaller tents some distance away from the encampment — he assumed they were the toilets or wash rooms — and two longer lengths of material supported on poles over to one side, presumably shades erected over the excavation itself.
‘It looks virtually deserted,’ he said, a sudden sense of disquiet striking him. ‘Where is everybody?’
Angela glanced at the dashboard clock.
‘It’s just after midday,’ she said. ‘They might be having lunch or taking an early siesta.’
‘That makes sense,’ Stephen remarked.
But Bronson stiffened, leaned forward in his seat and then turned to Angela.
‘Stop the car,’ he said, the tone of his voice making it perfectly clear that it was an order, not a subject for discussion.
Angela hit the brakes and the Toyota shuddered to an almost immediate halt.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Bronson pointed through the windscreen.
‘What’s wrong is those birds,’ he said, gesturing towards a large bird with dark plumage and lighter coloured feathers on its head and neck that had just flapped a few feet up into the air before settling back down again on the ground.
‘I don’t know much about birds,’ he went on, ‘but even I can recognize a vulture when I see one. There are an awful lot of them on the ground near those tents. I also don’t know much about archaeology, but I do know that there shouldn’t be a dozen vultures in the middle of a working archaeological camp. Something must be dead over there, something substantial, and I think it would be a really good idea to find out what it is before we go blundering in.’