The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWELVE

Well, Simone thought, swiveling her stool back toward the bar, that didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. She should have relied more upon her feminine wiles — she had noted a certain glimmer in his one good eye, and, truth be told, she might have responded to it under different circumstances than these — but it was too late now.

She took a hearty swallow of her Campari and smoothed her skirt over her lap.

The bartender studiously attended to wiping some glasses clean.

She knew she had no one but herself to blame. Despite her intelligence and vast erudition, she had never mastered the gentle art of persuasion. While there might be some people who were natural diplomats, she wasn’t one of them. She was forever butting heads with people, challenging them when she should have been convincing them, raising hackles where she should have been raising support. She had always been in a hurry, without always knowing where she wanted to go; she was too impatient to wait for the right time or the right confluence of events.

And she had inherited her late mother’s temper. Everyone said so, most notably her long-suffering father: “If your mother were here today, you’d finally have an even match.”

But without that inborn obstinacy, who knew if the ossuary, now resting only a short walk away, would ever have been uncovered? When her father had first found the ancient papyrus scroll in the storeroom of the Cairo Museum — one of the many papyri that had been ignominiously deposited in the genizah, the refuse pile of fragments and faded scraps that no one thought important — he had been unable to persuade anyone of the magnitude of his find.

“That’s very interesting,” the director of the national library had said, patting him on the shoulder. “We’ll be sure to follow up on that one day, Dr. Rashid.”

And when he’d tried to acquire funding from the Ministry of Culture in order to launch an expedition, he hit the same brick wall. The fact that Simone had recently landed a job there only made things worse; she’d had to recuse herself from any deliberations lest it look like nepotism.

“Can’t you see that my father might have found the true tomb of Saint Anthony the Anchorite?” she had declared at the one board meeting she had been allowed to attend, under a vow of silence that she’d failed to honor. “For nearly two thousand years, penitents and worshippers from all over the world have been making pilgrimages to an empty tomb in the desert monastery at Al-Qalzam.”

“We don’t know that it’s empty,” the minister said.

“Of course we do,” Simone had insisted. “We’ve done the ground tests. We only keep this myth alive to keep the tourists coming.”

The minister shot her a warning glance — but she had built up such a head of steam that there was no stopping her.

“Our country should be proud, rightly proud, of Saint Anthony,” she said, rising from her chair. “Not only did he found the entire Christian ascetic theology, he defied a Roman emperor and prevailed. He came to the aid of persecuted Christians and led the fight against the Arian heresy. Without him, there would be no tradition of monasticism in the church.”

“Yes, Miss Rashid, we all understand the saint’s importance.”

“So then why don’t you all want to find his actual sepulcher?” She waved a copy of the monograph that she and her father had written, in which they had outlined their theory and even marked a possible route to the tomb. “Doesn’t the truth interest any of you?”

And that’s when she’d been ejected, under threat of losing her job altogether. It’s also when she had decided to cash in some of her considerable resources and use the money to finance the expedition herself. Her father, though, had been torn between his determination to find the tomb and the dangers such a mission might pose to his daughter’s career.

“For me, it doesn’t matter so much,” he said, trying to sound resigned. “I’m an old man.”

“You’re hardly an old man.”

“Old enough,” he’d replied. “But you are just at the beginning of your career. You do not want to offend the powers that be. Life is a hard journey, with many unexpected setbacks,” he said, and she knew he was thinking that if he’d played the game better, he’d have been appointed the head of the ministry himself, long ago. “You do not want to make enemies along the way, as I did.”

“We are defined as much by our enemies as we are by our friends,” she’d retorted, and her father had turned up his palms in defeat, as he often did when they had an argument.

“You are cut from the same cloth as your mother,” he said.

“And as you.”

Within a matter of weeks, she had assembled a skeleton crew of drivers, bearers, and a Bedouin guide to take them where they would need to go — the Sahara el Beyda, or White Desert, a vast and largely uncharted section of wasteland that began fifty miles southeast of Cairo. Simone and her father had traced the location of the tomb by laboriously piecing together the shreds of the scroll that had been mixed in, rather inexplicably, with a clutch of Hebrew fragments recovered long ago from the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat. The document, rendered in early Arabic, indicated that the monk Saint Anthony — perhaps the most famous hermit in the whole Christian canon — had been buried in a secret cavern under a “spitting cobra.” Plainly, no real snake could be expected to remain in one place, much less mark a spot for eternity. But Simone knew that the ancient limestone and chalk of the Sahara, which had once comprised the bed of a prehistoric sea and which lent the region its distinctive name, had been scoured by the winds of millennia into fantastic rock formations that resembled everything from teapots to minarets.

There would even be one, she strongly suspected, that looked like a spitting cobra, and if the document was true, it was located within a single day’s camel ride, due west, from the oasis at Baharīya.

The first leg of the trip was made in jeeps, carrying supplies and provisions, over the almost impassable road that followed the meanderings of a primitive camel track. But once they had reached the oasis, the jeeps could go no farther. There was not even a semblance of a road, and the sand dunes would only engulf the tires if they tried to drive any farther. Simone stretched out under the stars and palm fronds that night, while her father slept in the back of the jeep. For hours, as the others snored and slept around her, she could barely close her eyes, so eager was she to get up with the dawn and begin the search for the cobra rock and the sepulcher that the ragged scroll said lay beneath. The discovery would be a vindication of her father’s work, a laurel wreath to crown his career, and at the same time a brilliant start to her own.

The stars were so thick in the sky that she could not even begin to find the most elementary constellations. They were like a million glistening grains of sugar on a black velvet cloth, and the waning moon shone like a Saracen’s blade. Occasionally, she heard the furtive movement of the little desert foxes, sniffing the dying smoke from the fire, poking their noses into the encampment, once or twice snatching some bit of refuse and scurrying back into the blackness. It was as peaceful and beautiful a night as she could ever have imagined, and she understood what drew the Bedouins to this barren place and kept them there.

When the sun rose, the distant rocks took on the most magnificent hues — the peachy gold and pale strawberry and pistachio green of ice cream — and Simone was quick to mount a camel and, with spurs and a riding crop, urge it on.

“The rocks aren’t going anywhere,” their teenage guide, Mustafa, warned her from the back of his own lumbering beast. “If you push him too hard, he’ll dig in his heels.”

Simone’s father, bringing up the rear, laughed. “They’re a perfect match then.”

Simone smiled, but kept up the pace. The orange sand gave way to ground as white as snow, covered with a powdery chalk, and as she entered the field of rocks, some as big as locomotives, others the size of dogs and cats, she marveled at the variety of shapes they had assumed. It was like an enormous menagerie, miles long and miles wide, of real, and mythical, creatures. One rock looked like a sphinx with its paws extended; another like a heron about to take flight. And the wind, which had sculpted them, continued its incessant battering, knocking Simone’s hat off her head more than once and making the sleeves of her khaki shirt ripple like waves.

But she had yet to see a formation that resembled a rearing cobra. Mushrooms, yes — the wind had a way of scrubbing the bottoms of the rocks more harshly than the top, leaving what looked like a crop of enormous, teetering toadstools; acres of them surrounded her. But the papyrus was old, and perhaps this particular formation, which had once resembled a snake, had been reduced to dust by now. Somehow, in her haste, she had not considered how hard it might be to spot one fanciful shape among a battalion of others. She wished that the papyrus had been more explicit. While it had extolled the bravery of the sainted monk who had gone, alone, into the wilderness and wrestled there with demons — legend had it that Anthony had even broken the tail off of one, before strangling it with his bare hands — the scroll did not provide directions, and the compass had not yet been invented in Saint Anthony’s time.

Born into a prosperous family in the upper Egypt town of Coma in 251 AD, Anthony was orphaned at eighteen, and took the words of the Lord to heart: “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor — you will have riches in Heaven.” In obedience, he sold off everything he owned, including a vast herd of swine, and gave the money away. Then he deposited his sister with a community of nuns and wandered off to live alone in the barren desert, where his only companions were the snakes and scorpions, hawks and foxes.

But after years of solitude and self-abnegation, his fame began to spread, and soon enough, pilgrims were flocking to the cave where he had taken up residence, bringing him tribute of everything from animals to incense. Some were searching for spiritual guidance, others for more practical help. His natural poultices and remedies, made from the roots and brambles found in the arid soil, were said to cure many ills. He was especially known for treating skin afflictions, often with an application of pork fat, and as a result, he had come to be associated with such skin diseases as eczema and the eponymous Saint Anthony’s fire. Pigs became a symbol of his ministry, and in religious iconography he was generally portrayed as a swineherd, with a tau — T-shaped — cross in his hand.

Exactly what Simone hoped to find in the tomb, she wasn’t sure. It would not be riches; that was for certain. This was no Pharaoh. What she was looking for was the truth — proof that the man had lived, and died, as the Holy Scriptures said. Proof that the ancient stories weren’t just that — stories — and that there might be something more to this world than met the eye. For all her education and worldliness, Simone had a streak of the speculative in her. No girl brought up in the mighty delta of Egypt, where three of the major faiths had taken root, where the pyramids of kings had weathered sandstorms and floods for thousands of years, where seas had reputedly parted and prophets walked, could be without it. Even her mother, known for her wild ways, had become, particularly later in life as the cancer ate away at her, devoutly Catholic, and some of that, too, had been imparted to the young and impressionable Simone. What was it Cardinal Newman had once said? “If I have them at six, I have them for life.” Something like that. But Simone wasn’t of any one faith; she was simply a seeker, a scholar of the unseen and the ineffable as much as of the known and empirical world. In the undiscovered tomb of a saint, she hoped to find a mixture of both.

As the day waned, and the camels’ energy flagged, she knew that she must be close to reaching her goal. The scroll had said a full day’s ride, and now she had done it. The towering rocks cast deep and long shadows across the chalky ground. She was reminded of wandering through the Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford, back when she was at school there, and finding herself surrounded at dusk by the crumbling headstones and marble angels on every side. She had been visited not by a sensation of fear, or even dread, but of being a pilgrim in some alien landscape, somewhere altogether strange and unworldly. The surface of the moon, she felt certain, would bear a close resemblance to the place she was in now.

“It’s getting too dark to see,” her father said in a weary voice. “And the camels can go no farther.”

“Neither can I,” said Mustafa, pulling back on the reins, then sliding down from the saddle blanket to the ground. “We’ll have to look for this cobra in the morning.” He did not sound optimistic.

But Simone was reluctant to give up. Dismounting, she left the others to set up camp as she wandered across the rough and uneven terrain. Several times her boots slipped on the sand or chalk, and she fell to her knees. Each time, she got up, brushed the grit from her pants, and continued her search. The sun, as bright and round as a tangerine, slid below the horizon, and she removed the flashlight from her belt and aimed its beam at each configuration she came across.

So far, nothing looked remotely like a snake.

“Simone, where are you?” she heard her father call. “You’re going to get lost out there.”

She could smell the fire that Mustafa must have started, and hear the crackling of the wood. The sounds and scents were carried like gifts on the desert wind.

It was then, just as she was turning back toward the camp, that the light revealed an opening in the ground — the entrance to a cave, with jagged stones that looked like teeth, but big enough that a man could pass through it if he took the precaution of ducking his head. She slowly raised the beam of her flashlight, and even as she did so, she saw what resembled the coils of a giant snake and, rising above them, as if in keeping with the joy rising in her breast, a spindly neck topped with a broad, flat head shaped like a spade. Where there might have been a flicking tongue, there was even a sharp protuberance of stone.

If this was not the spitting cobra, nothing was.

She tried to cry out, but her throat was so parched that only a croak emerged. She took a swig from her canteen, wiped the dust from her face with another splash, then shouted, “Here! It’s here!”

But they must not have heard her.

She had to stumble back toward the camp, guided by the smell of the burning wood as much as by the flickering glow of the small fire. She dropped beside the tent in which her father was lighting the kerosene lamp.

“I found it!” she said. “I found it.”

“Where?” he asked, just as Mustafa came back from feeding the camels.

“She found it?” Mustafa exclaimed. “A girl? I don’t believe it.”

Simone nodded vigorously, and it was decided that they would eat some goat stew and drink some tea, get a good night’s sleep, and explore the cave first thing in the morning.

It was the longest night she had ever spent.

By dawn, Simone was dressed and ready, hurrying Mustafa and her father through their rudimentary breakfast, and leading them back to the gigantic cobra rock. In the first light of day, the white stone took on a golden hue, while the entrance at its base, still in shadow, remained as black as pitch. Crouching down, though she hardly needed to, Simone entered first, playing her flashlight beam around the immediate interior.

There was a narrow slope, easily navigable, leading down to a floor of smooth white sand. Mustafa followed right behind her, and her father, holding the lantern aloft, brought up the rear. Once they had all arrived at the bottom, Dr. Rashid held up the lamp, turning slowly in place, and the whole cavern suddenly resembled the mouth of some monstrous beast, with thousands upon thousands of stalactites, some small and needle-sharp, others blunt and wide, hanging like teeth from the ceiling.

“My God,” Simone said, “I feel like Jonah.”

“Allah be with us,” Mustafa murmured. For a kid more given to wisecracks than reverence, it was a testament to the power of their surroundings.

“More proof,” Dr. Rashid intoned, his words echoing around the limestone walls, “that an ocean was here many millions of years ago.”

Simone didn’t know where to look first — everywhere the stone had been carved into preposterous configurations, rippling waves and swirling spirals. The amber walls resembled folded draperies, in some places vertically lined and striated, and in others laid horizontally so that the flowstone looked like sheets stacked in a linen closet. But even a quick survey of the vast interior revealed one troubling thing: there was no sign of a proper sepulcher, much less a sarcophagus.

Could the genizah fragments have been right about so much, but wrong about this? Or was it possible that the tomb had been discovered, and plundered, a thousand years ago?

Simone made a grand circuit of the cavern, aiming her flashlight into every nook and cranny, in search of a passageway that might lead to a chamber beyond. She had just about given up, when a slight gust of air — cooler even than the air in the cave — brushed across her cheek. She stepped back, felt the breeze again ruffle the hair of her brow, and examined the spot more closely.

The countless ages of seepage and erosion had lent the wall the appearance of a waterfall, a veiled cascade behind which she could now see that there was a space, invisible from the front, but opening behind amply wide to admit passage. Best of all, she could see, at the very limit of the flashlight beam, traces of a figure incised against the far wall.

“It is very beautiful,” Mustafa was saying, “but I think we have come a long way on a fool’s errand. Ali Baba never lived here.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Simone said, waving them over. “Look at this!”

The two men joined her, Dr. Rashid extending the lantern into the tunnel. The walls here had been planed smooth, and either the stone had been exceptionally pale to begin with, or it had been whitewashed long ago. Simone dug a fingernail into it, and a flake of paint crumbled away. The stone beneath was more of a dull yellow.

Her heart sang.

Though the roof of the tunnel was low, it had been scoured almost entirely clean of the dangling stalactites — only a few had grown back to the length of daggers — and its width was more than sufficient to admit any kind of altar, sarcophagus, or ornament the builders of a tomb might have wanted to install. She moved carefully, stopping to examine the figure she had seen incised in the rock. Though much eroded by time, it was unmistakably a pig.

The saint’s patron animal.

If she had found a diamond necklace there, she could not have been any happier.

“Is there still any doubt?” she crowed, letting the flashlight linger on the image.

The tunnel made an elbow turn to the right, and then another, sharply to the left, before it debouched into a vaulted chamber with a high roof, carved like a cupola, and smooth, sloping walls, which had also been whitewashed. Though large patches of the paint had long since fallen away or discolored, there were pictures daubed all around the rim of the ceiling, in blue and gold, depicting in rudimentary fashion events from the life of the saint. In one, he led, with his distinctive staff, a herd of swine; in another, he appeared with a halo before a figure on a throne, no doubt depicting his intercession with the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in defense of the early Christian martyrs. Behind the emperor’s head, almost as if it were whispering in his ear, hovered a winged black insect. Simone had never seen an image quite so strange.

As for the rest of the artwork, it was almost as if another hand had interceded. These pictures were more crudely drawn and rendered only in black and red; the people and animals were drawn like a child’s stick figures, and some of the scenes were even superimposed upon the others. All of them shared, however, a theme of violence and horror. Writhing pigs roasting on spits; the saint himself being torn to pieces by horned demons; skeletons with blood erupting from their bones. Was this last conceit a way of depicting death by a virulent skin disease? If so, it was odd, as the ministrations of Saint Anthony were supposed to be proof against such ailments.

“It’s in the corner,” she heard her father say, his voice filled with awe. “There. The ossuary.”

Tearing her eyes away from the troubling scenes above, Simone followed the glow of the lantern light to the farthest reach of the chamber, where a deep niche had been carved into the stone. In the ancient Hebrew tradition, kept by the Christians to come, these niches were called a kokh; in Latin a loculus. This one was arched, and held, on its ledge, a pair of red clay urns. One of them had lost its top, and Simone could make out the tip of a tightly rolled papyrus scroll inside. Her fingers itched to open it.

The real prize — an alabaster chest, with iron chains securing its ponderous lid to its lower portion — lay between the urns. It was no surprise she hadn’t seen it at first. The box was not only nestled as far into the niche as it could go, it seemed also to reside in a deeper and darker pool of shadow than was natural. It was almost as if it could disappear before one’s very eyes.

Even for someone accustomed to the mysteries of ancient artifacts, the ossuary cast a spell all its own. For the first time in her life, Simone felt an involuntary shudder run down her spine.

But Mustafa was plainly unaffected. Sensing there might still be some loot here, he scurried toward the urns, knocked the top off the sealed one, and glanced inside.

“More papers!” he declared in disgust. Then he went for the box. “What’s inside it?” he cried out enthusiastically, his voice booming around the otherwise empty chamber. Tugging at the chains, he said, “How do we get it open?”

“We don’t,” Simone replied. “Stop trying.”

“This is not a treasure hunt,” Dr. Rashid declared, bringing the lantern closer. “It’s an archaeological expedition.”

The distinction seemed to be lost on the young guide, who looked from Simone to her father, desperately awaiting a better explanation.

“We’re not in the Valley of the Kings,” Simone said. “This casket won’t hold golden masks or silver goblets. It holds bones.”

“That’s all?” Mustafa said. “Papers and bones? And we came all this way?” He stalked off, muttering, “The worst jobs — I always get the worst jobs.”

Simone bent her head toward the ossuary, where she could see in the lantern light a host of markings and inscriptions. It would be the work of many months — happy months, and maybe even longer — to decipher them all. Of one thing she was confident — she had found the tomb of Saint Anthony of Egypt, the reputed father of Christian monasticism, and battler of the demonic hordes sent to torture him and test his faith. Who knew what else the scrolls might be able to tell her?

Glancing up again at the pictures on the ceiling, she could almost believe that the cruder, crueler scenes had been scrawled there by those demons themselves.

Something else struck her as odd, too.

She could swear that in the picture of the saint being rent limb from limb, Anthony had been standing; now, he was prone on the ground, and a gibbering creature, like a monkey with a forked tail, was leaping on his back.

Instead of the Emperor Diocletian sitting on the throne, the seat was occupied by a grinning dog — or maybe it was meant to be a hyena — wearing a crown and holding a scepter.

Even stranger were the birds — flocks of little black birds — painted all across the white walls, and even the ceiling, of the chamber. Before she could ask her father, she saw that he, too, was staring at the birds, perturbed.

“Were they there,” Simone said, “before?”

Then they moved — not flying, but crawling, like insects more than sparrows. Creeping out from the crevices in the flowstone. Emerging from the sand.

Scorpions.

Dozens of them — hundreds — their lethal stinging tails quivering and erect. The single greatest scorpion colony Simone could ever have imagined — lying here, perhaps undisturbed for millennia.

A scream reverberated from the antechamber. Mustafa shouted, “Get them off of me! Help me! Get them off!”

Simone straightened up and ran back toward the tunnel, feeling the crunch of brittle carapaces under her boots. She could hear her father right behind her, but then he stumbled and fell, nearly knocking her over, too. He had gashed his leg on a jagged rock, and even as she helped him to his feet, Mustafa’s screams got louder.

Something dropped from the ceiling onto Simone’s hair, and a pincer nipped at her fingers as she brushed it off.

Grabbing the lantern with one hand and using the other to hold her hobbled father by his elbow, she moved down the tunnel, first right, then left, then into the front cavern, where Mustafa was all but unrecognizable. He rolled around on the floor of the cave beneath a seething swarm of scorpions. His arms flailed, his legs kicked out, and one of his sandals flew off his foot and over her head.

“Stop them! Stop them!” Mustafa screamed, but Simone couldn’t do anything to help him without letting go of her father, who was already leaning hard against her shoulder, and breathing even harder; she needed to get him out of the cave before he collapsed. She swung the lantern over Mustafa’s body as she passed by, hoping to knock loose at least a few of the creatures, and she stamped her boots on several more, but her father’s feet were dragging in the sand, and his weight was becoming too much for her to bear.

Mustafa’s hand lashed out and clutched at her ankle, but another scorpion promptly plunged its stinger into his wrist, and he yanked it away.

Dropping the lantern at the bottom of the ramp, she crawled up toward the mouth of the cave, pulling her father alongside. It was like dragging a bag of wet cement. The entrance was filled with the golden light of the morning sun, and Simone forced herself to stare into the blinding light — willed herself, step by step, to move toward it — until she suddenly emerged from the cave, feeling like some small fish that had wriggled free from the jaws of a crocodile. Her father fell in a heap on the sand, croaking for water. Blood was running down his leg.

She put her canteen to his lips. And then she turned back toward the entrance.

“No, no,” Dr. Rashid said, alarmed, the brackish water dribbling down his chin. “It’s too late.”

She had to try. She ducked back into the grotto, and aimed her flashlight into the antechamber of the tomb. She did not need to go any farther to see that Mustafa was lying dead — no one could have survived such a monstrous attack. The sight was obscene, and she knew she would never be able to forget it, or forgive herself. His body lay sprawled facedown on the sand, as dozens of the scorpions, some with their tails still coiled and pincers extended, roamed around on top of him, for all the world as if they were dancing in celebration of their kill.

One, still in attack mode, scuttled threateningly toward the toe of Simone’s boot, and she smashed it underfoot, grinding its hard shell into dust; she had to scrape her sole against a rock to get rid of its sticky residue, and even then, the deadly tail shook in a final reflex of fury.

When she came back for the sarcophagus and the urns — as she knew she would do — she would bring a flame thrower.