Newton’s Fire

II

No one seemed to be in charge. Morgenstern had headphones and a throat mike on, the better to describe what he was seeing to the Vice President and answer her questions. Everyone else was staring raptly down, forgetting that they had work to do. Croke therefore stepped up to the plate. He turned to an NCT man. ‘Get the ladder,’ he said.

The man nodded and fetched it, lowered it into the hole, twisting it sideways to feed it between two beams before setting it on the floor. The chamber was deeper than they’d anticipated; only the top rung protruded above the mouth, making descent somewhat precarious. ‘I’ll go first,’ said the NCT man. ‘I can hold it from the bottom.’

‘No,’ said Croke. ‘I’m going first.’ He sat on the floor, felt for a rung with his foot, turned around and steadied himself before he began his descent. It grew dark more quickly than he’d expected. At the foot, all he could see was a few marble steps leading down into the blackness, and pale walls that glowed like ghosts around him. He was about to call up for a flashlight when he saw Morgenstern already on his way down with two of them, though both were turned off at present, presumably so that the Vice President could share the moment of revelation with them. And now the cameraman joined them at the foot, taking pains not to film their faces.

Morgenstern passed Croke the spare flashlight. ‘Ready?’ he grinned.

‘Ready,’ agreed Croke.

They turned on and raised their flashlights together. Their beams pierced the darkness, their flare making Croke blink. The marble steps fanned out as they led down to a large chamber directly beneath Nelson’s tomb, perhaps eight paces square and twelve feet tall, its walls inlaid with mosaics of a garden paradise, sunlit orchards heavy with fruit, streams cascading into lily-pad lakes while gorgeous birds thronged the cloudless skies. But that wasn’t what grabbed their attention. For there was a second, smaller chamber nested inside the larger. Its walls were of flawless white marble and it was fronted by a pair of tall ebony doors. Croke advanced, mesmerized, down the staircase towards it. He stepped up onto its dais, took hold of the twin golden handles, tried to pull the doors towards him. The hinges had stretched over the centuries, however, so that the doors dragged across the floor, screeching and scoring tiny marks in the marble. He took them one at a time instead, lifting the right-hand door then shuffling backwards before setting it down again. Christ, it was heavy. He still couldn’t see inside, for a white linen curtain was draped across the mouth. Rather than drawing it back straight away, he opened the left-hand door instead. Now he glanced at Morgenstern. Morgenstern nodded. Croke took a deep breath and swept the curtain aside. ‘My god,’ he muttered, when he saw what was inside. And it sounded, even to his own ears, like a prayer.

The walls, floor and ceiling of the inner sanctum gleamed with gold, dazzling as dawn in the sudden torchlight. And on a low marble central plinth, there it stood, the Ark of the Covenant itself, a chest of wood and gold, smaller than Croke had anticipated, smaller than the legends that surrounded it, but beautiful nonetheless, and extraordinarily potent, with its carved panels and the pair of golden cherubs kneeling in adoration on its lid, facing each other with their wings outspread and almost touching.

Something touched Croke’s heart then, a childlike awe he hadn’t expected to feel again. A sense that there was so much more to the universe than he understood; more to destiny and the divine. And he found himself, to his own surprise, crying out to the Lord and falling to his knees before it; and then Morgenstern and the cameraman did likewise, and the others behind, all falling to their knees and crying out to the Lord.