Testament

16

Captain Edward Gillespie Wood of the Madras Sappers and Miners stood with his telescope on a ledge behind the battlefield, staring at the wide saddle that separated his position from the great granite plateau of Magdala less than half a mile to the west. It was an extraordinary sight, at the end of an extraordinary expedition. For more than two months since leaving their forward supply base at Senafe, he and his sappers had reconnoitered ahead of the main force, surveying, taking photographs, and tracing the road that had been hacked out of the rock for the animals to get through. On the way they had encountered almost every physical obstacle known to man: scorching salt pans on the coast, nearly impenetrable juniper forests in the foothills, terrifying ravines and defiles beset by rock falls, and almost impassable scree slopes, an obstacle course that only seemed to get worse as they ascended ever higher to the upland plateau of Magdala, a dead end that had made it nearly impregnable as a fortress.

Day by day the army behind them had progressed, inch by relentless inch, the ridges getting higher and the canyons deeper until finally, three hundred miles from the sea, they had reached the mountainous spur he was standing on now. He raised his telescope, training it on the entrance to the fortress. The crenellated mud — brick battlements seemed almost inconsequential set against the grandeur of the place, with sheer cliffs and vertiginous scree slopes dropping thousands of feet on all sides of the plateau except for the saddle in front of him. He had only ever seen anything like it at the ancient fortress of Masala in the Holy Land, another place where the besieging army of a mighty empire had forced an enemy into a desperate last stand, one from which escape was beyond all possibility.

He looked down to where he could see the entrenched troops on the edge of the saddle, his engineer’s eye taking in all of the details. They were the vanguard of a force of nearly twelve thousand; among them were hundreds of mules from India and Egypt, dozens of camels from Arabia, still snorting and stamping from the noise of the battle, fifteen elephants, and the Armstrong guns that were shortly to be used to attempt a breach in the walls of the fortress. All of that had come grunting and bellowing and sweating from the sea, through sweltering days and freezing nights, through mountain passes that rose ever more precipitously until at the end there was only a narrow fissure above, barely wide enough to squeeze the elephants through. Even after they had reached the tablelands the rigors had not let up, as frequently they had been obliged to descend thousands of feet between the plateaus only to ascend again, pushing men and animals to the limits of physical endurance. And always there had been the nightmare of supply; they had found some grass and barley and meat and wood on the way, but not nearly sufficient, meaning that a continuous mule train of provisions was snaking behind them over the hundreds of arduous miles to and from the coast, making that same soul-destroying journey over and over again.

The smell of the battlefield was beginning to permeate the air unpleasantly; the sulfurous reek of gunpowder had been replaced by a sickly-sweet odor that he knew would only grow stronger. It always astonished him how quickly bodies left on a battlefield began to decay. Already the vultures had begun to pick away at the corpses; another day in this heat and the stench would be intolerable. It had only been a few hours since General Napier’s disciplined infantry with their Snider — Enfields had lined up against the Abyssinians, pitting the latest breech-loading rifles capable of ten rounds per minute against shields and spears. It had all been over in a matter of minutes, leaving more than seven hundred of the enemy dead and many more wounded, the remainder having been driven back into the fortress at the point of the bayonet. With King Theodore’s force now so depleted, it had become feasible to think of an artillery barrage and a frontal assault using infantry, a tactic straight from medieval warfare that Wood had never imagined he would see being acted out for real in a place so far removed from civilization as this.

The young sapper who had been struggling up the slope with the camera apparatus finally reached the ledge and dropped his burden, panting hard and sweating profusely. His skin was darkened by the sun and by the dust that seemed to penetrate every pore, finding its way into every conceivable part of the body, within and without. Wood offered him his water bottle, and the sapper took it gratefully, drinking deeply and then passing it back. “Excellent work, Jones,” Wood said. “Now let’s get the thing set up while the light’s still good.”

“It’s too bloody hot, sir,” Jones said, sinking back against a rock. “And I can hardly breathe.”

“It’s the altitude. We’re over ten thousand feet up. There’s about a quarter less oxygen in the air here than there is at sea level.”

Jones gestured at the plateau ahead. “Down in the camp they say he’s got gold up there, tons of it — mad old King Theodore.”

“We’re here to rescue missionaries, Jones, not to loot gold.”

“Speak for yourself, sir, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m not leaving this godforsaken place without something for my troubles. Anyway, I didn’t join up to rescue missionaries, or anyone else.”

“Why did you join up, Jones?”

“Well, sir, I joined the sappers to learn stuff.” He gestured at the camera. “To learn photography, sir.”

“Precisely. And now it’s time you put your learning to good use and set that thing up. I believe that in short order we’ll be called out for the final assault, and I want to get some pictures before that.”

“Sir.” Jones struggled to his feet and began breaking down the crate with the camera and extending the tripod.

Wood took up his telescope again, scrutinizing the plateau, and then lowered it and gazed at the battlefield. He thought about what Jones had said. They might just as well have been here to loot gold, given the absurdity of the real reason. The hostages had been taken by the Ethiopian king because his request to Queen Victoria for arms to defend his borders had gone unanswered: arms from the queen who had personally sent him a revolver as a present and had led him naïvely to believe that the weapons needed for his army would follow.

There was no doubt that Theodore was a sadistic monster, given to acts of bestial cruelty. A week before, Wood and his sappers had come across several of the king’s native hostages, including the son and daughter of a local chieftain who had wavered in their loyalty and had their hands and feet chopped off and hung around their necks. They had been a pitiful sight, dumped provocatively in front of the British column, and Wood had shot them both out of mercy. Yet part of him felt slightly sorry for Theodore, perched up there in his eyrie with no chance of escape, with no hope of an honorable exit now, and with the scribbling newspaper journalists ensuring that his ignominy would soon be the talk of the world. They were here to save missionaries, unquestionably a humanitarian cause, even a noble one, yet they were really here to slap an ally on the wrist for flying too close to the sun, for being too cocky and for expecting Her Britannic Majesty to answer his call. Wood peered at the battlefield, seeing the dark haze that he knew was millions of flies beginning to swarm over the corpses. It was a slap on the wrist that had already cost over a thousand Abyssinian lives all told, with many more doubtless to join them rotting in the sun before this affair was over.

A small, dapper figure, not in uniform but wearing a pith helmet and a Colt revolver on his belt, came and stood beside Wood, notebook in hand, surveying the battlefield. “That’s quite a sight,” he said, his accent a curious mixture of Welsh and American. “I haven’t seen anything like that since the Battle of Shiloh in ’62, during the Civil War.”

“Well, Mr. Stanley, you should be able to add your own memories of the sensations of war to your description, and make a fine account for the newspapers.”

Wood remembered other battles he himself had seen, ten years ago in India during the Mutiny. The sickly-sweet smell had brought back images of horror, of women and children butchered, of fighting without mercy, of mutineers hanged and blown from the guns. He remembered not just the carnage of war but how shockingly quickly the veneer of civilization had fallen away: how the women who had come out from England, the memsahibs, those who had tried to create a fantasy of Wimbledon or Kew in the sweltering cantonments, had become hardly recognizable as human beings, tattered, begrimed, emaciated, their countenances lost in the settled vacancy of insanity. He remembered how the stench of the unwashed mingled with that of the corpses, the flies swarming around the living and the dead alike, a pestilence from Beelzebub himself.

No matter what the cause, no matter what the trigger that drove men to war, the outcome was always the same. Ten years ago, it had been a terrifying breakdown in order that had swept across a continent, seemingly unassailable, merciless; here it was the ludicrous business of a few missionaries taken hostage, and the delusions of a pitiful king. But looking at the battlefield now, Wood saw little that was different from the scenes of ten years ago: the same hideous wounds, the same rage and anguish, the same smell of fear and adrenalin, the same baying for blood long after the reason for war had been forgotten in the exhaustion and the scrabble for survival.

Another man joined them from the slope, an officer Wood recognized from General Napier’s staff but did not know personally; a soldier labored up behind him carrying a large sketchpad, a folding chair and a satchel. “Baigrie, Bombay Staff Corps,” the officer said, proffering his hand. “I’ve seen you and your men often enough ahead of us, but I don’t think we’ve met. Wood, isn’t it?”

They shook hands, and Wood gestured at the soldier’s load. “I’ve seen you at your watercolors before. I understand that the Illustrated London News has taken them, and I offer my congratulations. It seems that you and I and Mr. Stanley are all of a mind being on this ledge and recording our impressions of this place, though my photographs are of a more prosaic nature, I fear, as part of an archive for the School of Military Engineering.”

“Have you tried developing pictures out here?”

“Tried, but failed. A damned nuisance really. One of them was a picture I took two months ago at Annesley Bay before the main force had disembarked, while my company was employed building landing stages across those infernal salt flats. Right out at the edge while sinking a beam we discovered the frame and planks of a wreck, a very old one I believe, with a painted eye on the bow and alphabetic symbols incised into the timbers that I think were Phoenician. Some of the timbers had already been pulled up and reused by my sappers in the revetments, and what was left will, I fear, by now also have been destroyed, for the same purpose.”

“You have an interest in antiquities?”

“I traveled on leave to Jerusalem and widely in Palestine last year.”

“Then you’ll know what they’re saying about this place.” Baigrie nodded his head toward the fortress. “About the treasury of King Theodore.”

Jones had been listening intently. “Here you go, sir. I told you. Gold.”

“Sapper Jones here has a particular interest in filling his pockets with loot,” Wood said.

“As do two thousand other British and Indian troops encamped below. After what they’ve been through, they feel they deserve a bonus.”

“Too right, sir,” Jones said. “A bonus. For all my efforts.”

“You’ll get nothing if you don’t set that camera up before sundown.”

“Sir.”

Baigrie watched as his batman opened out the tripod canvas chair and the satchel, laying out his brushes and paints. “What they’re saying,” he continued, “is that his treasures include ancient antiquities of the Israelites, brought here by the lost tribes of the Exodus as they fled the Babylonians after the sack of Jerusalem.”

“Soldiers’ rumors, no doubt,” Wood said.

“Napier had a local chieftain in his camp last night, one of those who have been helpful to us. He had a priest with him who said there’s a tapestry in the church at Magdala depicting a procession coming ashore carrying the Ark of the Covenant. He claims that the tapestry is exceedingly old, older even than the ancient Christian kingdom of Axum.”

“We don’t want some old bit of cloth,” Jones grumbled. “We want gold.”

“I think we’ll all get our share,” Baigrie said. “Napier has told everyone to pool what they find, and then he’s going to hold a drumhead auction. The proceeds will be spread about the entire expedition according to rank.”

“There are said to be ancient manuscripts in the church too,” Wood said. “I just hope someone sensible gets in there first and keeps them from being destroyed.”

“Not that I’ll see any of it,” Jones said ruefully. “Not much call for a photographer in the first wave of the attack. Those are the lucky ones who’ll get their hands on the best of it. And I can tell you, not all of what they find is going to some drumhead auction, orders or no orders.”

Baigrie took out a pipe and tobacco; he packed it and lit it while contemplating the grim scene below. “You know, after the Mutiny, I thought I’d never see anything like this again. Indeed, I rather hoped I would not.”

“Where were you?” Wood asked.

“Central India Field Force, under Sir Hugh Rose.”

“Sagar Field Division, under Whitlock. I know what you mean.”

“I had a close friend in the Light Dragoons. We shared a tent on campaign. I was going to resign with him after the war and join him on his father’s sheep station in New Zealand to start a new life. In the event I never did; I stayed on in the Staff Corps. But I’d had enough of war.”

Stanley looked up from his notes. “Truth be told,” he said, “I never was much one for war either. I left Wales to find a new life in America, but by unfortunate timing I became settled in New Orleans just in time for our great national conflagration. I believe I have the unique distinction of having served in the Confederate Army, where I had my baptism of fire at Shiloh; in the Union Army, after being having been captured and turned; and then in the Union Navy, from which I am sorry to say I jumped ship. Indeed, I garnered no military glory whatsoever from any of those unhappy adventures. It was journalism that saved me, and then I found I had a taste for exploration.”

“I rather wanted to be an explorer too, and one thing this expedition has done is to give me a renewed taste for it,” Wood said. “During my next furlough I’m determined to go north into Afghanistan to follow the River Oxus to Lake Aral. I want to see if there are any traces left of Alexander the Great’s expedition.”

Baigrie pointed the stem of his pipe at Jones. “And what about you?”

“Me, sir? Sapper Jones might become Corporal Jones, and Corporal Jones might become Sergeant Jones. That is, if the loot in that fortress doesn’t make me King Jones.”

They all smiled, and Wood glanced up at the sky. “Look, the sun has that brown halo around it again, the corona.”

“Down in camp, they say it’s an omen of blood,” Jones said. “They say that King Theodore sees it too, and knows it signals his end.”

“It’s an atmospheric phenomenon, a result of the rising dust. The next time we have one of those terrific thunderstorms, it will go.”

“Or the next time we create a thunderstorm, you mean, tomorrow when we take that place.”

One of the local girls they used as messengers came running up the slope from the headquarters encampment and handed Wood a slip of paper. He read it, looked up and paused for a moment, then scribbled his name in acknowledgment and gave it back to her. He watched her run off, mesmerized as always by the long, effortless stride and the ability of the girls to run fast even at these altitudes without losing breath.

“Anything interesting?” Stanley asked.

“That was from Napier,” Wood replied. “Apparently there are no other engineer officers available to effect the breach. They don’t expect the Armstrong guns to punch their way through, and want a charge to be taken up. It looks like my lucky day. One photograph, and then I should report to headquarters.”

“Good luck to you,” Baigrie said. “Not worth coming all the way up here just to get killed.”

“Hear, hear,” Stanley said. “And bring me back a good story.”

Wood put his head under the black cloth that Jones had set up, adjusted the camera, and composed the scene. Shorn of sky and people the image looked bleak, elemental, with hardly any vegetation or other evidence of life. On the sides of the ravines rose high sandstone cliffs, scarped and water-worn, so different from the mountains on the frontier of India that he was used to; here, the weathering gave a certain sinuous beauty to the landscape, almost a voluptuousness, but it was fragile and ephemeral, the slopes and pathways liable to be swept away at any time by the torrential rains that beset this place. This was what he had wanted to photograph, not Magdala itself. He slotted in the holder containing the plate, removed the lens cover for three seconds, then replaced it and got out from under the hood, nodding at Jones to begin breaking the camera down.

He stared out at the encampment and the battlefield again, thinking of what lay ahead. From the outset this had been an engineers’ war, a war of logistics and transport, of construction and mapping and reconnaissance, as arduous as any they had ever experienced. They had built piers, roads and railways, and condensers by the sea for fresh water; they had triangulated, measured and photographed, had blown rock and spanned rivers and ravines. For the first time he had felt as if he had used everything he had been taught as a young officer, almost as if this campaign had been designed to parade the engineer’s skills. But what he had been asked to do now would be different, something that no amount of training could prepare him for. It was about inching forward, about finding his way up a redoubt under fire, about setting and blowing charges, with the bayonet and the revolver taking the place of the pick and the shovel.

He pulled out his own revolver from its holster, checking the cylinder, pleased that he had replaced the old cap-and-ball Adams that had served him through the Mutiny with a new cartridge version, harder-hitting and far faster to reload. One thing they had learned from the Mutiny was that men crazed by fanaticism were very hard to put down, would pick themselves up and keep coming. And the Abyssinians had more to them than that, an obstinate, suicidal courage that they had shown in the battle that morning, a courage that had kept them charging again and again against a murderous fire until hardly any were left standing.

Holstering the revolver, he knelt down and helped Jones pack up the camera, then put a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, and Jones.”

“Sir?”

“It looks as if you might get first pick at the loot after all. I’m going to need someone to help me carry up the charges, and then to cover me while I lay them. When was the last time you fixed a bayonet?”

17

Captain Wood shifted slightly to the right, wedging his body against the boulder at the edge of the precipice to stop himself from slipping any further down. He rested his revolver on a rock and pulled out his pocket watch, checking it and quickly resuming his position. It was a quarter to four in the afternoon; the main wave of the assault was due to begin at four. Before then the storming party was meant to have breached the thick timber doors and stone archway of the Koket-Bir, the entrance to the fortress, using the powder kegs that should have been brought up to him by now.

Already he and Jones had endured the initial British cannonade, a pulverizing salvo from the Armstrong guns and the eight-inch mortars on the saddle and the mountain guns and naval rocket battery on the ridge behind, the rounds bursting against the parapet and steep ground in front of them, showering him with rock fragments and leaving his ears ringing. Being put in charge of the reconnaissance party at the outset of the campaign had meant a pleasant alternative to the toil of joining the main expedition through the mountains, but in the past hour or so it seemed as if he and Jones were having their comeuppance, finding themselves at the sharp end of the assault against an extraordinary natural fortress and a deranged king who by now had no hope left and was bent only on his own destruction.

The wind wafted over the ridge from the precipice below, bringing with it a sickening stench of decay. Wood leaned over and glanced down the vertiginous slope, seeing the sprawled cascade of bodies at the base of the ravine, hundreds of them, all without hands or feet. The day before, Theodore in a rage had ordered all of his Abyssinian captives to be mutilated and thrown over the cliff from the plateau. Several of the corpses had already bloated in the heat and split open, the source of the terrible smell. He pulled out his pocket telescope and peered at a ledge about a hundred yards ahead, above a sheer drop at least three times that. Among the twisted, swollen limbs he had seen movement, someone still alive. He thought of taking Jones’s rifle and finishing the poor devil off, as he had done the two pitiful wretches on the road a week earlier, but to do so would risk revealing their position to Theodore’s few remaining marksmen on the ramparts above. The time for mercy was now over, to victim and perpetrator alike. All he wanted now was to see this day over and the enemy destroyed.

“What are we doing here, sir?” Jones said, ducking as a bullet whizzed by. “I mean, why are we trying to take this place?”

“For God’s sake, man, this is hardly the time,” Wood exclaimed, peering over the boulder and spotting the man with the musket on the parapet. Here, give me your rifle.”

Jones passed it over and lay back against the rock, looking up at the sky. “I mean, old Theodore released the European hostages yesterday. That’s what we came here for, isn’t it? And it looks as if the Abyssinian hostages are all done for… or rather it smells that way. It positively reeks. If you ask me, sir, it’s time to pack our bags and go home.”

“That’s a change of tune. Yesterday it was all talk of loot.”

“That was before they started shooting at me.”

A musket ball ricocheted off a boulder beside them, and Jones ducked down, his hands covering his helmet. Wood opened the breech cover of the rifle, checked there was a round in the chamber and snapped it shut again, then slowly brought the muzzle to the side of the boulder until it was facing the parapet. With the bayonet fixed it was going to be difficult to shoot accurately, but the parapet was near enough to give it a try. He pulled back the hammer, curled his finger round the trigger and waited, knowing that the marksman had an old muzzle loader that took him at least a minute to reload. On cue a few seconds later the man reappeared, poking his barrel above the parapet. Wood aimed quickly and fired, the kick of the rifle pushing him down the slope. He saw the man lurch forward, blood spilling from his chest, and then hang head-down over the parapet with his arms dangling, his musket clattering to the rocks below and discharging. The smoke from the rifle wafted back over Wood, pleasantly sulfurous after the ghastly odor from below. He pulled himself up and handed it back to Jones. “That’s your job from now on. You’re supposed to be here to provide covering fire.”

“Sir.” Jones fumbled with the cartridge box on his belt, and Wood turned around on his back, staring down the slope at the troops marshaling for the assault. The expedition had an overwhelming force of arms, but even so they had been lucky. The battle on the saddle the day before had swept away the finest of Theodore’s warriors, and most of his artillery had been abandoned on the retreat up the slope. Had he chosen not to meet the British in open battle but instead to occupy and fortify one of the rocky ridges further back along the escarpment, he could have poured down a murderous fire and inflicted many more casualties.

The Abyssinians had shown extraordinary bravery, but Theodore was no tactician. The fortress looming above Wood now should have been impregnable, but the Abyssinian defense had been fatally weakened by the loss of most of Theodore’s muskets and rifles on the saddle below. He had never faced a European army in battle before, and he had expended too much in pomp and show, all that was usually needed to subdue his recalcitrant chieftains. Somewhere up there was his greatest folly of all, a mortar of monstrous dimensions named Sevastopol, dragged all the way up here from the plains to the north. Even if his gunners could manhandle the half-ton ball into the muzzle, the quantity of powder needed to propel it any meaningful distance would blow the gun to smithereens. It was the farcical side of his madness, though at the moment any thought of that was subsumed by the murderous cruelty revealed by the horror spread across the ravine below.

Wood watched as the regiment chosen for the assault, the 33rd Foot, formed up below, seven hundred men in ten companies, with those on the flanks in skirmishing order, all with bayonets fixed, wearing the khaki uniforms and white pith helmets that had been an innovation on this campaign, far preferable to the old red battle order. Ahead of them he saw the storming party making their way up the slope, some thirty men of the 33rd alongside turbaned Indians of his own regiment, the Madras Sappers and Miners. A few minutes later, the officer of engineers accompanying the party scrambled up to his position, panting and dripping with sweat.

“Le Mesurier, Bombay Sappers,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve got bad news, I’m afraid. The girl carrying the message to bring up the powder kegs and scaling ladders was shot down by one of Theodore’s muskets. We’re simply not going to have them in time for the assault.”

“For God’s sake.” Wood snorted in anger, but then remembered the girl he had watched yesterday bringing the message from General Napier; he hoped she was not the one who had been hit.

Another officer joined them, a subaltern of the 33rd, and Wood could see the rest of the storming party spread out among the rocks just below them, awaiting orders. He turned to the two officers and pointed up at the parapet. “Do you see beyond where that body’s hanging, about ten yards to the right? A tall man might stand on that outcrop of bedrock below the wall and pull himself up, or push a small man above him. There’s a rather nasty-looking thorn and stake hedge on top of the wall, but I think it could be done. If we’re not going to be able to blow our way through the gate, then this might be our only way up.”

The infantry officer followed his gaze, and nodded. “I think I’ve got just the men for the job.” He turned and whistled. “Private Bergin and Drummer Magner. Up here, at the double.”

Two soldiers detached themselves from behind the rocks and scrambled up the slope, falling back against the boulder beside Wood with their rifles at the ready. One man was very tall, the other very short. The tall man crinkled up his nose. “That’s a God-almighty stench, sir, if you don’t mind me mentioning it,” he said in a rich Irish brogue.

“That it is,” the other man said, his accent equally thick, his free hand over his nose. “Positively disgusting, it is.”

“Well the sooner you get on with the job I’ve got for you, the quicker you’ll get away from it,” the officer said. “You see that low point in the parapet ahead? We’re going to storm it. You, Bergin, are going to stand on the rock, and you, Magner, are going to stand on his shoulders. How sharp are your bayonets?”

“Razor-sharp, sir. We ground them yesterday evening.”

“Good. Because you’re going to need them to cut through that hedge on the top. Understood? There’ll be a medal in this for you if we get through.”

Both men looked distinctly unenthusiastic. “Sir.”

The officer spoke quickly to a sergeant who had come up behind him. The sergeant saluted and slid back down the slope, and the remainder of the party began moving up from their positions. The officer turned back to Wood. “Half of my men and all of the sappers are going to the gateway as originally planned, to try to find a way around it. From here it looks as if it’s been blocked from behind by a mass of boulders, so your gunpowder might not have done much good anyway. The rest of my party is forming up here. I’m assuming that you and your sapper will be joining us?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Jones muttered, tightening the bayonet over the lug on his barrel. “Just what I signed up for.”

“Good. I don’t see any more of the enemy actually on the parapet. They may have fallen back to the second wall, the one that leads into the fortress. If we keep our wits about us and abstain from unnecessary fire, we might achieve an element of surprise. Agreed?”

Wood and Le Mesurier nodded. Wood checked the chambers in his revolver and got up on his haunches. “I’m the senior officer here, so leading this assault should be my job.” The infantry officer nodded, raised his arm, and held it ready to signal his men to advance, his own revolver at the ready. Wood knelt up, peered round the boulder and put a hand on Jones’s shoulder. “Right, Jones. You’re with me. Let’s move.”

Ten minutes later Wood emerged scratched and grazed from the thorn thicket on top of the parapet. Bergin and Magner had hacked their way through easily enough, but there had been no time for finesse and there were many vicious thorns still to negotiate. He dropped down on the other side, taking cover next to the two Irishmen, and waited while Jones came up cursing and grunting behind. Ahead of them lay about seventy yards of dead ground between the two walls, much of it variegated and rocky like the slope below, but more level. The inner wall itself had clearly been built for show rather than defense; Theodore could hardly have expected any attacker to get this far. Wood scanned the ground, revolver at the ready, looking for the few final Abyssinian defenders they assumed must be here. The imminent fall of the fortress now seemed certain, but they had all seen the suicidal bravery of the Abyssinians on the battlefield the day before, and they were taking no chances.

The officer of the 33rd slid down beside Wood, one side of his face scratched and bloody. At that moment there was the whoosh of an incoming shell and a deafening detonation some twenty yards to the right. Three Abyssinians who had been concealed there were flung into the air like rag dolls, their limbs and heads flying away and hunks of flesh splattering all around. The officer turned to the man who had followed him through the hedge. “Get the colors up now,” he yelled. “On the parapet!”

He turned to Wood. “I’m not supposed to do this until we’ve taken the fortress, but it might stop our own side from shooting at us.”

The soldier did as instructed, raising a pole he had been carrying and unfurling the colors of the 33rd, a Cross of St. George with a wreath in the middle and a Union Jack in the corner. They waited for a few tense minutes, but no further shell came. All eyes were on the patch of ground where the shell had burst, near the path from the outer to the inner gateway. Suddenly an Abyssinian got up, yelling and ululating, sword in hand, and then another; both were instantly shot down.

The officer turned to Wood. “Right. An old-fashioned bayonet charge should finish the job.” He drew his sword and bellowed at his men. A pistol cracked from somewhere ahead, and he stumbled back, the bullet grazing his forehead.

The dozen men of the 33rd who had made it over the wall got up and charged forward, yelling and swearing, Wood following close behind. Two more Abyssinians appeared brandishing their weapons, one of them firing a flintlock pistol that sent a ball whizzing past Wood’s ear. The Abyssinian stumbled backward and fell, and Wood heard a string of Irish profanities as Bergin lunged at the writhing body with his bayonet. Another soldier barreled into the second Abyssinian, dropping his rifle and clutching the man’s head by the ears, smashing it again and again into a rock, bellowing himself hoarse. Wood could see that the Abyssinians had been well dressed, chieftains rather than foot soldiers, Theodore’s last loyal guard. The rest of the army seemed to have melted away.

The soldier who had smashed the man’s head was ripping the gold brocade from his robe; others were picking over the bodies ahead, several holding up shields and daggers as trophies. Looking back down to the outer entranceway, Wood could see that a route had been found around the boulders and the first of the main force were already through, their bayonets glinting. It could only be a matter of moments now before all resistance ended and Magdala fell.

He reached the path that led toward the inner gate, seeing that there was no door in this one to bar their way; through the passageway he could make out the thatched roofs of the houses on the plateau beyond. He and Jones advanced inside, hardly expecting further resistance now but still being cautious. Suddenly a man appeared in front of them, standing up from a cleft in the rock, a pistol held muzzle-down by his side. Wood aimed his revolver at the man’s chest, but he had recognized his face and did not fire. The golden mantle, the braided hair, the wispy beard, and the white robe were all familiar from the illustrations that had garnished newspapers the world over for months now; only the eyes were different, not wide open in some caricature of madness but somehow anchorless, the eyes of a man who no longer knew the measure of himself, who had lost all grip on reality.

King Theodore looked at Wood, the pistol still by his side, and spoke in English. “Your queen has destroyed me. But you will not have our greatest treasure. It is no longer here, and will never be yours.” Then he raised the pistol, put it in his mouth, and fired. A large chunk of skull and brains exploded from the back of his head and he collapsed on the ground.

Wood remained transfixed for a moment, watching the blood rapidly puddle around Theodore’s head, then reached down and picked up the pistol, the smoke still curling up from the muzzle. It was highly ornate, with etching on the lock plate and silver inlay in the grip, and had the king’s name on the escutcheon plate. He realized that it was one of the pair that Queen Victoria had sent to Theodore as a present, and that he had just witnessed the grotesque irony of the king using it on himself in the last desperate act of war against his erstwhile benefactor. He dropped the pistol beside the corpse, suddenly repelled. Someone else would claim it, for certain, but for now there were more pressing treasures to safeguard.

The officer of the 33rd came up beside him, his head swathed in a bandage. He stared at the corpse and then turned to the soldier who had hurried up behind him. “Get our Abyssinian. Tell him to call out that Theodore is dead. That should put an end to it.”

Moments later the chieftain’s son who had come along for this purpose with the storming party raised his voice and shouted, a high-pitched, penetrating sound that reverberated off the walls, repeating the same mantra again and again. Wood advanced past the corpse into the fortress, coming out among a cluster of thatched huts. In front of him was the gaping maw of Sevastopol, the huge mortar that Theodore had dragged up here at immeasurable cost in lives and energy and yet never fired, mute testament to the futility of the enterprise. To his left a group of emaciated Abyssinians stood with spears and shields on the ground in front of them; others were coming forward from the huts, dropping weapons and putting their hands in the air. Wood gestured to Jones, who advanced with his rifle raised and directed the men toward the others with his bayonet.

The rest of the storming party came streaming through the entranceway, the sergeant ordering several of them to take over from Jones in guarding the prisoners. The standard-bearer appeared with the colors he had brought from the parapet and now proceeded to mount them on the highest point he could reach above the gateway, making sure they would be clearly visible to the main force below. Seeing the red, white, and blue fluttering in the breeze, Wood knew that this really was it, that the game had been up the moment Theodore had put the pistol into his mouth.

He quickly took stock. There were wounded soldiers among the 33rd and the sappers, men such as the officer who had been grazed by the pistol ball, but, incredibly, they appeared to have forced one of the most formidable natural fortresses ever known without suffering a single fatality. That at least was something to be thankful for. Officially, the orders to the sappers on taking Magdala were to destroy the guns, mine the gates, and burn everything that was flammable: the huts, the palaces, the storerooms, only the church to be spared. But Wood was here as a reconnaissance officer, not in charge of a sapper company, and for a few crucial minutes before the main force arrived he might be able to limit the desecration that he knew was about to happen.

He turned to the officer of the 33rd, who had come up beside him. “For the time being I’m the senior officer present, so I’m taking charge. I want you immediately to post a guard around the church to prevent looting.”

The officer nodded. “Understood. But it won’t work.”

“I’m obliged to try.”

The officer told his sergeant to take a section of eight men across the plateau to the thatched building with the cross on top visible on the far side. They left on the double, Wood and Jones following some twenty meters behind. Wood’s heart sank when he saw what transpired once they reached the church; the officer had been right, of course. The soldiers immediately stacked their arms and went inside, ignoring the remonstrations of the sergeant, who was the only one to remain at the entrance. Jones passed his rifle to Wood, ran ahead and went inside as well. Already other soldiers were spreading out over the plateau with firebrands, lighting one thatched roof after another, the flames flickering and crackling and leaping out with the wind, igniting the adjacent buildings. Wood could see that there was no way the church could escape that holocaust either, regardless of General Napier’s orders, and that attempting to save it was going to be a lost cause. All he could do now was join the melee and try to rescue what he could.

He reached the entrance, holstered his revolver and leaned Jones’s rifle against the others. Three soldiers came out carrying great handfuls of objects in gold and silver and brass: crosses and chalices, shields and crowns, vestments covered in filigree and gold. A boy stood at the entrance, weeping, seemingly not caring as the soldiers jostled him in their eagerness to get out with their booty. Wood ducked inside and immediately smelled smoke. Above him part of the thatch was already ablaze, spreading as he watched it. Some soldier had clearly been overzealous with his firebrand. He seized a handful of rolled manuscripts, passing them to another man, who rushed with them to the entrance, and then turned around looking for more. The smoke was billowing, catching in the back of his throat. One of the roof timbers crashed down on the altar, crushing a metal chest and spreading the fire to the rushes on the floor. He realized that Jones was nowhere to be seen, and then he saw that the soldiers were coming up with their booty from a hole in the ground, evidently some kind of crypt. He crouched down over it, and shouted, “Everyone out. The church is burning. Everyone out now!”

Two soldiers came struggling up the rock-cut stairs, attempting to carry a large painted triptych between them but dropping it. Another timber came down from the ceiling, bringing with it the ornate bronze cross that had stood on the roof. One of the soldiers lunged for it, but immediately sprang back, clutching his burned hand, and staggered away to the entrance, helped by the other man. Jones appeared behind them, carrying scrolls that spilled from him as he struggled up the stairs. One of the scrolls was larger than the rest, and Wood grabbed it, pulling Jones up with his other hand and pushing him toward the entrance just as another beam came crashing down.

They stumbled out into the open air, coughing, Wood still clutching the scroll and Jones a handful of others, all that he had managed to rescue. Wood picked up Jones’s rifle, the last remaining one outside the church, and pulled him farther away, well beyond the flames that were now licking off the roof. They came to a halt under a stunted acacia tree some twenty yards farther on, and both went down on their knees, coughing and catching their breath. Wood peered at the other man. “I never thought I’d say this, Jones, but I had expected you to go for the treasure, and instead you would appear to have done a selfless service for mankind.”

Jones dropped his armful of scrolls on the ground and began counting them. “It’s not quite what it seems, sir, but thanks all the same. Yesterday evening at headquarters, when our role in the storming party became known, the archaeologist, Mr. Holmes, the one who often comes and talks to you, took me into his confidence and asked whether I would rescue scrolls for him, knowing that we would be among the first to come up here. He would have asked you, but he thought you might be constrained, sir. He promised to pay me straight up, no questions asked, five shillings per scroll, no need to put them in the kitty for the drumhead auction. Twenty scrolls here, that’s five pounds, sir, not bad for a hard day’s work, wouldn’t you say? He wants them for the British Museum.”

Wood coughed, and shook his head. “Well I’m glad there’s something in it for you. It’s still a good deed you’ve done. God know how many of them have been lost in that conflagration.”

Jones gathered up his load again and stood up. “I’ve got to be going now. Two fellows from the 33rd are ahead of me, taking the other scrolls I managed to get out before you arrived. I’ve promised them both a cut of the proceeds. None of the soldiers think the old parchment and vellum is of any value, so nobody should bother them as they go down. But I need to be there to give Mr. Holmes’s name should they be in any way harassed.”

“And then you need to retrieve the camera. I want to take some pictures of the entranceway and the revetments. It’s too late for much of value to be photographed inside the citadel, with everything going up in smoke, but we’ll do what we can.”

“Sir. I’ll be at the bottom of the slope in an hour. Thank you, sir. I’ll send the money home to my poor mother in Bristol. She’ll be ever so grateful, she will.”

“Right, Jones. I’ll look forward to the postcard. And mother or no mother, you’ll have to take your rifle, otherwise you really will be in trouble.”

Jones looked at the rifle, then at the scrolls. He sighed, dropped the bundle of parchment, slung the rifle over his shoulder and laboriously gathered the scrolls up again, dropping one and nearly losing the rest as he stooped to retrieve it. Then he seemed to remember something. He stopped and turned. “Sir.”

“What is it?”

“That one you’ve got. The big one.”

Wood looked at the scroll he had picked up. “I don’t think you’ve got space for it.”

“Perhaps, sir, if you could, you might show it to Mr. Holmes? He might pay more for it, see, being bigger.”

“Don’t push your luck, Jones. Remember, what you’re doing here is actually contravening General Napier’s orders. If anyone finds out, that drumhead auction will also be a drumhead court martial for one Sapper Jones, never to be Corporal Jones or Sergeant Jones, and certainly not King Jones. Now get on with it.”

“Sir. Thank you, sir. Bottom of the slope, one hour.”

Wood watched him hurry off down the path beside other soldiers struggling with their own loot, then looked at the scroll he had kept. He could immediately see that it was not in fact a scroll but some form of tapestry. He undid the leather cord and rolled it out, holding it up under the shade of the tree so that he could see the design more clearly. It was obviously very old, the colors faded, and was an impressive antiquity, showing a scene that was perhaps biblical: two men carrying a shrouded box between them the size of a seaman’s chest, another behind who looked patriarchal, with a braided black beard, and then behind him a cluster of horsemen, one with a lasso or whip and long hair.

He looked up, seeing that the boy who had been at the entrance to the church was watching him, standing by the tree. Perhaps he was the son of the priest, someone who might know the significance of this scene. Perhaps, indeed, this might be one for Holmes, for the British Museum. Holmes had become something of a friend on the occasions over the last weeks when Wood had been able to come down from the forward party and spend time with the headquarters staff of the expedition. It was he who had inspired Wood to think of planning his own archaeological expedition into Central Asia, something that he now had firmly in mind for his next furlough, an expedition for once without the dismal context of war and death and destruction, but purely for knowledge and gratification and discovery.

He turned from the boy and began to roll up the tapestry. As he did so, he saw the diminutive figure of Stanley coming up the path toward him, his pith helmet askew, clutching his notebook and pencil. “Mr. Stanley,” he said. “We meet again. You have seen the body of Theodore? He took his own life. I saw it myself.”

Stanley was covered in dust and looked shaken, pale. “There is nothing redeeming in what has happened here. Nothing redeeming at all.”

Wood thought for a moment, and gestured at Stanley’s notebook. “It will make a good story. Your readers will lap it up. That’s all.”

The acrid smell of burning thatch was beginning to disguise the reek of squalor and death that had pervaded this place. Soon, once the regiments of the expedition had returned to their stations in India, the proceeds of all that loot would be squandered in the way of soldiers, in the brothels and taverns of Mhow and Nowshera and Peshawar, drained away as if it had never existed. Well before then, a few hours from now, the smoldering remains of Magdala would be quenched by the torrential rains of the late afternoon, and the place would appear cleansed, the memory of this day swept down the eroded channels of the hillsides, flushed down the ravines to the sea.

Wood took out his handkerchief and rolled the tapestry inside, careful not to get any of it dirty. Looking down, he saw that his tunic was splattered with blood, and realized that it must have been Theodore’s. He squinted up at the sun, seeing the curious brown corona still there, ominous and looming, and remembered what Theodore had said about his greatest treasure, wondering what he had meant. He tucked the tapestry under his arm; at least he had managed to save something. He took one last look at the burning church, seeing the black smoke twisting and writhing up toward the corona, then nodded at Stanley and turned to go.

18

A little over twenty-four hours after leaving Louise in the nursing home, Jack stood on the plateau of Magdala in the central Ethiopian highlands, the site of King Theodore’s last stand against the British in 1868. Earlier in the afternoon he had scoured the saddle in front of the plateau for evidence of the battle, finding three corroded Snider — Enfield cartridges where the British line had stood their ground; further up the slope he had discovered the broken tip of a bayonet where the Abyssinians had been forced back by the British charge.

It was a beautiful summer day, the plateau and the ravines green with the vegetation that had not yet sprouted in the month of the 1868 siege, making it difficult to marry what he had seen with the bleak landscape in the photographs taken by the Royal Engineers just before the assault. But what had brought home the reality of the siege for him was the seven-ton bronze monster in front of him now, the mortar that Theodore had dubbed Sevastopol after the Crimean War battle of the previous decade. It had never been fired, and had remained on the plateau ever since, half buried and nearly forgotten. It was a reminder that Theodore, too, had engaged in a Herculean undertaking to get here, dragging this behemoth all the way into the mountains, cutting the road ahead of him as he struggled to reach Magdala before the British arrived. Reading the accounts from 1868, it had almost seemed as if some supernatural force had been attempting to prevent both sides from reaching the plateau, but having been here now himself and experienced the terrain, Jack knew that this was no more than the overwhelming challenge posed by nature, a catalog of physical obstacles that would make retracing either expedition a monumental enterprise even today.

“Jack. The Patriarch is ready to see you now.” A lean, wiry man wearing a shirt with the IMU logo over the breast pocket came up to him carrying the large picture-frame-sized package that Jack had brought with him from England. Zaheed was IMU’s representative in the Horn of Africa, an archaeologist trained in Britain who had worked in Egypt with Maurice and Aysha, excavated extensively at the ancient site of Axum in Ethiopia, and recently relocated to Mogadishu to help get the Somali national museum back on its feet after years of civil war. Jack had only met him briefly before, but had warmed to him greatly on their two-hour helicopter flight from Addis Ababa into the mountains that morning. He was earnest and enthusiastic, with a deep-rooted love of his country and many contacts that had facilitated not only this encounter at Magdala but also the next stage in the trip, one that should see them meet up with Costas at Mogadishu airport that evening and then travel on to the Somali naval headquarters the next day. It was a tight schedule, with Deep Explorer now approaching Somali territorial waters, but the chance presence of the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia at Magdala on a routine visit had meant that this was an opportunity not to be missed, particularly given the extraordinary item in the package that Jack had been able to bring with him.

He took a final photo of the mortar, focusing on the founder’s mark near the breech. The verdigris on the bronze made him think of the incredible image Maurice had sent him of Lanowski with the Ba’al sculpture at the bottom of the trench at Carthage, something that Jack had been unable to get out of his mind since they had spoken on the phone outside the nursing home; the gorilla skin was even more astonishing. Then he put his camera away in the old khaki bag that he had slung over his shoulder and followed Zaheed along the path toward the church.

He was thrilled that there had been time to trace Captain Wood’s movements in the final hours of the assault on that day in 1868. While Zaheed had hurried ahead to announce their arrival to the Patriarch, Jack had followed his path more slowly, making his way from the ledge where the helicopter had landed across the battlefield and up the boulder-strewn track, beside the precipice where the executed Abyssinian hostages had been found. At the ruined entranceway, the Koket-Bir, he had passed the place where Private Bergin and Gunner Magner had won their Victoria Crosses, the walls still pocked with bullet holes, and on the plateau itself he had found the stone that marked the spot where Theodore had shot himself and the British had cremated his body after pillaging all they could from his citadel and its churches.

Wood’s diary had remained unopened since it had been brought back to England by Jack’s great-great-grandfather in the 1880s, and discovering it in the family archive had been a huge excitement. After reading it, Jack had pieced together what he could of Wood’s life in the years after Abyssinia, up to his sudden death from cholera in 1879; he had been particularly fascinated to read Wood’s book on the expedition he had undertaken in 1875 with the Russian Prince Constantin down the River Oxus to Lake Aral, making archaeological discoveries on the way that Jack intended to follow up when he had time. The box in the archive contained one other extraordinary item, something that had stunned Jack when he had first unrolled it. He had taken it straight to the IMU conservation department and had received it back from them stabilized and framed just before leaving for his flight. It was that item that had made the presence of the Patriarch here so opportune, and that made Jack’s pulse quicken as he followed Zaheed toward the circular thatched building with the cross on it at the western end of the plateau.

“He knows who you are, and is up to speed on IMU,” Zaheed said. “He has a doctorate in theology from the Sorbonne and speaks English better than I do. He will quickly get down to business.”

Zaheed opened the hanging curtain at the entrance and ushered Jack in. Sitting on a low chair in the center of the church was an elderly Ethiopian wearing a white robe and skullcap, with an elaborate metal cross hanging from his neck. On his right side was a low table, and behind him stood another man in white, evidently his assistant. The Patriarch raised his hand and Jack strode over to shake it.

“Dr. Howard. I apologize for staying seated. I greatly relish doing the rounds of these remote churches once a year, but I am not the spring gazelle I once was.”

Jack sat on the stool that had been placed in front of the Patriarch, and Zaheed pulled up another and sat alongside. “This is a very peaceful church,” Jack said. “I like the simplicity.”

“It is not exactly Westminster Abbey. Most of what was once here is now gone. The original church was destroyed when the British took Magdala in 1868.”

“Before flying out here, Zaheed drove me past the Church of our Lady Mary of Zion, and the Chapel of the Tablet.”

“Are you going to ask me whether you can see the Ark of the Covenant? Is that really why you are here? Then you would disappoint me.”

Jack shook his head. “I have no justification for seeing the Ark. How could I, when for millions of believers the time of revelation is not yet here? To see it, to touch it with my hands, would be a marvelous thing, but to do so would be a travesty against those for whom the continuing concealment of the Ark, the mystery of it, is what gives them hope.”

The Patriarch’s eyes twinkled. “Then you are not like other archaeologists who have come asking me this question.”

“Because most of them are not archaeologists. Most are treasure-seekers, chancers, looking for a best-selling book and a media sensation. To be an archaeologist you have to see that artifacts such as the Ark have a transcendent quality, a meaning greater than their physical presence. And knowing that to reveal an artifact to the world might shatter that meaning, as an archaeologist you have to be able to stop, to draw a line in the sand.”

“And yet as an archaeologist you are driven by the quest.”

“The quest to find the truth, to discover what happened. My line in the sand stops in front of the Chapel of the Tablet.”

“Then I think we might have an understanding, Dr. Howard.”

“Zaheed has filled you in on the background of why I’m here, the diary of the British officer who was present at the siege of Magdala in 1868. I now wish to make a gift, to the Ethiopian Church and to the people of Ethiopia, of something that was taken from this place on that day.”

Jack nodded to Zaheed, who passed him the package. Jack withdrew a framed picture about two feet square and held it up for the Patriarch to see. “This was found with the officer’s diary. He made a note that he intended on his eventual return to England to pass it on to Richard Rivington Holmes, later Sir Richard, the British Museum curator who accompanied the Abyssinia expedition, and this would perhaps have happened had Wood not died suddenly of cholera in Bangalore in 1879. In the lower right corner is a note in his hand saying it was taken from the church at Magdala — this very church — on the day of the final assault, the thirteenth of April 1868.”

The Patriarch stared at the picture, and then gestured for his assistant to come over. The two men talked excitedly in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, gesturing at the frame, and then the Patriarch turned to Jack. “This is an astonishing rediscovery for us. Do you know what it is?”

“It’s a woven woolen tapestry. We were able to get a radiocarbon date in the IMU lab for a sample from one corner of the fourth century AD, the time of the Kingdom of Axum. But the image of the man with the braided beard looks much older, Sassanid perhaps, something that would fit more comfortably in Mesopotamian art of the early to mid-first millenium BC. And that doesn’t take into account the image of the two large black men ahead of him, and what they’re carrying. According to everything I now believe, that means that this image is drawn from an actual historical event of the early sixth century BC.”

“A memory of this tapestry has been passed down through the Church, but I hardly dared imagine that it might still exist,” the Patriarch said. “According to tradition, the man with the braided beard was Phoenician, and had brought the Ark by ship.”

Jack reached over and pointed at a cluster of riders shown behind the man, one of them clearly a woman, with long dark hair and swirling a whip. “Do you know who these people are?”

“They look as if they’re chasing him, but they’re not. They’re actually protecting him from the brigands of the coast, riding to his rescue. According to tradition, the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel had mandated a Judaic warlord of the coast to protect the Phoenician and escort him to the mountain cave with his cargo. She was Yusuk As’ar, meaning ‘she who takes vengeance.’ There were other Jewish female warriors like her throughout history — the mother of Dhu Nuwas of Yemen in the sixth century AD, the Berber Jewish Queen Dihya in North Africa a century later — but Yusuk As’ar may have been the fiercest of them all, a scourge of the Babylonians and the marauders of this coast.”

Zaheed nodded in agreement. “A colleague of mine who is an expert on these traditions thinks she might even be the model for the stories of Makeda, the legendary queen who married King Solomon of Judah. The traditions may contain a conflation of historical reality from those centuries.”

Jack passed the tapestry back to Zaheed, and leaned forward intently. “The looting that took place after the death of Theodore is well known. I’m also interested in another period when Ethiopia was desecrated by outsiders. Do you have any knowledge of the Nazi Ahnenerbe coming here on the hunt for artifacts?”

The Patriarch pursed his lips. “The period of fascist rule from 1936 to 1941 was a dark time for us. Some of the looting was brazen, such as the ancient obelisk from Axum that still stands in Rome. My predecessors did their best to conceal the treasures of the Ethiopian Church. You’ve seen the Chapel of the Tablet, so you see we have some experience in that regard. But many lesser items went missing.”

“Not just from the churches and monasteries, but also from the museums,” Zaheed added. “We attempted an inventory a few years ago. Much of the material never resurfaced, so we think it must have been cached somewhere and never recovered, perhaps because it hadn’t been removed before Mussolini’s soldiers were driven out of the country in 1941. By then it would have been difficult to get anything back to Italy or Germany.”

“You say Germany. So the Ahnenerbe were here?”

The Patriarch was quiet for a moment, and then nodded gravely. “I have never told anyone else this. But they were here, in this village on this plateau. The priest here now was a boy at the time and remembers it, but is still so stricken by what happened that I fear he would not talk to you. Three Germans came, two of them claiming to be archaeologists and the other some kind of thug from the SS, the sort Ethiopians had become used to under the fascist regime. They spent many days here, measuring, digging, going from hut to hut, interrogating. The priest, the boy, had been trained in his vocation by a German in Addis Ababa, so understood some of what they were saying. They appeared to be looking for anything that might have been left over when the British left in 1868. They had high hopes of treasure. They too were after the Ark of the Covenant.”

“Did they find anything?”

The Patriarch pointed to the floor of the church. “There used to be a cavern under here, now filled in. For centuries it had been used to store the valuables of the church. When the British soldiers broke in, they ransacked it, taking that tapestry among many other items, but they failed to notice a sealed chamber at the back. Unfortunately, the Germans were very thorough and tested all of the walls, eventually discovering a hollow space. In it was the only great treasure we lost to the Nazis, a treasure that we had kept secret for centuries and a loss that we have not spoken of until now.”

He turned and spoke to his assistant, who reached into an old wooden chest embedded in the floor behind the Patriarch’s seat and pulled out a worn leather folio volume. He put it on the Patriarch’s lap and opened it up, the parchment crackling as he turned the leaves. After about a dozen pages the Patriarch put out his hand, and the man stopped turning and stood back. The Patriarch swiveled the folio on his lap so that it was facing Jack, and looked at him. “This is an old illustration of it, made in the sixteenth century. That is what they stole.”

Jack stood up for a better view and stared at the image, a faded painting of an inscription picked out in gold with the letters in black. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating, and he sat back down again, stunned, needing a few moments to marshal his thoughts.

“As you can see, the artifact was a bronze plaque with ancient lettering,” the Patriarch said. “It was brought to us in the early sixteenth century by the Lemba people of southern Africa, who had safeguarded it for many centuries before that. They took it from their own safe place because of the arrival of the Portuguese, and the fear that this and other treasures might be discovered and taken away. They brought it all the way to us because in their tradition it had been they who carried the Ark up the mountains to this place, to the cavern in the rock; they could think of no better place of safety for their plaque than here. Their tradition was that the plaque had been set up at the southern cape by the mariner who had brought the Ark from the north, who took them on board to help him with his task.”

“The Phoenician, the man with the braided beard in the tapestry,” Jack said, coursing with excitement. “His name was Hanno. Without looking again at that illustration, I can tell you that there’s a crude pictogram at the end showing two men carrying a chest on poles between them, surely a representation of the Ark. I know this because a little over a week ago, I was staring at that actual plaque, closer to it than I am to you now.”

“Where could you possibly have seen it?”

“About a hundred and twenty meters deep, inside a Second World War shipwreck off the west coast of Africa. Seeing that plaque was what set me on this trail to begin with. We found it embedded among a consignment of gold bars from South Africa, and had reason to believe that it had been Ahnenerbe loot. But now we know where they found it, everything is suddenly falling into place.”

“Can we see it?”

“You’ll see the images soon enough, splashed around the world, along with some incredible finds that our colleague Maurice Hiebermeyer has just told me about from his excavations at Carthage. One of them, amazingly, is a gorilla skin, just as Hanno described in his Periplus as having taken back to Carthage. What’s most astonishing is that it was flecked on the inside with gold in the shape of a box. I think it can only have been a cover for the Ark, removed on this mountaintop after the Ark had been taken away and concealed, perhaps inside the cavern in this very church.”

“Perhaps,” the Patriarch said, closing the folio. “Perhaps that story one day too will be told, of how a treasure that had been here for all those centuries, for a full two millennia before the plaque was placed inside with it, was taken out in secret and brought to its present place of waiting.”

Jack nodded. “Perhaps it will. But for now we’ve nearly come full circle on our journey, just as we now know Hanno must have done, circumnavigating Africa, coming here, taking the skins back to Carthage, fulfilling a bargain he had made with those who had entrusted him with their sacred cargo.”

The Patriarch put the folio on the table beside him. “Before you go, I have something I want to give you.” He gestured behind him, and his assistant gave him a package. He unwrapped it, taking out an object about six inches square inside a blue covering, and passed it over, putting his hands around Jack’s and the object as he spoke. “You will know not to open this. It’s made of acacia, what the Israelites called shittim wood. Many Ethiopians have one of these. We call it a tabot, a tablet of the Commandments. This is our Ark, and now it’s yours.”

He withdrew his hands, and Jack got up, carefully placing the tabot in his bag. “I’m very grateful to you. Thank you for seeing us today. You’ve filled gaps in an incredible story, one of the most amazing I’ve ever been involved with.”

“The tapestry will be a prize exhibit in the National Museum in Addis Ababa,” Zaheed said. “It will join other artifacts from the 1868 looting that are being returned. We’ll take it back with us in the helicopter.”

“Where are you going now?” the Patriarch said. “Zaheed tells me there might be trouble brewing off the Horn of Africa. You need to be very careful if you’re going to Somalia.”

Jack gave him a steely look. “Being on the trail of the Ark has set us on another trail, one involving a particularly insalubrious treasure hunter and the possibility of a cache of loot from seventy years ago that might include some lethal weapons material.”

“Is that Jack Howard the archaeologist speaking, or Jack Howard the former naval commando? Zaheed filled me in a little on your background.”

Jack held out his hand. “Both. I’ve enjoyed talking with you.”

“Perhaps, if you’re on the trail of those Nazis, you’ll come across some of those other lost artifacts from our museums and churches and be able to return them to us?”

“That would be my very great pleasure.”