The Exodus Quest

SIXTEEN
I

Stafford and Lily were already waiting by the Discovery's passenger door when Gaille went out at twelve minutes to five. 'Sorry,' she said, holding up Stafford's book by way of an excuse. 'I got carried away.'

'It is good, isn't it?' he nodded.

'The Copper Scroll,' she said as she and Stafford climbed in and Lily went to open the gates. 'That's for real, is it?'

'Do you imagine I'm in the habit of populating my books with make-believe artefacts?' he asked sourly. 'Go and visit Jordan's Archaeological Museum if you don't trust me.'

'I didn't mean for real like that,' said Gaille, gunning the engine a little to warm it up before pulling away. 'I mean, how can you be sure it's not a hoax of some kind?'

'Well, it's certainly not a modern hoax,' he said, as Gaille braked to allow Lily to climb in the back. 'Scientific analysis has proved that beyond question. As for an ancient hoax, the Essenes weren't exactly known for their frivolity, were they? Especially as the copper was over ninety-nine per cent pure – effectively ritually pure; and the Essenes took ritual purity very seriously.'

'Yes.'

'Besides, it wasn't on just one sheet of copper, surely plenty for a hoax, but on three sheets riveted together. And it wasn't inscribed in the normal fashion, with the letters scratched out with a sharp stylus. Someone actually punched the letters out from behind with a chisel. Extremely painstaking work, believe me. No. Whoever went to all that trouble believed it genuine.'

'Believed?' asked Gaille.

He granted her a slight smile, a teacher rewarding a bright pupil. 'The text seems to have been copied from another, older document, probably by someone unfamiliar with the language. So it's possible, I suppose, that some mischief-maker wrote out a hoax on parchment or papyrus, and that this hoax was somehow mistaken by the Essenes for the real thing, and that it became so venerated by them that when it began to disintegrate, they copied it out, only onto copper this time. But that's quite a stretch, wouldn't you say?'

A donkey cart ahead, laden with long green stalks of sugar cane that bounced and swished like the skirts of an Hawaiian dancer, blocked the full width of the narrow lane, forcing Gaille to fall in behind. It was still dark, but the eastern horizon was just beginning to lighten with the first intimations of dawn. Stafford leaned across and tooted the horn again and again until Gaille swatted away his hand. 'There's nowhere for him to pull into,' she said.

Stafford scowled and folded one leg across the other, crossed his arms. 'Do you realize how important this shot of sunrise is for my programme?' he asked.

'We'll get there.'

'Akhenaten chose Amarna as his capital because the way the sun rose between two cliffs mimicked the Egyptian sign of the Aten. That's going to be my opening shot. If I don't get it-'

'You'll get it,' she assured him. The cart finally found a place to pull in. Gaille waved gratefully as she sped by, the acceleration making Stafford's book slip from the dashboard. He picked it up, flipped the pages with authorial pride, stopped to admire a photograph of himself by the Wailing Wall. Gaille nodded at it. 'How come you're so sure these Copper Scroll treasures came from the Temple of Solomon?' she asked.

'I thought you'd read it.'

'I haven't had a chance to finish it yet.'

'The scroll's in Hebrew,' he told her. 'It was owned by the Essenes. So the treasure was unquestionably Jewish. And the amounts involved are staggering, I mean over forty tons of gold. That's worth billions of dollars at today's prices. The kind of quantities only a hugely wealthy king or a very powerful institution could possibly own. Yet some of the treasures are described as tithes, and tithes are paid exclusively to religious organizations. Others are religious artefacts like chalices and candelabras. A religious institution, then. In ancient Israel, that means either the First Temple, the Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC; or the Second Temple, which was built on the ruins of the first, and which was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. Most scholars ascribe these Copper Scroll treasures to the latter. But my book proves that impossible.'

'Proves it?'

'It's all to do with dates,' said Stafford. 'The Copper Scroll was found in the Qumran caves, remember. And Qumran was taken and then occupied by the Romans in AD 68, two years before Jerusalem fell. Advocates of the Second Temple theory would have you believe that Jews took the treasure out of Jewish-held territory to bury it in Roman-occupied territory, then hid the map to it right under the noses of a Roman garrison. How crazy would they have had to be to do that? But even that's beside the point. The Copper Scroll was found buried beneath other scrolls that had been left there at least twenty years before the Roman invasion. And, as I just said, it was copied from another, older document. And the script itself is a very peculiar version of archaic square-form Hebrew dating to 200 BC or even earlier. Tell me, is it likely the Second Temple treasures were hidden from the Romans hundreds of years before they came rampaging?'

'It does seem odd.'

'So if the Copper Scroll treasure didn't come from the Second Temple, it must have come from the first. QED.'

They reached the Nile road, headed south. The lime, flamingo and turquoise strip lighting of a minaret lit up the darkness like a fairground ride. Gaille turned right and then left, wending through a small village then out between lush fields of budding grain and down a gentle incline to the Nile, flowing sedately by. The glow of dawn was turning the eastern horizon blue, though the sun wouldn't rise over the Amarna cliffs for a while yet.

'Any good?' she asked.

'Perfect,' grinned Lily from the back.

They climbed out, yawned, stretched. Lily set up the camera and checked the sound while Stafford took out his vanity case and primped himself. Gaille sat upon the bonnet, savouring its radiated heat, her mind buzzing pleasantly. Somewhere, in the far distance, a muezzin began his call to prayer.

The Copper Scroll. Ancient lost treasures. She laughed out loud. Knox was going to love her for this.