The Exodus Quest

II

Lily looked a little dizzily down at the ground beneath her feet. 'You don't suppose… I mean, it's not possible that any of these treasures are still here?'

'I doubt it,' said Gaille. 'This place has been pretty well searched over the years. Nothing much has been found. Some Nefertiti jewellery back in the eighteen hundreds. Some bronze temple vessels. I guess they might have been part of it. And there was something called the Crock of Gold too, a jar half-filled with ingots. They used to make them by digging grooves in the sand with their finger, then pouring molten gold into them to set. I've always thought that was most likely someone's life-savings or a goldsmith's stash of raw material, but I suppose it could be part of this.'

'Nothing else?'

'Not that I know of. But then you wouldn't expect to find much. Remember, this whole city was completely dismantled after Akhenaten died.' Gaille gave a dry laugh. 'In fact, maybe that's why it was dismantled, not simply demolished or abandoned. Think about it. If the new authorities realised what the Atenists had done, maybe because they found a cache or two, or because someone talked…'

Lily nodded vigorously. 'They'd have taken the place apart brick by brick until they'd found the lot.' She touched Stafford's book. 'Does it say where these things were buried?'

Sunlight glared upon the white paper. They turned their backs until it was in shadow. 'In the fortress in the Vale of Achor,' murmured Gaille. 'Forty cubits under the eastern steps. In the Sepulchral Monument. In the third course of stones. In the Great Cistern in the Court of the Peristyle, concealed in a hole in the floor.'

Lily wrinkled her nose. 'Pretty vague, isn't it?'

'You'd expect it to be,' replied Gaille. 'If we're right, the Atenists would have believed their eviction only a temporary setback. They didn't need precise directions, only an aide-memoire.'

'What about these place names? Secacah, Mount Gezirim, the Vale of Achor?'

'They're all near Jerusalem,' admitted Gaille. 'But maybe that's not so surprising, either. I mean, if our theory's right, this is at least a double translation. Egyptian into Hebrew then Hebrew into English. And these places would only originally have been designated by a series of consonants, because neither Egyptian nor Hebrew had vowels. So when the translators came across place names that didn't quite fit their preconceptions, wouldn't it have been natural for them to tweak them until they did? I mean, take the Royal Wadi here. It used to be known as "Vale of the Horizon", or "Vale of Akhet" in Egyptian. Is it really too great a stretch to imagine that being translated as the Vale of Achor? Or that Secacah might originally have been Saqqara?'

'I thought Saqqara was near Cairo?'

'Yes, but it got its name from Sokar, a god of the dead worshipped throughout Egypt. Burial grounds were often-'

Footsteps crunched the crusted sand behind her. She snapped the book closed, whirled around to see Stafford approaching, camera bags hoisted over his shoulder. 'Can't put it down, eh?' he asked complacently.

'No,' agreed Gaille. 'It's quite extraordinary.'

'That's why I wrote it.' He checked his watch, nodded at the Discovery. 'Whenever you're ready,' he said, heaving the camera onto the back seat. 'We are on a schedule, you know.'