The Exodus Quest

II

Kostas always took his own good time answering his front door, blaming either his failing hearing or his failing legs. He took it as a privilege of age to make people wait. But eventually he arrived, patting down his wreath of tangled, snowy hair, producing a pair of half-moon spectacles from his jacket pocket, then peering over the top of them. 'My dear Knox!' he exclaimed. 'What a delightful surprise.' But then he blinked and took half a pace back. 'My! You have been in the wars.'

'That bad, is it?' grimaced Knox. 'I couldn't use your bathroom, could I?'

'Of course. Of course. Come in.' Kostas shuffled along his obstacle course of a hallway, using his cane as a white stick to help him navigate between the dusty high stacks of academic tomes and packing chests of exotic artefacts, making the place feel more like a bric-a-brac store than a home. His walls were just as cluttered, a collage of astral charts, lurid occult posters, his own watercolours of herbs and other medicinal plants, framed frontispieces of arcane works and yellowed press clippings of himself in the news.

Knox examined himself in the washbasin mirror. A sight indeed: dried blood on his scalp and forehead, his face haggard, his hair prematurely aged with dust. He lathered up some soap, cleaned himself as best he could. A line of Greek text across the top of the mirror made him smile: NI?ONANOMHMATAMHMONANO?IN. One of the earliest known palindromes: Wash your iniquities not just your face. He dried himself with a hand-towel, turning it an ugly brown, then went back out.

'Well?' asked Kostas impatiently. 'What brings you here in such a state?'

Knox hesitated. It wasn't that easy to explain. 'I don't suppose you're on the Internet, are you?' he asked.

'Sadly, yes,' said Kostas, leading Knox through to his library, where subdued lighting glowed on the burnished leather of innumerable old books. He opened his bureau to reveal a slimline laptop within. 'One can't do anything without them these days.'

Knox logged on, went to his hotmail account. But, to his dismay, Gaille's email had vanished. That bloody man in his motorcycle helmet must have deleted the photographs. He closed down the browser. 'Looks like I'll just have to tell you,' he said. 'But please bear with me if everything's not entirely clear. I took a bit of a bang on the head.'

'I noticed.'

'It seems I stumbled across some kind of antiquity out near Borg last night. It's being excavated by some biblical archaeologists, and it seems it might have some connection with the Therapeutae. I took some photographs. There was a statuette of Harpocrates. Six severed mummified ears. A mosaic of a figure inside a seven-pointed star that reminded Augustin of a picture of Baphomet by some French guy whose name I can't remember.'

'Eliphas Levi,' nodded Kostas. 'I know the one.'

'And there was a mural of Dionysus. Another of Priapus. That's about it.'

'What a fascinating list,' gloated Kostas, his eyes watering with pleasure. 'You realize of course that the Therapeutae lived out near Borg?'

'Yes.'

'And Harpocrates. The Romans worshipped him as the god of silence, you know, because the Egyptians depicted him holding a finger to his lips. But in fact that had nothing to do with hush.'

'No,' agreed Knox. It was one of the ways that the Egyptians had indicated youth, like the curled forelock on a prince's forehead.

'His name is actually a corruption of the Egyptian Har-pa-khared. Horus the Child. Horus being the falcon-headed god who fused with the sun god Ra to become Ra-Horakthy, rising each morning in the east.'

'I am an Egyptologist,' observed Knox.

'Of course you are, my dear boy. Of course you are. That's why you'll already be aware of the connection between him and Baphomet.'

'What connection?'

'Aleister Crowley's religion of Thelema, of course. Crowley picked up where Eliphas Levi left off, as you no doubt know. He identified Baphomet as Harpocrates, though to be fair that was mostly due to his extraordinary ignorance. On the other hand, now that I think of it, Harpocrates was associated with a particular – and quite fascinating – group of Alexandrian Gnostics.'

'Which group?'

'A cup of tea first, I think,' said Kostas, licking his lips. 'Yes. Tea and cake.'