The Lost Testament

6

The present Khan el-Khalili souk dates from 1380, but it had been known as a Turkish bazaar for decades before that date. The name itself is something of a misnomer, because khan translates as a ‘caravanserai’, rather than a bazaar or market, and is a reference to the stopping place for traders and their camel trains that grew up on that site in the fourteenth century. In those days, Cairo was one of the most important merchant towns anywhere on the old Silk Road, and the Khan el-Khalili area was where most of the trading in the city took place.

In the latter part of that century, the Sultan Barquq began his madrassa in Bayn al-Qasrayn, sparking a rebuilding programme, one phase of which resulted in the establishment of the souk. It’s changed very little over the centuries. It’s still Cairo’s main souk, a maze of narrow streets, twisting alleyways, tiny shops, street traders, mediaeval arches and bizarre architecture, mosques and madrassas. The sights, sounds and smells — especially the smells of the spices — would be familiar to anyone who had ever visited a Middle Eastern bazaar: in fact today it is visited by almost as many tourists as locals. Visitors walk in a daze, staring about them at the astonishing range of goods for sale, at the antiques and antiquities, carpets and kilims, lamps, gold, silver, jewellery, alabaster ornaments, pottery, shisha pipes, cloth and textiles, clothing and anything and everything else.

On a particularly stuffy day, while pale and sweating visitors ambled through the streets and alleys of the souk, a local dealer slipped silently and efficiently through the crowds. He dealt in antiques and collectables — a term that covered almost everything — and knew that many of the objects he saw on the stalls, being touted to passing tourists as genuine ancient relics, were probably significantly younger than he was, and in some cases might have been made as recently as the previous day.

Anum Husani visited the souk almost daily, trying to seek out the genuine goods, the occasional real bargains, and any attractive items of whatever age that he could sell through his shop. He knew most of the stallholders, and was in his turn known by them. He knew what he was looking for, and was used to getting what he wanted at a price which he felt was fair, even if the negotiations involved prolonged haggling and more than one visit to the seller.

As was indicated by his first name, Anum Husani was the fifth child in his family. The son of comparatively wealthy parents, he had been born and brought up in the city. His second name — which followed tradition in that it was his father’s first name — meant ‘handsome’, which proved the optimism of his parents, if nothing else, because his face was dominated by a large, curved and blade-like nose, and under his scrubby beard his cheeks were marked by a rash of old acne scars. His eyes were perhaps his best feature, their piercing blue hinting at an interesting genetic mix somewhere among his forebears, and clear intelligence shining from them.

As was his habit, Husani paused for a few minutes at one of the many tiny cafés deep inside the souk and drank thick black coffee from a cup little bigger than a thimble. He was about to continue his searching when a trader he recognized approached him, smiled a welcome and then sat down.

They exchanged greetings and discussed friends, family and acquaintances for some minutes, before the trader finally worked his way round to the matter he wanted to talk about.

‘I have something that might interest you,’ Mahmoud began.

‘I’m interested in lots of things,’ Husani replied vaguely, gesturing at a number of items he had already purchased at various stalls in the souk. A few old pottery vessels and a couple of pieces of jewellery lay on the small circular table in front of him. ‘What have you got?’

‘You’ve heard about the building work going on over at al-Jizah?’ the trader asked.

Husani shook his head.

‘They were demolishing a couple of buildings,’ Mahmoud explained, ‘and a large battered metal case turned up in the rubble. Nobody had seen the object before the demolition started, and I think it’s possible that it might have been hidden under the floorboards of one of the rooms, or possibly secreted within a wall.’

Mahmoud paused for a moment and looked keenly at his companion.

Husani’s interest and attention were obvious, and he gestured for the trader to continue his story.

‘One of the workmen forced it open, obviously hoping that there was something of value inside it, but all it contained were papers, so he tossed it away. Another one of the men working there is known to me and thought I might be interested in the case itself, even if there was nothing worth selling inside it, so he picked it up and brought it to me.’

Husani shook his head and picked up one of the pieces of jewellery he had purchased that morning, his attention already wandering.

‘I have no particular interest in metal cases, my friend,’ he pointed out.

Mahmoud nodded.

‘I know that,’ he replied, ‘and in fact I have already sold it to a tourist, who of course paid far more than it was really worth. But I also examined the papers that were inside it, and I think you might like to see those.’

Husani shook his head again.

‘I mostly deal in relics and artefacts,’ he said, dropping the necklace on the table and lifting up an old pottery lamp, ‘things like this. Documents, even very old documents, have little value for me. They are usually difficult to sell, and are also quite fragile.’

‘But you have sold parchments and scrolls in the past?’

‘Parchments only occasionally, but scrolls, yes, because they are decorative and the tourists like them, even the modern fakes. But you said the box contained papers. Did you mean that they were scrolls?’

‘Not scrolls, no, but there was one piece of thick paper that looks very old, and I didn’t recognize the writing on it. That is the object I thought you might be interested in seeing.’

Husani nodded slowly. Mahmoud was a competent market trader, but a generally unsophisticated and uneducated man, and what he was describing as ‘thick paper’ might be parchment or vellum, either of which could suggest considerable age. On the other hand, it could also be simply a sheet of thin cardboard. But whatever it was, Husani guessed it was probably worth his while to take a look.

‘Is it at your stall?’

‘Yes. My cousin Rashid is there now, if you would like to see it.’

‘Very well, my friend,’ Husani said, careful not to appear too enthusiastic because that would encourage Mahmoud to raise the asking price of the object. ‘There are a few other dealers who have offered me relics, and I need to see them now, but I will be at your stall within the hour.’

Husani arrived at Mahmoud’s small establishment just over forty minutes later, having found nothing of real interest in the other stalls.

Mahmoud opened a battered leather suitcase and removed a pile of yellowing paper.

‘That,’ he said, as Husani looked at the bundle of pages, ‘is exactly the way the papers appeared when I opened the metal case. The unusual one is right in the middle.’

Husani picked up the top sheet and studied it for a few moments. It appeared to be part of some kind of contract or agreement — the numbers on the left-hand side of the indented paragraphs suggested that very clearly — and he thought the language was Spanish, or perhaps Italian. What struck him as odd was that the first paragraph was numbered ‘17A’, which suggested that there must be at least two or three other pages that would presumably contain the earlier sections of the document, but none of the pages immediately underneath appeared to be in any way related to the sheet he held in his hand. Some of the sheets were unusual sizes, and the colour of the typewritten text varied from blue to black.

Those pages that had dates on them suggested that the papers had all been acquired at more or less the same time, because they were all from roughly the same period, the early-to mid-1960s. But, glancing at the text on each one as he did so, Husani guessed that the typewritten sheets had probably been selected at random. They looked like nothing more than a miscellaneous collection of discarded business documents.

And that gave him pause for thought. There were two fairly obvious reasons why somebody should have decided to stuff the metal case with such pages. They might be there to protect something, the pages to act as nothing more important than packing material, or perhaps they might be a kind of basic disguise — something to show an inquisitive customs officer if he insisted on the case being opened and checked. Or maybe, he decided, the pages could be performing both functions, acting as a protection and a disguise.

‘This is exactly how you found them?’ Husani asked.

Mahmoud nodded. ‘Exactly. I lifted the bundle of papers out of the case and examined the sheets just as you are doing now, but I didn’t change the order of the pages, in case that was important for some reason.’

He paused for a moment and glanced shrewdly at Husani.

‘So is it important, my friend?’

‘At this moment, I have no idea.’

Husani ran his fingers down the side of the bundle of papers until he felt something thicker and stiffer approximately in the middle of the pile. He took hold of the stack of pages which overlaid it, and lifted them all to one side.

The object was not particularly impressive. It looked like a sheet of brownish cardboard, but as soon as Husani touched it he realized that it was actually parchment, and it looked old. There were words written on it, the letters barely visible and extremely difficult to make out. He picked up the parchment by its edges and held it up to the dim light streaming through a section of the roof of the souk, angling it to try to make out what was written on it.

At first, he could only pick out the occasional letter, but then he saw one word fairly clearly, and a tingle — like a shot of electricity — passed through his body. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, what he was looking at was written in Latin.