The Sanctuary

Chapter 38

The project supervisor at the foundation sounded mortified as Mia related what had happened. He apologized profusely, as if his own family were responsible for the attacks, and assured her that he fully understood her position and would support any decision she took.

She hung up, and her eyes settled on the computer screen before her. She realized she’d been in e-mail exile since having drinks with Evelyn. Corben had asked a secretary to log her into the press office’s system, but as Mia reached for the keyboard, she decided she’d extend the exile a little longer.

She was, quite simply, overwhelmed. She glanced out the window at the lush forested hills behind the embassy, sorting out the confused, frantic scenes unfurling in her mind’s eye, and inviting some of the tranquillity outside the window to seep into her. All she got instead was a recall of the Ouroboros, which she soon found herself doodling on the writing pad in front of her.

She gave up trying to duck it. She pulled a number off her cell phone and dialed it. Mike Boustany, the historian she’d been working with on the project, answered after the fourth ring, his dulcet tones replaced by urgent, heartfelt concern. He hadn’t heard of Ramez’s kidnapping yet, and it took him by surprise. He was even more shocked to hear that Mia was present at both.

He asked what was going on. Mia didn’t feel compelled to hide anything from him. He stayed silent through most of it, clearly stunned by her experience.

“Maybe there’s something you can help me with, Mike,” she concluded. “What do you know about the Ouroboros?”

“The tail-eater? We’ve got some carvings of it, on some Phoenician temples. Is that what you mean?”

“No. The one I’m interested in is much more recent. Tenth century, maybe.” She filled him in about its appearance in the underground chambers and on the book.

He knew a lot about the Brethren of Purity, but couldn’t see a connection there to the Ouroboros. She wanted to go further, but felt she should avoid mentioning the hakeem and his house of horrors. Instead, she told Boustany about being a bit confused as to the symbol’s significance and brought up what she’d read about the Arab and Persian scientists of the era.

Which was something he knew a lot about.

“What I don’t get is this,” she concluded. “Someone’s willing to shed a lot of blood to get his hands on this book, but there’s nothing sinister about what these scientists were trying to achieve. So what’s in this book?”

Boustany chuckled softly. “Must be the ikseer.”

“The what? What are you talking about?”

“Man’s oldest craving. See, you’re just looking at it from a rational point of view.”

She frowned. “So I’m told.”

“You’ve been reading up about the achievements of these scientist-philosophers that are easily demonstrable. But, as you know, they didn’t limit themselves to one discipline. They were interested in everything known to man, they wanted to master the mysterious forces of nature and become the leading lights in all of the sciences. So they studied medicine, physics, astronomy, geology…their minds were hungry, and there was a lot to discover. They dissected bodies, postulated about how the solar system operates…And sooner or later, the one thing that hogged their attention was alchemy.”

“Alchemy? These guys were scientists, not quacks.”

Boustany’s voice came back tranquil as a lake. “Alchemy was a science. We’d still be rubbing sticks for fire without it.”

And with that, he took her back to the earliest days of the uneasy relationship between science and religion, and to the origins of alchemy.

Boustany explained how the ancient Greeks had separated science — which, at the time, consisted mostly of studies of astronomy and explorations of khemeia, which meant “the mixing together” of substances — from religion, to great effect.

“Science flourished as a rational vocation of academics and thinkers,” Boustany told her. “This all changed when one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Ptolemy, established his kingdom in Egypt. Alexandria — the city that had been founded by and took its name from the great conqueror — became a center of advanced learning, as exemplified by its legendary library. The invaders were impressed by the Egyptian mastery of khemeia, even though it was fused with their religion and their obsession with the afterlife. And so the Greeks absorbed both the science and the religion. Khemeia became intertwined with mysticism, and its practitioners were viewed as shady adepts of dark secrets. Practitioners of khemeia and astrologers became as feared as priests. They soon embraced that perception, reveling in their newfound status of sorcerers and magicians, and closed ranks, retreating behind a veil of secrecy. In an effort to feed their own myth, they shrouded their writings in a symbolism only initiates could understand.”

Science and magic became indistinguishable.

And, as a result, science — serious science — floundered. This mind-set led to scientists working apart and not sharing their discoveries — or their failures. Even worse, it attracted quacks and charlatans, who dragged science further into disrepute. The allure of the ultimate chemical challenge — changing base metals into gold — became prevalent. It all spiraled out of control until two forces all but smothered science in Europe: the Roman emperor Diocletian’s fear of cheap gold undermining his rule, which led to his ordering the burning of all known writings of khemeia; and the rise of Christianity, which ruthlessly stamped out heretical, pagan learning. The Christian Roman empire was thus cleansed of Greek learning. The East, however, would take up the mantle and run with it.

In the seventh century, armies of Arab tribes united and, driven by a new religion, emerged from the Arabian Peninsula and fanned out across Asia, Europe, and Africa. When they conquered Persia, they discovered the surviving remnants of Greek science. The writings intrigued them. Khemeia became al-kheemia, the Arabic prefix al meaning “the.” Fate had entrusted Greco-Egyptian alchemy to Arab scientists. It would remain in their care for the next five hundred years.

And they would serve it well, embracing the knowledge handed down to them and greatly advancing it.

That golden age would wither away under the invasions of the barbaric Mongols and Turks. Eventually, the Crusaders would bring the remnants of Arabic scientific knowledge back to Europe. The Christians of the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, would spearhead the return of the lost Greek knowledge back to its European home as they reclaimed the lands of Spain and Portugal from the Moors. Through the efforts of translators working in Toledo and in other centers of learning there, the scientific advances of the East would find a new life in the West.

Al-kheemia would become alchemy, and centuries later, it would take on the more respectable name of chemistry.

“These philosopher-scientists achieved great things in the field we now call chemistry,” Boustany informed her. “They created acids, mixed metals, and synthesized new substances. But one substance, in particular, was the most sought after for centuries.”

“Gold,” Mia said flatly.

“Of course. The tantalizing possibility of manufacturing gold never failed to seduce even the most levelheaded of these scientists. At some point in their careers, every one of them became obsessed with the one thing that their patrons, the caliphs and the imams, were most interested in: turning base metals into gold.”

Mia mulled his words. She’d skimmed a brief bio of Jabir ibn Hayyan — whom the Europeans would later refer to as Geber—at Corben’s apartment. His writings, cloaked in an unreadable code, were thought to be at the root of the term gibberish. He had been able to prepare strong acids, but he’d also worked extensively, and with success, on the transmutation of metals. Mia hadn’t given it much attention since, even if it were remotely possible, not that she thought it was, she didn’t think that it was, to use Corben’s pet adjective, relevant, given the discoveries in the hakeem’s lab.

“I don’t think that’s what this is about,” she said.

“Why not?”

“There’s something I haven’t mentioned,” she added somewhat hesitantly. “There’s a guy out there who we think may be behind all this. He…he was running some weird medical experiments.”

Boustany’s voice disappeared for a beat. “On humans?”

“Yep.”

Boustany went quiet, weighing her response. “So maybe this guy really is after the ikseer.”

“Again with the ikseer. What the hell are you talking about?”

“An obsession as old as time itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the oldest written stories in recorded history, is about this.” In the brief time she’d known him, the historian had developed this habit of teasing her. It was often endearing. Right now, she needed to know.

Boustany explained how for Avicenna and the other philosopher-scientists, the missing piece of the puzzle was the trigger, the catalyst that would stimulate the right mix of the base metals. Ancient tradition led them to believe the catalyst was a dry powder. The Greeks had called it xerion, which meant dry. The word became al-ikseer in Arabic. Hundreds of years later, the Europeans would refer to the undiscovered al-ikseer as the elixir. And, since scientists of the era were referred to as philosophers, and because it was believed to come from the earth, it also became known as the philosopher’s stone.

“This mythical substance was believed to be so wondrous that these alchemists soon assigned other powers to it as well,” Boustany added. “Aside from being the catalyst that would help create untold wealth, they also attributed to it the power to heal all illnesses. Eventually, conferring immortality was also believed to be within its powers. And so the notion of a potential al-ikseer of life—an elixir of life — took hold, and al-kheemia became a double-pronged quest for two intimately related goals: gold and eternal life.”

The two became intimately linked in the alchemists’ minds. Gold itself was incorruptible: It didn’t age. Some scientists even found ways to ingest it as an elixir itself — usually in powdered form — and gold became more sought after for its perceived antiaging powers than for its timeless beauty or for its monetary value.

The notion of an elixir of life, Boustany went on, embraced the archetypal theory of aging, blaming it on the loss of some kind of vital substance. That was why our bodies effectively shriveled up and shrank before ceasing to function altogether. The Taoists called this substance the ching and described it as the vital breath of life. Aristotle, Avicenna, and countless others since also thought the body, in aging, lost its “innate moisture.” The Viennese physician Eugen Steinach preached coitus reservatus to rejuvenate his patients — a method of preserving the vital fluid that we now call a vasectomy. Another surgeon, Serge Voronoff, believed that since reproductive cells didn’t age as badly as the other cells in the body, they had to contain some kind of antiaging hormone. In a misguided attempt to transfer more of that magical elixir back into the body, he grafted monkey testicles into his patients’ own testes with predictably dire results. Even the fervent belief in a rosy afterlife didn’t seem to deter the desperate pursuit of longevity: In the 1950s, the aging Pope Pius XII kept six personal physicians on hand at all times. A Swiss surgeon by the name of Paul Niehans injected him with the glands of lamb fetuses. Niehans’s impressive roster of clients at his clinic in Montreux, Switzerland, included kings and Hollywood stars.

“And so,” Boustany concluded, “over the ages, alchemists and quacks concocted all kinds of potions and elixirs, fountains of youth “that could replenish or replace this lost ‘essence’ of life. The hucksters’ wagons have since been replaced by the supplements aisles in supermarkets and by the Internet, the snake-oil salesmen by pseudoscientists touting hormones, minerals, and other miracle cures and promising to restore our bodies to their youthful vigor with little or no hard, scientific evidence — or a highly selective interpretation of scientific data — to back up their claims. But the quest is the same. It’s the final frontier, the only one left for us to conquer.”

Mia sighed glumly. “So I guess what we’re dealing with here is a madman.”

“Sounds like it.”

Mia put the phone down, fighting with the notion that the mad scientist tag that she’d been keeping at bay when thinking of the man who held her mother, probably wasn’t far from the truth.