The Templar Heresy

31

The biggest problem Khaled had encountered in his search for a possible location was the sheer number of places that could be described in a way that matched the crucial words in the deciphered inscription, that could be below a ‘lost temple’. There were far more destroyed temples, buildings lost to the world through neglect, natural catastrophe and, inevitably, war, than there were places of worship still standing.

There were obvious filters that he could apply — it had to have been in existence at least as early as the thirteenth century, for example — but that still left dozens of possibilities. The other problem he faced was that although he knew that many Christian churches — and in his opinion these could be generically described as ‘temples’ — had crypts lying underneath the building, this fact was rarely a matter of public record. The number of places he found that were described as having such a structure was vanishingly small, and he was quite certain that subterranean chambers existed below many buildings that he had initially dismissed.

Khaled pushed back his chair, stood up and paced back and forth across the carpet in front of his desk. It was a habit he had acquired years earlier, as the worn track in the carpet mutely testified, but it did seem to help him think more clearly. And after only a couple of minutes, a thought popped into his mind, an idea that might focus his search significantly. But first, he needed to check his translation of the inscription again.

He sat down in front of the computer and pulled up the transcription he had prepared. He scanned down to the appropriate section, and then nodded. It was something of a jump, but it seemed to him to make sense. It all hinged on the interpretation of a single word, a word chosen by a man over five hundred years earlier.

He looked again at the decrypted Latin, and then navigated to an online Latin dictionary and entered the word hypogeum into the search field. He’d done it before, and the result was exactly what he had expected. It wasn’t even an unusual word, and had been in use during the entire period when Latin had been the predominant European language — but just to make absolutely certain he brought up three other different Latin dictionaries, one after the other, and checked the results in those as well.

They all agreed. The translation was simple: the word meant a crypt or a vault, or some other kind of underground chamber, and that was what had prompted his re-examination of the text. The question really was whether or not the mediaeval author of the inscription had thought the same way that he was now doing.

Because there was another word, a word much more commonly used than hypogeum, and which indicated almost exactly the same kind of thing, but with one subtle difference. In Latin, the word crupta — the root of the English word ‘crypt’ — also meant an underground chamber, but one that was additionally used for rites, for religious services of one sort or another. If Khaled was right in his interpretation, the mediaeval author was specifically stating that the ‘hall’ was not used by the temple above it for any kind of religious function, and — making another leap of deduction that might well not be justified by the evidence — might not even be in any way a part of that temple. The writer could simply have been referring to two entirely separate buildings: a temple, or to be exact a place where a temple had once stood, and some kind of hall cut into the ground some distance underneath it.

And if that were the case, then there was one very obvious location that sprang into his mind.

There was also, he supposed, trying to rationalize and justify his deduction, a piece of what might be described as negative evidence as well. By simply using the word templum, meaning the temple, rather than one of the other fifty or so words in Latin that could be employed to refer to a place of worship, and by not specifying where that temple might be located, the author could have been alluding to the best-known such structure of his time. Khaled had spent some years in Britain and, to take a modern example, if most citizens there heard a reference to ‘the abbey’, he guessed that most of them would immediately assume that the speaker was referring to Westminster Abbey because that was the most famous such structure in the United Kingdom.

And although the mediaeval world was geographically diverse and well separated, culturally and religiously it was a very small place and he was reasonably confident that most people in Europe and the Middle East in those days would know exactly which temple the author of the inscription would have meant.

Khaled turned back to his browser, thought for a few seconds, then entered an entirely different search string and scanned the list of pages that had been generated. At the top of the third screen was a hit that he thought seemed promising, and this time the page of information that was shown after he’d clicked the link was precisely what he was hoping to see. He now knew — or at least he hoped he knew — what the author of the inscription must have been referring to.

He read it all twice, then picked up his mobile phone and called Farooq.

They needed to move quickly, but the good news was that they didn’t have quite as far to go as he had expected.