Akbar came running at the altar and somersaulted over it, whereupon I made for the cave entrance, only to be confronted by another pair of locals who grabbed hold of one of my arms each and dragged me back into the cave-shrine.
‘Let go of me!’ I protested, and struggled to no avail. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I didn’t even have my stone on me, so I couldn’t call Albray for help. Yet in my mind I screamed for his aid, as he was my only hope of getting out of this, short of a busload of tourists suddenly arriving in the teeth of the gale outside. ‘Surely you can’t expect to get away with killing me?’
‘Have you seen the cliffs on the far side of this mountain? There is no recovering a body that has fallen down there.’ Now that I had no chance of going anywhere, Akbar took his time to stroll over and taunt me with my impending death. ‘You shall not defile this sacred place with your foul presence any longer, American.’
‘I’m an Australian,’ I stressed, hoping the fact might lessen his wrath.
‘Is there a difference?’ he replied, nodding to his associates to force me to my knees so that he might remove my head.
Praise be to Hathor, Albray joined me at that moment. The sweet relief I felt at his presence enfolding me cannot be put into words. It felt like a tremendous gift of love, but whether this sentiment stemmed from myself or my protector, I could not tell.
My feet now firmly planted to the ground, I resisted my captor’s intent by stepping back and swinging the men into each other with such force they staggered backward in a daze.
As Akbar lashed out with his sword, I dived into a tuck roll, and then, turning about on my haunches, I swung a leg wide into the back of Akbar’s legs and he went crashing to the ground. I jumped up, used his face as a football, and stomped on his sword arm to retrieve his razor-sharp weapon. I held it beneath his chin. ‘I’ll cut his throat as quickly as he would have cut mine,’ I threatened, and his accomplices backed up. I turned my attention back to Akbar, as he was obviously the man in charge. ‘What if I can prove to you that I have a perfect right to be here?’ I found myself saying it, yet Albray had control of my body at present and I wondered what he planned.
‘This cannot be settled by a work visa,’ Akbar snarled, humiliated by his defeat at the hands of a foreign woman. ‘It is about—’
‘Being of the blood.’ I finished his sentence, and managed to gain his ear with my words.
I stood and tossed the sword straight up, where it lodged in the roof. Pardon me…I heard Albray’s voice in my mind, as he raised my hands and ripped open my shirt to expose the mark between my breasts. I was horrified to have done so in front of the local men, until they all got to their knees and bowed down before me in apology. Albray closed my shirt and held it together with one hand.
‘Daughter of Isis, forgive us.’ Akbar did not look up as he spoke. ‘We live only to serve you.’
‘What!’ My voice responded at last to my command, as I felt Albray withdraw. I was left dazed and staggering with the impact that the extreme effort had had on my body.
‘I told you that men worship you, Mia.’ Andre happened upon the scene, and was amused until he noticed I was holding my shirt together. ‘Are you all right, Mia?’ He looked from the cowering men to me. ‘What happened to your shirt?’
‘I, ah…tripped and ripped it.’ It sounded weak but it would do. I looked back to the men paying me homage. ‘Thank you for showing me that prayer ritual, Akbar. It was very informative, but you can get up now.’ I hurried him along with my hand and he obliged me, motioning his men to follow him. ‘I’m done here, for the moment.’ I fetched my notes and left the cave, leaving Andre to bring up the rear.
The storm had worn itself out and blue skies prevailed, along with the searing heat of the sun. There was clear fresh air to breathe and I filled my lungs with it, having felt like I’d not drawn breath during that entire incident.
When Andre joined me at his jeep, he knew something was not quite right. He climbed into the car and started it up, and as he turned to look behind and reverse, he commented, ‘I could have sworn I saw a sword hanging from the roof in the cave just now.’ He looked at me for a comment, after he’d backed up the car.
‘Don’t ask.’ I ended the conversation by pointing him toward camp.
I used work-related research as an excuse to part with Andre and take dinner in my tent. I really was dying to look into Lord Hamilton’s account of opening the mysterious entrance in the mountain that was currently puzzling us.
I entered my tent to find a forlorn Albray. ‘I am so sorry I wasn’t there sooner…are you all right?’
‘Don’t apologise,’ I insisted, suppressing a grin. The thought of him ripping my shirt open infused me with such desire that my cheeks burned—thank god I was not wearing the stone! ‘It felt incredible to be so powerful and able to control the situation.’ I badly mimicked how I rescued myself. ‘You must have been a very great knight, Albray.’ I came to a standstill.
He shied from the suggestion. ‘If I had been a very great knight then Molier would be dead.’
He wasn’t good at taking a compliment; this score Albray had to settle with Molier was undermining his self-esteem badly. ‘I don’t suppose you want to talk about Molier?’
Albray shook his head. ‘I’d really rather that you read the details. The tale is very long and complicated, and Mrs Devere is a much better storyteller than I.’
‘As you wish.’ I let the issue go, as it obviously disturbed him. I didn’t mention that I was going to take a look at Lord Hamilton’s journal first, because Albray was opposed to opening the mysterious entrance. Whether we opened the door or not, I still had to discover the key.
‘I shall leave you to read.’ My knight disappeared through the wall of the tent.
It was only after Albray had gone that I thought to tell him that I suspected I’d had a vision whilst in the Cave of Hathor. I fancied that my psychic ability was kicking in. But why now, when I had never shown any aptitude, or taken any ability-enhancing elixir? I couldn’t help but feel it was due to Albray’s influence: not that he’d developed my talent, but, rather, inspired it. He made me feel, for the first time, that anything was possible. Albray had done the same for Ashlee by granting her physical liberation from the constraints of her era. He had given me spiritual freedom, despite the restraints of my scientific mind. A week ago, I would never have considered psychic ability possible, let alone that I was psychic. Or perhaps it was just wishful thinking, because I wanted to impress Albray the way Ashlee obviously had.
‘Paid work first,’ I resolved.
Armed with tea and chocolate, I found the silver key that opened Lord Hamilton’s big green journal and, placing the book on my desk, I opened it up under the lamplight and sat down to read.
I skipped over Hamilton’s account of his early days in the Middle East and the funding troubles they’d had with the excavation of the mountain. I took up the tale where the discovery of the superstrong doorway had led to the project being served notice to wrap up their dig—their excavation permit had been revoked.
LESSON 11
DARKNESS
FROM THE JOURNAL OF LADY CLARISSA HAMILTON
The night before our departure from Serâbit el-Khâdim, Lord Hamilton was in a highly-strung, depressed mood, and quite the worse for drink. This was understandable when one considered that my husband had devoted twenty years to the excavation of this mountain, only to be locked out when he was on the verge of a major discovery.
In the middle of the small section of the site we’d managed to unearth, my dear Mr Hamilton had taken to the mountain with a shovel. He dug by lantern light, determined to make use of every hour he had left to excavate.
We’d seen all our fellow archaeologists depart in the past few weeks, and all our hired hands had left to find new work. Only a couple of guides and the camels kept us company in the barren wilderness in those last few days.
I stood there and watched m
y husband dig for some time that evening, but he was unaware of my presence before I made it known. I asked him what he hoped to achieve at this late hour of our stay in the Holy Land. He was certainly in no fit state to stumble into a potentially precarious situation. And even if he did manage to find the key to unlock the mysterious door we’d unearthed, we had to leave by noon the next day or we would not have enough water to comfortably sustain us for the journey back to civilisation.
‘If I find something tonight then we will bloody well ration—’
My Lord Hereford was not given the chance to finish his sentence, for as he slammed the tip of his spade into the earth, the soil gave way beneath him and he disappeared from my sight.
Fearful for my husband’s wellbeing, I went forward and dropped on to my stomach to call into the dark abyss. My cries resounded in the space that opened out below the hole that Hamilton had fallen through. I knew he was alive; I could hear him coughing.
Fortunately, the drink had relaxed him and small piles of soft sand on the floor of the chamber had also cushioned his fall. He hadn’t broken any bones, which was a great relief indeed, considering our imminent departure. Hamilton requested that I tie a lantern on a rope and lower it down to him.
He had landed in a room filled with hieroglyphs—the walls and the square central pillar were covered in them. The floor was entirely covered by fine white sand, and both doorways leading out of the chamber were collapsed and blocked. When Hamilton bent down to dig into the floor, he realised the substance that covered it was not sand. It felt like ash to the touch, and yet it was as white as snow. The tiny particles were so fine that they began to rise and dance toward the lantern flame. When he held his hand down close to the powder, it was attracted to his skin. ‘Must be the heat,’ he’d concluded, then was flabbergasted at the sight of his lantern slowly levitating toward the ceiling.
When I heard my husband chuckling, I leant over the hole to see what amused him.
‘Boo!’ Hamilton stuck his head through the ground and startled the life out of me.
I squealed at the unexpected apparition and then laughed with relief as I recognised my husband. ‘How did you get up here?’ I had been wondering if I was going to have to wake our guides to hoist Mr Hamilton out of the hole he’d dug for himself.
‘I’m floating!’ he announced with a chuckle. He hoisted himself out of the hole to sit on the side and dust the mysterious powder off, so that he wouldn’t float away into the stratosphere. ‘I believe I’ve had a revelation regarding the key to our mysterious door.’
‘Evidently,’ I concurred, as his lantern floated into my grasp. I looked at him, confused as to how this could be happening.
‘This powder reacts to heat,’ he said, laughing at the simplicity of the solution. ‘I strongly suspect that the sun will open the door for us.’
The next morning we were up with the sun. We had covered the gaping hole in the mountain with a boulder after withdrawing several buckets of powder from the chamber—the last thing we needed was for the sun to heat, and float away, all the mysterious powder.
Since uncovering the entrance door in the side of the mountain, we had noted how the mysterious substance used in its construction was heated to extreme temperatures during the day. So our plan was this: wait for the door to heat up and then we would cast this powder over the metal—even if it didn’t all instantly stick to it, the door was the hottest thing in the immediate area and the particles would surely be attracted to it. Our theory was that once the sun baked the powder the door would lift right out of its frame.
If we did get the entrance open, there was every reason to believe that it would be dark inside. We had our guides prepare some torches for us. For this they used rags, doused in an absolutely foul-smelling oil, which were then bound tightly to the top of a stake—not only did the oil burn well and slowly, the locals swore that the scent kept the insects at bay too.
And so we waited for the day to heat up and here in the Sinai one did not have to wait very long.
I stood by, shaded under my umbrella, while Mr Hamilton tossed buckets of powder over our mysterious round entrance into the mountain. As anticipated, we lost very little of the powder to the hot breeze. Exposed to the morning’s heat, the tiny granules began to emit light, glistening like snowflakes in the full gaze of the sun. Like nails drawn to a magnet, the light specks settled upon the mysterious metal doorway.
‘So far so good.’ Hamilton came to stand beside me and bear witness to what eventuated.
The metal of the doorway did react with the particles, but not in the way we’d expected. Instead of lifting the door out of its frame the powder began eating into the metal, reducing it to pure light, until nothing was left inside the black circle of hieroglyphs that marked the perimeter of the entrance.
At this point our guides begged us not to enter, and requested that we all leave at once.
Hamilton refused to leave; the guides refused to stay.
‘I know the way to the Suez Canal blindfolded.’ Hamilton insisted that if they wanted to leave they should do so. ‘I release you from your duties…go, with my blessing.’ He looked at me, and I know I did not appear as confident at being left without a guide as he would have liked. ‘You trust me, don’t you, Mrs Hamilton?’
If I had answered in the negative, I would have found myself on one of those camels, accompanying our guides home. ‘I married you, didn’t I?’ was my reply. The way I saw it, I should give my husband confidence in our relationship or I would defeat the point of my staying. If I was going to die out here, at least I would meet my death in the arms of the man I loved. Deep down, I knew Hamilton would get us home as he promised, for it was not in his nature to fail. ‘Besides,’ I pointed out, ‘the inscription around the door did specify that a woman had to enter this shrine first, so for a change, Mr Hamilton, you cannot do without me.’
The love and admiration on his face filled me with such joy of being! ‘I should never be able to do without you, my dear.’ He took my hands in his and kissed them both. ‘You are a once-in-a-lifetime partner. Praise god I didn’t allow you to pass me by.’
My husband was far too charming and handsome for my own good; my family had always said so. He could talk me into anything, and I had followed him to the ends of the earth just for the pleasure of his company.
I had to take a break from reading; I couldn’t see for the tears streaming down my face. ‘This is so romantic.’ I gasped for breath and blew my nose. ‘No wonder Ashlee wanted to marry Lord Hamilton. I want to marry him too.’
But it wasn’t Lord Hamilton who had me in tears—it was Clarissa, loving her husband so much that she would stay in a barren wilderness with him. It can’t have been easy for a woman in her day and age to adjust to life in the Sinai, and then to accompany Hamilton into an unknown ancient shrine showed exceptional courage. The Egyptians went to great lengths not to have their sacred places looted or defiled. Going through that doorway could be fraught with danger and possibly booby traps.
I blew my nose again and attempted to steady my breathing.
It had been very interesting to read that the powder found on-site had opened the entrance without needing to be blended with other ingredients, which seemed to indicate that the substance had already been transmuted into the Bread of Life. And perhaps it had still been glowing and levitating things when Petrie uncovered the site in the early twentieth century, but the information might have been deliberately omitted from the record of Petrie’s excavation.
‘I was right about how the powder affects the door though.’
I was also thankful to discover that the foul-smelling insect repellent I’d found in the back of the red book, along with Albray’s stone, was not meant to be applied to one’s body. Still, I wondered why it was important enough to include in the family inheritance. Surely modern insect repellents would prove more effective than the smoke from a roughly-made torch?
I carried the tissues with me back to the
desk in case I needed them, and having made a fresh cup of tea, I continued reading the Hamiltons’ account of Serâbit el-Khâdim.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF LADY CLARISSA HAMILTON
So, there we were—two little people on a big mountain, in the middle of a huge desert, and we were about to enter a place that had not been open to the world in god knows how long.
Torches lit, we approached the opening, and drew a deep breath.
A steep path of red gold, the like of which we had never seen before—or since—provided a walkway down a tunnel leading into the mountain. We descended slowly, in awe, as it was all perfectly preserved. The entire length of the passageway was lined with gold into which hieroglyphs were inscribed in straight lines that passed overhead from one side of the tunnel path to the other.
The silence inside the tunnel was unnerving, as was the smell of stale air that became increasingly overwhelming the further down we travelled. The entrance into the mountain was still within our sight when the tunnel ended, although the daylight fell well short of being any aid to us. Here, the skeletal remains of a warrior greeted us. The bones sprawled across our path were clad in chain mail and still clutched the weapons that had failed to save his life.
‘Well, it would seem this tunnel has been opened in the last six hundred years at least,’ commented Hamilton, having looked over the body to assess the era to which it belonged. ‘This fellow belonged to a breakaway French faction of the Templar Knights…he bears the emblem of the Order de Sion.’
‘Why did these knights split from the original chapter of the Templars?’ I thought this might have some relevance as to how the knight had come to meet his end in this place.
Hamilton explained to me that the purpose of the Crusades was to seek the sacred relics of the Holy Land on behalf of the church and to protect them from the infidels who were not of the faith. The Templar Knights were a breakaway faction formed from within the upper echelons of the crusading knights; for the discoveries and contacts they made in the Holy Land caused this elite group of knights to think twice about surrendering the relics and secret doctrine they discovered there to the church. The Templars took measures to hide their discoveries, including the formation of an inner order of the Templars, known as the Order of Sion, whose existence was kept a secret. The Templars became the public face of the order, that by all appearances still supported the church’s cause in the Holy Land, whilst the Order of Sion saw to the concealment and protection of ancient relics, places and doctrine. Many of this secret order of knights belonged to the disinherited Judaic line of kings who had settled in the Languedoc area at the time of Jesus Christ. When the church began the Albigensian Crusade and sent crusading knights to wipe out the Cathar heretics who were suspected to be hiding the Templars’ treasures, the Templar Knights’ loyalties were tested, for they could not stop the slaughter for fear of having their loyalty to the church come into question and a charge of heresy brought against their entire order—still, the following century that was exactly what happened. Thus the Sion knights were called in to retrieve the sacred relics and spirit them away to safekeeping. It was speculated that some of the treasures were returned to their shrines in the Holy Land.