The Exodus Quest Read online

  ‘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 Lévi,’ 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 Lévi 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.’

  III

  Khaled climbed back up the rope ladder, then contemplated a final visit to the burial chamber. Crossing the sump wasn’t a comfortable experience. The only access was on a makeshift bridge of two planks, each just a few centimetres longer than the shaft was wide, and which bowed uncomfortably when you stepped upon them.

  It hadn’t mattered when they’d first brought them in, for the sump had still been nearly full of rubble, so the fall would only have been a couple of metres. But now, even with a torch, you could scarcely see the foot. Sometimes he had nightmares about tumbling into that great hungry darkness. Yet he hadn’t wanted to be the first to suggest they get longer planks. And none of his men had either.

  He negotiated the crossing safely, however, entered the burial chamber, high heaps of rubble obscuring much of the walls, completed and plastered but not yet decorated, presumably because the tomb hadn’t been—

  He froze suddenly. A voice. A man’s voice. Coming from above. He listened intently. But now there was only silence. He relaxed, smiling at his foolishness, his heart slowing back down. These ancient tombs! They’d play tricks on your imagination. They’d make you feel—

  The voice again. No question this time. He recognized it too. That damned TV man. He must have come back! He looked in horror up at the ceiling, unnerved by how close he sounded. Maybe he was close. There was a cleft in the hilltop above them. And the first time he’d come here, it had been ankle-deep in storm water. So there had to be a fault in the rock. He hurried back across the planks, up the passage to the entrance. Faisal and Nasser had heard the voices too; they’d turned off their lamps, were squatting there by the mouth, sackcloth curtain glowing russet against the setting sun.

  ‘The TV people,’ whispered Faisal.

  Khaled nodded. ‘They’ll film and then they’ll go.’

  ‘What if they see our truck?’

  The other side of the sackcloth, a shoe slithered on shale. Khaled went cold. Faisal sniggered with nerves, clenched his jaw in both hands to stop himself, his eyes blinking maniacally. Khaled quietly unbuttoned his holster and drew his Walther. He aimed at the mouth of the tomb. A sudden sharp vision of home, childhood, the way his mother had boasted of him, all those photographs of him in uniform on her walls. Another scuff on the ledge. A mutter of surprise and then the sackcloth drawing back and the woman Gaille standing there, silhouetted against the sunset.

  How quickly a life can turn, thought Khaled bleakly, as they stared at one another. How suddenly catastrophe can strike. He felt strangely calm, like the one time he’d seen anything approaching action as a soldier, on checkpoint duty in Sinai, waving down a truck laden with timbers and other carpentry supplies, ready to haggle out a small gift of baksheesh, glimpsing a gun barrel beneath the tarpaulin. He’d been aware of his bodily reaction then too, the fizz of adrenaline, yet in a bizarrely detached way, watching the scene unfold on TV as much as living it. He’d relished the way his senses had sharpened, data flooding his mind, sharper than it had ever been; hearing breath catch in a throat, seeing the driver glance in his rear-view; feeling the truck lurch slightly as someone reached for their weapon, having all the time in the world to take command, as though they were moving in honey while he alone was free.

  But this time it was Gaille who reacted first. She span on her heel, shouting warnings as she fled.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I

  Knox took the tray back through to the library, set it down on the low coffee table. He wasn’t exactly in the mood for a tea party, but Kostas evidently was, so he tried to master his aches and jitters. He was at least safe here, after all. He poured them each a cup of aromatic pale tea from the silver pot, cut two thin slices of moist chocolate cake. ‘You were telling me about Harpocrates and the Gnostics,’ he prompted, passing Kostas his plate.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Kostas. He nibbled the end of his cake, washed it down with a decorous sip of tea. ‘You see, there was a group of Gnostics actually called the Harpocratians. At least, they may have been called that, though it’s hard to be categorical. They’re only referred to once or twice in the sources, you see. And there was another, much better-known group of Gnostics called the Carpocratians, founded by an Alexandrian by the name of Carpocrates. So it seems feasible, perhaps even probable, that these two were one and the same.’

  ‘A spelling mistake?’

  ‘It’s possible, of course. But our sources were the kind of people to know the difference. So my suspicion has always been that these Carpocratians might have been reputed to worship Harpocrates as well as Christ. That the names were therefore interchangeable, if you like.’

  ‘Is that plausible?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ nodded Kostas vigorously. ‘You have to realize that Gnostics weren’t Christian in the modern sense. In fact, even grouping them together as Gnostics is really to miss the point, because it implies they had a single way of thinking, whereas in fact each of the sects had its own distinct views, drawn eclectically from Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and other traditions. But the great pioneers of Gnosticism, people like Valentinus, Basilides and Carpocrates, did have certain things in common. For example, they didn�
�t believe Jesus to be the Son of God. Come to that, they didn’t believe that the Jewish God was actually the Supreme Being at all, but merely a demiurge, a vicious second-tier creation who mistook himself for the real thing. How else, after all, could one explain all the horrors of this world?’

  ‘So who was the Supreme Being?’

  ‘Ah! Now there’s a question!’ His eyes were watering freely, his skin flushing. Like many solitary people, Kostas tended to become over-stimulated in company. ‘The Gnostics held that it was incapable of description, incapable of even being contemplated, except perhaps in mathematical terms, and only then by the exceptionally enlightened. A very Einsteinian God, if you like. And that’s where Christ came in, because Gnostics saw him, along with Plato and Aristotle and others, as gifted but essentially ordinary men who’d nursed their divine sparks sufficiently to have glimpsed this truth. But I’m getting away from the point, which is the similarities between Harpocrates and Christ.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh my dear Daniel! Where to start? Luxor Temple, perhaps. The nativity reliefs. A newborn pharaoh depicted as Harpocrates. Nothing surprising about that, of course. Pharaohs were the physical incarnations of Horus, so infant pharaohs were by definition Horus-the-child or Harpocrates. But the details of this particular tableau are curious. A mortal woman impregnated by a holy spirit while still a virgin. An annunciation by Thoth, the Egyptian equivalent of the archangel Gabriel. A star leading three wise men from the east, bearing gifts.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I thought you’d enjoy that,’ smiled Kostas. ‘In fact, the wise men crop up all the time in divine nativity stories, especially among sun-worshippers. An astronomical allegory, of course, like so many religious conceits. The three stars of Orion’s belt point towards Sirius, the key to the ancient Egyptian solar calendar and for predicting the annual inundation. Gold, frankincense and myrrh often crop up too. Man’s very first possessions, you know, given by God to console Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden. Seventy rods of gold, if my memory serves.’

  ‘Rods?’ frowned Knox. A rod was a unit of distance, not of weight.

  ‘According to The Book of Adam and Eve,’ nodded Kostas. ‘Or was it The Book of the Cave of Treasures?’ He sighed wistfully. ‘My memory, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think it was The Cave of Treasures,’ said Knox, who’d wasted countless glorious summer afternoons in a forlorn effort to master Syriac by studying that particular text, about a cave in which Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses and most of the other leading Jewish patriarchs had supposedly been buried. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There are some startling parallels between Horus’s mother Isis and Mary the mother of Christ, of course. You must be aware of those. And Harpocrates was believed to have been born on a mountain, the hieroglyph for which was the same as that for a manger. Ancient Egyptians used to celebrate his birth by parading a manger through their streets. Easier than carrying a mountain.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Kostas nodded. ‘The Gospel of Matthew claims that the Holy Family fled to Egypt when Jesus was a child to avoid the Massacre of the Innocents. According to Saint Edward the Martyr, they got as far south as Hermopolis, city of Thoth. Which brings us neatly full circle, for Hermopolis was directly across the Nile from the city founded by this pharaoh I mentioned, the one in those Luxor reliefs.’

  ‘You mean Amarna?’ asked Knox. ‘The pharaoh was Akhenaten?’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Kostas, allowing himself a little chuckle. ‘Just think of it! The New Testament accounts of Christ’s Nativity borrowed from the birth of a heretic Egyptian pharaoh. Not something the Church has sought to publicize, for some reason or other.’ He held out his cup. ‘You couldn’t pour me some more tea, could you?’

  II

  ‘Come back!’ yelled Khaled, hurrying after Gaille, almost losing his footing in his haste. ‘Come back!’ he shouted again. But Gaille did nothing of the sort. A flash of movement and colour above, a cascade of grit and pebbles. Khaled glanced up to see Lily bringing her camera to bear. Khaled felt sick. He had to stop them getting away, contacting the outside world. He scrambled recklessly along the path, feet slipping on the limestone, clinging on desperately with one hand, trying to holster his Walther with his other. Faisal came up behind and hauled him back to safety, but valuable seconds had been wasted, allowing Gaille to get further ahead.

  He reached the top to see her fleeing helter-skelter after her companions, Stafford way out in front, Lily flailing inelegantly with the camera on her shoulder. Khaled put in a burst, closing the gap a little, but not enough. They ran down the hillside into the wadi, clambered east over the scree towards the desert. Khaled couldn’t sustain his pace. He slowed, came to a halt. ‘Wait!’ he panted, hands on his knees, his leg muscles fibrillating wildly. They slowed and turned, if only to catch their breath. ‘Let’s talk,’ he shouted, holding up his hands and smiling in an effort to convince them he was no threat. ‘We can sort this out.’ But even he could hear the falseness in his voice.

  They began to hurry again. He scowled, drew his Walther, fired a single shot into the air. It made them run all the faster. Nasser and Faisal came up alongside him, wheezing for air. They set off again, legs heavy with exertion. The Discovery came into view ahead. Lily looked around to check on their pursuit and promptly stumbled on a stone. Her camera went flying and hit the rocks hard, shattering into component pieces. Stafford reached the Discovery. He tried the door but it was locked. ‘The keys,’ he yelled at Gaille, who was hauling Lily back to her feet. ‘Throw me the bloody keys.’

  Khaled heaved for breath. His shirt had tugged free from his belt, he felt obscurely furious at the indignity. He fired another shot but the women didn’t even break their stride. He put in a last burst, giving everything to the chase. Gaille took out her keys, pressed the remote. The corner lights on the Discovery flashed orange. Stafford opened the driver door and climbed in. They were going to get away. Khaled stopped, aimed as best he could, squeezed off three rounds. Metal pinged. The driver-side window disintegrated and fell out. The two women stopped dead, as though they believed Khaled some kind of marksman who could pick them off at will. They raised their arms and turned to face him.

  He walked towards them, his hand against his side, heaving for breath, trying not to let it show, wanting to appear in control. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead and trickled chillily down his flanks. Faisal and Nasser came up behind, but he kept his eyes firmly on the foreigners, the sag of their shoulders, their shiny faces and bedraggled hair, their dread-filled eyes, that poignant dash of hope. He scowled, hardening his heart towards them. These weren’t people. They were problems. Problems to be solved. Problems to be eliminated. He drew to within a few paces, wondering which one to take out first.

  The one with the car keys. Gaille.

  He was raising his gun to kill her when a mobile phone began to ring.

  III

  Knox poured more tea for Kostas and himself, watched his sugar dissolve in the whirlpool of his stirring. ‘What about the Therapeutae?’ he asked. ‘Did they have any links to these Carpocratians?’

  Kostas pulled a face. ‘I’ve heard it claimed that Carpocrates was a devotee of the teachings of a Talmudic figure called Jehoshua Ben Panther. A fascinating character. You may have heard of him, because he’s been conflated with Christ by some, but he was most probably an Essene leader.’

  ‘Linking him to the Therapeutae.’

  ‘Quite,’ nodded Kostas. ‘And their doctrines mesh too, though admittedly with one major discrepancy. The Therapeutae were famously chaste, you see, whereas the Carpocratians were notorious for licentiousness and orgies. But almost everything we know about the Carpocratians was written by their enemies, so it’s quite possible that that was nothing but malicious propaganda. And if you discount it, the two groups prove a remarkable fit.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In every way. Long initiations. Water baptisms.
The rejection of materialism. Carpocrates is credited with the phrase “Property is Theft”, you know. Both abhorred slavery. Both believed in some kind of afterlife or reincarnation. Both accorded unusual respect and power to women. One of Carpocrates’ most celebrated followers, Marcellina, even became quite a figure in Rome. They both had very Hellenic elements, and shared a great deal with Pytha-goreanism. Both included traces of sun-worship. Both studied angels and demons. Both believed in and practised magic. Both prized numbers and symbols. And both were hideously persecuted too. Maybe that’s why they both lived outside Alexandria. And, now that I think about it, the Carpocratians appeared around AD one hundred and twenty, around the same time we lose track of the Therapeutae.’

  ‘You’re suggesting the Therapeutae became the Carpocratians?’

  ‘It’s not inconceivable, I suppose. But all I’m really saying is that it’s quite possible they overlapped in some way. Bear in mind that this whole region was fervid with philosophical and religious energy back then – everyone borrowing, sharing, arguing. Religions hadn’t yet set in the way they have today. Places that were sacred to one were holy to others too. Many early churches were built on old pagan temples, you know. Even the Vatican. So perhaps they lived together for a while, or perhaps the Carpocratians took over this antiquity of yours after the Therapeutae moved on.’

  Knox nodded. It seemed plausible enough, though plausibility was a very different beast from truth. ‘What else do we know about the Carpocratians?’

  ‘Founded in Alexandria, like I say, but they flourished elsewhere too. In Rome, as I mentioned. And I believe they also had a temple in …’ He pushed himself to his feet, went over to his shelves, plucked down a volume, leafed through it, then put it back, shaking his head.