Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [43]
Espy’s mind is traveling the same path. “If people from Egypt arrived here in the first century, what do you think their reaction would have been to this side of the world’s equivalent of the pyramids?”
“They would have recognized the similarities, a kinship.”
“And they might have learned how to build one?”
I don’t answer, but I lift my eyes away from the text and take in the whole of the chamber. Espy’s right; it’s the only thing that makes sense. Egyptians were not just here during the construction of Quetzl-Quezo, they were its builders.
I focus on the writing. The letters are not quite right. In the first part of the text, there are places in which the curves are too wide, where one character or another is not fully formed. It indicates that this is early Coptic, scribed at a time when the language was still absent of defined boundaries. I read it twice to make sure I’ve got it right. What’s strange is that the latter text is obviously from a later time period and not just because of the use of a more advanced alphabet.
“What does it say?” Espy prompts.
“The first part reads, ‘Come from the four winds and breathe into these that they may live.’ ” I look up and meet Esperanza’s hopeful gaze, and I offer a smile. It’s too close to be chance, yet it’s not spot-on. “It’s from Ezekiel: the Valley of the Dry Bones. Metaphorically speaking, it’s a related text, but it’s far removed from anything to do with Elisha.”
Espy’s not buying it. She knows the odds. There is a look on her face that I’ve shared on more than one occasion, when the things I’ve read about have taken form. She has a first-timer’s glow and, despite myself, it’s one that I share.
“You said the ‘first part.’ Well, what does the rest of it say?”
“It says I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for having such a difficult time dating this place.”
Actually, the rest of the inscription translates to a single word: Lalibela. And, to me, it’s a much more exciting find than the biblical text it accompanies. Because I can catch a plane in Caracas and be walking the streets of Lalibela by tomorrow. It’s the ancient equivalent of a Post-it Note—an arrow pointing back across the ocean. The thing that makes it especially intriguing is that the city didn’t get its name until the eleventh century. And while I’ve been playing fast and loose with the dating, I would stake my dusty credentials on the fact that these two sections of text were recorded at least a millennium apart.
I sense the substantial weight of a long-lived conspiracy threatening to rest on my shoulders. For the first time since starting this project, I’m approaching the place where I’m willing to believe there’s something here, and that it spans a vast timeline. And the thing that tells me that five years of teaching has changed me is that I’m almost frightened by the prospect.
I resist the urge to allow this foreboding to mar the pleasure I feel at having discovered a Mayan-style temple, built by Egyptians, sporting a road map to Ethiopia, and hidden in a South American jungle. The disparate parts, by themselves, would keep me writing papers for the rest of my life—if I were still doing that sort of thing.
I’m about to tell Espy what the last part says when something wraps its burly arms around my mental faculties. All of a sudden, what we’ve found—the Egyptian connection, the Ethiopian city name, something—is coaxing a related item up through the clutter of other things begging for my attention. When it finally surfaces, I react with a start—one violent enough to send the rest of my team jumping back. It’s the knowledge that there now exists a connection between this project and KV65, and a dramatic improvement in the odds that the man at the bar was in fact the vanishing Australian. Unbidden, the glimpse of text I saw scrawled on the inner coffin in 65 comes to me: bones of the holy man. It hits me like a medicine