The Messiah Secret - James Becker [49]
Chris was coming to her apartment that evening and they were going out for a meal together. She wanted to make sure she looked her best.
25
‘OK,’ Chris Bronson said, leaning back in his chair. They were sitting over an after-dinner pot of coffee in a small Italian restaurant a few streets away from Angela’s apartment in Ealing. ‘Let’s look at it like a police investigation. What’s your evidence?’
Angela leaned towards him, her brown eyes shining in the candlelight. ‘We know about Bartholomew’s Folly – at least, we know what’s printed in the Carfax Hall guidebook and what Jonathan Carfax told us. I also told you I recognized the reference to the “treasure of the world” on the parchment that old Bartholomew found, and I was right – the same expression was used on the Hillel fragment. In fact, both appeared to be copies of the same source document. The only difference was that the parchment Bartholomew found is written in Persian, and the Hillel piece is in Hebrew, but the text is virtually identical on both.’
Bronson nodded, happy to see Angela so excited. ‘What else did you find?’
‘I looked at a thirteenth-century grimoire – that’s a kind of ancient magician’s sourcebook of spells and incantations – and I found the same expression there. It even suggested the treasure was hidden in the “gorge of the blooms”, which is close enough to the “valley of the flowers” to suggest it’s referring to the same treasure, hidden in the same place.’
‘But you still don’t know which country?’
Angela put her hand on his. ‘No. That’s the downside. But I plugged away, going back through all the ancient texts I could find, because I thought there might be some really old source document that other authors had copied from over the centuries, and if I could find that, I hoped it might tell us where we should start looking.’ She paused, and Chris raised his eyebrows, so she continued.
‘I started with De Administrando Imperio. That’s a really long letter written in Greek by the tenth-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII to his son, the future Emperor Romanus II, telling him how to run an empire. As far as we know, it was never intended to be published – it was just a private letter. I found a single reference in that text to an important treasure that was supposed to be “hidden in the valley”, which I agree isn’t an exact correlation with the other references. I also checked the translation of a tenth-century geography book written in Persian and called Hudūd al-Ālam, which translates as “The Limits of The World”.’ She looked at Bronson. ‘Following me so far?’
‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘Just don’t question me too closely afterwards. And I hope you aren’t expecting me to remember any of this,’ he muttered.
Angela laughed. ‘Point taken. The Hudūd al-Ālam described what was then known about the entire world, and its author divided the world into three areas – Asia, Europe and Libya, by which he almost certainly meant the whole of Africa – and described the geography, the people, the languages, the food, and so on. In the section dealing with Asia, I found a phrase very similar to those I’d looked at before. One section referred to “the treasure of the world” and described it as being hidden in a place of stone located in a high valley.’
‘But still no mention of where the hell the place is?’ Bronson said, sounding frustrated.
‘No, and that’s probably because the author didn’t know either. It’s generally accepted that he was just regurgitating chunks of information he’d gleaned from earlier works. And I found similar references in other books that dated from the tenth century. I then went back about half a millennium to the sixth century and a man named Procopius of Caesarea. He left a manuscript known as the Anecdota, which means “unpublished things” and which is today normally referred to as the “Secret History”, and there’s a mention in that of a treasure hidden in the valley