The Messiah Secret - James Becker [56]
‘The second point is that the name of the artist was Edward Montgomery. I think the reason Bartholomew had those two portraits painted was so he could conceal the text of the ancient Persian script within them. That’s what he meant by “the Montgomerys hold the key”. I think he leased them to al-Sahid as a kind of insurance policy, so that there’d always be another copy of the parchment text in existence, just in case Bartholomew lost his version.’
‘Or in case something else happened to him,’ Bronson said thoughtfully.
‘Yes, and Hassan al-Sahid had special significance. His home was in Cairo, and he was Bartholomew’s gang master on all his explorations in Egypt, and probably the one man Bartholomew trusted implicitly – his best friend, in fact. His expedition notes make that very clear. The text of that piece of Persian script has to be hidden in one of those two paintings, and that’s what we’re going to Cairo to track down.’
‘What about that roaring-Amun stuff?’
‘Amun-Great-of-Roarings,’ Angela said patiently. ‘Everything I’ve discovered up to now suggests that the “treasure of the world” is actually the Ark of the Covenant, and one of the likeliest contenders for seizing the relic is the Pharaoh Shishaq.’
‘OK,’ Bronson said, determined to be practical. He also knew that these discussions were what made them such a good partnership. ‘Let’s accept that the relic that’s referred to in the grimoire and the other places really is the Ark of the Covenant. What do we know about it? What does the Ark look like, for instance? And what’s supposed to have happened to it?’
‘According to the Bible, it was a wooden box made of acacia wood. The acacia was known to the Israelites as the shittah-tree, and it was an important botanical with several uses in traditional medicine. The Ark was built in accordance with the so-called golden ratio – that’s the relationship between the dimensions of an object – and it was two and a half cubits long and one and a half cubits high and wide. If we assume they were using the Egyptian royal cubit, that would make it about four feet long and two feet six inches wide and high.
‘The box was then covered with pure gold, and the lid, which was known as the kaporet in Hebrew, was possibly solid gold, or at least it had a gold rim. The lid was decorated with two sculpted cherubim, facing each other with their wings spread out over the top of the Ark. On each of the long sides of the box were two gold rings, so that gold-covered poles could be inserted to lift the object, because it wasn’t ever supposed to touch the ground.’
Bronson smiled to himself: Angela was getting into her stride.
‘We touched on this before, when we were in Israel. According to the Bible, the Pharaoh Shishaq sacked Jerusalem in about nine hundred and twenty BC and took away the treasures of the Temple, which might have included the Ark. According to legend, he hid the Ark in Tanis, his capital city, which is about fifteen miles from Cairo.
‘Where the Ark is now is unknown, obviously. Perhaps the most widely accepted possible location is the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum in Ethiopia. But there’s the problem of proof – nobody’s allowed inside the building to see or photograph the object, and it’s never taken out, so they might just as well claim to have aliens and spaceships and Elvis in there as well.’ Angela frowned, obviously frustrated.
‘So what do you think happened to it?’
‘Well, the Ark was almost certainly in the Second Temple in Jerusalem in nine hundred and twenty BC, and it seems to me that there are only two possible things that could then have happened to it. Either