The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [114]
‘I think I might just do that.’
An hour and a quarter later, the helicopter landed in Eilat at the north end of the airport. Dov saw Sarit into a waiting taxi which would take her to the hotels that were all grouped around the lagoon and the beach. Then he had the helicopter refuelled and took off for Herzliya.
From inside the taxi, Sarit watched the helicopter vanish into the distance before jumping out, apologizing to the taxi driver and dashing to the main building to hire a car with four-wheel drive.
Then she drove to the Yitzhak Rabin terminal on the Israeli side of the border, presented her Irish passport and passed through the Wadi Araba, crossing into Jordan as Siobhan Stewart.
From there, she proceeded north to Petra.
Chapter 91
‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ said Daniel, still in a daze from what had happened as he sat in the driver’s seat of the car outside the visitor centre.
‘Doing what?’
‘Running away. If they find Sheikh Ibrahim’s body back in that cave—’
‘They won’t find it. At least not for a long time.’
‘We can’t just leave him there. His family has a right to know… to give him a decent burial—’
‘Okay, but we need to buy some time.’
‘For what? At the moment we’re just wasting time.’
His heart was still pounding, after both the events at the cave and the long trek back.
‘Well, I for one would like to know what’s in The Book of the Wars of the Lord.’
And with that she took the tablets out of the carrier bag and put them on the space between the seats.
‘We can hardly go through it here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, how long is it?’
‘There are five tablets.’
She picked up the first of them.
‘What’s the hurry?’ he asked irritably. ‘Why don’t we just take it back to Israel?’
‘And what if we’re searched and they catch us trying to smuggle historical artefacts out of Jordan? I don’t know how this is going to pan out, but if we’re arrested now, there’s a chance that we may never see these tablets again. Now I don’t know about you, but if these tablets were written by the hand of the biblical Moses, then I want to see them translated.’
‘Then maybe we should just turn it in to the authorities here.’
‘And never see it again? Remember what Ibrahim said about those bones. They took them to the university and wouldn’t talk about them after that.’
Daniel realized she was right. This was a piece of ancient history they held in their hands. And there was no guarantee that they would get another chance like this.
‘Okay.’
Gabrielle breathed a sigh of relief as Daniel put a large, illustrated guidebook on his lap and then placed the first of the tablets on it. He raised one knee to tilt the tablet slightly to catch the light better and then studied the script.
‘Can you read it?’ she asked.
‘Barely.’
I was fed milk from the breast of an Israeli woman and her son was like a brother to me, more than my brother Sethi, the son of Mernepteh, my King, my Lord whom I served with loyalty despite his wickedness to Israel.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said, breaking off. ‘Can you work out from that who the author might have been?’
Gabrielle gave this a few moments’ thought.
‘Let’s see. He refers to Sethi as his brother. Now there were a number of people called Sethi,’ she said ponderously. ‘But he also calls him the son of Mernepteh! That’s the one who wrote the famous Mernepteh stele that we saw at the museum back in Cairo. So that would make his son Sethi the Second. And that means that this was written by someone called Amenmesse who may or may not have been Sethi the Second’s brother but who was certainly involved in a power struggle with Sethi the Second.’
‘Is there any evidence that this Amenmesse had a Jewish wet nurse?’
‘There’s no record of it. But then again, not much is known about him at all. It certainly wouldn’t have been impossible by any means.’
‘I was just thinking about the story of Moses,’ said Daniel. ‘After his mother hid him in the bulrushes and he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter, his real mother came forward and offered to be his wet nurse.’
‘Then this reference to her other son