The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [122]
‘Yes. But I wasn’t going to make an ass of myself by publishing a paper saying we’ve found Moses.’
Daniel decided to back off slightly. He was in a foreign country, sitting in the office of a leading professor of medical pathology who had been kind enough to give him time at very short notice. It was not Daniel’s place to question the probity or veracity of his host, but he hadn’t come all this way just to draw a blank. Over the last few weeks, he had been locked in a cave, shot at, threatened by an oversized lunatic and now he was on the verge of making a major discovery. He had to find out the rest – especially considering how high the stakes were.
‘Could I ask you about the cause of death?’
‘As I said, we conducted various tests, but there are no guarantees that one can find the cause of death in three-thousand-year-old bones.’
Daniel’s alertness was highly tuned by now and he picked up on a curious omission in Fikri’s statement: he hadn’t actually said that he had failed to establish the cause of death. He had merely alluded to the difficulty of the task.
But Daniel also remembered something he had read from the clay tablets …we were afflicted with boils on our skin that looked like fiery snakes.
He decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘We believe that he may have died of some disease… possibly a disease that produced red elongated lesions.’
Fikri froze. ‘How could you possibly know that?’
Daniel knew that he had him. Now he had to press home his advantage. ‘Suffice it to say that we do.’
‘Then you’ll also know that the last thing we need is to encourage tourists to start swarming over the area.’
‘I don’t quite follow your logic, Professor.’
‘We found spores in the linen shroud that the bones were wrapped in. We studied them under the microscope and they were in stasis – but we know that spores can remain in stasis for tens or even hundreds of years.’
Daniel was not a doctor, but as a bit of a renaissance man he had some medical knowledge and he knew that stasis was a kind of state of suspended animation that spores and certain other biological matter could stay in for a long time.
‘We’d already carbon dated the bones and we’ve never seen cases of spores remaining in stasis for three thousand years. But we couldn’t rule out the possibility. So we tested them in controlled conditions and discovered that there were two factors that kept them in stasis: heat and dryness. The hot, dry conditions of Petra made it ideal for keeping the spores in stasis. But if their temperature was lowered and they were exposed to water – fresh water, that is, or even just humidity – they could be reactivated and turned into the pathogenic bacilli.’
‘The disease-causing bacteria,’ Daniel said to Gabrielle, much to her annoyance. He had to know more. ‘How virulent was it?’
‘Well, we could hardly test it on people. But we did some toxicity tests on rhesus monkeys and it was fatal in the cases of the old, the young and the frail.’
‘So it wasn’t fatal in healthy adults,’ said Gabrielle.
‘In some cases them too.’
‘And how contagious was it?’
‘We didn’t do any epidemiology trials. But any disease spread by spores is going to be highly contagious. We knew enough and so we froze a few samples and then destroyed the shroud.’
‘And the bones?’
‘What about them?’
‘Did you destroy them?’
‘We considered them important enough to preserve… so we irradiated them.’
‘And where are they now?’
‘I’ve said all I can say.’
He got up from his desk and made it clear that he meant not only with regard to that last question but with regard to this entire conversation. Daniel sensed that Gabrielle wanted to press on further, but he also sensed that this was not a good idea. They had gone as far as they could and would not get any more useful information from this man. If they pushed their luck, there was a danger of them outstaying their welcome and possibly getting themselves into trouble.
‘Well, thank you, Professor Fikri,’ said Daniel, standing up and seizing the initiative back from Gabrielle. ‘You’ve been most helpful.