The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [32]
‘That’s about a hundred years after Bankes travelled in Egypt and Nubia,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Why the long wait before they started digging?’
The curator scratched his chin. ‘Well, let me just put that into its proper historical context. The site was known about for some considerable time before that. Indeed, a large number of papyri were found there as far back as the 1840s.’
‘Papyri?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were any of them in Proto-Sinaitic script?’
‘Proto-Sinaitic?’ The curator sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Not as far as I know. But not all the papyri are extant. Some of them were stolen.’
‘And never found?’ asked Gabrielle.
‘Well, a few of them ended up in the village well. Actually, that’s from the second excavation. The Schiaparelli excavation turned up loads of pottery and ostraca but no papyri. The Bruyère excavation, on the other hand, turned up many papyri. But unfortunately it wasn’t administered or controlled all that well. Consequently, something like half the papyri were taken without Bruyère’s consent or even his knowledge. Those were the ones that got stolen.’
‘And do we have any way of knowing how much of it ended up in private collections?’ asked Gabrielle.
‘Probably not.’
‘And by the same token,’ she pressed on, ‘we have no way of knowing what language or writing system they were written in?’
‘Not unless the heirs of those private collectors come forward,’ the curator conceded.
Gabrielle’s mind was racing ahead.
Could the papyrus Mansoor showed us be one of the missing Deir el-Medina papyri? If so, it could be part of a huge collection – and what a story THEY could tell!
Chapter 18
Goliath hardly noticed the streets of Cairo sweep by as he drove his rented car to the Theodor Bilharz Research Institute Hospital. In his head he was turning over the mantra about doing God’s work that gave him solace when times were hard. It was the same thought that had kept him going in prison.
After he had gone to work for Senator Morris, he had been given a difficult assignment. It involved killing a rabbi whom the senator said was part of the Jewish conspiracy to create a New World Order. Goliath had felt uncomfortable about killing. But, as Arthur Morris had told him, it was the will of God.
Only it had gone wrong – horribly wrong. He accomplished the killing all right, but he had got caught. However, Arthur Morris had not abandoned him. He had got him a lawyer who managed to get him off with manslaughter. He learnt an important lesson at the trial, namely that securing the right verdict had less to do with the law or the facts than with getting a sympathetic jury. The lawyer had managed to get the trial relocated to a different venue and had used a lot of so-called ‘peremptory challenges’ to get undesirables off the jury.
However, the judge was angered by the verdict and sentenced him to seven years in prison, of which he had served three and a half. It was a strange experience. He had always heard that prison was a tough place. But most prisoners stayed away from him, especially after he had killed one who tried to steal money off him. Amazingly, although there were several witnesses, they all told the prison guards that they had seen nothing. He was told by one old prisoner that he should do the same if ever he were asked if he had seen anything.
When he arrived at the hospital, he set about finding the patient, Joel Hirsch. Morris had told him not to draw attention to himself so he couldn’t ask at the main desk. Instead, he started walking down the corridor towards the intensive care unit, where Morris had told him Joel would be. He found it by following the path marked on the map at the entrance. When he walked in there was only one nurse on duty. That was good.
‘Excuse me,’ he said in slow English, to make sure that he was understood. ‘I’m looking for a patient called Joel Hirsch.’
The nurse appeared to respond to the name and pointed to a glass-encased unit. Goliath started to walk towards it, but the nurse