The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [4]
The volunteer who had just emptied his bucket into the sieve screen that Joel was operating didn’t wait to see the results, he simply returned to his digging. The screen consisted of a four-sided wooden box with a quarter-inch metal mesh ‘floor’ and a pair of handles that could be used to shake it.
Joel shook the screen now to begin the separation process, and as the sand fell away through the mesh, a large number of stone fragments remained. Normally the residue proved to be nothing but desert pebbles, but this time something caught his eye. Mindful of Gabrielle’s instruction to observe the residue before bagging it up, he looked more closely, blinked and then looked again.
It wasn’t that the stones were of any radically different material – quite the contrary: they were typical of the local stone – nor were they any larger than usual. And they certainly didn’t have the glint of noble metals or the crystalline glow of precious stones. No, it was just that these stones, or rather fragments of stone, seemed to have markings on them.
Joel picked one up and held it closer to get a better look. Turning it this way and that, he noticed that on one side it seemed to have some engraved shapes. The shapes were too simple to be hieroglyphics and they looked too unfamiliar to be any alphabet that he knew. But they did look like writing, not merely random markings.
He picked up another and looked at it, then another and then yet another. He noticed some repetition of the symbols, which confirmed his suspicion that there was nothing random about these engravings. They had been made purposively, by a human hand. And that made this a find!
He could just bag it up and mark it, leaving the others to figure out its significance in due course, but something about this discovery appealed to his ego. He wanted some small share of the kudos, even if someone else had dug it up, and someone more knowledgeable than himself would interpret it. And in any case, if it was something important, they would surely want to know about it now.
Joel realized that he had been daydreaming and Jane had noticed that something was up.
‘What?’ she asked, in that ever cheerful way of hers.
He held out one of the stone fragments and let her look at it, making sure that she didn’t actually get her hands on it.
‘Oh… my… God!’ she blurted out.
Fearing that others people would hear and start gathering round before he had had a chance to claim his glory, he threw the fragments into a plastic bag and raced over to Professor Gusack, suppressing the urge to cry out aloud like Archimedes on his homeward sprint from the public bath house.
While Joel was racing off to claim his share of the glory, Jane felt her breath constricting. Unlike Joel, she understood the full significance of what she had just seen. And she had to do something about it.
Mumbling some excuse about a stomach bug, she raced off to the latrines, which were little more than holes in the ground with individual booths around each drop. She closed and bolted the door behind her and whipped out her slender mobile phone from the pocket of her combat trousers. She was supposed to have handed it in to the security people at the entrance to the camp, but she had been forewarned of this in advance, so she had made sure she had two mobiles. The large flashy one she had handed over meekly with a look of disappointment. But this small thin one with its limited features, she had retained. She knew that the male soldiers wouldn’t frisk a woman, and they had no female soldiers at hand to do the job. So her secret was safe.
Safely ensconced in the latrine, she frantically keyed in a message and hit the ‘Send’ button. A minute later her message appeared on another phone six thousand miles away. It said: They found the stones.
Chapter 2
‘I got the message at two in the morning,’ said Arthur