Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Interesting, the hakeem mused. The Iraqi dealer’s hardly in town for a few hours and the first thing he does is head straight out to see a woman who happens to be an archaeologist? He archived the information for further consideration. “And…?”

Another hesitant pause, then Omar’s tone dropped lower. “We lost him. He spotted us and ran. We looked for him all over the town, but he disappeared. But we’re watching the woman. I’m outside her apartment right now. They were interrupted, there’s unfinished business between them.”

“Which means she’ll lead you to him.” The hakeem nodded quietly to himself. He raised his hand and rubbed his face with it, massaging his furrowed brow and his dry mouth. Failure would certainly not be tolerated here. He’d waited too long for this. “Stay on her,” he insisted coldly, “and when they meet up, bring them both to me. I want her too. Do you understand?”

“Yes, mu’allimna .” The reply was crisp. No hesitance there.

Which was just how the hakeem liked it.

He clicked off and replayed the conversation in his mind for a beat before stowing the phone in his pocket and getting back to the business at hand.

He washed his hands and slipped on a new pair of surgical gloves, then walked over to the bed where the young boy lay, strapped in, hovering at the edge of consciousness, his eyes narrow, ceramiclike white crescents peeking out from under heavy eyelids, tubes emerging from various spots on his body drawing out minute amounts of liquids and sucking the very life out of him.

It was past six in the evening by the time Evelyn made it back to the city and to her third-floor apartment on Rue Commodore.

She felt exhausted after a day that had marked her on many levels. After Farouk had slipped away, Ramez — who, in what Evelyn took for a remarkable display of self-restraint, hadn’t asked her about him or even tried to casually slip it into conversation — had been able to get them a face-to-face with the mayor of Zabqine, who understandably had more pressing matters on his mind than discussing the excavation of a possible early-Christian temple. Still, Evelyn and her young protégé had charmed him, and the door was left open for a further exploratory visit.

Which was quite a feat, given that her mind was totally elsewhere the whole time they were with him.

From the moment Farouk had shown her his tattered envelope of Polaroids, the memories they’d awakened inside her had consumed her every thought. Once at home, she’d taken a long, hot shower and was presently sitting at her desk, staring at a thick file that had followed her like a shadow with each relocation. With a heavy heart, she pulled its cloth straps open and started to flick through its contents. The old photographs and faded, yellowed notebook sheets and photocopies lit up a part of her that had been smothered in darkness for a long time. The pages flew by, one after the other, conjuring up a jumble of emotions that swamped her, taking her back to a time and a place she’d never been able to forget.

Al-Hillah, Iraq. Fall, 1977.

She’d been in the Middle East for just over seven years, most of that time spent on digs in Petra, Jordan, and in Upper Egypt. She’d learned a lot on those digs — it was where she’d first fallen in love with the region — but they weren’t hers. Before long, she was yearning to sink her teeth into something she could call her own. And after a lot of hard research and some relentless lobbying for funding, she’d managed to swing it. The dig in question would concern the city that had fascinated her for as long as she could remember and yet had been underserved by archaeology of late: Babylon.

The history of the fabled city went back more than four thousand years, but as it was built of sun-dried mudbrick, not stone, not much of it had survived the ravages of time. The little that had was eventually carted away by the various colonial powers who had ruled over the troubled area over the last half century. With Mother Nature, the Ottomans, the French, and the Germans picking away at it like vultures, the ancient cradle of civilization didn’t stand a chance.

Evelyn had hoped, in however small a measure, to try to rectify that injustice.

The digs had started in earnest. The working conditions weren’t too harsh, and she’d gotten used to the heat and the insects by then. She’d been surprised at how helpful the authorities had been. The Ba’athists had taken control of the country five years earlier after a decade of coups d’état, and she’d found them pragmatic and courteous— The Exorcist had been filming nearby when she first got there, and Saddam’s bloody takeover was years away. The area around the dig itself was poor, but the people were kind and welcoming. Baghdad was only a couple of hours’ drive away, which was handy for good food, a decent bath, and some sorely missed social interaction.

The find itself had come about by fluke. A local goatherd who was digging for water had discovered a small trove of cuneiform tablets, among the oldest examples of writing, in an underground chamber near an old mosque in Al-Hillah. Being close by, Evelyn had been the first on the scene and decided the area merited further exploration.

A few weeks later, while doing soundings inside an old garage adjacent to the mosque, she found something else. This find wasn’t nearly as ancient or valuable. It wasn’t a spectacular find, by any means: a series of small, barrel-vaulted, underground chambers, tucked away for centuries. The first few rooms were bare, aside from some austere wooden furniture and some urns, jars, and cooking utensils. Interesting, but not exceptional. Something in the deepest chamber, however, grabbed her attention far more viscerally: A large, circular carving of a snake eating its own tail had been tooled into the main wall of the chamber.

The Ouroboros.

It was one of the oldest mystical symbols in the world. Its roots could be traced back thousands of years to the pig dragons of the Hongshan culture in China and to ancient Egypt and, from there, on to the Phoenicians and the Greeks, who gave it its name, Ouroboros, which meant the “tail-devourer.” From there, the image was found in Norse mythology, Hindu tradition, and Aztec symbolism, to name but a few. It also held a firm place in the arcane symbolism of alchemists over the centuries. The self-devouring serpent was a powerful archetype that represented different things to different peoples — a positive symbol for some, a portent of evil for others.

Further exploration of the chambers yielded more curious discoveries. What had been thought to be cooking utensils in one of the chambers turned out to be something rather more esoteric: primitive laboratory equipment. The shards of broken glass, upon closer examination, were actually pieces of flasks and beakers. Remnants of cork stoppers and pipes were also found, along with more jars, and pouches made of animal skins.

Something ominous about the chambers captivated Evelyn’s curiosity. She felt as if she had stumbled into the locale of an unknown clandestine group, an unknown cabal who wished to meet away from curious eyes, watched over by the sinister tail-devourer. She spent the next few weeks exploring the tunneled rooms more carefully and was rewarded by a further discovery: a large, earthenware jar, sealed with animal skin, buried in a corner of one of the dark rooms. The Ouroboros, similar to the one on the wall, was tooled into it. In it, Evelyn found paper folios — the material had supplanted parchment and vellum in the area since the eighth century, long before reaching Europe — that were richly covered with texts and elaborately decorated with mesmerizing geometric patterns, scientific renderings of nature, and colorful, if bizarre, anatomical studies.