Adam Palmer: The Moses Legacy

Fikri squirmed. ‘Well, I suppose they could be the bones of the biblical Moses, but the only way we could know for sure is by doing a DNA comparison between them and a known relative of Moses. And when I last checked there weren’t any.’

It was a crude attempt to use sarcasm to brush off their probing questions. But Daniel wasn’t convinced. And he knew that neither was Gabrielle. He decided to leave it to her.

‘No, but you could have compared the DNA to various ethnic groups – including Jews.’

Fikri seemed to grow bolder at this. ‘As a matter of fact, we did. And the DNA didn’t match the genetic types that we normally associate with Jews. It was actually more like the genotype we associate with Egyptians. Maybe it was a refugee from Egypt.’

Fikri was smiling at his own sarcasm. Daniel was not. Gabrielle however was smiling, because of the full implications of what Fikri had intended as a brush-off.

‘And what about the age?’ asked Daniel.

‘It was an old man,’ Fikri responded. ‘Surprisingly old, considering that human lifespan was shorter in those days. But that still doesn’t make it Moses.’

‘Sorry, that wasn’t what I meant. I was asking about the age of the bones. How long ago are they from?’

‘Well, we-’

Fikri broke off, realizing that he was doing the very thing that he had tried so hard not to do: talk about it. But the looks on their faces made it clear that he had passed the point of no return. He had already implied that the bones were old by using the phrase ‘in those days’.

‘We carbon dated them to around 1200 BC.’

Daniel decided to summarize. ‘So let me get this straight. You found the bones of someone of probable Egyptian origin-’

‘ Possible Egyptian origin. Probable is too strong a word.’

‘ Possible Egyptian origin… in a cave in Petra in an area associated with the Israelites. And the bones date back to the late Bronze Age – exactly the time associated with the biblical Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.’

‘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.’

Gabrielle, who had remained seated, looked daggers at Daniel. Finally, she stood up and muttered a polite thank you.

Goliath had taken the bus from Petra back to Amman, knowing that if he took the car, Klein and Gusack could report it to the police and they would be on the lookout for the vehicle. It wouldn’t be so easy to catch him on a tourist bus packed with other people.

His plan had been to hire a car to drive back across the King Hussein Bridge and then to Israel’s main Ayalon Highway. However, he was told that because today was Friday, the King Hussein Bridge was closed from midday and would not reopen till Sunday. That left him with a problem. The longer he waited around, the greater the likelihood that he would be stopped.

And he had no intention of being stopped.

Then someone told him that there was another way of getting into Israel – if he hurried.

‘The spores must have got reactivated at Petra and become even more virulent,’ said Daniel. ‘And the so-called fiery snakes in the Bible that bit the Israelites were actually snake-like boils that infested their skin.’

They were driving from Amman to the King Hussein Bridge, Gabrielle at the wheel.

‘But why would the spores come out of stasis? Petra’s a pretty hot dry place-’

‘Wait a minute, I have an idea.’

He opened the glove compartment and took out a compact book. It was a copy of the Bible that Daniel had bought in Israel and had been keeping with him for reference. He started thumbing through it.