Will Adams - The Exodus Quest

'Pretty big damned cave.'

Knox nodded. 'Jewish archaeologists have been hunting it for centuries. Quite something to find the tombs of all those Bible legends.'

'So what would it be doing in Egypt? Shouldn't it be in Israel?'

Noise behind them. Someone had started wading through water. The passage ahead showed no sign of ending, though it curved sinuously this way and that, limiting their horizons. 'You've got to understand,' he told her, 'that the Bible isn't historical. It's a collection of folk-tales designed to convince the Jews that they'd brought their Babylonian exile and the destruction of the Temple upon themselves. That's why so many of the stories follow the same basic moral path.'

'Man makes covenant with God,' murmured Lily. 'Man breaks covenant. God punishes man.'

'Exactly,' said Knox. He set Gaille down a moment, giving his arms a rest, flexing his fingers. 'One explanation is that the person or people who put the Bible together actively looked for stories that fitted this pattern. But there's another possibility. Take Adam and Eve. The first man and woman, right? Yet even the Bible tacitly admits there were other humans around.' He picked Gaille up again, continued walking. 'Cain was branded for killing Abel, for example, so that others would know not to harm him. Which others? He married and had a son called Henoch who founded a city, which you can't exactly do if you're alone in the world. So maybe Adam and Eve weren't the first humans in a biological sense, only in a spiritual sense. That's to say, maybe they were the first to understand the true nature of God.'

'Akhenaten and Nefertiti?' said Lily sceptically.

'Think about it,' said Knox. 'Here you are, living in Amarna. It's your paradise, your Eden, your Promised Land. You're certain nothing can go wrong, because this is the home on earth of the One True God, and you're under His protection. But something does go wrong. You're expelled, forced to flee in the night, then to leave Egypt altogether. How is this possible? Surely the only explanation is that you made your God angry for some reason, that you failed him in some manner. You vow never to let that happen again. You renew your covenant. And in return God gives you a new Amarna, a new Eden, a new Promised Land. But not in Egypt this time. In Canaan.

'Decades pass. Centuries. The people of the Exodus splinter into different settlements, different tribes, each with their own identity, though still with that common bond of flight from Egypt. They pass their stories down from father to son, time after time after time, so that they gradually blur with narrative invention and blend with local folklore until, hundreds of years later, they're not only unrecognizable from what really happened, but from the folk-histories of their neighbours too, even though they're describing the same events.

'Then the Babylonians arrive. They defeat the Israelites in battle, destroy their temple, take them into exile. They become introspective, wondering once more how such a calamity could have overtaken God's chosen people. They look to their heritage for answers, gathering all these different traditions together and weaving them together with their favourite Mesopotamian and Canaanite myths to create a single narrative about Adam and Eve, Abraham and Moses, all those journeys back and forth between Egypt to Canaan, all those Edens and Promised Lands and New Jerusalems. But in fact these stories aren't about numerous patriarchs and ages and places at all. They're about one patriarch, one age, one place. They're about Akhenaten and Amarna.'

'It can't be,' muttered Lily weakly.

'Did you know that Akhenaten solicited gifts of exotic animals from his brother kings? He kept them here. The whole Amarna plain would have flooded during the annual inundation of the Nile. All those animals would have had to be loaded onto rafts. Remind you of any Bible story at all?'

'It can't be.'

'When Adam and Eve were in the Cave of Treasures, God gave them the very first possessions ever owned by man: gold, frankincense and myrrh. We even know how much gold they got. Seventy rods of it. Which is really odd, because a rod's not a unit of weight, but of length. About five metres, as it happens. Much the same as each of these steps.'

'So seventy rods would make three hundred and fifty metres,' murmured Lily.

'Yes.'

Ahead, the passage opened up into a chamber, the golden thread coming to an end at the base of the wall opposite. 'So how far do you reckon we've come?' she asked.

'About three hundred and forty-nine, I'd guess.'

Khaled joined Faisal at the foot of the shaft, peered through into the new chamber and passageway. A man's body was floating face down in the water. He lifted his head by a hank of blooded hair to check. Stafford, the TV presenter. One down, three to go. He dropped him again, held his flashlight and the AK-47 at the ready as he waded through the chamber then along the passage. 'Well?' he snapped at Faisal, who was holding back. 'Are you coming or not?'

'Let's just get out of here,' pleaded Faisal. 'We've still got time.'

'And then what?'

'What do you think? We vanish.'

Khaled hesitated. A new life somewhere no one knew him. Port Said. Aswan. Or over the border into Sudan or Libya. It was easy enough buying a new identity if you had contacts and baksheesh. But a new identity was only the start. And the prospect of starting over in a new land with nothing to his name made his heart sink to his boots.

Leave now and he'd be poor forever. He wasn't designed for poverty. He was designed for good things. And they were so close. At the very least, he had to see what lay at the end of this passage. 'We're finishing this,' he said. 'Trust me. No one will ever find out.' He smiled encouragingly, then turned his back on Faisal and walked on, knowing that the man was weak, that he'd buckle and follow.

And, sure enough, he did.

Knox laid Gaille down, brushed hair from her brow and cheek. The cut in her scalp was clotting, her complexion was perceptibly healthier, her breathing stronger. He stood up, took the torch from Lily, shone it around the new chamber, took it to the left-hand wall. It was coated with gypsum, and there were markings visible beneath the thick coats of dust. He took off his wet shirt, wiped it down, bringing a night-time scene to vivid life: people huddled in their beds as robbers roamed their houses, while outside lions prowled, snakes slithered, crocodiles lurked.

He went to the wall opposite, cleaned that too. A daytime scene. Akhenaten and Nefertiti handing out gold necklaces from a palace balcony while farmers went about their work, cattle grazed in the fields, ducks flew over the reeds and fish leapt in the lakes, all sporting in the beams of sunlight.

'It's The Hymn of the Aten,' he murmured. 'Akhenaten's poem to his sun god.' He illuminated the left-hand wall. 'That's the world by night,' he said. 'Lions coming forth from their dens, snakes preparing to strike.' He pointed right. 'And this is day. "Cattle and sheep welcome in the dawn, birds take wing as you appear. Boats sail upon the waters, all paths open through you."'

'What good is that?' said Lily, her voice cracking a little. 'We need to get out of here.'

The sunbeams converged towards the upper left-hand corner of the wall, Knox noticed. Yet they didn't meet. They hit the junction with the neighbouring wall before reaching their focal point, then promptly vanished. He turned the torch upon this wall, noticed something that had eluded him before. It wasn't a single flat surface, as he'd first thought. There was a recessed V-shaped section in its centre, set perhaps half an inch behind the rest, and it was actually at the base of this V that the golden thread stopped.