The Alexander Cipher Page 0,105
toppled it forward. She flinched as it fell, professionally appalled by such cavalier vandalism, but the sand was soft and it didn’t shatter. She was still as determined as ever on her vendetta, but she also had to see what lay inside. In every way possible, this was the climax of her career.
They each took flashlights, shining them down into the black mouth. A flight of steps almost entirely submerged beneath a slant of sand led down to a rough-hewn corridor just tall and wide enough for two men to stand shoulder to shoulder. Elena followed Nicolas and his father fifty paces into the hill before the corridor opened out into a cavernous chamber. But as they shone their flashlights eagerly around, they soon realized it was empty except of dust and detritus: a broken drinking vessel, an earthenware amphora, the hilt of a dagger, the bones and feathers of a bird, presumably trapped here centuries before. Only the walls repaid in any way the efforts they had made to find this place, for the raw sandstone was handsomely sculpted like the stations of the cross, with scenes from Alexander’s life in deep relief, furnished with real artifacts.
In the first, to their left, Alexander was a gurgling infant in his cot, strangling snakes like Hercules—and evidently there had once been real snakes there, though time had disintegrated them, leaving only wafer-thin translucent skins. In the second, he was leading his famed horse Bucephalus away from his own shadow, the better to tame him. The third showed him with other young men around the feet of an elderly man, perhaps Aristotle himself, reading from what would once have been a parchment scroll but which had long since crumbled into fragments that lay at his feet. The fourth showed Alexander on horseback, exhorting his men to battle. The fifth had him plunging a wooden-shafted javelin through the chest of a Persian soldier with a bronze ax. Then came the celebrated Gordian knot. Legend had promised sovereignty over all Asia to the person who could untie it, even though untying it was impossible—a conundrum that Alexander resolved with his customary directness by cutting straight through the rope, represented here by a carved trunk of wood, one end looped around the metal yoke of a chariot, the other anchored inside a slot in the rock wall. The next scene showed him consulting the oracle of Siwa itself, the chief priest assuring him of his divinity. And so it went on, his victories, his setbacks, and his deathbed, all beautifully recorded. The final scene showed his spirit ascending a mountain to join the other gods, being welcomed as an equal.
Their flashlights played among these mesmerizing sculptures, creating shadows that stretched and danced and ducked and darted with life after twenty-three hundred years of utter stillness. No one dared speak. For though this was a remarkable find, Elena knew that it wasn’t what Philip and Nicolas Dragoumis had come for, it wasn’t what they needed for their mission. Either the shield bearers had never made it this far with Alexander’s body or someone had been here before them.
“I don’t believe this,” muttered Nicolas, balling his fist. “I don’t fucking believe this. All our work! All our work!” He gave an inarticulate cry of frustration and kicked the rock wall.
Elena ignored his tantrum and crouched down instead by the foothills of the mountain up which Alexander’s spirit was ascending. “There’s an inscription,” she told Dragoumis.
“What does it say?”
She wiped away the dust and held her flashlight at an angle to accentuate the shadows and make it easier to see. “ ‘Go up into the secret skies, Alexander,’ ” she translated aloud, “ ‘while your people here mourn.’ ”
“There’s another one there,” said Costis, pointing his flashlight at the base of the relief of the infant Alexander strangling the snakes.
Dragoumis translated this one himself: “You do not know your strength, Alexander. You do not know what or who you are.” He glanced doubtfully at Elena. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“It’s from the Iliad, isn’t it?”
Dragoumis nodded. “They both are. But what are they for?”
Elena went down on her haunches by a third scene, a depiction of fierce fighting. “ ‘Shield clashed against shield, and spear with spear. The clamor was mighty as the earth turned red with blood.’ ”
Dragoumis was by the Gordion Knot, he and Costis working their flashlights in tandem, the better to see. “ ‘Whichever man undoes the knot that fixes this yoke will