Gaddis Suites, Asyut
At the conclusion of their drive, check-in at the Gaddis Suites Hotel in downtown Asyut took Michael only ten minutes. Five later he, Chris and Emily were ensconced in a double suite on the sandstone building’s fifth floor, with views overlooking the ancient town and the bluffs beyond.
‘I call the shower,’ Chris offered before he had even passed fully through the door. ‘I’ve got sand in more places than just the cut on my arm.’
His grin beamed as he walked past Michael and Emily, pulling the bathroom door behind him. His upbeat attitude had clearly returned.
‘I’ll sort out the supplies from the first-aid kit so we can do up a proper dressing once he’s out,’ Michael said. He loosed the tie atop Chris’s rucksack and emptied its contents onto the bed’s overly floral covering.
Emily made her way to the small desk in the suite’s sitting room, situated directly beneath a large picture window. An ethernet connection was provided via a port on the desk, and in a few moments she had extracted her laptop from one of her cases and signed herself online.
It only took a few minutes of navigation before Emily was able to call up high-resolution images of the Nag Hammadi Codices on her laptop. She began to scroll through page after page of detailed scans, her transcribed copy of the keystone’s surface lying before her on the desk. As she scanned the images she continually passed her glance back to her sketch, hoping for a connection to make itself apparent.
‘Finding anything?’ Michael entered the smaller room and moved to her side. His eyes caught a fragment of papyrus photographed on the screen.
‘Have you tapped into the resources of the Library of Alexandria?’ He knew that the interface to the library’s unparalleled collection was available to Emily anywhere she had an internet connection, and their current project seemed the ideal opportunity to make use of the almost inconceivable collection of historical and scientific information she had at her disposal.
‘There’s no need,’ she answered. ‘This is all available publicly on the internet. The scans were made three years ago by Forrester and Jakobson. Anyone who wishes can view them at will, though the publisher has kept a few folios from each codex unavailable. I suppose to urge us to buy the printed volumes.’
Michael peered over her shoulder, knowing his expertise in Coptic studies could prove helpful.
‘That looks like one of the fragments of Codex II – a passage from the Apocryphon of John, by the looks of it. See, there’s a reference to Sophia, the renegade spiritual power, seeking to create other beings after her own likeness.’ He motioned to a cluster of Coptic letters towards the lower portion of the small, broken fragment of ancient paper.
Emily clicked her notebook’s trackpad and advanced to the next image. Like so many before it, this was of a small fragment, containing only a few disjointed letters.
‘I hadn’t realized the texts were so fragmentary.’
‘They’re not all like this,’ Michael said. ‘Some of the pages have deteriorated, but the bulk of the collection is in remarkably good condition. Here, let me.’ He gently nudged Emily’s wrist aside and navigated the display to Codex I.
‘That’s amazing,’ Emily gasped as the display loaded a large graphic, containing a complete page of ancient Coptic writing. The thumbnails along the top of the monitor indicated that all the pages to follow were equally as complete.
‘It doesn’t take too much scholarly acumen to appreciate why this find was so important,’ Michael affirmed. ‘The best hypothesis is that this was either the library of a Gnostic sect in the fourth century, hidden once the persecutions became too fierce, or of a Christian monastic community with Gnostic leanings who decided that continuing to harbour forbidden documents was simply too dangerous.’
Emily allowed herself a long, silent ponder. From the other room, the sounds of Chris stepping out of the bathroom echoed through the half-closed door. His voice followed, apparently engaged in conversation. Emily raised a questioning brow to Michael.
‘Probably his mobile phone,’ he said. ‘It was buzzing all throughout his shower.’
Emily nodded, then turned her gaze back to the computer display. Something had gelled in her mind.
‘The keystone,’ she said, motioning towards her sketch from the cave, ‘has to be a cipher connected to these documents. The problem is that there are so many of them. Twelve complete codices and remnants of a thirteenth, containing fifty-two separate texts. If we’re going to figure out precisely what Bell wants, we’ve got to know which text to decode.’
She looked back into her husband’s eyes. ‘And then, we’ve got to get to Cairo.’
‘You think that’s where he’s headed?’
‘You know how insistent Bell has been about getting his hands on originals, not copies. If he’s set on these texts, then he’s going to go after the Nag Hammadi Codices themselves.’
Michael didn’t answer. Bell’s plans seemed to become more grandiose by the minute.
Breaking through the silence that had descended between them, Chris burst into the room, his mobile phone still clutched in his grasp. He had overheard Emily and Michael’s final remarks, but his mind was filled with something else.
‘You’re going to want to hear what I was just told,’ he said, his face grave. ‘There’s a whole lot more at stake than just some old documents in an Egyptian museum.’