Bronson steered the nano-drone out of the room and back into the hallway, turning it towards the open door, keeping it about ten feet above the floor. The hallway had a high ceiling and the door itself was probably ten or eleven feet in height. As the guardian monk stepped in through the doorway, he flew the drone through the open space directly above his head and out of the building. The man looked up, a puzzled expression on his face – he had obviously heard the buzzing of the rotors – then ducked down, perhaps thinking that it was an insect, and turned his head to follow the sound.
The moment the drone cleared the doorway, Bronson climbed it to about thirty feet, where it would be completely inaudible to anyone on the ground and invisible against the blue of the sky, and steered it away from the chapel towards the spot where he and Angela had been sitting earlier.
The guardian had turned around in the doorway and was looking up into the sky. After a few seconds he seemed to give a slight shrug, then turned away and stepped back into the chapel.
Bronson made his way back towards Angela, shutting down the drone as he did so.
‘Did you get it?’ she asked eagerly.
‘I think so, yes,’ he replied quietly. ‘We’ll talk later when we can watch the footage. Now I think we need to make ourselves scarce before the guardian starts to wonder if that really was a sodding great wasp or something else that passed him in the doorway.’
He put the controller and the drone back into Angela’s bag and they made their way towards the new cathedral and then out into the street beyond. On their way back to the hotel, Bronson managed to lose the quadcopter, the control unit and the box in separate piles of rubbish, and then for safety he sent copies of the footage he’d captured to his and Angela’s email addresses from his phone.
He didn’t think they were under any suspicion, because the actions of the guardian monk suggested that he thought he’d been passed by an unusually large insect that he hadn’t seen clearly and couldn’t identify. But it was important to behave normally, so he and Angela walked back to the hotel after their morning’s ‘sightseeing’, sat in the bar for a few minutes having a drink and then went into the dining room for lunch. Only after they’d finished and had their coffee did they head upstairs to their room.
Bronson connected his smartphone to Angela’s laptop and they sat side by side on the bed to watch what he’d recorded.
‘That’s really not a bad picture,’ she said as the video began playing, showing the view as the drone accelerated towards the chapel.
They watched in silence as the drone’s camera showed the interiors of two of the rooms and then headed towards the third door.
‘This is the one,’ Bronson said.
The difference in ambient light was immediately obvious, but the pictures from the camera were still clear enough.
‘That’s the relic,’ Angela said as the drone came to a hover near the shrouded shape on the plinth. ‘We need scale, something to measure it.’
‘I know. The only other thing in there, apart from that prayer mat, are these incense sticks and the brass holders.’ He pointed at the laptop’s screen, where the incense and holders appeared in sharp focus. ‘We’ve seen pots like these in some of the shops here, and we know how long most incense sticks are, so maybe that will be enough.’
‘Maybe.’ Angela sounded doubtful. ‘But the one thing that’s really obvious to me is the shape. That looks like a fairly heavy material covering it, but if that is the Ark, then where’s the lid? What we’re seeing looks more like a regular box, but the lid should have the two raised figures of the cherubim on it. And that hasn’t. You can see that even with the cloth over it. And they wouldn’t separate the Ark and the lid. It comes as a piece.’
‘Look, let’s try measuring it, just to be sure.’
Bronson ran the video backwards and then stopped it when he reached a particular image. He pointed at the screen.
‘That brass incense holder beside the box is probably no more than four inches tall, but let’s say three to give a margin of error. It won’t be what you might call high-tech, but it will give us an estimate of the size of the box.’
He took a piece of paper and a pencil, held the paper against the image of the incense holder on the screen and made two faint pencil marks to indicate its height.
‘Right,’ he said, resting the paper on a magazine and using the pencil to thicken the two marks. He reached over to Angela’s laptop bag, took out a plastic six-inch ruler and proceeded to produce a very simple scale on the paper, marking it every three-inch equivalent, four for a foot and so on. In less than a minute he had the equivalent of six feet marked out on the edge of the paper.
‘Can you just remind me what the dimensions of the Ark were supposed to be,’ he said.
‘Burned into my brain,’ Angela replied. ‘It was fifty-two inches long, thirty-one inches high and the same wide.’
‘Right.’
Bronson held the edge of the paper against the frozen image on the screen, measuring its length. He jotted a figure down and turned the paper through ninety degrees to estimate the height of the object.
‘You’re sure those figures are accurate?’ he asked.
‘As accurate as anything else in the Bible, yes. The dimensions come from the Book of Exodus and are given in cubits, obviously, along with very detailed instructions on how the Ark is to be made. In fact, the same dimensions are given twice in Exodus.’
‘Then that isn’t the Ark of the Covenant. We’ve probably underestimated the size of that incense holder, but if it was three inches in height, the length of the object, including the cloth that’s covering it, is no more than forty-three inches. Take away the cloth and you could probably knock at least a couple of inches off that because of the folds in the material, so we’re looking at something about forty inches long. That’s a foot too short for it to be the Ark. And the height’s wrong as well. That works out at no more than two feet.’
‘I knew it,’ Angela said, a note of triumph in her voice.
Bronson ran the video forward a few frames, then backwards until he found a good shot of the top of the shrouded object and froze the image again.
‘This won’t be as accurate because the drone has moved,’ he said, using his paper measure again, ‘but the depth is wrong as well. I reckon that’s about eighteen inches, and it should be almost double that.’
‘The other thing you can see in this shot,’ Angela said, ‘is that the aspect ratio is wrong. The Ark was supposed to be two and a half cubits long, one and a half cubits high – thirty-one inches – and the same wide, which is a square cross-section. Without doing any measuring at all, you can see that this box is taller than it’s deep. The cross-section is oblong, not square. It’s not the Ark.’
Bronson scrunched up the sheet of paper and lobbed it into the waste basket on the other side of the bedroom.
‘Good. I’m glad that’s out of the way. Can we go home now?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Angela said. ‘This afternoon we’re going to do the tourist bit and visit Lalibela. We’ve flown halfway across the world, so let’s do some sightseeing.’
Tens of thousands of pilgrims visit Lalibela every year. What draws them is a collection of monolithic churches constructed in an entirely unique way. At the ancient site of Petra in Jordan the ancient Nabataean people carved tombs and dwellings out of the rock cliffs, producing spectacular buildings as fine as anything found in ancient Greece or Rome, each one an architectural wonder in its own right.
The ancient Ethiopians obviously decided to substantially increase the degree of difficulty in constructing their places of worship. Instead of building churches out of rocks or stones, or even hacking them out of cliff faces like the Nabataeans, they decided to construct their churches starting at the top. They carved them out of the bedrock, working vertically downwards. And as the buildings dated from about the twelfth century, their only tools would have been hammers and chisels.
Each church is set within an open shaft carved straight down into the rock to form what is effectively an underground cathedral, a type of church found nowhere else in the world. It would be remarkable enough if they had constructed one such place of worship, but there are eleven of them, linked by tunnels and passages. The complex is named after the Ethiopian king Lalibela, and it’s been theorised that he was trying to replicate Jerusalem, albeit in a rather unusual way.
‘This is a weird, weird place,’ Bronson said as he looked across at a square opening in the rock in which sat Biete Giyorgis, the Church of St George, the flat top of the cruciform monolith marked by three crosses, nestling one inside the other and carved into the solid rock. And it wasn’t just a roughly cut lump of stone. The church gave every impression of having been constructed from below in the traditional manner, with decorations on the walls, carved windows and impressive doorways, the whole standing on a shaped plinth. But it hadn’t been.
‘You got that right,’ Angela said. ‘Let’s explore.’
They wandered through the complex, down stone staircases and along narrow passageways, marvelling at the skill of the masons who’d done the work.
‘These may be churches,’ Bronson remarked. ‘Well, they are churches, but they could also be fortresses. They’d be really easy for just a small group of people to defend because the passages are so narrow and they’re the only way in.’
The interiors were amazing, not least because of some of the curious carvings.
‘That’s the Star of David,’ Angela said, ‘but inside it there’s another symbol that we’ve met before.’
Bronson looked where she was pointing and nodded. ‘A cross pattée. The unmistakable symbol of the Knights Templar. In fact, I’ve seen Templar crosses and symbols all over this place.’
‘They were here in the thirteenth century,’ she reminded him.
They left after about an hour and climbed into the waiting taxi to return to Axum and their hotel.
‘So now what?’ Bronson asked when they were once again having a drink in the bar. ‘What’s your next step?’
‘That’s the problem,’ Angela replied. ‘I know where the Ark isn’t, so I’d like to find out where it is. My best guess is that the Temple priests hid it somewhere in Jerusalem – most probably down in the tunnels that honeycomb the Temple Mount – before the Babylonians overran the city in 587 bc, and it wasn’t recovered because the only people who’d known where it was were killed at the end of the siege. It might still be there, but I doubt it because of the nine years or so that the Knights Templar spent exploring and excavating the Temple Mount, and what happened when they finished. I believe they found it, used it to blackmail the pope and then hid it somewhere else. And then it again vanished from the historical record.’
‘So it’s a dead end, then?’
‘Maybe,’ Angela replied, ‘or maybe not. Sometimes things that are lost suddenly get found again. Maybe a clue will surface somewhere. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I hope that one day something will just turn up. And when it does, I’ll be right on it, digging away.’
‘And you know I’ll follow you on the trail,’ Bronson said. ‘Just like I always do.’