42

Angela spread out her notes on the table in front of her and bent forwards, studying what she'd written. They were in the departure lounge of the Mohammed V airport waiting for their flight to London to be called.

'I think your solution to the puzzle of the clay tablets has to be right. I wrote out everything we'd deciphered, but in the order you suggested, and now it does seem to make more sense. I just wish we had better pictures of the Cairo museum and the O'Connor tablets – it would be a great help if we could read a few more words of the inscriptions on those two.'

She looked down again at the papers in front of her. Bronson's idea was so simple that she, too, was amazed it hadn't occurred to her.

Aramaic, he'd said, was written from right to left, and they'd more or less agreed that there had originally been four tablets, arranged in a square. Why not, Bronson had proposed, read the text starting with the first word at the right-hand end of the top line of the top right tablet – which they didn't have, of course – and then read the word in the same position on the tablet at the top left of the square. Then move to the bottom left, then bottom right and back to the top right, and so on, in a kind of anticlockwise circle. That, at least, meant that the words Ir'Tzadok and B'Succaca could be read in the correct sequence.

But even that didn't produce anything that seemed totally coherent – it just formed very short and disjointed phrases – until they tried reading one word from each line and next the word from the line directly below it, instead of the next word on the same line. Then, and only then, did a kind of sense begin to emerge.

What they now had read:

----- by ----- ben ----- ----- perform the ----- task ----- the -----
----- ----- completed ----- ----- ----- now ----- ----- ----- last----- the
----- scroll ----- ----- took from ----- ----- ----- have ----- ----- -----
cave ----- ----- ----- place ----- ----- ----- of ----- ----- -----
settlement ----- ----- Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca ----- scroll ----- silver
----- ----- ----- we ----- ----- ------ cistern ----- ----- place of -----
end ----- days ----- the tablets of ----- temple ----- Jerusalem -----
----- ----- the ----- ----- ----- concealed ----- ----- ----- of ----- -----
----- a ----- ----- four stones ----- the ----- side ----- a ----- of -----
----- ----- height ----- ----- cubit to ----- ----- ----- within ----- -----
of our ----- and ----- now ----- ----- ----- we ----- ----- ----- our
----- ----- ----- invaders ----- our ----

'Have you tried filling in any of the blanks?' Bronson asked.

'Yes,' Angela nodded. 'It's not as easy as you might think, because you can easily end up tailoring the text to whatever it is you want it to say. I've tried, and a few of the missing words seem to be fairly obvious, like the end of the last line. The word "invaders" seems to stand out as being different to the rest of the inscription, so I think that's possibly a part of a political statement, something like "our fight against the invaders of our land". That would be a justification of their opposition to, most probably, the Romans, who were all over Judea during the first century AD.

'The rest of it is more difficult, but there are a couple of things we can be certain about. These tablets do refer to Qumran: the words Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca make that quite definite. And in the same sentence, or possibly at the beginning of the next one, I'm fairly sure that those three words mean the "scroll of silver", the Silver Scroll. That's what really excites me. The problem is that, if the author of this text did possess the scroll and then hid it somewhere, presumably in a cistern, which is what I'm hoping, we still don't know exactly where to start looking, apart from Qumran, obviously. And the country, of course, was full of wells and cisterns at this period. Every settlement, from a single house right up to large villages and towns, had to have a source of water close by. I've no idea how many cisterns there were in first-century Judea, but I guess the numbers would run into the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.'

She looked down at the deciphered text, studying the few words they'd managed to translate. If only they could fill one or two more of the blanks, they'd have some idea where to begin their search.

Bronson's next question echoed her thoughts. 'Assuming the museum will agree to let you go out to Israel, where do you think you should start looking?'

Angela sighed and rubbed her eyes. 'I've no idea. But the reference we've managed to decode is the first tangible clue to a relic whose existence has been suspected for over fifty years. Half the archaeologists in the field that I've talked to have spent some time searching for the Silver Scroll, and the other half have dismissed it out of hand as a myth. But the O'Connors' clay tablet is almost certainly contemporary with the relic, and I think the reference is a strong enough piece of evidence to follow up. And there's something else.'

'What?'

'I don't know that much about Israel and Jewish history, so I'm going to need some specialist help from somebody who speaks Hebrew, somebody who knows the country and its history.'

'You've got someone in mind?'

Angela nodded and smiled. 'Oh, yes. I know exactly who to talk to. And he's actually based in Israel – in Jerusalem, in fact – so he's right on the spot.'