Mr. Gladstone’s lips quirked ever so slightly. Though I assumed—correctly—that he was Protestant, even a Presbyterian was bound to be annoyed at hearing someone call the Virgin Mary a mother-goddess. But all he said was, “It would be interesting to see, yes.”
Charlie wouldn’t let up. “You will, of course, look in at the Seljuk Museum to see the predecessor goddess’s statue, won’t you? Diana, I mean. Diana of the Hundred Breasts. It’s best to visit the museum before you begin your tour of the ruins, anyway. And the statues—there are two, actually—sum up the whole concept of the sacred female principle in a really spectacular way. The primordial mother, the great archetype. The celestial cow that nourishes the world. You need to see it, if you want truly to understand the bipolar sexual nature of the divine, eh, Mr. G.?” He glanced toward me. “You too, Tim. The two of you, meet me in front of the museum at nine tomorrow, okay? Basic orientation lecture by Dr. Walker. Followed by a visit to ancient Ephesus, including the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. Perhaps the Meryemana afterward.” Charlie flashed a dazzling grin. “Will you have some wine, Mr. Gladstone?”
“No, thank you,” Mr. Gladstone said, quickly putting his hand over the empty glass in front of him.
* * *
After the museum, the next morning, we doubled back to the ruins of Ephesus proper. Mobs of tour groups were already there, milling around befuddledly as tour groups will do, but Charlie zipped right around them to the best stuff. The ruins are in a marvelous state of preservation—a nearly intact Roman city of the first century A.D., the usual forum and temples and stadium and gymnasium and such, and of course the famous two-story library that the Turks feature on all those tourist posters.
We had the best of all possible guides. Charlie has a genuine passion for archaeology—it’s the only thing, I suspect, that he really cares for, other than himself—and he pointed out a million details that we would otherwise have missed. With special relish he dwelt on the grotesqueries of the cult of Diana, telling us not only about the metaphorical significance of the goddess’s multiplicity of breasts, but about the high priest who was always a eunuch—“His title,” said Charlie, “meant ‘He who has been set free by God’”—and the staff of virgins who assisted him, and the special priests known as the Acrobatae, or “walkers on tip-toe,” et cetera, et cetera. Mr. Gladstone showed signs of definite distaste as Charlie went on to speculate on some of the more flamboyant erotic aspects of pagan worship hereabouts, but he wouldn’t stop. He never does, when he has a chance to display his erudition and simultaneously offend and unsettle someone.
Eventually it was mid-afternoon and the day had become really hot and we were only halfway through our tour of the ancient city, with the Cave of the Seven Sleepers still a mile or two in the distance. And clearly Mr. Gladstone was wilting. We decided to call it a day and had a late lunch of kebabs and stewed eggplant at one of the innumerable and interchangeable little bistros in town. “We can go to the cave first thing tomorrow morning, when it’s still cool,” Charlie offered.
“Thank you. But I think I would prefer to visit it alone, if you don’t mind. A private pilgrimage—for my late wife’s sake, do you see? Something of a ceremonial observance.”
“Certainly,” Charlie intoned reverently. “I quite understand.”
I asked him if he would be coming out to the hotel again that evening for dinner with me. No, he said, he would be busy at the dig—the cool of the evening was a good time to work, without the distraction of gawking tourists—but we arranged to meet in the morning for breakfast and a little brotherly catching up on family news. I left him in town and drove back to the hotel with Mr. Gladstone.
“Your brother isn’t a religious man, is he?” he said.
“I’m afraid that neither of us is, especially. It’s the way we were raised.”
“But he
really
isn’t. You’re merely indifferent; he is hostile.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because,” he said, “he was trying so hard to provoke me with those things he was saying about Diana of Ephesus. He makes no distinction between Christianity and paganism. All religions must be the same to him, mere silly cults. And so he thinks he can get at my beliefs somehow by portraying pagan worship as absurd and bizarre.”
“He looks upon them all as cults, yes. But silly, no. In fact, Charlie takes religion very seriously, though not exactly in the same way you do. He regards it as a conspiracy by the power elite to remain on top at the expense of the masses. And holy scriptures are just works of fiction dreamed up to perpetuate the authority of the priests and their bosses.”
“He sees all religions that way, does he, without making distinctions?”
“Every one of them, yes. Always the same thing, throughout the whole of human history.”
“The poor man,” said Mr. Gladstone. “The poor empty-souled man. If only I could set him straight, somehow!”
There it was again: the compassion, the pity. For Charlie, of all people! Fascinating. Fascinating.
“I doubt that you’d succeed,” I told him. “He’s inherently a skeptical person. He’s never been anything else. And he’s a scientist, remember, a man who lives or dies by rational explanations. If it can’t be explained, then it probably isn’t real. He doesn’t have a smidgeon of belief in anything he can’t see and touch and measure.”
“He is incapable of giving credence to the evidence of things not seen?”
“Excuse me?”
“‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1. It’s St. Paul’s definition of faith.”
“Ah.”
“St. Paul was here, you know. In this town, in Ephesus, on a missionary journey. Gods that are fashioned by human hands are no gods at all, he told the populace. Whereupon a certain Demetrius, a silversmith who earned his living making statuettes of the many-breasted goddess whose images we saw today in the museum, called his colleagues together and said, If this man has his way, the temple of the great goddess Diana will be destroyed and we will lose our livelihoods. ‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” And the whole city was filled with confusion.’ That’s the Book of Acts, 19:28. And there was such a huge uproar in town over the things that Paul was preaching that he found it prudent to depart very quickly for Macedonia.”
“I see.”
“But the temple of the goddess was destroyed anyway, eventually. And her statues were cast down and buried in the earth, and now are seen only in museums.”
“And the people of Ephesus became Christians,” I said. “And Moslems after that, it would seem.”
He looked startled. My gratuitous little dig had clearly stung him. But then he smiled.
“I see that you are your brother’s brother,” he said.
* * *
I was up late reading, and thinking about Charlie, and staring at the moonlight shimmering on the bay. About half past eleven I hit the sack. Almost immediately my phone rang.
Charlie. “Are you alone, bro?”
“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone and I are hunkering down getting ready to commit abominations before the Lord.”
“I thought maybe one of those horny Kraut ladies—”
“Cut it out. I’m alone, Charlie. And pretty sleepy. What is it?”
“Can you come down to the ruins? There’s something I want to show you.”
“Right now?”
“Now is a good time for this.”
“I told you I was sleepy.”
“It’s something big, Tim. I need to show it to somebody, and you’re the only person on this planet I even halfway trust.”
“Something you discovered tonight?”
“Get in your car and come on down. I’ll meet you by the Magnesian Gate. That’s the back entrance. Go past the museum and turn right at the crossroads in town.”
“Charlie—”
“Move your ass, bro.
Please
.”
That “please,” from Charlie, was something very unusual. In twenty minutes I was at the gate. He was waiting there, swinging a huge flashlight. A tool-sack was slung over one shoulder. He looked wound up tight, as tense as I had ever seen him.
Selecting a key from a chain that held at least thirty of them, he unlocked the gate and led me down a long straight avenue paved with worn blocks of stone. The moon was practically full and the ancient city was bathed in cool silvery light. He pointed out the buildings as we went by them: “The baths of Varius. The basilica. The necropolis. The temple of Isis.” He droned the names in a singsong tone as though this were just one more guided tour. We turned to the right, onto another street that I recognized as the main one, where earlier that day I had seen the gate of Hercules, the temple of Hadrian, the library. “Here we are. Back of the brothel and the latrine.”
We scrambled uphill perhaps fifty yards through gnarled scrubby underbrush until we came to a padlocked metal grate set in the ground in an otherwise empty area. Charlie produced the proper key and pulled back the grate. His flashlight beam revealed a rough earthen-walled tunnel, maybe five feet high, leading into the hillside. The air inside was hot and stale, with a sweet heavy odor of dry soil. After about twenty feet the tunnel forked. Crouching, we followed the right-hand fork, pushing our way through some bundles of dried leaves that seemed to have been put there to block its entrance.
“Look there,” he said.
He shot the beam off to the left, and I found myself staring at a place where the tunnel wall had been very carefully smoothed. An upright circular slab of rough-hewn marble perhaps a yard across was set into it there.
“What is it?” I asked him. “A gravestone? A commemorative plaque?”
“Some sort of door, more likely. Covering a funeral chamber, I would suspect. You see these?” He indicated three smaller circles of what looked like baked clay, mounted in a symmetrical way over the marble slab, arranged to form the angles of an equilateral triangle. They overlapped the edges of the slab as though sealing it into the wall. I went closer and saw inscriptions carved into the clay circles, an array of mysterious symbols and letters.
“What language is this? Not Greek. Hebrew, maybe?”
“No. I don’t actually know what it is. Some unknown Anatolian script, or some peculiar form of Aramaic or Phoenician—I just can’t say, Timmo. Maybe it’s a nonsense script, even. Purely decorative sacred scribbles conveying spells to keep intruders away, maybe. You know, some kind of magical mumbo-jumbo. It might be anything.”
“You found this tonight?”
“Three weeks ago. We’ve known this tunnel was here for a long time, but it was thought to be empty. I happened to be doing some sonar scanning overhead and I got an echo back from a previously uncharted branch, so I came down and took a look around. Nobody knows about it but me. And you.”
Gingerly I ran my hand over the face of the marble slab. It was extraordinarily smooth, cool to the touch. I had the peculiar illusion that my fingertips were tingling, as though from a mild electrical charge.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Open it.”
“Now?”
“Now, bro. You and me.”
“You can’t do that!”
“I can’t?”
“You’re part of an expedition, Charlie. You can’t just bust into a tomb, or whatever this is, on your own. It isn’t proper procedure, is it? You need to have the other scientists here. And the Turkish antiquities officials—they’ll string you up by the balls if they find out you’ve done a bit of secret freelance excavating without notifying any local authorities.”
“We break the seals. We look inside. If there’s anything important in there, we check it out just to gratify our own curiosity and then we go away, and in the morning I discover it all over again and raise a big hullaballoo and we go through all the proper procedure then. Listen, bro, there could be something big in there, don’t you see? The grave of a high priest. The grave of some prehistoric king. The lost treasure of the Temple of Diana. The Ark of the Covenant. Anything. Anything. Whatever it is, I want to know. And I want to see it before anybody else does.”
He was lit up with a passion so great that I could scarcely recognize him as my cool brother Charlie.
“How are you going to explain the broken seals?”
“Broken by some tomb-robber in antiquity,” he said. “Who got frightened away before he could finish the job.”
He had always been a law unto himself, my brother Charlie. I argued with him a little more, but I knew it would do no good. He had never been much of a team player. He wasn’t going to have five or six wimpy colleagues and a bunch of Turkish antiquities officials staring over his shoulder while that sealed chamber was opened for the first time in two thousand years.
He drew a small battery-powered lamp from his sack and set it on the ground. Then he began to pull the implements of his trade out of the sack, the little chisels, the camel’s-hair brushes, the diamond-bladed hacksaw.
“Why did you wait until I got here before you opened it?” I asked.
“Because I thought I might need help pulling that slab out of the wall, and who could I trust except you? Besides, I wanted an audience for the grand event.”
“Of course.”
“You know me, Timmo.”
“So I do, bro. So I do.”
He began very carefully to chisel off one of the clay seals.
It came away in two chunks. Setting it to one side, he went to work on the second one, and then the third. Then he dug his fingertips into the earthen wall at the edge of the slab and gave it an experimental tug.
“I do need you,” he said. “Put your shoulder against the slab and steady it as I pry it with this crowbar. I don’t want it just toppling out.”
Bit by bit he wiggled it free. As it started to pivot and fall forward I leaned all my weight into it, and Charlie reached across me and caught it too, and together we were able to brace it as it left its aperture and guide it down carefully to the ground.
We stared into the blackest of black holes. Ancient musty air came roaring forth in a long dry whoosh. Charlie leaned forward and started to poke the flashlight into the opening.
But then he pulled back sharply and turned away, gasping as though he had inhaled a wisp of something noxious.