The Lost Scrolls. Alex Archer

He struggled with the first name—it came out sounding close enough to Stepan. “He’s our expert in extracting the scrolls safely from the ground.”

      “We all do what we can,” Pilitowski said in a cheerful tone. “There is much to be done.”

      The other two, a man and a woman, turned around and picked themselves up from the floor. They wore kneepads, Annja noticed. One was a man, the other a woman. Both were thin and dark, and she took them for Egyptians.

      “This is Ali Mansur and Maria Frodyma,” Ismail said. The man just bobbed his head and grinned shyly.

      The woman stuck out her hand. She wore her black hair in a bun, and had a bright, birdlike air to her. “Please call me Maria,” she said in a Polish accent as Annja shook her hand.

      “Annja.”

      “This was a library storeroom,” Ismail said. “Most of the scrolls were kept in locked cabinets, in chambers such as this. Only the most popular items, or those specifically requested by scholars, were stored in the reading rooms.”

      “So that heap…?” Annja said, nodding toward the rubble mound where Maria and Ali had been working.

      “The remains of a cabinet,” Pilitowski said. “Damaged by the fire, it collapsed and mostly decomposed, leaving the burned scrolls behind.”

      “How many scrolls did the library possess?” Annja asked. “Or does anyone really know?”

      “Not precisely,” Maria said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. She seemed to show a quick smile to the bulky and jovial Pilitowski, whose own smile broadened briefly. “Some have hypothesized it held as few as forty thousand scrolls. Others suggest the founding Ptolemy set a goal of half a million. On the basis of what we have found, we feel confident conjecturing the former limit is far too low. As to the upper—” She shrugged expressively.

      “This isn’t my time period,” Annja confessed, believing as she did in professional full disclosure. “But I can certainly see how the recovery of any number of scrolls at all from the ancient world is a terrific thing.”

      “Oh, yes,” Maria replied.

      “And here you see three of them,” Pilitowski boomed. A vast callused paw swept dramatically toward the table.

      They looked like three forearm-sized chunks of wood fished out of a campfire, Annja thought. They lay on a sheet of white plastic.

      “These are actual scrolls?”

      “Yes, yes,” Pilitowski said. “My friends and I extracted them this morning.”

      Annja felt a thrill. She’d seen older artifacts—she’d seen Egyptian papyri a thousand years older in the British Museum. But there was something about these scrolls, the thrill of something lost for two thousand years and believed to be indecipherable even if found. Yet modern technology was about to restore the contents of these lumps of char to the world.

      “Even if they’re just grocery lists,” she said a little breathlessly, “this is just so exciting.”

      The others just smiled at her. They knew.

      “Who really burned the library, anyway?” she asked Ismail. “Was it Julius Caesar?”

      The others looked to Ismail. Ali was still grinning but had yet to utter a syllable. Annja’s first thought had been that he didn’t speak English. But that appeared to be the common language on the multinational dig. She began to suspect he was just shy.

      “Caesar was one of the culprits,” her guide said.

      “One of them?”

      “And not the first,” Maria said. The archaeologists seemed glad of the break. Annja understood that. They loved their work, she could tell, as she loved the work when she was engaged in it. But it could be brutally arduous, and breaks were welcome.

      “The first major fire damage occurred around 88 B.C.,” the woman said, “when much of Alexandria burned down during civil disorders. This may have been the greatest destruction. Then during the Roman civil wars in 47 B.C., Julius Caesar chased his rival, Pompey, into the city. When Egyptian forces attacked him, Caesar set fire to the dockyards and the Egyptian fleet. The fire probably spread through trade goods piled on the docks waiting to be loaded on ships. The library lay near the waterfront, like now. Many scrolls were lost in the conflagration. Also it appears Roman soldiers stole many scrolls and sent them to Rome.”

      “But that wasn’t the end of the library?” Annja asked.

      Smiling, Ismail shook his head. “Oh, no. Only a fraction of the scrolls were lost at that time. Although we believe that this site burned then. And finally, Emperor Aurelian burned the Greek quarter in 273, when the Romans made war upon the Palmyran Queen Zenobia. That destroyed more of the library.”

      “So what happened to the rest of the library,” Annja asked, “if fire didn’t destroy it?”

      “Time,” Maria said.

      Annja looked at the dark, diminutive archaeologist. Maria shrugged again. “Egypt’s rulers lost interest in maintaining the library. Much of it simply fell into disuse. Here, as elsewhere, people reused the scrolls, or even burned them for fuel. But most simply rotted away in the heat and humidity.”

      “All except the ones neatly protected by a thick coating of carbonization,” Ali said suddenly in a deep baritone and beautiful British accent.

      Annja stared at him. He smiled but said nothing more. She suspected he’d used up his allotment of spoken words for the day.

      “Ali has a second degree in biochemistry, you see,” Pilitowski explained.

      “Ah,” Annja said.

      “WELL, YOU KNOW, Annja,” the young Egyptian archaeologist said as he walked with her into the huge old brick building next to the dig where the team had set up headquarters, “we make no claims concerning the veracity of the scrolls. We only recover them. And are thrilled to do it, if I may say so.”

      “As well you should be,” she said. “It’s just that Atlantis is a hot button for archaeologists in the U.S., Ismail.”

      Their voices echoed slightly in the enormous space. Wooden partitions had been set up to delineate work areas and offices.

      “It is for all of us,” he said. “We are, after all, on a quest for the truth, are we not?”

      “Oh, yes,” she agreed.

      “And should we not follow the truth wherever it might lead us?”

      “All right. I see where you’re headed with this, Ismail. And you’re right. If I’m going to be a serious scientist, then evidence needs to outweigh my preconceptions.”

      He smiled and nodded with boyishly visible relief.

      “Now,” she said, “let’s go see this evidence.”

      The headquarters appeared to have spent much of its career as a warehouse, with high walls of yellowish brick, steel struts for rafters and grimy skylights admitting brownish morning light. It smelled more than slightly of fish. Annja presumed it must be their proximity to the waterfront. The smell couldn’t last decades, could it?

      They walked down an aisle to an open doorway. From inside came a blast of raucous feminine laughter. Ismail’s fine features tightened briefly.

      He ushered Annja into a wide room, well lit by banks of standing lights. Several people worked at a row of computers. Others examined blackened-log-like scrolls on a big table.

      “You might find this interesting,” Ismail said, leading her toward a table. On it stood a curious device like a bundle of upright rods worked through one of the burned scrolls. “It’s based on a machine invented in the eighteenth century to unroll burned papyri.”

      The two technicians operating it