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| Vatican Press handout photo (Pope denouncing destruction of cultural heritage) |
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| Egyptian obelisk, St Peter's Sq. |
(Excerpt from The Obelisk Prophecy - our investigators, Egyptologist/Museum curator Jennefer and Antiquities policeman, Jon, examine the Vatican obelisk)
Flocks
of believers, and the questioning, descended like pigeons on St Peter’s Square.
Many
visitors were fearful, Jennefer noted, casting anxious eyes at the clouds of
dust up above.
This
was the Vatican, yet it put her in mind of Vesuvian Pompeii, the sky laden with
disaster.
Jennefer
caught up with her investigative partner who was busy circling the Vatican’s
four thousand year old Egyptian obelisk that stood mounted on bronze lions and
rose eighty-three feet into the dusty sky.
“What
are you doing?” she said.
“I’m
trying to tell the time.”
Jon
followed a curve of pale travertine blocks set in the cobblestones like the hub
of a wheel that fanned out in radiating lines.
“You
have a watch, don’t you?” she said.
“We’re
standing on one. This square is actually a vast sundial, the obelisk acting as
the giant gnomon casting a shadow.” He stopped. “Even with this dust, I can
tell it’s almost midday. Or perhaps midnight.”
“Midnight?”
“Midnight?”
“For
the world, that is. Ironic that an ancient Egyptian obelisk is counting down
the days to the end of civilization.”
She’d
forgotten about the square’s role as a sundial, concentrating on the obelisk’s
ancient past rather than on its present utility. It belonged to an unknown
pharaoh from around the fifth dynasty, she recalled, and had travelled a great
deal before its arrival here.
“I’ll
tell you something else that’s ironic,” Jon said. “This circle around the shaft
of the obelisk is a symbolic vagina. Those in the know are amused that there’s
an act of copulation going on right in the heart of celibate city.” He pointed
to the Pope’s balcony. “The Pope looks beatifically over it every time he
addresses the throng from up there.”
She
frowned.
They
were trying to crack a code to stop a world calamity and he was cracking jokes.
But
it was more than that. She felt uneasy to think that they were both standing on
a marker of time inexorably measuring the hours, reminding her of the urgency
of their investigation.
A
count down to the end of civilization, he’d said.
The
dust-laden sky made it look like the end.
The
red dust haze turned St Peter’s Basilica, its cupola, and the embracing arms of
Tuscan colonnades around the square into historical sepia that added to the
place’s powerful sense of mystery.
“This
obelisk is peculiar in being uninscribed,” she said, “which sadly doesn’t
reveal many secrets to us.”
“Maybe
we’re looking in the wrong place.”
“Meaning?”
He
pointed up at a metal globe perched beneath a cross on top of the obelisk.
“What
about the secret up there? That hollow globe. Great hiding spot. Legend
tells that originally the globe held Julius Caesar’s ashes. But when they moved
the obelisk here from an earlier site in Rome, they opened it and found the
missing phallus of Osiris instead... no, just kidding. Only dust inside. And no
mummy dust, either. Just plain old dust, like the stuff blowing in the sky.”
“Not very helpful, Jon. We’re
looking for answers. What can we learn here?”
They
learnt something sooner than expected - that their close inspection of the
monument had been observed all the while by two burly shadows in black that now
appeared unexpectedly at a few minutes past midday on the sundial.
“We
wish to hear an answer too,” the one man spoke in an accent that sounded midway
between Italian and… German? “You will come with us, please.”
Jennefer
blinked in surprise at the two new arrivals. Fair men in black suits.
Swiss,
maybe. Swiss guards in plain clothes?
Had
their inspection of the obelisk brought them out of the shadowy heart of the
Vatican palace?
“Have
we broken some cardinal rule?” Jon said, pretending flippant unconcern at the
intrusion.
“The
Holy Father is hoping that you have learnt something from this monument that
will help the world.”
That’s
when it seemed to Jennefer that the sun stopped in the sky, just as the sun-god
Ra’s boat sometimes paused in the heavens in Egyptian mythology.
Even
the crowds of people in St Peter’s Square seemed to freeze, growing as still as
the obelisk.
The
Holy Father.
“His
Holiness is waiting to see you.”
“Jesus,”
Jon said.
“Not
exactly. Merely Our Lord’s representative on earth,” one of the men said with a
glimmer of a smile.
An
audience with the Pope?
What
next..?
