The Last Gospel by David Gibbins Read Free Book Online

excavated?’
    ‘Lots of reasons. Structural issues. Undermining the modern buildings above. Resources needed for maintaining the existing excavation, the main part of Herculaneum already revealed. Bureaucracy. Lack of funds. Corruption. You name it.’
    ‘Try again.’
    ‘Well, there are huge problems working out the best way of conserving and reading the carbonized papyri. You remember our visit to the Officina dei Papyri in Naples? They’re still working on the stuff found in the eighteenth century. And they need to determine the best way of excavating new material, of recovering any more scrolls that may exist. This place demands the best. It’s a sacred site.’
    ‘Precisely.’ Hiebermeyer clicked his fingers. ‘The last thing you said. A sacred site. And like other sacred sites, like the caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel, people yearn to find out what lies inside, yet they also fear it. And believe me, there’s one very powerful body in Italy that would rather not have any more written records from the first century AD.’
    At that moment the dust in the air seemed to blur and there was a palpable tremor, followed by a sound like falling masonry somewhere ahead. Maria braced her hands on the floor of the tunnel and looked at Hiebermeyer in alarm. He quickly whipped out a palm-sized device with a prong and jammed it on to the wall of the tunnel, watching the readout intently as the tremor subsided. ‘An aftershock, a bit bigger than the one last night but probably nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘We were told to expect these. Remember, the walls around us are solidified pyroclastic mud, unlike the ash and pumice fallout on Pompeii. Most of it’s harder than concrete. We should be safe.’
    ‘I can hear the others, coming up the tunnel behind us,’ Maria said quietly.
    ‘Ah yes. The mysterious lady from the superintendency. You know she’s an old friend of Jack’s? I mean, close friend. It was after you’d left, when he was finishing his doctorate and I was already in Egypt. For some reason they don’t talk. I can see the torch light now. Best behaviour.’
    ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Maria said quietly, then looked up at the snout. ‘Anyway, Anubis should stall them.’
    ‘Anubis will probably halt the whole project,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘It’ll be hailed as a great discovery, vindication of their decision to explore the tunnel. It’ll be enough for them to withdraw our permit and seal this up. The only reason we’re here is that someone leaked the discovery of the tunnel to the press after the earthquake, and the archaeological authorities had no choice but to put up a show.’
    ‘You’re being cynical again.’
    ‘Trust me. I’ve been in this game a long time. There are much bigger forces at play here. There are those who are fearful of the ancient past, who would do all they can to close it off. They fear anything that might shake the established order, the institutions they serve. Old ideas, ancient truths sometimes obscured by those very institutions which sprang up to protect them.’
    ‘Ideas that might be found in a long-lost library,’ Maria murmured.
    ‘We’re talking the first century AD here,’ Maurice whispered. ‘The first decades anno domini in the year of our Lord. Think about it.’
    ‘I have.’
    ‘It’s your call whether or not we continue down the tunnel to see what else we can find before they shut us down. I’ve got an excavation in Egypt waiting for me. You need a rest.’
    ‘Try me.’
    ‘I take it we’re in agreement.’
    ‘Let’s take the chance now while we’ve got it,’ Maria said. ‘You’ve found your treasure, now I need mine.’
    Hiebermeyer stowed the oscillator in his front overall pocket, sneezed noisily then peered at Maria. ‘I can see what Jack saw in you. He always said you might make something of yourself, if you got out of the Institute of Medieval Studies at Oxford and took a job with him.’
    Maria gave him a withering