The Rosetta Key by William Dietrich Read Free Book Online Page B

world for that. Jerusalem had fewer amusements than a Quaker picnic. Nor did there turn out to be much sexual temptation in a town where women were wrapped as tightly as a toddler in a Maine blizzard: my celibacy in Jaffa was involuntarily extended. Oh, women would give me a fetching eye now and again — I’ve got a bit of dash — but their allure was poisoned by lurid stories one heard in the coffeehouses of genital mutilation by angry fathers or brothers. It does give one pause.
    In time I was so frustrated and bored that I took inspiration from my amber play and decided to tinker with electricity as Franklin had taught me. What had seemed a clever Parisian hobby to charm salons with an electric kiss — I could make a spark pass between a couple’s lips, once I’d given a woman a charge with my machines — had taken on more seriousness after my sojourn in Egypt. Was it possible ancient people had turned such mysteries into powerful magic? Was that the secret of their civilizations? Science was also a way to give myself status during my winter of discontent in Jerusalem. Electricity was novel here.
    With Jericho’s reluctant tolerance, I built a frictional hand crank, with a glass disk to make a generator. When I rotated it against pads connected to a wire, the static charge was passed to glass jugs I lined with lead: my makeshift Leyden jars. I used strands of copper to wire these spark batteries in sequence and sent enough electricity to a chain to make customers jump if they touched it, numbing their limbs for hours. Students of human nature won’t be surprised that men lined up to be jolted, shaking their tingling extremities in awe. I gained even more of a reputation as a sorcerer when I electrified my own arms and used my fingers to attract flakes of brass. I’d become a Count Silano, I realized, a conjurer. Men began to whisper about my powers, and I admit I enjoyed the notoriety. For Christmas I evacuated the air from a glass globe, spun it with my crank, and laid my palm on it. The ensuing purple glow lit the shed and entranced neighborhood children, though two old women fainted, a rabbi stormed from the room, and a Catholic priest held up a cross in my direction.
    “It’s just a parlor trick,” I reassured them. “We did it all the time in France.”
    “And what are the French but infidels and atheists?” the priest rejoined. “No good will come from electricity.”
    “On the contrary, learned doctors in France and Germany believe electric shocks may be able to cure illness or madness.” But since everyone knows physicians kill more than they cure, Jericho’s neighbors were hardly impressed by this promise.
    Miriam also remained dubious. “It seems like a lot of trouble just to sting someone.”
    “But why does it sting? That’s what Ben Franklin wanted to understand.”
    “It comes from your cranking, does it not?”
    “But why? If you churn milk or hoist a well bucket, do you get electricity? No, there is something special here, which Franklin thought might be the force that animates the universe. Perhaps electricity animates our souls.”
    “That is blasphemous!”
    “Electricity is in our bodies. Electricians have tried to animate dead criminals with electricity.”
    “Ugh!”
    “And their muscles actually moved, though their spirits had departed. Is electricity what gives us life? What if we could harness that force the way we harness fire, or the muscles of a horse? What if the ancient Egyptians did? The person who knew how might have unimaginable power.”
    “And is that what you seek, Ethan Gage? Unimaginable power?”
    “When you’ve seen the pyramids, you wonder if men didn’t have such power in the past. Why can’t we relearn it today?”
    “Perhaps because it caused more harm than good.”
    Meanwhile, Jerusalem worked its own spell. I don’t know if human history can soak into soil like winter rain, but the places I visited had a palpable, haunting sense of time. Every