The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) by Kristen Elise Ph.D. Read Free Book Online

conducted at the Fayoum Oasis outside of Cairo. I went to the Fayoum in hopes of recovering an important fragment of the historical record that has been lost for centuries.”
    “Ambitious project for a student,” I said softly.
    “Indeed. When I selected my project and began to flesh it out, I knew I was embarking upon something risky. What I could never have predicted was the magnitude of what I would eventually find.
    “I had developed an hypothesis that a large critical piece of history had either inexplicably disappeared or, more likely, been deliberately hidden just before the birth of Christ. You asked me earlier what sparked the shift in thinking during that era from superstition to true science. The truth is, we don’t know. Nobody knows. That is what I went to the Fayoum to find out.
    “I decided to go into field work at the oasis after poking around in a microfiche database at my university library. I stumbled upon an article in a turn-of-the-century American newspaper. The story was about an accidental find in the Fayoum.
    “In the year 1900, an expedition was led by the Hearst Foundation and the University of California, Berkeley, into the Fayoum to excavate an archeological site. What they found was an ancient crocodile nursery and a cemetery full of mummified crocodiles.
    “The workers were furious. They were being paid to excavate human mummies, not animals. To them, this mishap was just a job they would lose money on. So one of the workmen took a machete and began hacking into one of the mummified crocodiles out of anger. Guess what was inside it.”
    “I give up.” I shrugged.
    “A hidden collection of papyrus scrolls, dating to 49 BCE.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Indeed. Evidently this site was used by the Egyptian rulers to raise crocodiles to adulthood and then use their mummified carcasses to archive documents indefinitely. Of course, the opportunity to explore it was a dream come true for me. Like browsing through a library of six-foot-long organic vaults containing buried treasure from Atlantis. And since my hypothesis dated to the same era, the Greco-Roman period, I thought that this burial ground might contain the information I was looking for. I went to the Fayoum to complete the excavation of the cemetery and to translate the texts inside the crocodile mummies.”
    “Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked.
    “Unfortunately, no. I had to change my entire doctoral hypothesis. But after I graduated, I came to Naples to resume my search. It was here that I finally found two examples of the documents I had been searching for. Five weeks ago. The documents you hold in your hand. I believe there are dozens, maybe hundreds of additional medical texts from the same era yet waiting to be discovered.”
    I glanced down at the texts I was still holding in my hands: the first, a case study of ten cancer patients; the second, a vague description of the healing of four of them. “What made you so sure that this type of medical writing would exist at all?”
    “Everything we know about the era,” she said.
    “We know a great deal about the author of these documents in particular. This was a public figure—a reigning queen, in fact. She was an exquisitely well-educated woman. She spoke and wrote fluently in nine languages. She had a well-documented, very sophisticated flair for the sciences. She loved her secrets, and she manipulated public record to suit her interests. She had both the means and the motive to store secret documents in the Herculaneum Villa dei Papiri because the library’s owner was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. And Caesar was her lover.
    “But then, because her life was cut short, she ran out of time to reveal her work on her own terms. This is why her legacy, her true legacy, has been lost to us. And why we have never found a single document of hers. Until now.
    “The nardo document is the first writing in existence in the hand of Queen Cleopatra the Seventh. I