Tarnished Scepter

John Smalldridge

Description

The thrilling third novel from John Smalldridge in the Tarnished Series.The Tarnished Scepter is a new story about Moses portraying an ordinary man who lived in an extraordinary time and who was used in an extraordinary way.A mixture of characters, views, religion, trials and tribulations making the Tarnished Scepter a compelling read.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849893633
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page

THE TARNISHED SCEPTER





By
John Smalldridge

3rd Book in the Tarnished Series


Publisher Information

The Tarnished Scepter published in 2010 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

Copyright © John Smalldridge

The right of John Smalldridge to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.


Prologue

Roger sat staring at the file in his hand. His secretary had just placed it on his desk only moments before. His fingers tingled with the anticipation of what this file might or might not contain. This file could contain the crown of his career or it could contain nothing and his career would go on as before. This file could put his name in the history books or it could continue to relegate him to the obscurity he now possessed.
He was Roger Whitmore. He had received his P.H.D. in Hebrew Archeology from the University of Tel Aviv more than thirty years before and had spent the last twenty teaching Archeology at Oxford University in England. He spent most of his summers in and around the Holy Land digging up historical sites and looking for relics in general. His latest stint had been east of the Jordan River looking for evidence of the encampments from where Joshua led the Hebrews into the Promised Land. Evidence of his people.
He was the son of an English father and a Jewish mother. He had gotten his love for Archeology from his English father, who was an Archeology professor at Oxford as well and his love for the Jewish people from his Jewish mother, Hanna Rosenblum.
He had spent the entire summer searching all of the lowland, or easiest, routes that led through Jordan to the Jordan River. He had been looking at all the routes that his mother’s people might have taken to enter the land that God had promised them under Moses. The summer had been a frustrating one. He had found nothing that even hinted at evidence that they had passed that way. He had looked at only the most probable routes all summer and then with less than two weeks to go before he had to head back to England he had turned to the less likely ones.
Then with a little over one week to go he found himself on Mount Nebo. On a whim, he had climbed to craggy peak just to see how far he could see into the Promised Land. This was the mountain that Moses was supposed to have climbed just before he died and he had climbed it for precisely the same reason, to see into Israel at the land that God had promised His people. He had climbed the highest of the craggy rock outcroppings and had been stunned by the view. He had seen all of the Promised Land clear to the Mediterranean Ocean. As he had stood there on the same rock that Moses had most likely stood on, he tried to picture Moses, an old man by then, looking into the promised land that he would never enter. Even the desert land to the east had looked beautiful from that vantage point.
It had been almost noon when he had reached the top most peak on Mount Nebo and the sun was shinning directly down on his high perch. It had been the location of the sun and his exact stance that had brought the Scepter to him. He just happened to look down and had seen something wedged between the rock on which he was standing and a smaller one at it’s base.
It had looked for all the world like a rusty ornamental piece of metal, but it had also certainly been out of place. The only way that it could have been seen was for the person to be standing on that exact rock at that precise time. Because of its tarnished condition, the metal object had the exact coloration as the surrounding rocks. He had had the impression at the time that he had been led here at that precise time of the day to find that metal object. But then, he had often had the same thoughts about things he had found in the past and they nearly always turned out to have little or no significance. But he always hoped that someday he would make “his find”.
It had taken him a while to descend the rock and locate the object and then a while longer to extract it from the crevice between the two rocks. It had certainly been there a long time and had been wedged solid. He had eventually pried the object out of its resting-place and held it up in his hands.
He hadn’t been sure what he had held in his hands, but he sensed that it had been a good find. By its weight, he had guessed that it had been either polished pewter of more hopefully solid silver. The object had been tarnished to a matte gray, but he had been able to detect some sort of writing under all of the oxidation. He had quickly taken a soft cotton cloth from his backpack and wrapped the tarnished object in it. He had very gingerly and almost reverently placed the object in his pack and after taking a long drink from his canteen, headed for the Land Rover, about a mile down the mountain.
Even though it had been well past noon when he had reached the Land Rover, he had been too excited about his find to stop for lunch. He had eaten some of it on the drive back to his base camp, just outside the city of Al Qatranah. He had had only one thing on his mind, finding out what that object was.
Once in his tent in camp he unwrapped the object with an almost reverent tenderness. He placed the figure on the blotter on the desk that was an army surplus desk from the 1967 war. At first he just stood there and looked at it. He was trying to will it to tell him it’s secrets before he dug any deeper. He knew that some men swore that an object would reveal itself to you if you only listened and looked long enough. It had never worked for him before and it didn’t now.
He then sat down and began to gently rub the object with the soft cotton cloth he had wrapped it in earlier. There was no genie in this ancient relic, but it had begun to reveal itself almost immediately. As some of the tarnish began to fall away under his gentle rubbing he could see that he had been right. There was some sort of inscription on the base of the object. It was still too tarnished for him to try to decipher it but it sure looked like early Egyptian Hieroglyphics to him.
This fact along with the fact that the figure at the top of the scepter looked like Ptah, the god of power and authority in Egypt’s early worship of the sun god, Ra. The god Ptah was a lot earlier than the time of Moses and was confusing but it was still an exciting discovery. The early evidence that this was in fact an authentic Egyptian artifact made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end. His one concern was the fact that it was not made of gold. The early Egyptian rulers always made their personal as well as their temple gods out of gold.
“If this was an ancient Egyptian artifact, what was it doing so far from Memphis, Thebes or any other Egyptian capital.” The Egyptian armies under the powerful Pharaoh, Thathmes III had conquered this entire region clear through Syria but they had never had to come this far east and certainly didn’t bring any royal relics with them. He had to know more, no all, about this scepter. He had to know if it were in fact a Pharaoh’s emblem of power or if it were only one of the many household gods to fertility that many of the wealthier Egyptians owned.
He wanted to get the relic off to England as soon as he possibly could. He wanted to have it analyzed as soon as possible at the lab in London. He wanted to know it’s authenticity, it’s age and it’s origin. So he decided to have it registered the very next day. He spent the rest of the evening and night weighing, measuring and taking pictures of it from every angle possible. He rewrapped the old scepter in the cotton cloth he had used to wrap it in previously and stowed it in a special locker he had for such things.
He left Al Qatranah early in the morning for Tel Aviv. While the artifact had been found in Jordan, he felt that it technically belonged to Israel. Or at least he hoped that it did. He had been looking in places where it would be more probable to find evidence of Hebrew ancestry than anything that would remain of the early inhabitants of this dry God-forsaken land. He wanted to register his find with the Israeli ministry of antiquities.
He had to hide the tarnished item when he crossed the border from Jordan into Israel. The crossing guards were looking for weapons and bomb making material, not artifacts, so he crossed into Israel without discovery. He had the scepter hidden in the bottom of his insulated food trunk under his lunch. It was late in the day when he pulled into Tel Aviv. The minister of Antiquities was not available that evening so he made an appointment for the next morning.
He knew Ben Jareen well and had worked with him many times in the past several years. Ben Jareen had been the Minister of Antiquities for over ten years and they had met many times during his tenure in that capacity. When Roger took the artifact out of the wooden box he had transferred it to after crossing the border, the minister was as shocked as he had been. He had been just as anxious to have it analyzed as Roger had been. Together they weighed it, measured it, photographed it and finally got it registered. By noon of the same day it had been wrapped and sent by air to London.
The rest of