Ormai era prossimo ai confini del Regno Latino, stava cavalcando lungo la via che passa vicino al lago di Tiberiade e porta all’altopiano del Golan e poi in Siria. Diya non voleva cedere al pessimismo ma sentiva la luce della luna che illuminava il sentiero entrare nel suo corpo come mercurio gelido, incendiandogli il ventre mentre la brezza della sera si insinuava tra le vesti e portava l’odore dell’acqua, del pesce e del lago che era nascosto dai rilievi sulla sinistra, presto lo avrebbe superato arrivando in territorio sicuro. Il tempo che una scoreggia impiega per sfiatare, esplorando i toni bassi del pentagramma con sonorità ascendente e li aveva visti. I Templari erano fermi alla fine della salita, immobili sui cavalli e inconfondibili con la tunica bianca; la croce patente che portavano sulle tuniche sembrava disegnata con sangue rappreso. Il riflesso plutonico che la luce lunare generava sulle loro cotte metalliche faceva il paio con la liquida sensazione che gli infuocava le viscere e che le trasformava in qualcosa di solido, come un mattone di argilla cruda. Erano in tre, più che sufficienti per fare quello che avevano in mente, qualsiasi cosa fosse.
Chapter 11 – Qumran
The interior was dry and cool, a welcome relief after the climb. The lumens, which in full sunlight reached unimaginable yet quantifiable levels, decreased logarithmically in the uterine and enveloping environment he had entered. Generations of terracotta scrolls were piled up against the wall, which looked like an irregular but perceptible circle. It was inevitable to wonder how the Master knew what was in a cave that he had never even imagined existed, but he immediately dismissed the question as a divine mystery, without even hoping to one day be able to probe or know it. After a couple of breaths, his eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness. The cave was not very deep, and there was something promising towards the end, where the ceiling approached the ground. He approached with what he considered excessive caution, perhaps intimidated by the words of the Master, which at that moment gave him a mystical thrill, accompanied by echoes of distant and supernatural worlds. If he had given in to the fear that these echoes stirred in him and fled without the object, as his gut suggested, he would have had to face the Master, and that would have been even worse. The sweat-soaked tunic bothered him, sticking to his skin, and the coolness of the cave was turning into an oppressive cold. He wanted to go back outside into the wonderful and intolerable heat of the afternoon, but he would not do so without the object. Overcoming known and unknown fears, he opened the clay jar to discover that there was another one. Without thinking or reflecting, so as not to conjure up intolerable ghosts, he had also opened the last container and seen the object: a metal box just large enough to be held with two hands and shiny, as if it had just come out of the forge.
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