in detail, perched up on the citadel at Halabiyya, a stunning Roman fortress overlooking the river Euphrates. They had been inspecting the conservation work on one of the towers – Halabiyya was very well-preserved, but the Syrians had not so long ago ground the walls of a nearby fort for railway ballast – and Mohammed was leading a national effort with the Syrian government to raise money to save Halabiyya from a similar fate. They had looked out over the marvellous vista from the citadel, which the Romans had quarried into the side of a large rock, creating sheer sides and a tremendously defensible position. The low December sun sparkled on the glass-like river, which slid by lazily beneath them. Mohammed was talking to Andrew about the trouble he was having convincing donors of the need to save Syria’s heritage. He was one of Syria’s sizeable minority of Christians, and was happy to drink when it suited him. They had sat on rough blankets, drinking lukewarm bottles of the Syrian national beer, Barada, named for what was once a gorgeous spring in Damascus, but which was now, appropriately, a sewage-clogged gutter full of the city’s refuse and ordure. Art imitated life in the beer which bore the spring’s name.
Their dinner arrived, and Jack paused to pick up his knife and fork. He attacked his roast chicken with relish. It was perfectly charred on the skin, and sprinkled with Syrian olive oil and za’atar, a sesame and thyme concoction which, along with labneh, a thick, creamy yoghurt, Jack always thought was one of the best things about working in the Middle East. It made up for the depressing politics, at any rate.
‘Andrew, Mohammed came to see me because he found something quite remarkable and couldn’t get hold of you at the time.’ Thorpe had been away for a while, he recalled; but surely Mohammed could have found him. Jack paused to savour another piece of blackened chicken, swirling his fork around in the olive oil. ‘You remember Seis? Jebel Seis?’
‘Of course’, Thorpe replied, ‘the volcano. Creepy place.’
Jebel Seis was a volcanic mountain in southern Syria, near the Jordanian border. It had a high volcanic cone, inside which lurked another volcano, like a dark, sinister jack-in-the-box. In some years, a grey and depressing lake formed on the northern side. When he had last visited to scramble up its black, lava-strewn sides and admire the painted and inscribed rocks at the top, there had been birds, trees, and wildlife, a gift of an unnaturally wet spring which offset the general gloominess of the place, but even the birds that day seemed unhappy to be there. There was something disturbing about the blasted landscape, and what Jack was about to tell him only made him more curious about the things that went on there.
‘Mohammed found this,’ Jack said, pushing a piece of paper over to Andrew, who put down his knife and fork, wiped his face, and looked carefully. It was a rubbing of a graffito, roughly cut in a rock, and hastily transcribed onto a dirty piece of white paper:
HSE sep Sapor
Bass Leg VI fec
‘This was found at Jebel Seis?’ he asked, giving Jack a fleeting glance, before returning his gaze to the seven sets of letters in front of him. Jack nodded. Thorpe felt a familiar excitement swell inside. A new discovery! But this was different. The third word, a name, jumped out at him, as it would have leapt out at many of his colleagues in the academy. Could he be sure? He took a drink of water to calm himself down, while Jack looked over, saying, ‘can you read it? What does it say? Mohammed thought it was pretty important – important enough to come straight to me.’
‘Mohammed was here? In Riyadh?’
‘Yes, my friend – but he left last week. You were up in al-Ula that whole time.’
‘Jack,’ Thorpe said, ‘this could be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time. Do you know what this says? I’ll tell you.’
Thorpe paused, and then said:
‘HSE. Hic situs est. It’s Latin; it means, “here lies.” The rest – sep Sapor – sep is short for sepultus, tomb. Abbreviations are common on inscriptions – cutting stone is expensive and time consuming. You paid by the letter to have these things done properly, although this is just a rough graffito. As for Sapor – the “S” is capitalised, and this type of name – for surely that is all it can be – is rare in Latin. Sapor, or Shapur, is an Iranian name. More importantly, it was the name of one of Rome’s greatest and most formidable enemies – Shapur the Great, who famously defeated a Roman army at Edessa and captured the Emperor Valerian. The story goes,’ he continued, ‘that Valerian was skinned alive, his skin pulled over his head and tied there while he suffocated. Then he was made into a footstool, so that Shapur could always claim that he had his feet on the Roman Empire.’
‘Nasty chap,’ Jack commented, and then added, ‘and what about the last part?’
‘Bass leg VI fecit – Bass could be a name, perhaps Bassian, Bassianus. I don’t know, but that would be a reasonable abbreviation. ‘Leg VI’ is a legionary designation from Roman times – the Sixth Legion.’ A look of concentration passed over Andrew’s face. ‘If I remember, the Sixth was lost at Edessa – although,’ he said, slowly, ‘there were many incarnations of the Sixth, including one in Britain, and who knows really. As for fecit – it just means, ‘made’, with ‘made this thing’ implied. It would be a coup to find the tomb of Shapur. Its location is totally unknown - like that of Alexander the Great, which was once in Egypt, but which now has been lost for centuries.’
‘So,’ Jack said, ‘you have a Latin inscription about a dead Iranian made by a man from a vanished legion, about a lost tomb? Really?’ Jack’s face said it all. He didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Are you sure Mohammed isn’t just having you on? He’s like that, you know.’
Thorpe looked sharply at his friend. ‘I don’t know. It’s exciting though. I mean, what on earth is this doing at Seis? And why is it in Latin? Do you have a photograph?’ Jack shook his head. ‘It would be good to know if this was on a rock which could be moved, or on a stone. It seems improbable that, of all places, Shapur, the King-of-Kings of Iran, was buried at a godforsaken hole like Jebel Seis. And it all does seem a little far-fetched, I agree. You know what, I am flying back to London tomorrow and will see if I can stop in Damascus and visit Mohammed. Then I can go down to Seis myself – it’s only an hour or two away from the city – and see for myself.’
Jack dug back into his chicken. ‘Let me know,’ he chuckled, ‘but I wager our next dinner at this outrageously priced restaurant that this is all just some wild chase for nothing.’
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