The Rosetta Key
Wi l l i a m D i e t r i c h
—Anaïs Nin
Contents
Epigraph iii
Map viii
Part One 1
Chapter 1
Eyeing a thousand musket barrels aimed at one’s chest does…
3
Chapter 2
I started with brelan, which is not a bad game…
11
Chapter 3
Jaffa rises like a loaf from the Mediterranean shore, empty…
19
Chapter 4
Jerusalem was half ruin, I saw when I rode down…
29
Chapter 5
To pass the winter, I did my best to tease…
39
Chapter 6
My first reaction was to depart Jerusalem, and the cursed…
49
Chapter 7
I expected Haim Farhi would have some of the Aristotle-like…
63
Chapter 8
“You should be honored, guv’nor,” Big Ned said.
75
Chapter 9
We ran back upstairs to the statue as if to…
91
Chapter 10
I knew I was in hell when Najac insisted on…
101
Chapter 11
Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. 112
Part Two 123
Chapter 12
I came to Acre a hero, but not for escaping…
125
Chapter 13
I needed to generate an electric charge on a scale…
139
Chapter 14
I peered out the sally port into a fog of…
153
Chapter 15
Mohammad was watching me closely. “This ring means something
to…
162
Chapter 16
I’d assumed we’d travel directly to Mount Nebo with Najac’s…
173
Chapter 17
With his instinct for the political, Bonaparte immediately named
our…
183
Chapter 18
The entrance to the City of Ghosts was a slit…
201
Chapter 19
We pretended to descend as if we were making for…
216
Chapter 20
The level exit from the City of Ghosts would take…
230
Chapter 21
We were on the coastal plain as the sun rose,…
241
Chapter 22
And then Colonel Phelipeaux died. Did he really comprehend his… 257
Part Three 265
Chapter 23
I arrived back in Egypt on July 14, 1799, one…
267
Chapter 24
We had two tasks. One was to use the Rosetta…
276
Chapter 25
Fleeing at the pace of a donkey cart is not…
287
Chapter 26
Astiza and I landed on the southern coast of France…
298
Chapter 27
There was irony in being imprisoned in a “temple” first…
312
Chapter 28
Astiza and I were both weaponless. The woman, for lack…
326
Historical Note 337
Acknowledgments 341
About the Author
Other Books by William Dietrich
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Part One
c h a p t e r
1
Eyeing a thousand musket barrels aimed at one’s chest does tend to force consideration of whether the wrong path has been taken. So I did consider it, each muzzle bore looking as wide as the bite of a mongrel stray in a Cairo alley. But no, while I’m modest to a fault, I have my self-righteous side as well—and by my light it wasn’t me but the French army that had gone astray. Which I could have explained to my former friend, Napoleon Bonaparte, if he hadn’t been up on the dunes out of hail-ing distance, aloof and annoyingly distracted, his buttons and medals gleaming in the Mediterranean sun.
The first time I’d been on a beach with Bonaparte, when he landed his army in Egypt in 1798, he told me the drowned would be immor-talized by history. Now, nine months later outside the Palestinian port of Jaffa, history was to be made of
How far we’d both come in nine brief months!
4
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
I edged behind the biggest of the wretched Ottoman prisoners I could find, a Negro giant from the Upper Nile who I calculated might be just thick enough to stop a musket ball. All of us had been herded like bewildered cattle onto a lovely beach, eyes white and round in the darkest faces, the Turkish uniforms of scarlet, cream, emerald, and sapphire smeared with the smoke and blood of a savage sacking.
