The Bone Labyrinth (42 page)

“What?” Lena asked. “Like extraterrestrials?”

“That’s one of the theories floated.” Gray turned to Roland. “But others believe they were covering up some mystery tied to the moon itself.”

“Maybe they were right.” Roland admitted. “Father Kircher certainly became convinced there was something miraculous about the moon. He spent pages and pages exploring this possibility in his journal.”

“What else did he learn?” Gray asked.

Roland gripped the old book with both hands. “Most of it centers on the strange symmetries between the earth and the moon. For example, can you guess how many times the moon orbits the earth over the course of 10,000 days?”

No one bothered to answer.

“It’s 366 times,” he said. “And that number is important in so many other ways. You could almost consider it the fundamental code for our planet. And that’s been known for far longer than you could imagine.”

“How long?” Gray asked.

“Do you remember that staff we saw with Eve’s bones?” He pulled out his phone and brought up the photograph that Lena had taken of the remains, showing those bony hands clutching a length of carved mammoth tusk. “The reverend father named this
de Costa Eve
, or the Rib of Eve. And if you look closely, you can almost make out small gradations inscribed along its length.”

He zoomed in and passed the image around.

“What about it?” Gray asked.

“It’s marked that way because it’s an ancient measuring tool.”

“To measure what?” Seichan asked.

“Everything. It may be the key to our very world.”

Gray gave him an exasperated look, but Roland forged onward.

“Back at the chapel in Italy, I measured the staff’s length,” he said. “It’s 83 centimeters long.”

Gray shrugged. “So just shy of a meter or yardstick.”

“That’s right, but—”

“Oh, my God!” Lena suddenly blurted out, cutting him off and drawing their attention. “That length! I know what you’re getting at. It’s not a regular yard like we use today. It’s a
megalithic
yard.”

Roland nodded at Lena. “Precisely. I came across that same term while cross-referencing some of Kircher’s claims.”

“What’s a megalithic yard?” Gray asked, searching between Roland and Lena.

Lena spoke excitedly. “There was a Scottish engineer back in the thirties. I can’t remember his name . . .”

“Alexander Thom,” Roland filled in.

She nodded and rushed on. “He was surveying megalithic ruins throughout Scotland and England and noted how those prehistoric builders had laid out their giant stones along lunar or solar lines. Curious, he did a statistical analysis of ancient Neolithic sites across both the UK and France and noted a strange anomaly. Basically they all seemed to have been constructed using a standard unit of measurement.”

“The megalithic yard,” Roland explained. “It’s the same length as the staff held by Eve. That length appears again and again throughout history and cultures. The old Spanish vara, the Japanese shaku, the gaz of the Harappan civilization of ancient India . . . they’re all very close in length to this megalithic yard. Even going back to the ancient Minoans of Crete. A thousand Minoan feet is equal to 366 megalithic yards.”

“That number again,” Gray mumbled.

“And if I remember right,” Lena added, “the area found within the sarsen ring of Stonehenge is exactly a thousand square megalithic yards.”

Seichan turned to Lena. “How come you know so much about all of this?” she asked, plainly wondering how a geneticist had come upon such knowledge.

“Maria and I had studied markers such as this, indications of knowledge spreading globally during Paleolithic times. All of this ties to our hypothesis that there was a small band of people who helped with mankind’s Great Leap Forward, guiding the path to modern civilization.”

“Like the Watchers that Roland mentioned before,” Gray said. “Those otherworldly teachers from ancient scripture.”

Seichan scowled. “So what you’re saying is that some universal unit of measure was shared between societies, spread by these Watchers.”

Gray stared down at the phone’s screen, at the bones of Eve. He studied the unique features that marked her as a hybrid between early man and Neanderthals.

Am I looking at the face of one of those Watchers?

He finally returned his attention to the others. “But what’s so important about this length? Why is it the
key
to the world, like you said before?”

Lena stepped up and tried to explain. “Because the megalithic yard was calculated from the dimensions of the planet . . . specifically on the
circumference
of the earth.”

“Even Father Kircher came to realize this.” Roland opened the journal to a page of calculations surrounding an illustration of the sphere of the earth. “You can see here how the reverend father divided the circumference of the earth into 366 degrees, then sliced those degrees into 60 minutes, then again into 60 seconds. Here at the bottom you can see his final calculation, where he determined the length of
1 second
of the earth’s circumference.”

He tapped that final number.

“It’s that same sequence again—
366
,” Gray noted.

Seichan stared down at the page, too. “But how could these prehistoric people have come to know the circumference of the Earth and calculate something like this?”

“Most likely by indirect means. All of this could have been derived by simply using a string, a pebble, and a pole.” Roland turned to another page in the journal showing a crude pendulum. “Father Kircher diagrammed it out here, using the planet Venus as a positioning point.”

“Roland may be right,” Lena added. “We already know ancient builders were wise to the movement of the stars, and many early cultures revered the planet Venus. Take, for example, the Neolithic ruins of Newgrange found in Ireland. Its builders positioned its doorway to allow Venus to shine its light inside their structure on the winter solstice.”

Gray sat back. “So you believe that somebody calculated this megalithic length based on the circumference of the earth and eventually shared it as a universal unit of measurement.”

“That’s what Father Kircher believed,” Roland said. “He recognized these bones were ancient, that there was something not quite human in their conformation, and that the artifacts found with the remains—the length of ivory, the perfectly sculpted sphere of the moon—showed advanced knowledge of astronomy.”

Gray sat back. “And after coming to this realization, he secretly sought to learn more about these people.”

Roland nodded. “But being a pious man, he also sought support from religious texts. He came to believe that the Bible also hid clues about those special numbers we were talking about.”

“How do you mean?” Gray pressed.

9:09
P
.
M
.

Roland swallowed, almost fearful of revealing the ultimate truth he had discovered in Kircher’s journal. He imagined the reverend father must have struggled even more.

“Are you familiar with the term
gematria
?” he finally asked. After getting shakes of heads all around, he explained. “It’s a Babylonian system of numerology that was adopted by the Hebrews, where each letter is assigned a number, giving words extra meaning based on those numbers. It became the root of a medieval cabalistic system of interpreting scripture. Later, Christians also embraced this mystical way of looking at the Bible. And as Father Kircher was a mathematician, such numerology would have interested him. From the ramblings in his journal, he became fixated on one specific number and its connection to the Bible.”

“What number?”

“A prime number. 37.” He returned again to the page showing the length of Eve’s Rib tied to circumference of the planet. “At first I thought Father Kircher was merely rounding this number—36.6—to an even 37, but he also references what Lena and I saw above the grave of Adam back in Croatia.”

He flipped through the images on his phone until he came across the splay of palm prints above the Neanderthal male’s grave.

“If you count the number of prints, you’ll find 37 of them.” Roland turned to Lena. “You also took a picture of a similar star-shaped petroglyph above Eve’s grave, but those palms were more numerous. I don’t have that photo, but could you count the number of prints that make up Eve’s star?”

Scrunching her brow, Lena pulled out her own cell and searched until she found the proper image.

She tallied the number of prints and lifted her face when done. “There’s
73
.”

Roland nodded. “Father Kircher noted the same in his journal.”

“The numbers 37 and 73,” Gray said. “They’re mirrored prime numbers.”

“What Father Kircher called
stella numeros
. . . or star numbers, because of the patterns they formed.” Roland fanned through a section of the journal. “He also used gematria to tease out hidden messages from the Bible, coming to conclude that the number 37 was fundamental to understanding the Holy Scriptures.”

“How so?” Gray asked.

“A few examples. The word
faith
is used 37 times in the Gospels. Also if you convert the Hebrew word for wisdom—or
chokmah
—into its cabalistic equivalent, you get the numerical value of 37.” He glanced to Lena. “You’ve been searching for the roots of human intelligence. And the only word found in the Bible that equals 37 is
chokmah
.”

Her face grew thoughtful. “Wisdom.”

He turned to the others. “Father Kircher lists many other such biblical ties to the number 37, but his most compelling comes from the very first line of the Bible, from Genesis.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

Roland revealed a journal page with the same verse written in Hebrew, under which the reverend father had inscribed the numerological equivalent for each Hebrew word.

“If you total up this line of cabalistic numbers,” he said, “you get 2,701.”

Gray frowned. “How’s that significant?”

Roland turned to the next page and revealed what Father Kircher had calculated.