Part 11: Confabulation

            To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost.  It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished leaving behind the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit boarders, unmapped peoples.  The road forks and wanders wherever you are.  It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices.  Colin Thurbon

Duke Mitchum knew that the one consistent thing about recounting history is that timelines, theories, and facts are always changing.  Modern-day scholars and experts have great difficulty in bringing themselves to accept the possibility that what they were taught, what they write about, or what they teach to others may in fact be inaccurate.  But there always seems to surface new evidence which challenges orthodox preconceptions. 

Through his extensive scholarly research, Duke had discovered a long lost story of history, and by unraveling its thread, he was able to debunk one of the most popular myths from the Middle Ages while at the same time bringing to an end, in the most unlikeliest of places, the story of what really happened.

After Pope Urban II preached for a Holy Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, aiming his remarks at the French Monarchy and the rest of the Christian West to raise arms in order to stop the onslaught of Saracens and their Islamic faith, the whole of France was whipped into a religious fervor to march to Jerusalem in what became the First Crusade.  Christian power resided in Rome and Urban called for the West to come to the aid of the Byzantine Empire and city of Constantinople, the far eastern outpost of Christianity, now the one most threatened by invasion and ransack. 

Urban ordered for nothing less than the capture of Jerusalem which by then had been under Islamic rule 460 years, an open city where three religions had learned to co-exist.  Western Europe by the end of the 11th Century had turned into tribes of warring noblemen, with constant regional bloodletting and general lawlessness in society. 

Urban’s call to arms immediately drew attention away from French nobleman killing each other, to now making war on a common enemy, the Saracen.  The added incentive was that for anyone who chose to march to Jerusalem and fight for Christianity, the Catholic Church would forgive all past sins and furthermore, the Crusader would be guaranteed a perch in heaven.  Deus Vult or “God Wills It” became the Christian Crusader battle cry. 

Thousands set off for the Holy Land via the Sicilian port of Messina, or Otranto at the heel of Italy, or went via the land bridge from the Balkans east to Turkey then south, and after nine Crusades until 1241 it is estimated that between combatants and civilians 1.7 million people died.  Yet only the First Crusade was successful, although highly disorganized and chaotic. 

There was no single military leader, no strategic plan, no organized supply lines, and no chain of command.  Crusaders included not only noblemen and knights, but many peasants and laymen as well.  The First Crusader army recaptured the Holy Land and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099 which lasted until 1187.

For noblemen and knights, the Crusade to the Holy Land was vastly expensive, and many went bankrupt by the end of hostilities, unable to return home until they could find a source of new income.  There were also landless gentry and ne’er-do-wells, who took advantage of an opportunity to rob, pillage, and plunder in a far-away land of pagan heretics.  There were many tall tales of fabulous wealth hidden in Jerusalem like gold and precious jewels taken from ancient Babylonia, Egypt, and Nubia that attracted fortune hunters. 

Located on a hill overlooking Jerusalem is the Temple Mount and is venerated as a holy site by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism alike.   After the First Crusade, the Temple Mount’s compound had become barracks and stables for poor itinerant ex-combatants of the victorious army who still wandered the Holy Land, where once stood King Solomon’s Temple. 

Those that did seek treasure were often disappointed because the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder – a few people got rich but the vast majority returned home to France with only the clothes on their backs, and died at a young age from disease and injuries suffered.  It is now twenty years after the First Crusade. 

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            In 1119 a lowly young knight by the name of Sir Rowland von Dahlgrün lived in the province of Bavaria, in a village called Munich, on a small barely adequate stipend he inherited from his father’s estate in Prussia.  His title indicated he was of noble blood and he could trace his bloodline back to Roland and Charlemagne, but this honor did little to pay for his gambling debts, his whoring, and ceaseless consumption of fine Bavarian beer and Schnapps.

It is not clearly known how he happened to join up with the eight other nobles who together would found the Order of the Templar Knights – whether he was adopted as a fun loving mascot, as a long lost cousin with blood ties to the same Carolingian line of kings, traveled by himself to Jerusalem to seek fame and fortune, or traveled with a separate retinue of French or Flemish knights to the Holy Land. 

However he came to Jerusalem, like his comrades, he was not overly pious or religious for that matter, and had heard of the treasures of the Jews and the vast quantities of gold hidden in Jerusalem still – so he was eager to join in the quest for treasure.
            Through royal contacts and influence, the band of nine good men were given free reign by the French king of Jerusalem to excavate beneath the Temple Mount.  That the Templars were successful early on in their digs was apparent because gold was found and divided up amongst the brotherhood consortium, with tithes to king, important political contacts, and Church duly paid.

 Rowland paid no attention to the old scrolls, tablets, and manuscripts taken by Hugues de Payens from underground tunnels and vaults he and others uncovered, only paying attention to chests filled with religious icons, some of which were pure gold.  By the seventh year of the excavation, Rowland’s drinking, gambling, and whoring way of life became more excessive, habits frowned on by local Muslims and Jews – but not by the Christian brothel owners and tavern keepers.

                When not “working,” not manual labor mind you but supervising legions of servants and laborers to do the heavy lifting, he played cards and learned a war game we call today chess, actually invented in India and transported to the Middle East by Arab merchants.  He also learned how to speak fairly good Arabic and Hebrew, the better for conversing with women who plied their trade in brothels and on the streets.  It was also in the seventh year of his debauchery in Jerusalem that he met a young man who was to have a profound impact on his life, as a matter of fact, the most profound impact until meeting the Spanish Basque in Toledo centuries later. 

His name was Kali bin Saleh but everyone called him by his nickname “Kyoto,” after a town one of his famous ancestors had visited in Nippon many years before.  Kyoto’s family was well known as a group of scholars, artists, sculptors, mathematicians, and philosophers, and Kyoto himself had been educated by the best professors in Jerusalem.  His grandfather had moved westward from old Scythia, a region we know today which includes the country of Uzbekistan, Kyoto’s ancestral homeland. 

That Kyoto was allowed inside the Temple Mount grounds was a rarity in of itself since, although he spoke fluently and could read French, Hebrew, and old Aramaic, he was in fact not Jew or Christian but Muslim – but his knowledge of the Old Testament and the Koran was needed by the Templars because more and more manuscripts and artifacts were being found in the diggings which were written in ancient dialects. 

Kyoto also had an artistic side – he was a remarkably gifted sculptor and stonemason, able to carve from hard granite or soft limestone life-like busts of people in a very short time.  Another oddity was that his mother’s side of the family had been descendants of the tribe of Solomon and his father was born in Phoenicia before moving the family to Jerusalem, a city heavily influenced by this culture of sea-going men.

                Kyoto was a devote Muslim and prayed five times a day, facing Mecca each time.  He believed that all men were equal and had a right to pray to their own god, but that Allah was the one true God.  He felt Jesus Christ was a prophet to be held in high esteem but was a man of the Earth like Muhammad, the great Prophet of Islam.  And he felt that all were children of Abraham, all were descendants of Noah and Adam so should not be butchering each other over the ownership of the sacred city of Jerusalem, which he felt was a supreme sacrilege committed by all sides during the First Crusade. 

He didn’t drink or smoke and had no vices to speak of, and was much younger than Rowland.  He was a hard worker and read for long hours into the night the ancient written works uncovered by the Templars by candlelight.  Rowland took an instant liking to the lad and would accompany Kyoto down into the maze of shafts dug beneath the Temple Mount, and even lend a hand from time to time with pick and shovel to himself dig in the vast labyrinth of passageways.

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                It was on one such occasion, in late 1126 during the seventh year of the Templar dig, that Rowland swung his pick against a dimly lit catacomb wall and discovered he had hit a hallow space inside the wall.  Only he and Kyoto were present then and by the light of a lantern, they broke away loose wall to discover a small vault, stinking of age-rot and obviously sealed long ago. 

It contained a half dozen sealed jars of terracotta twenty-inches high which later revealed scrolls of manuscripts, of what appeared to be a busted up wooden box of some sort, and underneath the box was a heavy stone cup about four inches wide and seven inches in height, looking like an apothecary’s mortar; and like a pestle also found next to it, both objects were heavily covered in aged algae so had to be thoroughly cleaned to reveal the malachite-green heavy mineral beneath. 

The mortar and pestle appeared to have very thin veins of yellowish metal winding through them.  The wooden slats from the box wreckage were about forty-inches long and two-feet wide, and looked to be of an acacia and shittim wood type.  

Also in the pile of wood were four gold rings and two small sculptured cherubim, also made of gold, with wings swept forward.  As Kyoto inspected more closely the discovery, he saw embedded in the wood hieroglyphic and pagan symbols of Mithraic origin, the Eye of Horus and the ankh, cuneiform characters, and characters he recognized from the Orient – his great-grandfather had traveled there and back and wrote of the strange lands we today call China and Japan.

                Even before Rowland pried open the sealed jars, he could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand up and chills run down his spine – but upon quick inspection of the manuscripts’ Hebrew text, he knew that what he and Kyoto had stumbled on completely by accident were the broken remains of the Ark of the Covenant!

The manuscripts, according to Kyoto, told a remarkable, unbelievable story, which he began reading to Rowland by lantern light.  The texts were copied from a larger body of work called the Ha’Qabala or Kabbalah, of ancient Jewish traditional knowledge going back thousands of years, even before the time of Abraham, all the way back to Noah. 

The Ark had finally come to rest under the Temple Mount after traveling from Pisgah, Jordan where Jeremiah had hidden it from the Babylonians during one of their raids.  The Tablets of the Commandments had been taken to Ethiopia, stolen by Sheba’s son Menyelek, who King Solomon favored thinking it was his own son but who in fact was the son of the architect and skilled stonemason who built Solomon’s Temple, the Phoenician Hiram Abiff, who had also slept with the whore Sheba. 

                Word had reached the priests of Solomon’s Temple beforehand that Menyelek intended to steal the Ark of the Covenant and take it to Ethiopia so they built a fake Ark, but by mistake, placed the real tablets, the second set of Moses’ tablets (the original set having been destroyed by Moses in anger) of the Ten Commandments inside, accompanied with the Rod of Aaron. 

So when Menyelek stole the fake Ark and took it to Ethiopia, the priests were horrified of their mistake and sent soldiers to find the tablets but they have never been found to this day.  But the Jewish priests of the Temple still had the real Ark of the Covenant and the most important relic mentioned in the Old Testament – the Jar of Manna. 

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The Prophet Moses made a Covenant with God not to let men use any longer the power of the Jar since it held the secret of the Elixir of Life, but nor could he destroy it because it had been handed down from the time of Adam and before that Brazatlan and so was most sacred.  Moses feared that if men could achieve immortality from drinking of the elixir then they would lose their belief in a Higher Being, and so descend into pagan depravity and all would be chaos in the world once again.

                And who knew, the Jar of Manna may one day be needed again because it had powers of regenerative nourishment, feeding the Israelites during their Exodus from Egypt.  God had provided them with this “manna,” a miraculous food and heavenly bread, because they were the chosen people.  The Kabbalah texts also said that when Abraham arrived in Canaan from Mesopotamia, he brought with him a uniquely inscribed stone tablet of ideograms with conceptual symbols that could not be literally translated into words, and were in fact of Indian and Chinese origin. 

This cipher tablet was originally produced by an ancient civilization that fell beneath the sea but some lucky few had survived, able to spread modern civilization throughout Asia.  It was handed down since the days of Noah from one generation to the next; Noah had taken this tablet with him on the ark he built before the Great Flood.

 It was finally inherited by King Solomon handed down from his father King David.  The philosophical stone cipher became known as the Ha’Qabala and it was said that whoever possessed the stone cipher also possessed the knowledge to extend life and live for many generations.

                Kabbalah became an ancient aspect of Jewish mysticism dealing with the nature of divinity, immortality, the creation of mankind, and the human soul; the principle root of Kabbalistic tradition is a belief in the divinity of the Torah – the first five books of the Old Testament.  It is said that by studying the Torah, one can unlock the secrets of creation. 

One of the texts found by Rowland and read by Kyoto said that the “manna” from the Jar, besides providing life-giving nourishment, that when mixed with a white powder made from gold could extend life indefinitely; it was this elixir made from manna and the white powder that had been ingested by the ancient Biblical characters beginning with Adam and ending with Moses – so this was why they had lived so much longer than mere mortal men. 

Egyptian alchemists since the era of the man-god Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth) had searched in vain for the white powder and the stone jar to make the elixir, to drink from it, to be free of disease and live for centuries – but not finding the secrets, chose to build the great pyramids and temples instead to achieve a symbolic immortality. 

                The preparation of the white powder would have remained lost, possibly forever, had it not been for Rowland’s discovery and the decipherment of the codes for mixing the powder with the Jar’s manna; lost forever if it had not been for Kyoto’s flair with archaic languages. 

But to decipher the unknown ideograms inlaid in the wooden remnants of the Ark (ideograms purposefully left off of the forgery stolen by Menyelek), which was the code for preparing the powder and elixir, to accomplish this feat Rowland and Kyoto would need to steal away quietly and secretly into the night, that very night of discovery, and begin the long journey eastward to the native land of Kyoto’s ancestors, and then all the way to China. 

They thought they took with them everything they found, but in their haste to leave Jerusalem they had left behind by mistake one of the manuscript texts which the Templar Order’s commander, Hugues de Payens, came into possession of, and upon reading its translation, immediately ordered a warrant of apprehension and execution of both Rowland and Kyoto, and delivery to him personally those sacred artifacts they had stolen. 

Speculation and rumors spread quickly through the Temple and then the city about some ancient text found in a subterranean vault under the Mount from the time of King Solomon’s Temple, a temple destroyed centuries before, describing the philosopher’s stone cipher and a mysterious elixir of life that could be made from gold, granting immortality to its drinker – and so from that day forward the Philosopher’s Stone became embedded in Western folklore; the alchemists quest for gold and immortality became an obsession; and Rowland von Dahlgrün was soon to become the last Prophet of Brazatlan and only one still living to this very day.

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                And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah that is over against Jericho……the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord.  And He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day.  And Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.  Old Testament Deuteronomy 34:1-7

               

                Why Rowland decided in a blink of an eye to abandon the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of King Solomon’s Temple, and in so doing break his vows, he could not explain – only that he felt a compelling force so irresistible that he could not control his actions and could only think of seeking out the answers to the mysteries he and Kyoto had stumbled upon by accident.

That young Kyoto decided to leave friend and family so quickly was actually not such a strange occurrence – he was after all a high strung, gifted artist and intellect, and as was the spirit of the era, young Muslims saw in simple things the calling of a higher force to seek truth through some ordeal or quest. 

And since he had no doubt whatsoever that the materials Rowland and he had found were authentic, no calling could be higher than to seek a mystery involving the revered Prophet Moses, since both the Jewish and Muslim faiths, as did Christianity, shared the same common roots of the Prophet Abraham, and produced the Prophets Jesus and Muhammad – and did not all great prophets deserve the esteemed suffix of respect PBUH (Peace Be Unto him)? 

He knew before Rowland that the inner force the Knight Templar had felt was the hand of God pushing him onward, and he knew too that for some reason, this young Prussian had been selected by God to find the secret of the elixir and Jar, and like Moses, protect and keep its mystery secret from mankind.  And he felt as well that he, Kyoto, had been chosen personally by Allah to help this man, Christian and defiler of the only true faith that he was, to discover the secrets of the Jar of Manna.

                In gathering their belongings together and departing Jerusalem so quickly, they found as the city gradually disappeared from view that they had very little in the way of supplies or gold with which to buy food and necessities – they took with them the texts they had found (save the one accidentally left behind), the broken pieces of the Ark of the Covenant, the mortar and pestle, one riding horse apiece, and two pack horses they intended to trade for camels later on. 

If Hugues de Payens had found gold in the seven years of digging until Rowland decided to depart the scene, the young knight certainly had not seen much of it and was getting paid a small stipend of gold specie to live on (and party on) each month – so he had no savings. 

Rowland found out years later that after he had fled Jerusalem with Kyoto, towards the end of the Temple Mount excavation by the Templars, that Hugues de Payens found the Egyptian Coptic codex which he claimed linked his bloodline (and by extension, most of the nobility of France for the last thousand years, including Charlemagne, his nephew Roland, and even he himself) to the offspring of Jesus and Mary Magdalene - their only child, their daughter Sarah. 

Kyoto’s Arab family was large, and although his father was a scholar, what money he earned was needed to support the large family, including extended relatives so as both men fled Jerusalem, they had very little to live on.  As far as the route needed to be taken to reach the Orient was concerned, that was no mystery – the Silk Road had been used for many centuries and furthermore, it was the route taken by Kyoto’s grandfather to Jerusalem when he left the homeland in Central Asia three generations previously.  He was eager to return to his family’s roots and see the land he had heard so much about.

                Kyoto’s planned route was to head first on direct line to Baghdad and then Tehran, then zigzag through the Scythian “Land of Stans” to shake any pursuers – Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, upon finally arriving in Uzbekistan, where Kyoto’s family roots lay in the village of Barun-Khiva.  The trip to Uzbekistan would take some months (the trip from Jerusalem all the way to China, and then back west to the city of Toledo, Spain would in fact take many years). 

In Uzbekistan, Kyoto would consult with his distant cousins and uncles to learn more about the next leg of the journey into China, since traveling the Silk Road required much knowledge of the safest routes – and Kyoto wasn’t quite sure yet what they were looking for – although the manuscripts uncovered by Rowland did provide some clues. 

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But as the two adventurers passed into Lebanon, Kyoto insisted that they make a brief detour to a small village on the plains of Moab, which judging from the map diagram on one of the manuscripts appeared to be located in a valley near Mount Nebo, sometimes referred to as Pisgah. 

The underlying text said this was the holiest site in all the land and that a prophet lay buried in a tomb there, described as “the great deliverer of water Mosheh.”  This name appeared nowhere else in any of the scrolls discovered by Rowland, yet Kyoto was convinced that this man and his tomb was somehow of paramount importance to their undertaking.

                And so Kyoto and Rowland arrived in the valley of the tomb at dusk, with the twilight sky brilliant in red, purple, blue, and yellow and the temperature unseasonably cool.  The spot marked by the map was completely still, not even enough of a breeze to flutter the leaves of the eucalyptus trees standing guard about the place.  Now it was Kyoto who felt something, felt a presence so palpable that his skin tingled and his heart thumped loudly in his ears, and despite the cool chill in the air, he began perspiring. 

The westward-facing entrance of the tomb, about a twelve foot square, had been overgrown by vegetation but nonetheless, the diagram showed the exact location so the two men set about prying open the heavy stone slab guarding the tomb, which lie recessed in the ground – and there were no markings of any kind on the stone slab. 

And as the Sun set directly in line with the tomb’s entrance, as the large, flat stone was removed it permitted the remaining sun’s rays to strike the contents and at once the room fell ablaze – and as both men stepped in, they looked in wonderment at a sarcophagus raised on a pedestal, surrounded on three sides stacked four deep from floor to ceiling of solid gold ingots with the larger ones – called talents – weighing almost sixty pounds each!

Both men staggered then fell to their knees realizing what they had found – this was the tomb of Moses, whose Egyptian name had been Mosheh, and this gold was meant for whoever found the sacred manuscripts under King Solomon’s Temple and took up the quest to protect the Jar of Manna.  The symbols on either side of the sarcophagus were the same as those found on parts of the wooden planks still remaining intact from the Ark of the Covenant, but these were easier to read since they were of a larger size.

                Kyoto at once searched for wood to build a fire, and made torches to give light to the room as he set forth transcribing by hand these symbols on vellum, then they resealed this holy sepulcher – the sarcophagus of the Prophet Moses had not been opened for to do so would have been the utmost sacrilege.  Only a ton’s weight of gold ingots was removed from the tomb (much more remained) and buried in a pit dug some yards away for safekeeping, thus preventing the need to disturb the tomb again.  

The tomb was resealed with the large slab.  Other smaller ingots of gold were taken for financing the duo’s adventure to the Orient but owing to the heavy weight of gold, they were limited by what the horses could carry (just a cubic foot of pure gold weighs over half a ton). 

                As preparations got under way to re-start the long journey the next morning, Kyoto removed charcoal from the fire and darkened Rowland’s light hair, skin, and beard and for further anonymity both men adorned themselves in long flowing garments which engulfed their heads in long hoods. 

As the journey progressed month after month, then year after year, both men’s hair and beards grew long and a more permanent black dye was used on Rowland’s hair; his skin darkened naturally by the desert sun – and Kyoto looked every part the Arab Bedouin, with large hooked nose, long drooping mustache and beard, bushy eyebrows, eyes black as coal, and all his features covered with a long hooded robe. 

Kyoto, skilled as artist, scientist, and craftsman, wrote his personal observations down inside the log book he kept, and as he penned his stories each night sitting by the fire, Rowland listened to Kyoto’s telling of the events of the day and added his own detailed observations and perspectives.  Kyoto and Rowland also swapped stories with merchants, fellow travelers, and Christian and Muslim pilgrims they met along their journey, and Kyoto’s log became the source of many stories retold again and again in the West for subsequent centuries – and mistakenly attributed to other men who claimed dishonestly they were protagonists in the adventures of Kyoto and Rowland.

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                The Silk Road had taken Kyoto and Rowland far eastward by 1128, the year Hugues de Payens stopped the excavation under Solomon’s Temple and returned to Troyes, France with the other Templar knights – the Templar Order had still not grown to the hundreds of noble members it would have during the next fifty years but still, loyal followers were looking for the traitor Rowland.  The two travelers were nearing an oasis next to the generational home of Kyoto, a city on the border with Turkmenistan and located in Uzbekistan, today called Barun-Khiva. 

It had been a difficult trip since although they had taken what should have been enough gold with them from Jordan for the entire journey east and back, they had been robbed near Baghdad by bandits and some of their gold stolen, but nothing from the Temple vault find i.e. the scrolls or heaven forbid the Jar. Although not a literate and educated man like Kyoto, it was Rowland’s superb skill with weapons which beat away a dozen enemies who fled after many had been slain by his terribly swift two-handed sword. 

                So to survive the trip, Kyoto used his native entrepreneurial instincts to barter his written accounts – in Arabic, Hebrew, and French – of the duo’s journey, with merchants along the Silk Road, or in villages along the way, that became popular adventure stories for men to talk about in the tea houses and taverns. 

But Kyoto was intelligent enough to change names and events from total fact lest someone hot on their trail use these travel accounts to find them.  Occasionally, and with much conscience searching, he would transcribe a small portion of one of the Temple scrolls.  Then taking great care not to include anything sacrilegious and modifying the actual text, he would sell the final work which sold at a premium price. 

At first Rowland had opposed this approach but poverty and hunger have a way of making any man humble so he allowed Kyoto to proceed – and as time passed, he had less resistance to this method of bartering for food and coin.  Kyoto’s works became embedded in the folklore of the Silk Road during the Middle Ages and his stories were retold and rewritten many times between Asia and Europe for many decades thereafter.

                Upon arriving in Baruna-Khiva, Kyoto was surprised to learn that his extended family, now four generations removed, had been expecting his arrival and that of the Templar Knight – word had reached them that a price had been placed on their heads by the Christians in charge of Jerusalem for reasons not entirely clear to Kyoto’s family. 

And since the Christian infidels were after Kyoto and Rowland, they would of course be protected in the land of Islam from bandits and bounty hunters since Muslim law required refuge always be given to members of the same tribe, no matter what.  By now, except for his blue eyes, Rowland could have passed for an Arab since this skin was dark brown and his hair and beard dyed black, and he spoke excellent Arabic.  Kyoto had also taught him to read and write in various languages, including Rowland’s own native Old French so the knight was no longer an illiterate nobleman. 

Rowland, seeing Kyoto pen his own thoughts in a logbook, began about this time writing down his thoughts well, about his ancestor Roland, the hero of Roncesvalles and trusted knight and nephew of Charlemagne.  Like the works of Kyoto, Rowland’s stories would also make their way back to Europe and become part of its literary heritage. 

                After rest and recuperation the duo next set out again on their great trek to travel even further eastward – to India, Sumatra, Ceylon, Siam, Tibet, Burma, Nepal, and finally China and Japan over the next few years, and along the way not only did Rowland become a skilled writer but also a skilled stone carver and sculptor, especially enjoying depicting his friend Kyoto in small limestone carvings showing the Muslim at prayer. 

Both men had visited Egypt and seen the pyramids at Giza, thinking that nothing built by man could be more spectacular, yet in new land after new land in the east they saw amazing structures as well as pyramids which they were told were built thousands of years previously, some concurrent with or even before the Egyptian pyramids, but most now reduced to piles of rubble shaped like mounds.

                But no ruins were more spectacular than the ones Kyoto and Rowland saw as they reached their final destination of Xi’an, the ancient capital in the north of China, where there are literally hundreds of earthen pyramidal mounds. 

Kyoto and Rowland, with the help of the learned Scythians of Barun-Khiva and their ancient archives, and after conversations with many wise men, priests, and shamans during their travels throughout southeast Asia, learned that the sketches of the ideograms showed them by Kyoto, those taken from the wooden slats of the Ark of the Covenant and those ideograms taken from the tomb of Moses, had actually originated in Northern China from the ancestors of the Hsiens millennia before. 

So it was in Xi’an, the secret imperial city, where the duo began to unravel the mystery of the elixir and how the men of the East had prepared this brew at the dawn of the Biblical age of Adam.  The conditions under which the elixir was made and imbibed by the initiate were quite rigorous – including forty days and forty nights of fasting to rid the body of toxins, bathing twice a day, shaving of body hair from head to toe, celibacy, and complete isolation in a peaceful place of contemplation without interference from another human being. 

The initiate would himself become an alchemist by necessity, and after taking of the elixir, he would be a chosen one, a prophet like in the biblical days of old whose job it was to guard the secret of the elixir and only allow the most worthy to take of it.

                The initiate worked during the forty days creating his workshop, starting with a platform made of packed, hard earth.  The square platform had three tiers of dimensions – the first tier was one-foot-two-inches high by five-feet-five-inches wide, the second one-foot high by four-feet-five-inches wide, and the third eight-inches high by three-feet-five-inches wide. 

A warrior’s blooded sword was to be implanted with its hilt extending above the top tier (reminiscent of Arthur’s sword Excalibur) while under the platform, two pounds of reddish-hued cinnabar were buried (heating cinnabar produces mercury); then under each successive tier, another quantity of gold was placed.  A small blast furnace was needed to heat the gold, which melts at 1,946° Fahrenheit, in order to distill the powder from the gold. 

Upon the platform itself was placed an oven whose purpose was to hold the reaction vessel i.e. the Jar of Manna, completely cleaned with vinegar so as not to contain any self-generating “manna” deposit – this was important because the white powder had to be cooked and distilled first from the gold which was leached out by the heated cinnabar into the Jar, and then the Jar was left to sit for forty days until the “manna” had grown back and reacted with the powder to produce the elixir – a thick, dark-brown syrupy-like fluid of very bitter metallic flavor. 

A very minute amount of elixir, less than a gram, could cure any disease, but if the entire six-ounce potion filling the Jar of elixir was ingested at one go, then over a period of another forty days a person would appear years younger, and age very slowly over fifteen normal life spans.

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                After spending years in China, the duo knew they had learned everything they could about the preparation of the white powder and the elixir and decided to return to Jordan, both men knowing exactly what now had to be done.   So ten years after departing the Holy Land, in 1136 Kyoto and Rowland returned to the sacred site – the tomb of Moses in Jordan. 

They traveled in disguise and they traveled poor, since finding interested buyers for the stories of adventure written by the duo was becoming more and more difficult – now there seemed to be innumerable accounts of Europeans traveling eastward in quest of riches, truth, and religious purity.  Upon arriving in the valley of Moab they dug up the gold they buried years previously and once again removed the stone slab blocking the entrance of Moses’ tomb. 

Although they had first thought reentering the tomb would not be required again, they decided that they would leave in Moses’ tomb the five scroll texts they had found in the vault in Jerusalem carried with them all the way to Asia, along with the wooden remnants of the Ark itself they had also carried with them for the past ten years. 

But the journals, the logbooks belonging to Kyoto and Rowland, wherein they had copied everything found in the texts, as well as the formula for the elixir preparation and ritual of bodily purification required to drink of the elixir, they kept with them in their personal belongings. 

                Also not placed in Moses’ tomb was the Jar of Manna and pestle of course.  If someday the tomb was discovered, and provided the code for making the elixir could be deciphered, without the Jar the information would be worthless. 

But by keeping the Jar, upon Kyoto’s insistence (“You are the chosen one,” he affirmed time and again to Rowland) the Knight Templar knew that no other man should be permitted to drink of the elixir and think himself a god before other men – this was a blasphemous act that would shake to its roots the beliefs of millions of followers of the three dominant religions of the Holy Land – Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism, whose  followers all believed in a Higher Power; therefore imbibing the elixir was a dreadful sin. 

Humankind needed to believe in something after all, and the dirt-poor trodden-down peasant masses had to aspire to a paradise up above, to a land of milk and honey where life was good and the harshness of life on Earth would be rewarded for the true and faithful believers.

But at the same time, both Kyoto and Rowland knew that to destroy the Jar of Manna by hammering it into little pieces, this Holy Vessel made of Martian meteorite handed down from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses, would be an unthinkable act of heresy and sin of sins – since this one icon represented the hopes and aspirations of us all since the beginning of man on Earth, since the holy spark of life was first born, regardless of religious belief or country of birth. 

So here was the paradox of paradoxes; both men knew that the Prophet Rowland would have to drink the elixir in order to protect the Jar and keep it by his side until he died, but in so doing would cause himself to be condemned to eternal damnation in hell for his breaking of the Holy Covenant (the one Abraham and Moses both made) with God.

                And so it began by the tomb of Moses.  Rowland started his fast as part of the initiate ritual in preparation for drinking of the elixir, including the necessary bathing and shaving of the body – celibacy was not a problem since there were no women anywhere nearby and neither he nor Kyoto were homosexuals. 

Quite the contrary, over Rowland’s very long lifetime he would sire many children from many women, some of them his wives, and some of his bloodline would reach the shores of a new land called America centuries later.  And his curse was that he would have to outlive all those he loved. 

Kyoto would eventually marry a Spanish gypsy and sire sixteen children.  But now both he and Kyoto were focused on the work before them and that meant setting up the alchemic workshop – building the platform, implanting the Templar sword into the platform, preparing the cinnabar they brought with them all the way from China, building a furnace to extract from the gold the white powder, and lastly, mixing with pestle the powder and manna inside the Jar to produce the elixir and then baking the concoction in the oven. 

                To produce the necessary amount of powder to make a full potion of elixir, much more gold was needed than first thought, particularly if the gold was not pure and contained silver or copper alloys – Kyoto estimated the weight of the ingots they raided from Moses’ tomb to be in the neighborhood of 200 talents of gold or about six tons.  It would take fully a third of that total to make but one six-ounce potion of elixir.  The measurement of gold in Jerusalem was called the gold shekel, which weighed a half-ounce, fifty shekels to a maneh, and thirty-seven manehs to a talent. 

It struck Kyoto that the word “maneh” had been derived from the Old Testament stories of Ezekiel, he of the mystery of the heavenly bread called “manna;” Kyoto had never made the connection until now between the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah, and how the gold, the Jar, and the staff of life had been in plain sight for everyone to read about for centuries if they but read the good books.

                After its initial preparation, the elixir then had to sit for forty days to ferment before Sir Rowland von Dahlgrün could drink it from the Jar, and so he did, needing another forty days to recover from the side-effects of metallic poisoning, terrible skin rash and hives, dizziness, diarrhea, and loss of appetite – so all in all, just as Moses’ life was divided into three parts of forty-year intervals, the time elapsed from the initiate ritual until the side effects of the elixir had worn off after its consumption were three parts of forty days each. 

                And as he lay recovering under the shade of the eucalyptus trees, the very gaunt Knight Templar swore his oath to Moses and the Lord God, and Kyoto heard him and trembled since he knew that his friend Rowland was now a holy man, a great Prophet himself and near-immortal, and Rowland made his promise to God that he would protect the Jar of Manna with his life from those who would use its secret for evil purposes. 

Although technically feasible, Rowland doubted drinking another potion would be repeated – the physical effects might be deadly and vast quantity of gold needed may never be attainable again.  Perhaps someday the Jar would no longer be powerful unto itself, and mankind would find other means to achieve immortality without acquiring infinite wealth.  

Only then could he close his eyes and sleep the blissful sleep of eternity, but only after putting the holy icon that was the Jar of Manna in a place for safekeeping far from old Europe, Asia, Scythia, and the Holy Land.  This then was his Covenant with the Lord, in honor of the Prophets Abraham and Moses, and Rowland believed that if he kept his word, his terrible sin of drinking the elixir would be forgiven and he too could enter a heavenly paradise.

               

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Meanwhile, the Order of the Templars was gaining great power throughout the Holy Land and Europe, and rumor had it they had discovered unimaginable treasures under the Temple Mount, so much so that they were as powerful as Church and monarchy – and so it was becoming more and more difficult for Kyoto and Rowland to hide because even though ten years had passed since Hugues de Payens issued his command to apprehend the duo, they were still very much wanted men. 

It was decided by the adventurers, therefore, that they would leave the Holy Land and travel incognito to the Christian city of Toledo, Spain which had a very large Muslim population, having been ruled for four hundred years by Islamic clerics, and a large Jewish population who were scientists and learned men of the community that taught the mysteries of the Kabbalah.  With talk of a Second Crusade gaining momentum, Toledo was the perfect place to hide since it was a no man’s land between East and West. 

Now leaving even more gold buried in the pit they had dug outside the tomb of Moses, copious amounts in fact, they replaced the stone slab for the last time and set out with gold ingots, their journals, and the Jar of Manna in their baggage, traveled overland through Egypt and to the port of Alexandria, then journeyed by ship to Tripoli and old Carthage, then to Algiers, onward to Ceuta, across the Straits of Gibraltar to mainland Spain, and horseback to Granada – the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, and finally Toledo. 

Throughout the entire journey, the presence of the Templar Empire was strikingly apparent – castles and fortresses everywhere were flying the red patte cross on white background flag, which had become their symbol, so much care was taken by Kyoto and Rowland to disguise themselves.

                Upon reaching Toledo and settling in, Rowland von Dahlgrün, Prussian nobleman and ex-Templar knight, assumed the identity of a journeyman stonemason called Rolando, and Kali bin Saleh aka Kyoto assumed a Roman name and called himself henceforth Flegetanis.  As the years passed, the Muslim with the Roman name became a respected mullah of Toledo, married, had many children, and prospered. 

His infidel friend Rolando came and went over the many years, but always when staying in Toledo seeking lodging at the home of Kyoto, and as time passed and Kyoto died a natural death at eighty-five years of age, the still young-looking Rolando had a harder and harder time saying he knew the old mullah so changed his story to knowing his sons, then his grandsons, and so forth until their connection all but disappeared over many decades. 

Kyoto in his older years could not but fondly reminisce with anyone who cared to listen about the greatest adventure of his life together with a Templar knight – his brother the Prophet – and about their quest to find the secret of the Elixir of Life in the far Orient.  The stories were dismissed as babble from a senile old man. 

He still had his many journals, specially coded by him to be sure, but still containing fascinating stories about a holy vessel able to grant immunity from disease and assure long life for the worthiest of noble men – but many had taken to writing this very old man off as a crank and teller of tall stories having little factual basis.

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                An illiterate Bavarian knight by the name of Wolfram von Eschenbach in the year 1200 heard of these stories and liked them, having reached twenty years of age by the time Kyoto departed this Earth, and since he could not write, had to dictate everything to a scribe and this work became the epic German tale called Parzifal – based on the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table.  Wolfram attributed as his source for Parzifal and indeed the origin of the legend of the Holy Grail, facts drawn from accounts written down by two people – a person named Kyoto and one named Flegetanis – who unbeknownst to Wolfram were actually one and the same person. 

This then formed the basis for the legend and myth of a Holy Grail; yet during the 1200-year interval between the death of Jesus on the Cross and Wolfram’s Parzifal there had never been mention of a Holy Grail by anyone – not a single person.  Mention of a Holy Grail never appears in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, or the Torah, but the Jar of Manna appears in all Biblical literature.  The myth of the Holy Grail actually grew up as a result of the failed Crusades of the Middle Ages.

Rolando was with Kyoto on his deathbed as he took his last breath, and true to his promise to his dear Muslim friend, he bathed Kyoto’s body and wrapped it in a fine Egyptian linen shroud for burial.  Following Muslim tradition, the body of a deceased person must be prepared for burial, washed, and shrouded, and a funeral prayer must be offered him, then he should be buried; this process is a collective obligation of family called fard kifayah.

Kyoto’s remains were disturbed a decade after his burial by Christian grave robbers in Toledo who had heard that Kyoto as a young man had worked side by side the Templars excavating under Solomon’s Temple, and had learned of great and magical secrets, and the whereabouts of great gold supplies. 

                The robbers found in the tomb a few of the travel journals Kyoto had insisted be buried with him, and these manuscripts would circulate throughout Europe for many years, serving as the basis for legends and folklore surrounding a quest he made as a young man along with his companion, a brave and noble Christian outlaw.  The violators of the gravesite also removed from Kyoto’s decayed body his burial shroud which had the faint impression of his physical appearance somehow embedded into it, and later sold the shroud as a hoax, saying it was the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. 

Kyoto’s burial shroud today resides in Turin, Italy and Rolando, not having a photographic keepsake of his own, has visited there many times to see the faint outlines of his dear friend who died so many centuries before.  As a tribute to this dear friend, and in the very same likeness as those features shown embedded in the shroud, Rolando made a small stone carving of Kyoto in his familiar Muslim praying position with hooded robe, and that carving hangs today on the north exterior wall of a small Jesuit chapel, high on a university hill top in the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

                Rolando grew restless in Toledo so returned to the profession he had grown to love, that of an anonymous noble knight defending the Christian faith.   He returned to Jerusalem to participate in all remaining Crusades thereafter as a chronicler of events until the fall of Acre in 1291.  He refused to kill the Saracen however, and would only watch the slaughter from afar, and help the stricken on both sides the best he could. 

As time passed, the warrant of apprehension for Rolando by the Templar Order was forgotten, particularly after 1312 when the Order was itself dissolved by the Pope and quite naturally too because everyone just assumed that Rolando was long dead anyway since he would have to be over 200 years old by then – rather than a young man of forty years old which is what he appeared. 

Rolando watched with amazement as the Templar Order disbanded while other mysterious orders subsumed it, and observed as well how he and Kyoto’s exploits had grown into the saga of the Holy Grail Romances.  These Romances were fully embraced by the Catholic Church because the Crusades on the whole were a failure; believers had lost faith and the Church came under intense pressure to explain why their promise of “God Wills It” had failed.  The legend of the Holy Grail, the vessel that once held the blood of Christ, only strengthened over the centuries and entered into Western folklore up until present day.

The Grail Romances were welcomed by the Church so they embraced them.  But alas, there has never been a Holy Grail – but rather a Jar of Manna that really does exist.   The Holy Grail is nothing more than a confabulation of myth and legend!

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As the decades and centuries passed, Rolando moved frequently from place to place and made a respectable living as a craftsman, a highly skilled stonemason.  And he changed his name from Rolando, to Rowan, to Rollo and back again to Rolando to avoid problems. Finding work was not difficult as it was the age of the great cathedrals, chapels, and palaces being built all over old Europe.  He could not remain in Toledo long, nor any place else for that matter, as there were those who noticed he did not age, and accusations of witchcraft against him were always a possibility. 

But Toledo was home, so he always returned there.  Rolando was injured on the job frequently.  There were broken bones, cuts, and bruises galore, but he always healed quickly and was never ill from disease.  But he wasn’t immortal, a sword or axe could still end his life if not careful.

                Rolando found himself in Toledo once again during the turbulent times of the early-sixteenth-century when Charles de Bourbon and his cousin King Francis I were squabbling over gold and decided to invade Italy.  Turning to another wealthy relative in Spain when he needed additional funding by the name of Prince Charles (of the Hapsburg House who became Holy Roman Emperor), Bourbon also got military support when for various reasons Spain decided to invade France to teach King Francis a lesson. 

It was the year 1523, the year Rolando and Ignatius Loyola met for the first time in Toledo on a dusty bridge facing the main gate to the fascinating city - the Puerta de Bisagra.  With Loyola was his bodyguard and protector, the greatest swordsman in Europe at the time, Don Jorge Magda Artes. 

But it was no means the last year that Rolando witnessed inane warfare between the monarchies of old Europe, all of which were interrelated by blood and marriage to one another, and who used the resources of the country and the lives of their peasant armies to fulfill personal greed or the need to achieve dominion over rivals. 

The quest of the ruling class appeared to be focused on leaving behind a personal legacy, including many children, immortalizing themselves for history books, a symbolic immortality they craved so brazenly that they would stop at nothing to achieve it. 

So century after century many a good man died and the victors wrote of events of history one way, and the vanquished wrote of it another way, until all written accounts of history had turned to shit and no one knew anymore what was truth and what was lie.

Rolando became life-long friends with the Basque ex-soldier and nobleman Loyola and recognized in him a kindred spirit.  He was the first person since the death of Kyoto that he confided in, and told him the story of the Temple Mount and Jar of Manna.  His new friend died thirty-three years later in Rome and was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as St. Ignatius Loyola in 1622. 

It was Loyola who founded the order of the Jesuits called the Society of Jesus.  It was the Jesuits who accompanied Columbus on his voyages and all the voyages by conquistadores seeking gold and precious gems in the New World during the Age of Discovery - and they wrote everything down, documenting in detail everything they saw and heard. 

During the Age of Discovery there were many legends about cities made of gold.  Francisco de Orellano heard from Portuguese sailors about the Seven Cities of Cibola, whose legend had originated strangely enough at the time of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula during the 8th Century.  It told of how seven Christian bishops traveled from Ireland to a mythical land across the Atlantic called Hy-Brasil and each bishop founded a city in a remote region where an immense river flowed called Amazon.

It is from Jesuit accounts we know about Cortés, de Soto, Pizarro, Ponce de León, de Orellana, and the psychotic maniac Aguirre, men of humble origin from the hardscrabble inhospitable land of Extremadura we call conquistadores.  Gold drove them mad.  They searched for the fabled city of gold El Dorado, but it was the Seven Cities of Cibola that always intrigued Duke Mitchum because it was outside the mold of Aztecs, Mayan, and Inca lore. 

The Seven Cities were reputedly located in Mexico, but Jesuit missionaries accompanying Orellana said that after descending the eastern Andean Mountain range the band came across a vast flat plain, displaying what appeared to be seven large hills which had the appearance of pyramids but were covered in vines and green vegetation in the vast Amazon region. 

Gold was found in abundance in other Latin American countries, but neither Orellana nor any other conquistador ever found quantities of gold or vast city complexes along the Brazilian Amazon River, although rumor persisted about a strange race of people who lived along its banks millennia ago.  Legend had it they came from very far away, from a homeland that had turned white and became too cold for survival, and the last remaining survivors, the ancient shamans, still spoke about them around the fires and celebrated their exploits generation after generation.  Orellana never made it back to Spain.  He died and was buried in Brazil.

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It was around 1750 the old knight Rolando aka Rowland von Dahlgrün, looking more like a man of fifty years of age rather than a man over 650 years old, booked passage on a sailing ship from Leiden, Holland captained by the skillful navigator and Frenchman Jean-Maurice Tamisier and crossed the Atlantic to join one of the branches of his rather large family tree – the Dahlgrens of Maryland, the “Americanized” name of this particular branch who had been aboard the Mayflower.  It seemed fitting that he should change his name again, so he became Rollie Dahlgren and retains that name to this day. 

The old knight had made his final pilgrimage to Jordan, the last time he would ever see the tomb of Moses, just prior to departing Leiden and brought with him to the New World a dozen immensely heavy crates on the sea journey, specially packed and prepared by his trusty Amsterdam bankers whose offices flew the black and red triple “X” flag symbolizing fire, water, and plague: Herren Smuelders & Schramm. 

The majority of the crates contained many talents of pure gold to use in the New World for living expenses and investments.  Rollie also visited for the last time his favorite city in all the world, Toledo, and recovered from there the hidden journals and logbooks he and Kyoto had written, and not pillaged by tomb robbers, during their epic journey to the Orient as young men – it was Kyoto’s books which contained the codes for making the white powder and preparation of the elixir, though written in very hard to decipher languages of Arabic, Hebrew, Old French, Aramaic, and Old German all mixed together. 

Rollie couldn’t think of anyone else living today that could break these language codes – some written backwards to cause even more confusion for any unauthorized decipherment.  This set his mind at ease somewhat because his Atlantic crossing would combine for the first time since he interred Kyoto, the Jar of Manna along with the texts on how to prepare the Elixir of Life in the same place at the same time.

                And he left something very old and famous behind in Europe – his last ties to his ancient and noble roots traced as far back as his ancestor Roland and the family bloodline of Charlemagne whose family roots could be traced back to Noah, Adam, and ultimately Brazatlan. 

He first set foot on American soil, the modern day promised land, in New York City, carved from frontier wilderness by pure sweat and effort, a fabulous city where men came to live their dream; it was a city of hope – if they had a skill, drive, and ambition, and they could make it there, then they knew they could make it anywhere.  It was no longer their ancestral bloodlines that mattered but what they did as men that counted, so they felt beholding to no one and an equal to all. 

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After a few months, he booked his onward journey to the port named after Lord Baltimore Calvert in Maryland and lingered in the city for several more months before traveling slightly further south, where he decided to take up new residence in a swampy little town on the banks of the Potomac, full of mosquitoes and Indians, where he resides still – as does the Jar of Manna.  

It was in 1751 that Rollie Dahlgren put roots down on the Maryland side of the Potomac River in a settlement just granted township status by the State Assembly, named in honor of King George II, called George’s Town – a booming settlement which prospered as the years passed with many construction projects.

A township with strong beliefs in the Roman Catholic Church, it was the son of Irish immigrant parents who received a Jesuit education abroad that became the founder of one of America’s finest universities.  The year John Carroll became America’s first Catholic Bishop was 1789 and that’s when Georgetown University was born.

Besides having a king’s ransom in gold packed in crates, plus journals and logbooks he and Kyoto had kept, Rollie’s plan was to maintain a humble profile and keep out of the spotlight – he also kept close to him at all times the Jar of Manna and to protect it, at his bedside hung his ancient two-handed Templar sword.  He was helped since arriving in Baltimore by extended well-to-do members of the Dahlgren family, who had prospered in the new land, and upon arriving in Georgetown he was given lodging at a boarding house owned by a descendant many generations then removed. 

His English was fairly good, if not very old fashioned, and his accent quite queer, with tinges of French, Latin, Spanish, and Germanic pronunciations.  Nonetheless, he assimilated quite well into his new surroundings and was considered one of the long-lost European relatives by his American descendants – and a bit odd as he was seen going and coming late at night, arriving from his treks with muddy boots and a bit haggard looking each time.  This was because he had to bury his old-world Moses gold in small quantities at various locations, carried by packhorse, and digging the pits by lantern light. 

Furthermore, as the town spread out, he was forced to re-excavate and re-bury his loot frequently someplace else which presented him with many logistical problems – problems he would solve over time when commercial banks allowed storage of valuables in personal vaults or safe deposit boxes.  He never buried the personal journals, fearing mildew and decay from moisture, so those he kept close – but the Jar was hidden independently of everything else, so texts for the preparation of the white powder could never be found alongside the Jar.

Rollie’s official occupation was recorded as master stonemason and he joined a relatively elite society of craftsmen growing in popularity amongst the American colonies during the 18th Century, but with a slightly different twist than the more secular version of the same society which grew up a few years before in Scotland and England – the Freemasons.

After Georgetown was founded he began a lifelong association with the school, first helping to build the Old South structure and afterwards, the Old North – followed by many more buildings and a honeycomb of underground passages excavated underneath the hilltop the school occupied.  About the same time, he worked on the first bridge built over the Potomac River to connect up with the Virginia shore and Leesburg Pike road.

                 

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In 1824 a company called Chesapeake & Ohio was hired to cut a canal skirting the Potomac River shore from the District of Columbia 341 miles inland to the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, but this proved too expensive so a smaller canal was constructed from Georgetown to Cumberland on the upper Potomac, a rich source of coal in the region for later-year industrialization. 

The C&O Canal would eventually have a total of 74 lift locks between Cumberland and Georgetown to allow for the descending elevation change of 609 feet – and merchants on the Virginia side of the Potomac had to do something so as to participate in this lucrative trade route. 

So in 1828 influential businessmen in Alexandria petitioned their Congressional representatives for help and in 1830 the government approved the granting of a charter to the Alexandria Canal Company to build a canal connecting the C&O Canal with Alexandria. The canal would have to flow north to south over the Potomac River, so the new Aqueduct Bridge was constructed from Georgetown on the Maryland side to present day Rosslyn on the Virginia side, and then the canal continued along eastward, skirting the river for another seven miles until it reached the Alexandria basin.

                The Aqueduct Bridge was a marvel of engineering and construction for the age, with a 1,000-foot long wooden trough filled with ten feet of water – brought down from a Maryland reservoir – needing eight solid masonry piers to support the massive weight of water and barges high above the Potomac. 

In 1923 a new bridge was completed about a hundred feet downstream east of the old Aqueduct called the Francis Scott Key Bridge and by 1962 only one of the eight original massive abutments from the old bridge was still left standing, situated on the Georgetown side of the Potomac, while the others were blasted out to a depth of twelve feet below the waterline. 

Today standing on Key Bridge separating Rosslyn from Georgetown, one can still look down onto the boat house at the last remaining abutment and see the notch hewn from stone by Rollie Dahlgren that held the wooden trough.          

Funny, Rollie thought, these were considered huge undertakings given the rudimentary technology available for the era, and the men he worked with felt their feats of construction would last for centuries as monuments; yet for all the hard work and sweat, they lasted just a few decades.  Steam powered locomotives hauled freight much cheaper when the railroad came along, and afterwards, internal combustion engines propelled trucks on cement and asphalt highways making the canals and locks totally obsolete.

 In Georgetown the walls and locks of the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, and one of the original bridges crossing it, are still preserved and thousands of tourists pass right by every year without blinking an eye.  Rollie worked on this small bridge, which was built in 1831 extending Wisconsin Avenue across the canal, and he labored over blocks of Aquia Creek sandstone called Freestone to make sure the joints abutted perfectly – and his reputation grew as the most gifted and skilled master stonemason in the region. 

His trademark technique for hewing stones to perfection was called the “Rosslyn Cut,” which he learned in Scotland erecting a mysterious chapel with Templar ties in the mid-15th Century.

                In 1840 he worked on the Alexandria Canal lift lock south of the Potomac, in Virginia also constructed of Aquia Freestone from quarries near Rock Creek whose rock walls were fifteen feet deep and ninety feet long. 

Impressed with the quality of Rollie’s work in cutting the Freestone, the head of the Corps of Engineers supervising construction of the new lock called it the Rosslyn Lock in his honor and the name stuck – ever since then this small enclave of Arlington, Virginia has been known as Rosslyn and today it’s a bustling corporate and government jungle of office buildings.

                As the canals and locks became obsolete and were filled with dirt and paved over, it occurred to Rollie that he had found a permanent home for some of his Moses tomb gold ingots by depositing some of them inside the Rosslyn Lock, so immediately before its demise, he excavated a crater beneath the timbers used for planking the floor and stashed there fully half the gold he had brought with him on the cruise to America.  The year was 1850 and most of that gold is still there to this day worth a vast fortune. 

The other half had been dug up from the various pits around Georgetown where he had stashed gold over the years, converted to bank notes, and deposited, little by little, in the Farmers & Mechanics Bank, which later became the golden domed Riggs Bank on the corner of “M” Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown.  Despite all his wealth however, the millionaire Rollie Dahlgren still buys his clothes at Goodwill and Army/Navy surplus stores.

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Now that the gold was hidden, as years passed Rollie still had to find a safe and permanent home for the Jar of Manna and the secret formula for the process of making the Elixir of Life.  He tackled the Jar problem first.

                From the start up of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal the best diggers bar none were the Welshmen, perhaps because of their long history in burrowing for coal in the old country, and no one could surpass them in dirt excavation and tunneling prowess.

 By the late 1880s the American economy was once again suffering as people attempted to redeem silver notes for gold and a series of bank failures followed.  Times were hard in Washington City and pretty much every place else in the country, when a journeyman laborer by the name of John Owens struck a blow with his pick. 

He was working a new C&O canal excavation project 30 feet above the Potomac River, next to the tow path on a small rise running parallel to the river.  Try as he may to contain his glee at what he thought was the discovery of a large gold nugget he could not; it didn’t take long before his fellow laborers abandoned work on the canal and starting digging into the hill’s embankment.  For the skilled Welshmen that meant tunneling into the river’s embankment. 

During the four weeks it took to get back the assayer’s report from New York City, the Georgetown hilltop had become honeycombed with excavations, but as it turned out, this wasn’t all bad.  True, the “nugget” Owens thought was gold turned out to be iron pyrite, commonly referred to as “fool’s gold,” but some of the diggings at the canal level were used for sluice gates when the men returned to work on the C&O Canal, while others were simply filled in with slag and other debris when activities ended.

                The hilltop where Georgetown University is located is situated 151 feet above the level of the Potomac River.  Two or three of the tunnels burrowed out by the Welshman had sloped upwards almost to ground level of the university, laying a few yards beneath the surface but not threatening any building foundations, and these were never filled in. 

 Jesuits, who love secret passages and tunnels, were delighted at the discovery of the burrows dug out by the Welshmen and even expanded them over the years so that eventually an underground network of passages connected many of the university’s buildings.

                After the Civil War, the name Dahlgren reached celebrity status in Washington City and elsewhere in the country thanks to Admiral Dahlgren’s naval cannon design improvements.  Mrs. Dahlgren became one of the great names in Washington society and even though Rollie was a distant relative, needless to say, he didn’t rub elbows with this upper crust echelon of the family tree. 

Unfortunately, the Admiral’s oldest son Ulric was killed in action during the Civil War.  The admiral’s surviving sons John Vinton and Eric had attended Georgetown University and Rollie knew them. 

He had chatted frequently with the surviving sons and was quite proud knowing they shared a common bloodline, although none would have guessed who their famous ancestors were.  Rollie never mentioned to them his epic journey along the Silk Road or the story of the Jar of Manna, lest they think he was insane.  It was the death of John Vinton’s infant son Joseph Drexel Dahlgren in 1891 when the family decided to build a memorial chapel on the university campus.

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  The memorial chapel was to be built behind Georgetown’s Healy Hall.  It was at this juncture that Rollie came up with the idea for a solution to his centuries-long problem of what to do with the Holy Jar of Manna still requiring a safe and secure permanent home.

                The area behind Healy Hall was called the quadrangle and to prepare for the laying of the foundation of the chapel it had to be lowered a few feet and the old well on the construction site filled with dirt and stone.  The well had been abandoned many years before, partly because the water level had fallen and the well provided little water anymore, and partly because while digging deeper in search of more water, one of the old tunnels dug by the Welsh gold miners was inadvertently punctured, bringing a halt to any further excavation. 

Rollie volunteered to work on filling in the old well and tunnel, a rotten assignment which no one else wanted anyway since before the filling-in work could take place, an assessment of the underlying soil and rock formations had to be made which meant someone would have to be physically lowered down the fifty-foot well shaft. 

By the time Cardinal Gibbons officiated at the laying of the cornerstone of the Dahlgren Chapel in May 1892, buried beneath some fifty feet of dirt and rock in the old well was a malachite green apothecary mortar with gold striations, chiseled from a heavenly meteorite that fell eons ago, encased in a strong metal chest and bound Houdini-like with chains and padlocks. 

This then became the tomb of the Jar of Manna and pestle, in other words the end of the line and worlds away from Brazatlan, Atlantis, Moses’ Tomb, and King Solomon’s Temple! 

The metal chest was not surrounded by packed dirt but cradled inside a miniature tomb of steel and cement, sealed at the top by tons of earth separating it from the world above, and below the tomb was a heavy trap door, accessible from beneath using a very narrow passageway leading to a tunnel which meandered its way downward, zigzagging until reaching its end.

                The old C&O Canal is today but a memory along the upper Potomac and occasionally one can see the canal remnants running alongside the river south of “M” Street in Georgetown, now just a curiosity for tourists who have no idea how important the ditch once was in the history of the nation’s capital.  There’s a section of the canal, just west of Key Bridge and directly below the hilltop, where hundreds of cars pass everyday along MacArthur Boulevard that’s particularly interesting.

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Unlike other sections of the canal, this one is off the beaten path of tourists visiting downtown Georgetown’s shops and restaurants, and is not maintained nearly so well as a result.  Notched into this section of the canal is an old sluice gate at right angles to it and the Potomac River, and the back end of the gate was walled off in 1892. 

The only man knowing what’s behind the thick wall is over 900 years old and is a direct descendant of Charlemagne’s nephew and champion – the Knight Roland, direct descendant of the biblical Adam, Abraham and his wife Sarah, from whose beliefs ultimately sprang Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

When Rollie Dahlgren walled off the sluice gate in 1892 he did so knowing that if one day he had to retrieve the Jar, he could do so because he left himself a back door below the filled-in well shaft, but realistically he doubted he’d ever have to.  No, the future was set now and his life’s long journey was almost over.  There was just one more task before him: finding a home for the secret formula and process for making the Elixir of Life.

The bell atop the Dahlgren Chapel and cross hanging over the altar dates from the earliest days of the Maryland settlement.  The cross-shaped Scottish Gothic-style building was constructed of red brick and soft Indiana stone, which for an expert stonemason like Rollie meant it could be molded like putty into a simple yet elegant structure. 

The interior of the chapel is finished in Georgia pine, including huge rafters overhead and there’s a large room encasing the pipe organ just left of the interior’s entrance. 

All of the chapel’s stained-glass windows were made in one of Rollie’s old European stomping grounds, the brewery city of Munich, and supervising their exact placement was none other than Rollie Dahlgren himself, including the north wall windows. 

The central of the five stained-glass windows, the one above the main altar, depicts Jesus displaying the Sacred Heart and over the chapel door is another window with script asking passers-by to enter and pray for the Dahlgren family.  Other windows in the chapel depict St. Ignatius Loyola, the Spanish nobleman and soldier turned Catholic Jesuit and old friend of Sir Rowland von Dahlgrün.

                But it’s the stained-glass windows of the north wall that Rollie took a personal interest in.  The large windows depict the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Eucharist, and over these three windows there appears a larger window of circles forming a hexagon, and at the center of the colored images is one of a Golden Grail. 

On the floor beneath the windows of the north wall there stands the chapel’s little stone tabernacle, with carved inscriptions decorating it on all sides, and in the front there’s a small bronze door with a carved chalice protecting the storage compartment box where the hosts are kept for Holy Communion services – and beneath the floor, right underneath that very spot and deep inside the old quadrangle dry water well 50 feet down, rests to this day the most holy relic that has ever existed on the face of the planet!  After securing the Jar of Manna once and for all, Rollie then took up a new hobby, bookbinding.

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The Civil War had been terrible, and a hard time for Georgetown University as many students wore the blue or the gray, and so the school adopted both colors as its official colors as a symbol of respect to both sides after the war.  Having secured the Moses gold and Jar of Manna, it was time to turn his attention to the Elixir of Life.

Georgetown University’s Riggs Library was built slightly before the Dahlgren Chapel in 1890.  It has huge picture windows facing eastward towards Foggy Bottom from where you can also see to the northeast DuPont Circle and Embassy Row.  It is today just a show-piece from the days of the university’s old fashioned architecture.

But climbing the winding stairs of the library and examining the many dusty, leather-bound volumes of books once and awhile – written in Greek, Latin, and various other Old World languages – they can still reveal some interesting finds. 

Bookbinding today is pretty much a lost art – now it’s all mechanized or digitalized – but as little as a century ago, arthritic old men would sit in dusty, dimly lit shops mending and binding books which, like the family Bible, were considered treasures.  There used to be such a shop at the eastern end of “M” Street in Georgetown, long closed and gone, where Rollie Dahlgren asked the old proprietor to do work for him. 

                The old Templar Knight decided not long after coming to America that sooner or later he would have to find a permanent home for his ancient treasures – including the journals and logbooks penned by him and Kyoto along the Silk Road, and the verses he had written about his famous ancestor Roland of Roncesvalles, because not even Rollie would live forever.

Between his bank account and safe deposit boxes at the Riggs Bank, and the treasure buried under the Rossyln Lock, he had taken care of his entire gold stock.  The Jar of Manna was safely secured under the Dahlgren Chapel.  He now decided to hide everything else on the shelves of the Riggs Library. 

He had to do something with the written history of his and Kyoto’s journey eastward during the 12th Century, and the sacred recipe and process for preparing the white powder, and ultimately the Elixir of Life to keep them safe.  Working with the shopkeeper Rollie amassed some thirty volumes of documents from his ancient records – penned on vellum and parchment manuscript for the most part, using India ink and graphite, paint and charcoal, which held up reasonably well considering they were 750 years old!

The shopkeeper, like his forebears, appreciated old manuscripts brought in by customers for binding which were valuable antiques.  The documents Rollie brought him were the most unusual documents he had ever seen – the script, text, and languages used were not known to him but he did recognize the occasional word in Latin or Old English.  Other symbols appeared to be from the Orient and of Hebrew origin although he couldn’t be sure; drawings and diagrams were particularly odd looking but incredibly old and beautiful. 

Following the owner’s request, the shopkeeper bound the documents in thirty books of different dimensions, different color of leather cover, and different thickness – and engraved thereon titles in gold leaf which were printed in various Latin and foreign languages, the idea being to avoid any uniformity of appearance and therefore any logical connection.  Still, in his head, Rollie liked remembering all these ancient books as if they were one unique collection so he named the entire set after his late friend; he thought of the finished works as the Kyoto Chronicles.

                Then Rollie sought about hiding the thirty volumes in plain sight.  He interspersed them amongst the thousands of volumes within the Riggs Library so that none of the Kyoto Chronicles resided on the same shelf with any other – and only Rollie knew of the Dewey Decimal system number of each volume so he could keep track of all volumes, which he diligently did and, knock on wood, to this day all volumes are still in their rightful dusty places in the library. 

When he donated the complete collection to the library in 1894 along with a hefty monetary donation to the school’s endowment fund, he specified as a condition that none of his volumes could be checked out or replicated without his express written approval. 

As it turned out, this had never been much of an issue anyway because when students or school faculty opened any of the Kyoto Chronicles, or the many other esoteric Jesuit books on the library’s shelves to see what they contained, they would roll their eyes at the gibberish text staring at them and would quickly replace the volume back on the shelf. 

And so that was that, everything was taken care of and left for safekeeping in secret locations in arguably, more than ever after 9/11, the securest fortress city on Earth, Washington, D.C., the New World Jerusalem where gold still symbolized power and might makes right just like in the Bible stories.

                If anything, by the early-twenty-first-century Rollie, having been born in the eleventh-century, was a pragmatist and could feel in his weary old bones he was approaching his end of days – he estimated five to six more decades and his run would finally be over.

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Yes, he could prepare another potion of elixir to extend his life further and even though the thought of another 120-day grueling ordeal did not appeal to him, he would have done so had he felt it was necessary – but he felt it wasn’t any longer necessary since he had kept his promise to the Lord and carried through faithfully the Covenant he had made with the All Mighty so many centuries before. 

Modern science now enabled men to clone their image and perpetuate their genes through manipulation of DNA, and it was only a question of a few years before those same scientists would ensure, using their supercomputers, that things like memory and emotions could also be programmed inside the clone’s brain – so human immortality was indeed at hand, while Rollie, the Kyoto Chronicles, and the Jar of Manna were fast becoming obsolete.

                Nor was wealth and fame any longer tied to owning vast amounts of gold – financial experts and economists had figured out how to create wealth out of thin air, not based on amassing the noble metal, but by increasing paper debt into perpetuity and by allowing people to invest in stock markets, bonds, mutual funds, and real estate without even worrying about the government experiencing another one of those pesky economic depressions which had chronically plagued America’s past. 

But Rollie knew this was just an illusion of wealth – in the case of stocks and bonds people never touched their investment because it was all electronic, and most people who called themselves homeowners didn’t really own the home they lived in, the bank did, and when the real estate bubble bursts any day now, they will suffer because they have no personal savings. 

No, this new-age wealth would be blown away like dust in the wind and just like the lure of gold was illusion for the old-timey prospectors, it was just a question of time that America’s illusion of wealth would lead to another panic, and this time it could be devastating to the American economy and perhaps serious enough to cause the collapse of the Republic itself. 

When Rollie passes on to his great reward years hence, his will be the death of the last remaining prophet, but he knew another prophet would be along to take his place sooner or later thanks to the wisdom of the Lord, so this knowledge comforted him somewhat. 

He also knew that the Kyoto Chronicles, made of paper, sooner or later would decay and become dust; it was inevitable – just like writing something on the sands of a beach which are eventually erased by the ebbing tide. 

It was thus feasible that knowledge of preparation of the white powder could be lost and the mystery never solved again on how to prepare the elixir, so the only remaining testament to his and Kyoto’s great quest of spiritual discovery of the twelfth-century would be a solid stone Jar made from a celestial meteorite.  No place on the planet was more heavily fortified than America’s Jerusalem, so no place was safer than beneath the city’s chapel that bore his ancient family name.

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Smack in the middle of Georgetown University’s beautiful hilltop campus, formally nicknamed “The Hilltop,” within the lower level enclave ridged by pine trees, resides the Jesuit brotherhood cemetery for the school’s dearly departed clergy teachers. 

Rollie Dahlgren hopes to be buried there someday, not now, but some day.  He was growing old and tired.  The Jesuit cemetery has the graves of three hundred priests, crowned by simple gray headstones adorned with a cross, which when he passes by always reminds him of the Basque soldier he first met on that dusty bridge in Toledo centuries before.

Rollie remembers how the early settlers carved out of raw frontier a new country, where they could be free of foreign rule and be responsible for their own lives and fortunes, beholding to no one, free to worship as they saw fit, and not be a servant of a foreign despot.  Americans were always builders first and foremost.  Yeah, we didn’t screw around, we built shit.  He’s seen his adopted country at war many times, including two world wars, and seen how the country’s industrial might overcame fascism and evil.   

America’s First Centennial celebration in 1876 marked the emergence of the young country on the world scene with great promise for the future, after having fought two wars of independence with Britain and a very bloody civil war with itself, during which the country came within a hairsbreadth of disintegrating before even reaching its hundredth birthday. 

By America’s Bi-Centennial in 1976, it had established itself as a superpower beginning to pull away from the only other superpower in the world at the time – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – because of the sheer economic power of massive wealth thanks to patriotic citizens who played by the rules and diligently paid their taxes year after year.

 Will the Republic of the United States of America survive until its Tri-Centennial in the year 2076 or will its position on the world stage drastically decline as have so many other empires like ancient Brazatlan, Atlantis, Egypt, Mongolia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Britain, and the U.S.S.R.? 

Will it collapse from within due to loss of faith Americans have in religious beliefs, increasingly incompetent and more and more secular political leadership, biased media who interfere with the democratic election process, judges who cripple the legal system with their personal political views, lawyers who corrupt the national election process by yelling foul if their side doesn’t win, uncontrolled cross-border illegal immigration, or simply loss of faith by Americans in a capitalistic system that cannot provide even basic health care coverage or Social Security for its elderly citizens?

 Will Americans ever again respect their own ground rules laid down by the Founding Fathers, each other’s political and religious beliefs; will it ever get along with itself, or is it too late?  Or will America be weakened by anti-Western ideologies and aggression from the likes of Russia, China, or other authoritarian regime? 

Will it run out of money, will it commit suicide through internal squabbling, or will its demise simply come around because like Theodore Roosevelt once warned – “the laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing?”

There’s a disheveled, untidy old man with stubble beard still seen walking along “M” Street in Georgetown to this day and when he speaks, he has a most peculiar accent.  Occasionally he takes an odd job here and there at the University, tidying up the old cemetery and keeping the headstones clean and free of grime and algae – people swear they’ve seen this guy around forever and the old timers can’t figure out how he stays in such good shape. 

The old Templar Knight Rowland von Dahlgrün aka Rollie Dahlgren looks to be a man in his early seventies - those bright blue eyes still brilliant and penetrating.  He’s a humble man but an aura of wisdom and nobility envelope him. 

He has seen much in his lifetime and is feeling a little weariness in his bones – yet is determined to see through to the end the Covenant he made at the tomb of Moses so long ago.  He is fluent in many tongues, has fathered many children, and has traveled far and wide.  He can be as worldly rich or as humbly poor as he chooses since he has knowledge still of the whereabouts of great quantities of gold – and the secrets of the Elixir. 

He came to America before the First War of Independence and saw in this young country a promised land, where the sacred mortar he possessed and its immortal secrets might be safe, far from Old Europe and the Holy Land, until his Covenant was fulfilled – his faith in Jesus Christ has never wavered despite the unspeakable death and destruction that he has seen plague the globe over and over again from the same avarice for gold and power.

At 915 years of age Rollie has developed an uncanny ability, an intuitive radar of sorts to read people and size up situations – and he has a most unusual sense of humor.  He has educated himself by spending hours in libraries and reading volumes of works, magazines, and newspapers over the decades – he can speak a dozen modern languages fluently, and at least that many now extinct. 

Living in the nation’s capital he has access to all the cultural benefits the city offers – and visits frequently the Smithsonian, the Museum of Natural History, and the Air and Space Museum.  His university of higher education was life.

He has an ancient soul but has made himself into a modern man, but he sees that for all the differences in chronological time and geographical space he has traveled through, the human spirit is remarkably consistent for all time and in all the lands he has visited since the First Crusade – and there have been many such places. 

Another constant is man’s desire to ruthlessly subjugate other men, to rule with unlimited power, to strive for greatness, to build monuments to themselves as a way to achieve a kind of immortality, to achieve unlimited wealth, and make others accept his religion as the only true religion.

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Rollie will tell you that his all-time favorite view of the Georgetown Hilltop and Washington, D.C. is from the top floor restaurant of the Marriott Hotel on the Rosslyn side of the Potomac River, just at the foot of the Key Bridge, assuming he can get inside – more than once he’s been stopped at the revolving front door by a burly doorman or security guard mistaking him for one of the many of the poor homeless people living on the streets of our nation’s capital.

But after shaving and sprucing up a little, he can usually get in provided a different doorman’s on duty and doesn’t recognize him from last time. 

The huge panoramic windows allow for an unobstructed view all around and he can gaze to the east and see right below the hotel the faint outline of the Rosslyn Lock where his Moses gold still lies buried, protected many decades now by the city and federal government as a national historical landmark. 

The Kennedy Center is also easily visible as are other famous federal structures like the Watergate Apartments, U.S. State Department, Washington Monument, and Jefferson Memorial. 

To the north can be seen the Key Bridge over the Potomac, the buildings of downtown Georgetown with the perpetual traffic congestion in the streets, the constant hustle and bustle of tourists and shoppers placing their feet by sheer coincidence on the exact same spots walked by the famous and infamous men of American history, and the glorious hilltop skyline of the university itself lying directly northward from the window.  That’s where the Jar of Manna and secrets of the Elixir of Life are safely secured. 

To be sure, Washington’s environs looks more like an armed camp and huge fortress complex than ever before, with those ubiquitous bollards and Jersey tapered slabs – the hideous steel-reinforced concrete security barriers – blocking streets and protecting federal buildings everywhere from terrorists.  But these are the times in which we live, and believe you me the old knight’s seen a lot worse in the Old World.  

                 If Rollie’s favorite view of the city was from the top floor of that high hotel building on the Rosslyn side of the river, then his favorite walk was the stroll back to Georgetown University from Virginia – first over the old Aqueduct Bridge and then in later years over the current-day Francis Scott Key Bridge, then cutting across Canal Road and “M” Street and climbing the seventy-five Exorcist stairs up to Prospect Street, past the Tombs Tavern, and then making a dog-leg left until he entered those Healy Gates onto the Georgetown campus after crossing 37th Street, where a mysterious magnetic-like force invariably pulled him towards the quadrangle and to the small chapel located there. 

Contrary to what you might think, the force calling him was not linked to what lie buried below the floor of the chapel and underneath its tabernacle, nor did it have anything to do with the stained-glass windows or anything else inside the little chapel for that matter.

What pulled Rollie to the north wall’s exterior was what was tucked beneath the eve of the chapel’s roof; it was an old cherubic-style small stone sculpture he had carved from memory when the chapel was being built, and fashioned from similar likenesses he had carved in stone, centuries before and in lands, far, far away - it was the image of Kyoto.

                Rollie had originally requested from the foreman of the construction gang to position this stone sculpture over the main entrance of the chapel when it was being built, so it could face eastward as a token of respect for the great friend whose likeness the figure represented, but it was felt by the family who funded the building of the chapel that this would not be aesthetically pleasing to those entering the church, since the dull gray color of the sculpture did not match well with the red brick façade of the exterior walls. 

The discrete north wall location, however, was authorized so Rollie placed the stone sculpture there, tilted slightly eastward and facing the Old North porch where George Washington and Abraham Lincoln once stood. 

Rollie had carved Kyoto’s image from memory, remembering so well that familiar kneeling position he assumed while praying and facing east to Mecca, and had placed in the sculpture’s hands a book which hopefully anyone seeing it would think was their own personal book of prayer – the Bible, Koran, or Torah – and Rollie prayed the time would come someday when friendship replaced religious differences in the world and whoever saw the sculpture could somehow feel the spirit of its simple message.

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)