The big revelation

The edits I’m doing to The Sphinx Scrolls have today reached a chapter containing a major revelation in the book. Hints appear here and there earlier in the text, but 30% of the way into the book Ruby learns something astonishing about the Mayan sarcophagus she is studying. I’ve prolonged the reader’s suspense by chopping up one of the chapters and inserting a scene from the subplot in the middle: you would need to read on in order to find out where the hints are leading. One of the clues lies in the doctorate qualifications of some of the scientists sent to study the sarcophagus with Ruby. They are specialists in areas that she considers irrelevant to archaeology, and the reader is about to discover how wrong Ruby is about that.

To make the story flow better I’ve had to write a few new scenes, and the word count has crept up to a little over 169,000. Today’s additions including details from the road trip across Guatemala in the ancient VW camper van. There’s a lovely moment when the camper van misfires with a bang when the engine starts up after refuelling at a petrol station. The bang brings the twitchy station owner running out from his hut with his hands in the air.

This book delves deep into history, and history is full of what-ifs. What if that meteorite hadn’t killed off the dinosaurs? We probably wouldn’t have had a history to start with. What if Hitler had won the war? We’d probably have emerged from that regime at about the same time that communism fell away in Eastern Europe. What if Hitler had never started the war? Most of those post-war baby boom kids wouldn’t have been born, so my parents wouldn’t have existed and therefore nor would I. It’s quite disturbing to think that I owe my existence to the mad decisions of one of the most evil men in history. And I’m not the only one – millions of people are alive today who wouldn’t have been born without that war taking place. Equally, millions of people have never had the chance to be born for the same reason.

My point is that history is full of chance events: things happened, other things nearly happened which would have led to other things but didn’t, and so on. What if Charles Babbage had not argued with the man he was employing to construct his Difference Engine so that the thing had actually been built? The world came within a hair’s breadth of having computing power almost a century earlier than its eventual arrival. Think about it: a powerful, logical, mathematical computer could have been the introduced in the Victorian age. Electricity was already in use by then, so the mechanical machine might have become an electronic computer very quickly.

Was electricity in use far earlier than we think? There are objects in museums, dating from thousands of years ago, that appear to be electroplated. There are painted tombs with no evidence of scorching from oil or other naked flame lanterns. There is a giant, ancient ‘battery’ discovered in Baghdad, close to where the electroplated items were found. What if that brief spark of electrical usage hadn’t died out for two thousand years, but had developed steadily, as it did starting from its ‘rediscovery’ in the 17th Century? Could Galileo have been an astronaut instead of an astronomer? Could Chaucer have been a screenwriter instead of a poet? All these things were possible. Humans stopped evolving tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. The raw material brain power to do everything we do today has been around since before the Ice Age. We are fortunate to live at the culmination of a few hundred years of progress in science, medicine, technology and philosophy. It hasn’t been steady progress, but the result of all the random and crazy things that have happened in known history is the world we live in today.

What I wonder is, are we the first civilisation to experience this compounded growth in knowledge? Was there someone from prehistory who, like the maker of the Baghdad battery, created a technology which for a time was developed by succeeding generations before being lost due to natural disaster, disease or war? Was the Baghdad battery not a giant leap for mankind but the tail end of a more sophisticated knowledge base that was dying out? Archaeology has unearthed many clues and suggestions that could point to this. That’s what makes the big revelation in The Sphinx Scrolls so interesting…