Ethan Gage Collection # 1 by William Dietrich Page B

Imagine the advantages of immortality, of inexhaustible time! How much you could accomplish!”
    â€œOr at least benefit from compounding interest,” Monge joked.
    I stirred. Is this why we were really invading Egypt—not just because it could become a colony but because it was a source of everlasting life? Is this why so many were curious about my medallion?
    â€œIt’s all myth and allegory,” Berthollet scoffed. “What people doesn’t fear death, and dream of surmounting it? And yet they are all, including the Egyptians, dead.”
    General Desaix peeked from his slumbers. “Christians believe in a different kind of everlasting life,” he pointed out mildly.
    â€œBut while Christians pray for it, the Egyptians actually packed for it,” de Venture countered. “Like other early cultures, they put into their tombs what they’d need for the next journey. Nor did they necessarily pack light, and there lies opportunity. The tombs may be stuffed with treasures. ‘Please send us gold,’ rival kings wrote the pharaohs, ‘because gold to you is more plentiful than dirt.’”
    â€œThat’s the faith for me,” General Dumas growled. “Faith you can grasp.”
    â€œMaybe they survived in another way, as gypsies,” I spoke up.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGypsies. Gyptians. They claim descent from the priests of Egypt.”
    â€œOr they are Saint-Germain or Cagliostro,” added Talma. “Those men claimed to have lived for millennia, to have walked with Jesus and Cleopatra. Perhaps it was true.”
    Berthollet scoffed. “What’s true is that Cagliostro is so dead that soldiers dug up his grave in a papal prison and toasted him by drinking wine out of his skull.”
    â€œIf it was really his skull,” Talma said stubbornly.
    â€œAnd the Egyptian Rite claims to be on the path to rediscovering these powers and miracles, is this not so?” Napoleon asked.
    â€œIt is the Egyptian Rite that seeks to corrupt the principles of Freemasonry,” Talma responded. “Instead of pledging themselves to morality and the Great Architect, they look for dark power in the occult. Cagliostro invented a perversion of Freemasonry that admits women for sexual rites. They would use ancient powers for themselves, instead of for the good of mankind. It’s a shame they’ve become a fashion in Paris, and seduced men such as Count Silano. All true Freemasons repudiate them.”
    Napoleon smiled. “So you and your American friend must find the secrets first!”
    Talma nodded. “And put them to our uses, not theirs.”
    I was reminded of Stefan the Gypsy’s legend that the Egyptians might be waiting for moral and scientific advancement before yielding their secrets. And here we came, a thousand cannon jutting from our hulls.
    T he conquest of the Mediterranean isle of Malta took one day, three French lives, and—before we arrived—four months of spying, negotiation, and bribery. The three hundred or so Knights of Malta were a medieval anachronism, half of them French, and more interested in pensions than dying for glory. After the formalities of brief resistance, they kissed their conqueror’s hands. Our geologist Dolomieu, who had been drummed out of the Knights in disgrace after his young duel, found himself welcomed back as a prodigal son who could help in the surrender negotiations. Malta was ceded to France, the grand master was pensioned to a principality in Germany, and Bonaparte set himself to looting the island’s treasures as thoroughly as he had sacked Italy.
    He left to the Knights a splinter of the True Cross and a withered hand of John the Baptist. He kept for France five million francs of gold, a million of silver plate, and another million in the gem-encrusted treasures of St. John. Most of this loot was transferred to the hold of L’Orient. Napoleon also abolished slavery and