The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

And that was all that was known, or could be said, about the Templar tunnel. The archaeologists had only been able to confirm that it continued further than they themselves had been allowed to go. Extending inwards from the southern wall, however, I realized that it might well have penetrated into the very heart of the sacred precincts, quite possibly passing directly beneath the Dome of the Rock a hundred or so metres to the north of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Dome of the Rock, I discovered, was so named because within it lay a huge stone, known to the Jews as the Shetiyyah (literally the 'Foundation'). When the Temple of Solomon had been erected on this exact spot in the mid-900s BC, the Ark of the Covenant had been placed on the Shetiyyah, which had formed the floor of the Holy of Holies.(37) Then, in 587 BC, the Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians and most of the population of Jerusalem had been carried off into exile. There was no evidence, however, to suggest that the conquerors had also carried off the Ark; on the contrary, it appeared to have vanished into thin air.(38) Subsequently a legend began to circulate which provided a possible explanation for what had happened an explanation that was accepted by most Jews. According to this legend, only moments before the Babylonian looters had burst into the Holy of Holies, the sacred relic had been hidden away in a sealed and secret cavern directly beneath the Shetiyyah.(39) Expressed as it was in a variety of Talmudic and Midrashic scrolls, and in the popular apocalypse known as the 'Vision of Baruch'(40) all of which were still very much in circulation in Jerusalem in the twelfth century AD it occurred to me that the Templars might easily have learned the details of this intriguing legend. Moreover, with a little further research, I was able to establish that they could well have done so some years before 1119 the date of their official arrival in Jerusalem. Hugh de Payens, the founder of the order, had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1104 in the company of the Count of Champagne.(41) The two men had then returned to France and were known to have been together there in 1113.(42) Three years later Hugh went back to the Holy Land alone(43) and then returned once more this time to gather together the eight knights who travelled with him in 1119 and who formed the nucleus of the Templar order. The more I thought about this sequence of events the more likely it seemed to me that Hugh and the Count of Champagne could, on their 1104 pilgrimage, have heard of the startling possibility that the Ark of the Covenant might lie concealed somewhere within the Temple Mount. If so, I speculated, then was it not also probable that they could have formulated a plan to try to recover the sacred relic? And did this not explain the determined manner in which the nine knights had taken control of the Temple Mount in 1119 and also the many other curiosities of their behaviour in the early years of the order's existence? I found tangential support for this conjecture in Emma Jung's authoritative study of the Grail legend. There, in an excursus, the psychoanalyst argued that the European occupation of Jerusalem in the twelfth century had been inspired, at least in part, by a belief that some puissant, sacred and incalculably precious relic lay concealed in that city. As she commented:

This deeply-rooted concept of hidden treasure contributed to the fact that the summons to liberate the Holy Sepulchre awakened a resounding echo [and] imparted [an] inflammatory motive power to the Crusades if it did not actually cause them.(44)

There could have been no treasure more precious or more sacred than the lost Ark of the Covenant which, in a century that was unusually obsessed with the recovery of religious relics,(45) could well have looked like the ultimate prize. It therefore seemed to me not just possible, but actually highly probable, that Hugh de Payens and his backer the Count of Champagne could indeed have been motivated by a desire to find the Ark and that they could have established the Templars, and taken control of the Temple Mount, in order to achieve this goal. If so, however, then they failed in their objective. In the twelfth century, as one expert put it, 'the asset value of a famous relic was prodigious'.(46) Possession of a relic as uniquely significant as the Ark of the Covenant would, in addition, have brought enormous power and prestige to its owners. From this it followed, that if the Templars had found the Ark, they would certainly have brought it back to Europe in triumph. Since that had not happened it seemed to me quite safe to conclude that they had not found it. Yet rumours persisted that they had found something in their seven years of intensive digging on the Temple Mount. None of these rumours had any academic authority whatsoever but some were intriguing. According to one mystical work, which attempted to address what the Templars had really been up to in Jerusalem between 1119 and 1126:

The real task of the nine knights was to carry out research in the area in order to obtain certain relics and manuscripts which contained the essence of the secret traditions of Judaism and ancient Egypt, some of which probably went back to the days of Moses . . . There is no doubt that [they] fulfilled this particular mission and that the knowledge obtained from their finds was taught in the oral tradition of the Order's . . . secret circles.(47)

No documentary proof was offered to back up this attractive assertion. In the same source, however, I was interested to note a name that I had come across several times before in my research Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who here was said (again without any supporting evidence) to have sent the nine knights to Jerusalem.(48) I already knew that Bernard had been the nephew of one of the nine founder knights. I was also aware that he had joined the Cistercian order in 1112, that he had become an abbot by 1115(49) and that he had risen to a position of considerable prominence in French religious circles by 1119 when the first Templars had arrived in Jerusalem. I therefore thought that it would be most unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that he might have played some role in the formulation of their mission. This suspicion intensified considerably when I began to look into what had happened to the Templars after their first curious seven years.

A TRADE-OFF?

Late in 1126 Hugh de Payens suddenly left Jerusalem and returned to Europe accompanied by none other than Andr e Montbard,(50) the uncle of Saint Bernard. The knights arrived in France in 1127 and, in January 1128, participated in what was to be the most significant event in the early history of the Templars. That event was the Synod of Troyes, which had been convened with the explicit objective of procuring the Church's official backing for the Templar order.(51) Three things particularly interested me about this important meeting. First, it took place in the home town of the poet who, some years later, was to invent the Holy Grail; second, it was presided over by Saint Bernard, in his capacity as its secretary;(52) and third, during the course of the Synod, it was Bernard himself who drew up the formal Rule of the Knights Templar that, henceforth, was to guide the evolution and development of the order.(53) If my suspicions were justified, therefore, it seemed that the original nine knights had initially been preoccupied with their excavations on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Whatever else they might have unearthed there, however, it had become clear to them by 1126 that they were not going to find the prime object of their search, the Ark of the Covenant. This realization had made it necessary for them to consider their future: specifically, having lost their raison d' e, should they simply cease to exist as an order, or should they try to forge ahead? History showed that they had indeed suffered a crisis of identity in 1126, that they had resolved it and decided to forge ahead, and that they had enlisted the powerful support of Saint Bernard in this enterprise. At the Synod of Troyes he drew up their Rule and obtained the full backing of the Church for their expansion. And thereafter, in a series of sermons and glowing panegyrics such as De laude novae militae,(54) he vigorously promoted the young order thus using his own prestige and influence to guarantee its success. The results were spectacular. New recruits flocked in from all over France and later from many other parts of Europe as well. Donations of land and money were received from wealthy patrons, and political power quickly followed. By the late twelfth century the order had become phenomenally rich, was operating a sophisticated international banking system,(55) and owned properties throughout the known world. And all this, in a sense, it owed to the intervention of Saint Bernard in 1128 and to his continued solidarity and support in the years that followed. Had he played this role on behalf of the Templars purely out of a sense of altruism? Or had they perhaps given him something in return? Remembering that the 1130s were the decade in which Gothic architecture had suddenly and mysteriously burst upon the scene in France, remembering that Bernard had been a prime mover in the dissemination of the Gothic formula, and remembering too the persistent rumours that the Templars had gained access in Jerusalem to some deep and ancient source of knowledge, I could not help but wonder if this had been the trade-off. To be sure, the knights had failed to find the Ark of the Covenant. But what if, in their excavations on the Temple Mount, they had unearthed scrolls, manuscripts, theorems or blueprints relating to Solomon's Temple itself? What if these discoveries had included the lost architectural secrets of geometry, proportion, balance and harmony that had been known to the builders of the pyramids and other great monuments of antiquity? And what if the Templars had shared these secrets with Saint Bernard in return for his enthusiastic backing for their order? These speculations were not entirely without foundation. On the contrary, one of the oddities of the Templars was the fact that they had been great architects. In 1139, Pope Innocent II (whose candidacy, incidentally, had also been enthusiastically backed by Saint Bernard), (56) granted the order a unique privilege the right to build their own churches.(57) This was a privilege that they subsequently exercised to the full: beautiful places of worship, often circular in plan like the Temple Church in London, became a hallmark of Templar activities. The knights also excelled in military architecture and their castles in Palestine were exceptionally well designed and virtually impregnable. Foremost amongst these imposing fortresses was Atlit (Ch au P rin or Castle Pilgrim) which, I discovered, had been built in the year 1218 by the fourteenth Grand Master of the Templars, William of Chartres(58) in whose name was revealed yet another connection to the great Gothic cathedral. Standing to the south of Haifa on a spur of land surrounded on three sides by the sea, Atlit in its heyday was well supplied with orchards, fresh water, and vegetable gardens and even possessed its own harbour and ship-yard together with a jetty two hundred feet long. Often besieged by the Saracens but never captured, it had been capable of sheltering as many as four thousand people. Its massive walls, resting on unusually deep foundations, were more than ninety feet high and sixteen feet thick(59) and were so well made that large sections of them still survive intact. The site was thoroughly excavated by the archaeologist C. N. Johns in 1932. He concluded that the skills of the Templar architects and masons had been astonishingly advanced by comparison with the norm in the Middle Ages and had, indeed, been 'exceptional' even by modern standards.(60) The Templars also built extensively in Jerusalem where they continued to maintain their headquarters on the Temple Mount until the Holy City was recaptured by the Muslim general Saladin in 1187. I learned that a German monk named Theoderic had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1174 at which time he reported that all the buildings within the precincts of the Dome of the Rock were still 'in the possession of the Templar soldiers'.(61) He added:

They are garrisoned in these and other buildings belonging to them . . . Below them they have stables once erected by King Solomon . . . with vaults, arches, and roofs of many varieties . . . According to our estimation they will hold ten thousand horses with grooms.(62)

In fact the 'stables' had not been erected by King Solomon, but dated back to the reign of Herod the Great (around the time of Christ). The vaults, arches and roofs, however, had been the work of the Templars themselves, who greatly extended these subterranean halls and who were the first and only people to use them to accommodate horses.(63) Theoderic's eyewitness account of the Temple Mount in 1174 continued with these words:

On the other side of the palace [i.e. the Al-Aqsa Mosque] the Templars have built a new house, whose height, length and breadth, and all its cellars and refectories, staircase and roof, are far beyond the custom of this land. Indeed its roof is so high that, if I were to mention how high it is, those who listen would hardly believe me.(64)

The 'new house' that Theoderic had referred to in 1174 was, unfortunately, knocked down in the 1950s during some renovations undertaken on the Temple Mount by the Muslim authorities. The German monk's testimony was, however, valuable in itself and what I found most valuable about it was its breathless tone. Clearly he had regarded the Templars' architectural skills as almost supernaturally advanced and had been particularly impressed by the soaring roofs and arches that they had built. Reviewing his statements I thought it far from accidental that soaring roofs and arches had also been the distinguishing features of the Gothic architectural formula as expressed at Chartres and other French cathedrals in the twelfth century cathedrals that I knew were regarded by some observers as 'scientifically . . . far beyond what can be allowed for in the knowledge of the epoch'.(65) And this brought me back again to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Looking more thoroughly into what was known about his life and ideas, I was able to confirm my earlier impression that his influence on the iconography of the Gothic cathedrals had been massive, but indirect, taking the form mainly of groups of sculptures and of stained-glass windows that had been inspired by his sermons and writings, often after his death.(66) Indeed, in his lifetime, Bernard had frequently opposed the unnecessary proliferation of images and had stated: 'There must be no decoration, only proportion.'(67) This emphasis on proportion, harmony and balance in architecture was, I knew, the key to the strange magic of Gothic architecture and, as I became more familiar with Saint Bernard's thinking, I realized that it was in this area that his influence on the design of Chartres and other cathedrals had been most profound. In those great edifices, the introduction of a number of remarkable technical innovations like ribbed vaulting, ogive arches and flying buttresses had enabled the builders to use geometrical perfection to give expression to complex religious ideas. Indeed, in a very real sense, it seemed that architecture and faith had merged in twelfth-century Gothic to form a new synthesis. This synthesis had been summed up by Saint Bernard himself when he had asked 'What is God?' and had then replied to his own rhetorical question with these surprising words: 'He is length, width, height and depth.'(68) Gothic architecture, as I already knew, had been born at Chartres cathedral with the start of construction work on the north tower in 1134. This, I now learned, was no accident. In the years immediately prior to 1134 Bernard had cultivated a particularly close friendship with Geoffrey the Bishop of Chartres,(69) inspiring him with an 'uncommon enthusiasm' for the Gothic formula(70) and holding 'almost daily negotiations with the builders themselves'.(71) Interesting though it was in itself, the great significance of this piece of information for my purposes lay in the fact that 'the years immediately prior to 1134' were also the years immediately after the Synod of Troyes, at which Saint Bernard had obtained official Church recognition for the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. Historians had never been able to account adequately for the sudden way in which Gothic architecture had emerged in France in the 1130s. But my earlier speculation that the Templars might have had a hand in it now looked increasingly plausible. Reviewing all the evidence I had gathered I felt satisfied that they could indeed have unearthed on the Temple Mount some repository of ancient knowledge concerning the science of building, and that they could have passed on what they had learned to Saint Bernard in return for his support. Moreover Templar interest in the Ark of the Covenant, and the Templar connections with Wolfram and with Chartres, also rather neatly tied together the two cryptic 'maps' that I believed I had identified (one carved in stone in the north porch of the cathedral, the other encoded in the plot of Parzival). Those 'maps' had appeared to suggest that Ethiopia was the last resting place of the Ark. The question I now needed to address, therefore, was this: how could the Templars have come to the conclusion that the sacred relic (which they had failed to find after seven years of digging in Jerusalem) had in fact been removed to Ethiopia? What could have led them to think this way? A possible answer, I discovered, lay in Jerusalem itself where an exiled Ethiopian prince had sojourned for a quarter of a century before returning to his homeland to claim his kingdom in 1185.(72) Not much more than a decade later Wolfram began to write his Parzival and work started on the north porch of Chartres cathedral.

AN ETHIOPIAN PRINCE IN JERUSALEM

The name of the prince who had spent so long in exile in Jerusalem was Lalibela. I became interested in him because of the 'letter of Prester John' referred to in the last chapter. That letter had been written in 1165 and I knew that in 1177 Pope Alexander III had written a letter of his own to 'Prester John' in response to a request from 'the Prester's' emissaries for the concession of an altar and a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'the only real person' to whom the Pope's letter could have been sent was the King of Ethiopia.(73) I had therefore naturally wondered which king had sat on the Ethiopian throne in 1177. On researching the matter I had discovered that it had been a man named Harbay and that the concession requested had not been granted to him but rather to his successor, Lalibela. Neither Harbay nor Lalibela had stemmed from the line of monarchs supposedly descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through Menelik I. Instead they had both belonged to a usurper dynasty known as the Zagwe which had ruled in Ethiopia from roughly AD 1030 until 1270 when the Solomonids were finally restored to the throne.(74) This was a period of Ethiopian history about which very little was known. I was able to confirm, however, that the Solomonic line had been interrupted around AD 980 and that this coup d' t had been the work of a tribal chieftainess named Gudit, who adhered to the Jewish faith and who seemed to have been motivated above all else by a desire to obliterate the Christian religion. At any rate she attacked Axum, razed much of the ancient city to the ground, and succeeded in killing its Solomonic emperor. Two of the royal princes were also murdered but a third escaped with his life and fled to the province of Shoa, far to the south, where he married and produced children, thus ensuring the survival of the old dynasty, although in much reduced circumstances.(75) Gudit was the head of a large tribal confederation known as the Agaw to which the Falashas, the indigenous black Jews of Ethiopia, also belonged.(76) Although it was by no means certain that she had left any direct successor, historians accepted that within fifty years of her death most of northern Ethiopia had been united under the Zagwe monarchs who, like her, were all of Agaw extraction. In its early days this dynasty could again like Gudit have been Jewish.(77) If so, however (and the case was not proved), it had certainly converted to Christianity well before the birth of Prince Lalibela which took place in the ancient mountain town of Roha, in what is now the province of Wollo, around the year 1140. The younger half-brother of King Harbay, Lalibela appeared to have been destined for greatness from the moment when his mother saw a dense swarm of bees surrounding him as he lay in his crib. Recalling an old belief that the animal world could foretell the future of important personages, the legends said that she had been seized by the spirit of prophecy and had cried out 'Lalibela' meaning, literally, 'the bees recognize his sovereignty'.(78) Thus the prince received his name. The prophecy that it expressed caused Harbay to fear for the safety of his throne to such an extent that he tried to have Lalibela murdered while he was still a babe in arms. This first attempt failed, but persecutions of one kind or another continued for several years, culminating in the administration of a deadly poison that plunged the young prince into a cataleptic sleep. Ethiopian legends said that the stupor lasted for three days, during which time Lalibela was transported by angels to the first, second and third Heavens. There he was addressed directly by the Almighty who told him to have no anxiety as to his life or future sovereignty. A Purpose had been mapped out for him, for which reason he had been anointed. After awaking from his trance he was to flee Ethiopia and seek refuge in Jerusalem. He could rest secure, however, that when the time was tight he would return as king to Roha, his birthplace. Moreover it was his destiny that he would build a number of wonderful churches there, the like of which the world had never seen before. God then gave Lalibela detailed instructions as to the method of construction that was to be used, the form that each of the churches was to take, their locations and even their interior and exterior decorations.(79) Legend and history coincided at this point in a single well documented fact: Lalibela did indeed suffer a long period of exile in Jerusalem while his half-brother Harbay continued to occupy the throne of Ethiopia.(80) This exile, I learned, began around the year 1160 when Lalibela would have been about twenty years old and ended in 1185 when he returned in triumph to his own country, deposed Harbay and proclaimed himself king.(81) From that date onwards there were reliable chronicles of his rule, which lasted until AD 1211.(82) He made his capital at Roha, where he had been born and which was now renamed 'Lalibela' in his honour.(83) There, perhaps in fulfilment of his legendary vision, he almost immediately set about building eleven spectacular monolithic churches churches that were literally carved out of solid volcanic rock (I myself had visited those churches in 1983 some weeks after my trip to Axum, and had found that they were still places of living worship). Neither did Lalibela forget his twenty-five-year sojourn in the Holy Land many of the features of which he attempted to reproduce in Roha-Lalibela. For example, the river running through the town was renamed 'Jordan'; one of the eleven churches Beta Golgotha was specifically designed to symbolize the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; and a nearby hill was called Debra Zeit ('Mount of Olives') so that it might represent the place where Christ was captured.(84) Not content with making his capital a kind of 'New Jerusalem', the Ethiopian king also sought, throughout his reign, to maintain close links with Jerusalem itself. There was, I discovered, nothing particularly new about this. Since the late fourth century AD clergy from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had been permanently stationed in the Holy City.(85) It had been a desire to increase and consolidate this presence that had led to Harbay's request to Pope Alexander III to grant the concession of an altar and a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nothing had come of that other than the Pope's rather tentative letter sent in 1177 in reply to Harbay's initial approach. A decade later, however, there had been two important developments: in 1185 Lalibela had seized the Ethiopian throne, and in 1187 Saladin had driven the Crusaders out of the Holy City and had forced Jerusalem's Ethiopian community, together with other Eastern Christians, to flee to Cyprus.(86) The royal chronicles showed that Lalibela had been deeply disturbed by this turn of events and, in 1189, his envoys had managed to persuade Saladin to allow the Ethiopians to return and also to grant them, for the first time, a key site of their own the Chapel of the Invention of the Cross, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.(87) Subsequently, in relatively modern times, these privileges had again been lost; in consequence, I learned, Abyssinian pilgrims were now obliged to make their devotions on the roof of the chapel where they had established a monastery.(88) They also still possessed two other churches in Jerusalem as well as a substantial Patriarchate situated in the heart of the Old City within a few minutes' walk of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Both in terms of foreign and domestic policy, and also in terms of architectural expression and spiritual development, Lalibela's reign had represented the zenith of the Zagwe dynasty's powers and achievements. After his death a steep decline set in. Finally, in AD 1270, his grandson Naakuto Laab was persuaded to abdicate in favour of Yekuno Amlak a monarch claiming Solomonic descent.(89) Thereafter, until Haile Selassie was deposed during the communist revolution of 1974, all but one of Ethiopia's emperors had belonged to the royal line that traced its heritage back, through Menelik I, to King Solomon of Jerusalem. A pattern of coincidences Reviewing what I had learned about Lalibela's illustrious reign, I realized that it fitted perfectly into the beguiling pattern of coincidences that I had already identified as being associated with the Crusades, with the Templars, and with the twelfth century: At the very beginning of the twelfth century (or more properly in 1099, the last year of the eleventh century) Jerusalem was seized by the Crusaders. In 1119 the nine founding knights of the Templar order all French noblemen arrived in Jerusalem and took up residence on the site of the original Temple of Solomon. In 1128 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux won official church recognition for the Templars at the Synod of Troyes. In 1134 work started on the north tower of Chartres cathedral, the first-ever example of Gothic architecture. In 1145 the name 'Prester John' was first heard in Europe. In 1160 Prince Lalibela, the future monarch of Ethiopia, arrived in Jerusalem as a political exile fleeing the persecutions of his half-brother Harbay (who then occupied the throne). In 1165 a letter purporting to have been written by 'Prester John' and making a series of awe-inspiring claims about the size of his armies, his wealth and his power, had been circulated in Europe addressed to 'various Christian kings'. In 1177 Pope Alexander III issued a response to the above document but, significantly, made reference in it to another communication that he had received somewhat later a request from 'Prester John' to be granted an altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It seemed that this request had been lodged by 'the Prester's' emissaries who had spoken to the Pope's personal physician Philip during a visit that the latter had made to Palestine. (The 'Prester John' who had asked for this concession could only have been Lalibela's half-brother Harbay who, in 1177, was still on the throne of Ethiopia.) In 1182 the Holy Grail made its first-ever appearance in literature (and, for that matter, in history) in an uncompleted narrative poem by Chr en de Troyes. In 1185 Prince Lalibela left Jerusalem and returned to Ethiopia where he successfully deposed Harbay and seized the throne. Almost immediately thereafter he began building a group of spectacular rock-hewn churches in his capital Roha later renamed 'Lalibela' in his honour. In 1187 Jerusalem fell to the Muslim forces of Sultan Saladin and the Crusaders were driven out, along with members of the Ethiopian community in the Holy City who sought temporary refuge in Cyprus. (Some Templars also went to Cyprus indeed, after the fall of Jerusalem, the knights bought the island which became, for a while, their headquarters.)(90) In 1189 emissaries sent to Saladin by King Lalibela managed to persuade the Muslim general to allow the Ethiopians to return to Jerusalem and also to grant them a privilege that they had never enjoyed before, the same privilege that Harbay had sought from the Pope in 1177 namely a chapel and altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Between the years 1195 and 1200 Wolfram von Eschenbach began to write Parzival, which continued the earlier work done by Chr en de Troyes and which, in the process, transformed the Grail into a Stone, incorporated many Ethiopic elements into the story, and specifically mentioned not only 'Prester John' but also the Templars. At exactly the same time work started on the north porch of Chartres cathedral with its Ethiopic Queen of Sheba, its Grail (containing a Stone), and its representation of the Ark of the Covenant. The Templars, Gothic architecture, the Holy Grail and the notion that somewhere in the world there existed a powerful non-European Christian king called 'Prester John' had therefore all been the products of the twelfth century. And in that same century, just before Parzival was written and the north porch of Chartres cathedral built, a future Christian king of Ethiopia Lalibela had returned to his homeland to claim his throne after spending twenty-five years in Jerusalem.

It seemed to me, from everything I had learned, that all these matters must have been intricately connected by some common factor that had remained hidden from history, perhaps because it had been deliberately concealed. Proof positive of a Templar quest for the lost Ark of the Covenant, first in Jerusalem and then later in Ethiopia, would provide that hidden but common factor the missing link in the complex chain of inter-related events, ideas and personalities that I had identified. I knew, at least for the moment, that I had gone as far as I could with the part of my investigation that related to Jerusalem. But what about Ethiopia? Was there really any evidence at all that the Templars might have gone there to look for the Ark and that they might subsequently have arranged for the results of their quest to be encoded by Wolfram in the arcane symbolism of his 'Stone called the Gral'?