Читать онлайн «The Sword of the Templars»
Автор Пол Кристофер
Paul Christopher
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
MORTAL DANGER-MILITARY ZONE
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
LA ROCHA
28
29
30
31
32
33
Paul Christopher
The Sword of the Templars
Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be?-
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone,
Is gone,-and the birch in its stead is grown. -
The Knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;-
His soul is with the saints, I trust.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Knight’s Tomb”
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King.
Glory to God Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque, whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth all things.
And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness.
1
“In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown depicted the Knights Templar as being the sacred keepers of the secret of Christ’s bloodline. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade they were portrayed as immortal guardians of the Holy Grail. In the movie National Treasure, Nicolas Cage described them as being the caretakers of a vast fortune buried under Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan. According to various religious scholars they were gatekeepers of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem after the successful conclusion of the First Crusade as well as protectors of pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land.
“Bull. The truth is the Knights Templar, this self-described Army of God, was nothing more than a gang of extortionists and thugs. As a group they were certainly the world’s first example of organized crime, complete with secret rituals and a code not unlike that of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra-the Mafia. ”
Lieutenant Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, a dark-haired, middle-aged man in an Army Ranger uniform wearing a black patch over his left eye, looked out over the classroom, checking for some sort of response from his students, or failing that at least an indication of interest. What he saw were eighteen “firsties,” fourth-year students, all male, all wearing the same “as-to-class” short-sleeved blue uniform blouses with a neat triangle of snow-white T-shirt showing at the neck, all wearing the same gray trousers with a single stripe, all with the same high-and-tight haircut, all with the same sleepy, glassy-eyed expression of young men attending the last class of an academic day that had started almost ten hours before. Incredibly, this was the cream of the West Point graduating class, most of them single-minded ring thumpers who’d already branched Artillery, Infantry, or Armor, and none of whom had the slightest interest in medieval history in general or the Knights Templar in particular. Future Warriors of America. Huah!
