cultureclash
THE AMBER ROOM WAS BOXED UP IN [KÖNIGSBERG] CASTLE BUT HAD NOT YET BEEN SHIPPED OUT; AMBER GOES FROM SOLID TO GAS AT 200 DEGREES SO MOST LIKELY WHAT HAPPENED IS THE ENTIRE ROOM WAS VAPORIZED AND THAT IS WHY IT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN AGAIN. IT WENT RIGHT TO VAPOUR AND IS LONG GONE. In “The Romanov Prophecy”, racism based on color is prevalent in Russia and also in North Carolina. Do you think we as people have evolved past that?
Well, you might think but it is still there. I have been in Russia now twice and you see no dark faces there at all. That is basically a very Anglo country so they don’t have a lot of experience with that over there. That is one reason why I made Miles Lord black, was because he was going to be in Russia; because not only would people be trying to kill him but he would have literally no place for him to hide. There is still elements of it around, racism takes different forms nowadays, we are not quite so open about it. To say that it is gone away? No, I also have to say it comes from both sides; both sides of the aisle are guilty of it a little bit. “The Amber Room” deals with stolen antiquities. With the addition of the looting of the Iraqi museum at the start of the war, how many stolen artefacts do you think are floating around?
Thousands and thousands and thousands of objects are out there that we’ll never even know how many there
are. A lot of them are undocumentedIt is a lot of stuff. There is a huge market out there for stolen antiquities; I explore that in “The Amber Room” when I had my Retrievers of Lost Antiquities which is a club that basically steals what is already stolen. This whole idea of these artefacts being out there fascinates me and kind of permeates through my novels.
what happened is the entire room was vaporized and that is why it has never been seen again. It went right to vapour and is long gone.
The Amber Room is one of the great lost artefacts and a mystery from WWII that has yet to be solved. What do you think happened to it?
There was a book written after mine, a non-fiction book written by a couple of reporters for the London Times, I think they had the best answer about what happened to the Amber Room. It most likely was destroyed by the Russians themselves. When they retook Königsberg Castle, they set fire to that castle. The temperature of the fire was about a thousand degrees and we know that because of the condition of the stone. The Amber Room was boxed up in that castle but had not yet been shipped out; Amber goes from solid to gas at 200 degrees so most likely
THE MOTORIZED ISSUE
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