True Raiders

by Brad Ricca

  Father Vincent attempted to smooth out his dirty habit, took off his hat, and approached the men.

  “Captain Parker, if I may?”

  “Father,” he nodded, his pipe held fast.

  “Since the tunnel is finally open, might I be allowed to make a detailed plan of it?”

  Captain Parker regarded le petit saint against the bright sun. Father Vincent knew that the English were disappointed. But this—the chance to measure out the tunnel free of water, brigand, or beast—had probably never happened since it was first carved.

  Captain Parker offered to keep the tunnel open and not let the water through until Father Vincent was done with his inspection. Father Vincent shook Captain Parker’s hand vigorously and almost sprinted off, once again struck by the obliging natures of the explorers.

  The next day, armed with his tools, Father Vincent walked down the familiar steps. From September 26 to October 8, he had free rein of a tunnel that, save for a lonely puddle here and there, was completely cleared out. It was surely strange, thought Father Vincent. He hauled in instruments of all sorts: graduated rulers, water levels, graphometers, and even a portable darkroom. Father Savignac took detailed photographs of the tunnel, but mostly Father Vincent was on his own. Mostly, he was free.

  They may have found little in the way of more pots and lamps, but there were still other mysteries. There were markings, he supposed you could call them. Father Vincent had found more of the hollow triangles that first appeared in one of the galleries. They were so asymmetrical, so capricious, that their meaning continued to elude him. Father Vincent could not reduce them, even summarily, to either old or modern numerical systems. Why hollow triangles, instead of the simple arrowhead? The difficult labor of chiseling a symbol into stone did not usually indulge extra work. He studied them for hours. He couldn’t understand why there were also squares, some three and a half to four centimeters long. And these marks—whatever they were—could not be for measurement. They were the most inconvenient shapes possible with which to measure things when a simple line would have been so much easier. It felt like the Architect—the past—was taunting him. It felt personal.

  Father Vincent decided to tackle the overall question instead. He turned and walked down the length of the tunnel, took his measurements, and then walked back and did it again. He repeated this process several times. There was a curve to the tunnel that he could almost pace off blindfolded. He walked to the middle again, where the passage swerved to the side.

  He stopped. He was puzzled. Something was happening.

  Father Vincent looked down at his map. The tunnel moved east to west like a snake and then shifted north to south. The northern curve had ostensibly been made to avoid a well under the town, allowing for people to draw their water in security or for the possibility of striking another spring someday. That made sense. But it was impossible to find any sign of an opening to a well in the whole length of the aqueduct. Father Vincent tested his sandal against the ground.

  There was another dimension to this puzzle. The tunnel was also moving up and down.

  Father Vincent then realized what he had missed. Though there were the normal variations one might expect on the floor of the tunnel, it was the unequal heights at both ends that were exceedingly strange. One would expect that a tunnel commenced with such spacious grandeur would gradually get smaller as it penetrated farther into the heart of the rock, but here it was quite the contrary. It was clear that the roof gradually sunk lower and lower toward the entrance. Had the floor sunk over time? Closer examination of the floor revealed violent gashes, especially at the openings of some of the galleries. Was this the work of the Architect? Why?

  Father Vincent walked near the place of the meeting, the fateful turn where they knew the two gangs met—from opposite directions—in Hezekiah’s time. He pressed his ear to the wall. He knew that others had heard the sound of running water here, even though there was clearly no fissure. He could hear it. It was similar to the sound heard in the cave when the Virgin’s Well was active and loud: almost like boiling water for tea in a pot instead of a kettle, sounding far out of proportion to the actual amount of water moving behind it.

  The key question was if gang A started at the fountain, how did they meet up with gang B from the Pool of Siloam if they had to avoid the water and were digging at different levels? Father Vincent liked explanations. But he was not finding any easy ones. He stood there, in the black tunnel, and thought about what he knew and what he didn’t and what might explain that space of in between.

  The solution jumped at him. It was the water. The Israelites did not have the technology to divert it as they did, so when it rose, their work became faster, sloppier, and the tunnel floor got higher. Only when the water naturally retreated could they fix these areas by lowering the floor. Father Vincent could almost see it in his mind, these Israelites, in leather and cloth, picking the tunnel out against the clock of an invasion by the Assyrians. The northern gang seemed to work faster in the water, slinging their picks with abandon, while the southern gang was more methodical. How wonderful was the past, thought Father Vincent. They probably knew perfectly well that the floor was too high, but they kept on because they knew it would be easier to correct later.

  Father Vincent, with his eyes open, pictured their meeting. At the end, they were probably only about ten feet apart. They were shouting to each other. The clubs and axes opened a small opening, which was attacked with greater zeal. When the wall between them finally came down, a break between here and there, success and failure, truth and disguise, they must have cheered as they tore it down with abandon, not mattering the floor beneath them. The water was coming, as was the enemy.

  Father Vincent realized that once the tunnels were finally joined, the gangs had to turn their attention to the ground and level it so that the water, when it came, would flow in a direct route. But that was a few days’ work at most. The incredible scope of what these men had accomplished filled Father Vincent with awe. They had adapted to a changing geography and turned a plan into reality by their wits and will because the stakes were life itself. Father Vincent thought of the Master Architect and realized that his genius—his miracle—was that he was capable of being imperfect. He was just a man.

  “They had driven a tunnel under a hill and saved a kingdom,” Father Vincent said to himself. “No wonder they marked it with an inscription.”

  Father Vincent thought of the Siloam inscription, found by a young boy. The inscription he had read so many times that he knew it by heart:

  Behold the excavation! Now this is the history of the tunnel. While the excavators were lifting up the pick, each toward the other; and while there were yet three cubits to be broken through … the voice of the one called to his neighbor, for there was an excess in the rock on the right. They rose up … they struck on the west of the excavation, the excavators struck, each to meet the other, pick to pick. And there flowed the waters from their outlet to the pool for a distance of a thousand cubits; and of a cubit was the height of the rock over the head of the excavation here.

  The inscription was not about God, but the good works of men. The practical, scientific, imperfect works of men.

  Walking back, Father Vincent paused and looked back at the stairs again. There was that gap, just under the last step. After breaking through a portion of it, Father Vincent saw a new conduit that penetrated under the stairway and led into a small cavern. He shimmied through and looked up to see a rocky step. Father Vincent sifted his hands through the ground. The floor was dust and sand. There were potsherds, but not a fragment was intact, not one showed a trace of pattern, though they all looked ancient.

  Near the back of the dark cave, Father Vincent’s fingers struck something. He carefully rescued the rough fragments of a fairly thick earthenware piece. It looked to have been a vessel of some sort, most likely a bowl or cup. He examined it there, on the ground, in the dark: it was reddish, perhaps even yellow, and not elegant in its
working. The inside was glazed, though crudely. The piece had been baked very unevenly and was not the work of a skilled potter, which he could tell by feeling its sides. Father Vincent was confident in dating the piece, conservatively, to the ninth century BC, in the pre-Canaanite period.

  On the north side of the basin, Father Vincent found an Israelite lamp in excellent condition, and certainly as old as the eleventh century BC. So many different peoples had used these tunnels—for water, for battle, and for worship, in many faiths.

  As he tarried in the cave, Father Vincent could hear the rush of water building. Soon, they would release their dam and it would all work again, as it did all those years ago. The water from this spring would end up in the Pool of Siloam. He thought, as he often had in these tunnels, of John 9.

  And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.

  Father Vincent sighed and smiled. He thought of what was going to happen very soon.

  “Water,” said Father Vincent. “The gift of life. Now we are ready to give it.”

  A few days later, Father Vincent surrendered the tunnel back to Captain Parker. He had books of drawings, notes, and photographs—enough to perhaps write a book someday. But he knew he might never return to these tunnels, at least as they were now. He was very grateful.

  “Did you find anything?” asked Monty.

  “You will receive my report, Captain. Beyond that, there is one thing I wanted to show you.” He pulled out one of his latest attempts at a map, done in graphite and red, accompanied by a flowing script.

  “Look here,” he pointed to an overhead rendition of the Tunnel with its telltale curve. “We know it was meant to connect the Virgin’s Fountain and the Pool of Siloam, which is from here to here, as you know.” Here he drew a straight line between the two destinations, which the curvy tunnel did not follow. “I had thought that the northern part of the tunnel bent due to the presence of a well, or another spring, or just the natural cut of the living rock. But I was wrong.”

  “You were wrong?”

  “It happens. Yes. I believe that this curve was intentional. That the diggers deliberately avoided this area. I believe there was something there that they weren’t allowed to touch.” Here he circled the bulge missed by the Tunnel.

  “What do you think is there?” asked Monty, his eyes flashing.

  “A tomb,” said Father Vincent.

  Twenty-Six

  Bertha Vester

  JERUSALEM, 1910

  That night, Bertha went up to the rooftop. It was always a bit of a scramble, but it was worth the effort. Their location on the city wall afforded a magnificent vantage point: the Dome, now dark, and the stars above her seemed to glint with the same cord of light. The view was nearly unearthly. Bertha took a deep breath and did what she frequently did on these nighttime trips; she thought of her father. She felt close to him here.

  Horatio Vester had been gone for many years, but he was still a powerful motivation for the Colony’s efforts in Jerusalem. Bertha knew that he would be proud of all they had accomplished. The American Colony now ran a gift shop and a hotel, raised pigs, and had started a studio of photography. They taught handicrafts, made dresses and tailored suits, and funneled their profits into their philanthropy.

  Because of the Colony’s new reach, they had attracted many visitors. A few years ago, a man with a dark beard and a stoop to his neck asked to see the view from the roof. He was H. Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines and the other adventures of Allan Quatermain. Bertha watched quietly as he gazed on the golden Dome. There were plenty of other renowned visitors, but Bertha, like her father before her, was drawn to the misfit characters, the outsiders, who had come seeking answers.

  With the archaeological dig still in full swing on Mount Ophel, she had been thinking lately of one such man, Mr. Moses. He was a trader in rare antiquities and operated a small store in Jerusalem. He would look for ancient manuscripts in secret storefronts hidden behind rolled-down canvas doors. He would creep among the dusty hills looking for relics and inscriptions. He returned from one such trip with some ancient Canaanite idols he found in a cave somewhere in Moab. They were praised as an extraordinary find. Before they were announced to the archaeological world, Jacob’s school was given the rare honor of displaying them. Jacob, who had been so excited at the prospect of seeing these important artifacts, took one look and quickly averted his eyes. The pagan idols were depicted in very specific anatomical positions.

  Bertha laughed. Her brother Jacob was now a beloved teacher in the school and still looked at his shoes when she told the story. Mr. Moses was later discovered to have produced a scroll of great importance that the experts decried as fake. That part of the story ended quite awfully.

  Bertha looked out at the stars, trying not to think of it. Whenever she saw a shooting star, she thought of Miss Poole, another of her father’s favorites. She was quite a character, a charming, if eccentric, little Englishwoman who read astrology charts for tourists in Jerusalem. She would often engage in long, intelligent conversations with Bertha’s father. Miss Poole would sometimes come to the Colony and stay for three days to make a particular point (and to enjoy the food). But she was welcome. They all were. One night, a huge meteor hurtled from the sky and landed right in front of Miss Poole’s door. She called for Horatio and the men of the Colony came and moved the steaming rock, the very firmament of heaven, so that she might rejoin the world in her hoopskirt and curls.

  Bertha felt close to her father when she thought of these stories. Mostly because of his credo, that their mission was to help others, not convert them. Her father’s story was well-known to the public, but sometimes Bertha went through it in her mind, like a prayer. Horatio Spafford was a real estate lawyer, but the Great Chicago Fire took away his business. He and his wife, Anna, and their four darling girls finally found their way back and scheduled a trip to Europe to celebrate. A pressing business matter caused Horatio to stay home, giving them a promise to join them in England. His wife and daughters set off without him.

  On November 22, 1873, at two o’clock in the morning and halfway across the Atlantic, their boat, the Ville du Havre, collided with another steamer, the Loch Earn, and sank, taking 226 souls with her. Her father waited for any news of survivors in a daze. He finally received a telegram from Anna in England. It carried only two words: “Saved alone.”

  Once they were back in Chicago, her parents plunged into religious charities to keep themselves from going mad with grief. They welcomed a new son, Horatio, but he tragically died of scarlet fever. Her father could not understand: what had he or his young wife done that they should be so afflicted by such pain? Horatio felt that people’s eyes were looking at him in peculiar ways, wondering what abominable thing he had done. The Puritan strain of their Protestant congregation was strong in the Old Testament. Many of them believed that sickness or sorrow were the direct result of sin. One was the just retribution of the other.

  Her father searched for answers in the Bible, but he still could not reconcile this harsh tenet of retribution with his concept of Christian teachings. He told Bertha that he remembered Christ’s answer to the disciples when they asked whose sin it was, the parents’ or the man’s, that caused him to be born blind; Jesus answered that it was neither, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

  Bertha’s father was convinced that God was kind and that he woul
d see his children again in heaven. This promise calmed his heart. He sailed on a boat to the exact place where his daughters had fallen into the sea. He wrote to his sister, Rachel, of his experience there:

  On Thursday last we passed over the spot where the boat went down, in mid-ocean, the water three miles deep. But I do not think of our dear ones there. They are safe, folded, the dear lambs, and there, before very long, shall we be too.

  He wrote a hymn to commemorate the moment, “It Is Well with My Soul.” When he returned to America, Horatio voiced his views openly, and was removed from the church. Distraught with the constant ridicule and judgments, he took his family to Palestine to better live a life devoted to God. When they arrived, their new daughter Bertha was only three years old.

  Bertha, now grown, smiled at the story, though it still brought her sadness. She looked out onto the city, the dark sky, and the tiny pinpricks of light behind it all.

  Twenty-Seven

  Charles Warren

  JERUSALEM, NOVEMBER 1870

  FORTY YEARS EARLIER

  Charles Warren was riding back to Jerusalem from Jaffa when he was met by a wrapped-up Bedouin on his horse in the middle of the dirt road. Warren slowed his pace. Thieves were not uncommon here. The man was stopped directly in his path, as if waiting for him. As Warren rode closer, the man pulled down the covering on his face and greeted him.

  “Effendi,” he said.

  Warren breathed a sigh of relief. After preliminaries were exchanged, Warren found out that the man had indeed been waiting specifically for him. Warren had been in Jerusalem for so long, digging in the ground, that he had garnered something of a reputation. Strangers were always coming to him with leads on artifacts and caves. This time was no different.

  “There is a stone, across the Jordan,” said the man. “A black stone.”