by Brad Ricca
“No running!” Bertha said, stopping him gently. He looked no more than twelve. Not even her own son could break the rules in this place.
“Do you like the new ward?” she asked, putting her hands on his shoulders. The child nodded.
“When we started,” said Bertha, “we were over in the embroidery school!”
The boy had heard this story from his mother so many times, but it didn’t stop her. By now, everyone had heard it.
One night, many years ago, while walking outside the city to an event, Bertha ran into a Bedouin couple with a newborn boy. The baby was very sick. But they could not get into any of the hospitals. Bertha had connections and was able to find a nice warm bed for the new mother and child.
The next day, Bertha was surprised to see the father standing in her front yard, holding the same little baby. The small miracle had turned to darkness: the mother had died overnight. The baby, thank God, was doing well. But the Bedouin father, who lived in a cave in the desert, could not take care of him.
Bertha took the boy and adopted him, naming him Noel because she had found him on Christmas Eve, on her way to sing carols in Bethlehem under the night sky.
Bertha stared down at her son, still so full of promise, and could see him as he was then, a still and quiet baby, who only once in a while would sigh and squiggle, until he fell asleep.
Noel went off to find his friends. Bertha watched him go. As she left the new room, she paused by the plaque in the wall that commemorated the new wing of the Anna Spafford Childrens Home.
TO THE GLORY OF GOD
AND IN LOVING MEMORY OF
JACOB E. SPAFFORD
ADOPTED SON OF
HORATIO GATES AND ANNA SPAFFORD
IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF A LIFE
THAT WAS AN INSPIRATION TO MANY
The American Colony had survived war, the ongoing British mandate, and rioting, but it was a day in July of 1932 when Jacob’s car went flying off a swerving mountain road called the Seven Sisters that would forever diminish it. Jacob had been traveling to an archaeological dig, his lifelong hobby, in an area thought to be the site of the battle between David and Goliath.
Jacob had been her business partner and her greatest ally. She was so proud of him, her half brother, Jacob Eliahu Spafford, who had been adopted by their parents when he was young. She was proud that he had grown into such a good man and proud that he was the one, as a boy skipping school, who had discovered the Siloam inscription engraved on an ancient tablet in a dark tunnel, and had never once mentioned it to anyone, not even once.
In 1950, Bertha Vester published her memoirs, titled Our Jerusalem. She died, at age ninety, on June 27, 1968, in Jerusalem. She left behind two daughters, two sons, and countless more children of all kinds. Her visiting admirers over the years included Helen Keller, Cole Porter, T. E. Lawrence, kings and dignitaries, multiple American presidents, and Marilyn Monroe. The Baby Home, now known as the Spafford Children’s Center, continues to minister to the needs of thousands of patients, of all faiths, as it has done for nearly one hundred years. Bertha’s adopted son Noel grew up to join the Transjordan Frontier Force and worked with the United Nations in a refugee camp in Jericho. One day, in 1953, Noel came to say goodbye to his mother. He was going to Damascus, he said. They never heard from him again.
Forty-Eight
Monty Parker
When Monty Parker left Palestine, he traveled to Turkey, America, and Canada. Monty had mostly escaped the eyes of the continental newspapers, but he desperately wanted to return to Palestine. The Syndicate reorganized again and raised funds, and most of the crew that had allegedly been in the Dome of the Rock pledged to return with Monty. When the Turks, with help from Cavid, approved his return, the crew left for Jaffa once again. But when they arrived, they did so not as a secret cadre of Englishmen on some madcap adventure, but as some of the most infamous men to set foot in Jerusalem in the past decade.
The locals, even in Jaffa, were so incensed at their return that violence seemed imminent. Monty was told to stay on the boat. And thus the last iteration of the Parker expedition left for good on a long voyage home.
When the Great War came, Monty reenlisted with the Grenadier Guards, though some members of his family disliked his choice as being too common. Because of his injuries in South Africa, which were classified as “neurasthenia,” the contemporary term for the traumatic aftereffects of the combat he had seen on the battlefield, Monty served at headquarters in France and Belgium. He saw papers with impossible numbers pass over his desk. When the war ended, he slipped back into his old life.
Monty lived with his older brother Edmund, whom he affectionately called B, at Saltram. After their father died, Edmund realized that their debt was higher than their income and had to make difficult decisions in selling off parts of the estate. After inheriting a nightmare, Edmund developed a plan to save their family home, which seemed to be working.
When World War II began, all but two—the butler and cook—of the eleven-person staff of Saltram departed. When the Luftwaffe bombed Plymouth, it was Monty and his brother who stood on the roof of Saltram and put out the fires. Monty, in his sixties, rolled up his sleeves and felt the familiar heat and heard the same loud explosions that he never hoped to again, but Monty would not let his home be taken away by the Nazis. Soon, the Americans arrived and parked their great green vehicles in Saltram Park. Monty walked around and took pictures of the smiling soldiers.
Monty’s brother B passed away in 1951 at age seventy-four. Because Edmund had no children, Monty inherited both the title Earl of Morley and Saltram itself, which had bomb damage on its roof and escalating debt. With some help from politicians, including Nancy Astor, Monty arranged to let the National Trust take Saltram—all of it—to even up the heavy death-duty tax left by his brother. Though some of the outlying family members grumbled in their teacups, Monty had made the sacrifice to save Saltram, not for himself but for what it stood for.
Free of the constraints of a large household, Monty enjoyed the lifestyle of a louche, well-tailored gentleman, traveling to Greece, New Zealand, Hawaii, and points in between. He had lunches on the decks of white boats. He attended parties where women wore diamonds. With his big camera, he took photos of bathing beauties on fine sands. Pictures of him, bald, with a white mustache, appeared in the society columns of various magazines, his eyes always close to a wink. When he was home, his nephews and nieces called him “Uncle God.”
Monty Parker was eighty-three years old when he died on April 28, 1962. He had just returned from a trip to Australia and the United States. His obituary mentioned that he had considerable interests in the china clay industry—and, of course, some business about Jerusalem.
He never married and had no children. His mostly spent-up estate and effects were given to Marion Elizabeth Jessie Marconi Cecil, who was identified in the probate notice as “a married woman.” She was the goddaughter of Marconi, the radio pioneer. A lover of codes and ciphers, Marconi referred to her in his secret diaries as “Betty.” The title went to his nephew, Jack’s son, John St. Aubyn Parker, the sixth Earl of Morley.
St. Mary Church in Plympton, a fine country church dating back to 1311, is built over an old priory burial ground. Narrow and white, with a beautiful wood vault, it has, like all English churches of a certain age, its own secret things. In the chapel, tinted blue by a plate of stained glass and under a great window, there is a stone tomb of a knight. His effigy lies on top of an intricately sculpted rectangular crypt. The head of the figure is rested on his helmet. His eyes are closed but look wide open—blank—as he prays, his mouth voicing a word. On Sundays, all the children who should be listening instead stare at the box, sometimes, wondering what is inside. Or, rather, knowing. They stare at the outside of the vessel instead, built up as a kind of distraction. Or perhaps even a clue. There, right on the coffin, they can see a carving of the Father holding a crucifix, with a dove sitting on top. It is not the Holy Trinity but a repr
esentation of it—as hope, as belief—to make sense of the bones, of the darkness, within.
Monty is buried just outside the church, next to his mother and father; his brother Edmund can be found on their other side. Their Celtic-looking crosses have become chipped and worn over time, but they are strong, in their way, and picturesque in the deep green grass along the thin stone lane.
Forty-Nine
The Secret Cupboard
Throughout his public life, Monty never admitted to digging under the Dome of the Rock. It is easy to miss, because so many others did tell their versions, but Monty kept his cards close. When asked about the expedition by the press, especially in America, he would evade the question and smile.
I first heard of the expedition like so many others, in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s brilliant Jerusalem: A Biography. In his book, he devotes several dramatic pages to the history of the Parker expedition. I was utterly fascinated, not only by what Montefiore wrote but also by the honest-to-God amazement—and hope—that someone had actually gone after the Ark. I knew there had to be more to the story.
I saw a reference in the endnotes to “Parker Family Archive” and tried to track it down to no luck. Sometime later, I wrote a letter to the Earl of Morley that was a complete shout into the void. I looked up how to address him in the proper manner. Several months later, I got a tall, rectangular envelope in the mail, with a handwritten address and a typed letter. The letter was short and was signed by hand, “Morley.”
I read the letter many times before I realized there were two ways to look at it: as another dead end or as a possible clue.
In the meantime, I searched for other records of the expedition, from reports to novels; I looked for and translated and read everything I could get my hands on. It was another two years before I found an article I wanted to get translated from Hebrew. I contacted the author, who was very helpful. What she said next made me stare at my computer for a good two minutes.
The archive had been found. The bag of notes and papers that Monty carried with him every day over a hundred years ago in Jerusalem were real.
Dr. Nirit Shalev-Khalifa is a historian and curator in Jerusalem who had done an exhibit on the Parker expedition. She had been trying to find the archive since 1996. In 2012, while planning a vacation in England, she took a chance and got in touch with the Morley household. After a persuasive conversation with the maid, Dr. Shalev-Khalifa got the email address of the earl’s son; his father was very ill. She sent him a message and waited. It wasn’t until the night before she was about to leave for England, when she went to close her computer—at midnight—that she saw it: an email from the earl’s son. He wanted to see her.
When they met in England, it was “wonderful” said Nirit. The earl’s son was very interested in hearing more about his relative. That is when Nirit saw it, lying on the table.
The box.
She knew exactly what it was.
They opened it and saw papers, photos, reports—all of Monty’s original documents from the expedition. Nirit looked through it carefully. And there it was: “the treasure,” she said—the cipher itself. The earl’s son pointed to some words in Hebrew that she read for him. “If it’s true,” she said, laughing, “you’ll be the richest man on earth! Or at least,” she added, “you’ll get a medal.”
When Nirit came home, she made arrangements through her institution for a photographer to come down from Oxford. The entire box was photographed and scanned. A few years later, a man named Graham Addison indexed and collated it all to the letter, preserving its legacy for good.
“It was nice, as a historian, to be part of history,” said Nirit.
Nirit, who is warm and welcoming, listened to my own ideas and invited me to take part in a Parker conference in Jerusalem. She introduced me to other scholars, historians, and writers. All of a sudden, I was part of an expedition.
“It’s a never-ending story,” she said.
When I talked to the son, he was now the seventh Earl of Morley. I spoke with him and his daughter Olivia over a Zoom call. I first addressed him as “Lord Morley,” after again consulting more than a few manuals of proper etiquette.
“Call me Mark,” he said.
He told me that he had first seen the papers as a boy. His father, the sixth earl, John St. Aubyn Parker, was at Eton with his wife, picking Mark up from school. It was then that an old man, the Parker family lawyer, came up to them with his face white as a sheet.
“We found these papers,” the man said, his voice cracking with nerves. He produced a box from under his arm. “These should be kept quiet. They might cause an international incident!” Mark looked up at all these people who were taller than him and thought it all sounded incredibly interesting. He had met Monty once, he remembered. His granduncle had slipped him a toy at some family gathering. It was a little brown mouse, carved out of wood.
“We want the story out there for history,” Mark said. “It’s a real blue-sky adventure.” When I told them I had found a strange, symbolic connection to Jack the Ripper, his wife laughed off-screen, and we all had to agree. Locked in our homes during a pandemic, separated by an ocean, it was a good way to spend a morning, making a connection to the past through the present. The archive, like the Ark, was never where it was supposed to be. I can imagine there is some kind of lesson in that.
I thanked the Parkers for letting the story continue. Over the next days, I began going through Monty’s archives myself. Among the ciphers and reports, I found exactly what I had been searching for as the truth of this story. Not if he found it, but if he did it—did he really try that last gambit and dig under the Dome of the Rock? There is so much uncertainty in the other accounts that this became the most important question for me. Mostly because he never says so.
But in Monty’s archives, I found the answer.
The letter was from Monty to Constantinople, dated November 2, 1911. When I finally read it, it did not fall lightly out of an old, worn book, crumbled with age. The soundtrack didn’t swell behind me. Nor did I have to read it in a mirror or apply a secret reagent. But as I slowly opened the PDF on my computer screen in Cleveland, it sure felt like all these things happened. There, on a perfect scan of an old piece of paper, was Monty’s only confession.
During my last stay in Jerusalem, it was claimed that I smuggled into the revered Omar Mosque to do searches and that I even took some objects.
My entry into the revered mosque has been duly authorized by the authorities and I have never bribed anyone for this purpose.
The object of my research in the so-called revered mosque is purely scientific with the sole aim of discovering whether there is not a tunnel under the mosque leading to Silwan.
As for the objects found, there are some potiches discovered in my excavations at Silwan which are currently in a cupboard placed in a gallery, and the said cupboard was sealed jointly by the inspectors and by me.
Therefore, I assure you that I have taken away nothing and I hope that you will not listen to unfounded tales manipulated by intriguing outrageous people.
The people and the faithful of Jerusalem, not knowing the authorization I had and ignoring the scientific purpose of my research in the said sanctuary, wrongly accused me of desecration.
Believe, honorable deputies, I worshiped mosques as well as churches and other holy places.
Upon entering the revered mosque in question I never thought of committing a wrongdoing; but unfortunately, unwittingly, I had offended very respectable feelings, I deeply regret this and I beg you to accept my sincere apologies.
My duty and the duty of all honest people is not to have the innocent wrongfully convicted; therefore I urge to be heard before the judgment by a Letter of Request officially appointed.
Having explained the situation to you clearly, I hope that you, Honorable Members, will help me to save these poor innocent fathers of families. I also hope that you will help my friend Hanna Bey to calm the spirits for the continuation of t
he works to take place without further complications and under the supervision of the Authorities, according to my contract with the Government.
Please accept, Honorable Deputies, my most respectful tributes.
Capt. Montague B. Parker
Even in this, Monty’s only admission, there is still some sway from the slippery adventurer. For though he does not mention the Ark, he admits to being there to search for a tunnel that would reach down into the valley. Was he confessing to unburden his soul or as part of an agreement where he would take at least a bit of responsibility (if only in a file somewhere) to free the prisoners in Beirut? If we are following Monty’s own words here—and we shouldn’t always, for obvious reasons—we can at least know one thing: he did dig under the Dome of the Rock.
There is no evidence—and I looked—of a gold box somewhere in Saltram or a massive influx of cash to Captain Parker in a buried account notice. Juvelius claimed there were ten full boxes taken from the yacht that were seized by the Turks and remained in Malta, unopened. This is an easy scene to imagine. When this was brought up later in the Turkish parliament, one of the ministers noted dryly that the boxes contained only “tools, clays, and stones.”
There was one last clue in Monty’s confession that struck me: the curious “cupboard” he refers to. In no other account was there a reference to a hiding place. I kept looking.
On December 19, 1919, the brand-new Jerusalem Headquarters of Antiquities, housed in Way House and consisting of only a few shelves, tasked with preserving the history of the region, received a typewritten telegram from the military governor of Jerusalem on green and yellow paper in thin, faint type. It was stamped and penciled and official looking. Since it was so new, the headquarters did not get a lot of mail. The subject line read: “Silwan, Confiscation of Antiquities from D. Parker’s Excavation.” The telegram stated:
I beg to report that Ibrahim Eff. Stambuli states that Mr. Montagu Parker, who was excavating in Silwan before the war, left in his charge two cupboards containing antiquities and deposited in his house in Silwan. The two cupboards of antiquities, which were sealed by the Turkish Government and Mr. Parker, still remain intact.
