Rebecca suddenly seemed distracted, and looked back down the alley. “Are we still being followed?”
Jack nodded. “By David’s men, and probably Abdullah’s. Everyone’s always watching everyone else here. It’s a place you can’t disappear into, unless you really know where you’re going.”
“Underground,” Rebecca said. “That’s where you need to go. Everything’s just under the surface here: war, the truth behind religion, the reality of history. Jerusalem’s riddled with natural caves and man-made tunnels, a honeycomb beneath your feet almost everywhere you step. Some archaeologists I’ve spoken to say there’s nothing more to be found here, that every last fissure has been scraped clean by treasure hunters over the centuries. Others believe that the ban by the mosque authorities on exploration beneath Temple Mount has concealed untold treasures, the sacred relics of the temple and much else besides.”
“The stuff Abdullah really wants to get his hands on,” Jeremy said.
“Abdullah was being disingenuous when he lamented the ban. For him, the possibility of undiscovered treasure boosts the mystique of the place and keeps his customers coming back for more. Buy a coin or an oil lamp from Jerusalem and you buy into that dream. And there may be a blanket ban on official exploration beneath the Temple Mount, but those who supply him with antiquities operate outside the law and will always be trying to find a way in. Once they’ve gotten there, it would be a free-for-all, but with Abdullah poised to stake the biggest claim.”
Jack peered at Rebecca. “And he’s canny enough to know that someone like you might be able to go to places along the temple precinct that would be denied to his people, and that you might be able to unlock vaults that would make him richer than his wildest dreams. That’s what those Russian oligarchs really want—the real treasure, not pots and coins—and they’d compete with one another to own it. Abdullah truly would become the new caliph of the Jerusalem underworld, and you would have been his unwitting pawn.”
“But I’ve used him, not the other way around. Let’s move. We’ve only got a few hours until you have to leave.”
They came out in front of the Western Wall precinct, the midday sun after the gloom of the alleyways reflecting blindingly off the white surface of the rock and making Jack squint and shade his eyes. A pair of Israeli Air Force F-16s shrieked overhead, banking right in the direction of the southern border with Gaza and Egypt. The police and army presence was stronger than he had ever seen it before, and the worshippers were limited to a few groups of Hasidic Jewish men with black hats and long hair who were bobbing and praying in front of the wall. Jack found himself hoping that the twelfth-century poet Yehuda Halevi of the Geniza letter had gotten here, that he had broken the Crusader ban on Jews entering the city and had touched the wall before he died, and had found the spiritual revelation that had eluded him in his life in Spain. The wall itself seemed impermeable, as if the shaped masonry were a natural extension of the bedrock, and Jack had to remind himself that like the mosque above it the wall was an accretion on a rock that had a far older history of human occupation than either of the two religions that claimed it.
Rebecca veered to the left to head back toward the city and the conjunction between the Western Wall and the medieval structures that abutted it. Jack followed, and caught up with her. “Isn’t the Temple Mount excavation to the right, at the City of David site?”
Rebecca waved her hand dismissively and flashed him a smile. “Been there, done that. I’ve got a new project.”
Jack stared at the wall ahead. He remembered what Rebecca had said: underground. He had an ominous feeling, but one tinged with excitement. He had guessed where she might be taking them. Any political storm that he might have provoked by transgressing on forbidden territory in Egypt and Sudan would be nothing compared to the one Rebecca might be risking now.
They came to a halt in front of a stone archway, and Jeremy walked up alongside. “Any hints, Rebecca? Any special equipment needed?”
She hitched up her rucksack, kicked back on the heel of one boot, and stared determinedly at a man-sized crack in the wall in front of them. “All I can say is, you haven’t seen anything yet. Follow me.”
CHAPTER 17
Jack squeezed sideways through the crack in the masonry and came out on a boardwalk that ran the interior length of the wall, at least twenty meters in either direction. They were inside a cavernous enclosed space between the outer medieval wall they had just penetrated and a continuation of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. Its huge blocks were visible some ten meters in front of Jack and disappeared to the left under accretions of later structure.
On the ground in front of the wall was the exposed rock that formed the edge of Temple Mount, an area previously covered over with paving slabs of Roman appearance that were now stacked around the edges. Pockets of the rocky ground were under excavation, with hard-hatted archaeologists visible where the dolomite had been cut in prehistory to form tombs and underground dwellings. Rebecca beckoned Jack and Jeremy forward along the walkway to a table covered with files and cameras. A bearded man with a skullcap was working at a laptop. He smiled when he saw Rebecca, and then sprang to his feet when he saw Jack following. Rebecca quickly kissed his cheeks and took his hand. “Shalom, Danny. My friend, Dr. Jeremy Haverstock, and my father.”
Danny shook their hands, and spoke quietly to Jack. “It’s an honor to meet you. Let me know if I can help in any way.” He watched them as they each took a hard hat and a torch from the table and Rebecca led them along the final length of the boardwalk. She turned to Jack. “Danny’s the assistant director, in charge for today. I told him I wanted some time alone with you in my excavation, and he agreed not to broadcast your presence. It’s a good thing the director’s not around as he’d have been all over you. The rest of the team would have been clamoring to meet you, and we’d never have gotten anywhere.”
The boardwalk ended where the outer wall and Western Wall began to converge, and the area of exposed bedrock reduced in width to less than five meters. They were a good twenty meters from the nearest excavator and well beyond the temporary lighting that had been set up over the main area. Rebecca led them out of sight behind a rocky knoll and then down an ancient rock-cut staircase some fifteen steps into the gloom. They passed several burial niches, rectilinear recesses cut into the rock, and then turned a corner in the passageway and came to a halt in front of a hole in the lower side wall only a little wider than Jack’s body. Rebecca sat down, poked her legs inside, and then switched on the headlamp on her helmet. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”
She disappeared down the hole, followed by Jeremy. Jack eased himself behind, holding the rim of the rock with his fingers and feeling for the floor with his feet. “Another six inches, Dad,” Rebecca called up, her voice resonating in the chamber. Jack let himself slide down, twisting sideways to prevent his spine from being scraped, and landed in a low crouch. He looked around, his headlamp beam joining the other two, and could see immediately that they were inside an ancient rock-cut tomb, the walls showing some erosion from rainwater percolation but overall in a good state of preservation. One wall was partly covered by a hanging sheet and still had large sections of its plaster facing intact. A foldable plastic chair lay in front, and an array of cleaning tools and brushes were set alongside as well as a bucket half-filled with debris. The opposite wall from the entrance tunnel, in the direction of the Western Wall, was not rock-cut but instead was made up of a precarious-looking jumble of rubble, more like a rockfall than a deliberate construction.
Jack looked at Rebecca. “Okay. Fill us in.”
Rebecca nodded, and knelt beside the rubble wall. “When I saw those initials on that artifact in Abdullah’s storeroom and identified them as Charles Wilson, I immediately thought of Wilson’s Arch, the feature abutting the Western Wall that was above us when we came into this place. It’s named after Wilson because he uncovered it in 1867. If he was working there then, this seemed a good pla
ce to begin my search for places underground where he might have found that artifact, places dating to the later second millennium BC. By good fortune the Israelis have been carrying out extensive excavations and clearance as far as they can along the length of the Temple precinct at this point, so my next step was to get myself on the excavation team.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Let me see, that would normally take a degree in archaeology, probably a master’s, a track record of several years, and impeccable references, not to speak of several months coming up the hard way washing potsherds and pushing wheelbarrows.”
“Not if you’re Jack Howard’s daughter. Not if you’ve been seen on our films excavating at Troy and at Herculaneum. Two days after being accepted on the team, I had my own special hole in the ground, one that I’d selected myself.”
“And how did you manage that?”
“I took a page out of Uncle Hiemy’s book. Maurice once told me that the best way to get to grips with an excavation is to go there at night when nobody else is around. So I sweet-talked my friend Doron, the night watchman, into letting me stay here one evening, and I spent the entire night searching every cavern and tunnel I could find in this place. I was looking for somewhere near the arch that looked as if it might once have led deeper into the rock, actually beneath the Western Wall. I finally broke my way into this tomb. That far wall of rubble was plastered over, but the plaster looked to me to be relatively recent, within the last couple hundred years rather than ancient. It might have been put there by an excavator in the nineteenth century to seal up a discovery. That was nearly good enough for me to have a go breaking through, but I wanted some more definitive indication that this might have been Wilson’s hole. So I looked carefully around, and I found this.”
She reached up to a ledge and took down an old smoke-blackened tobacco pipe. She passed it to Jack, who turned it over in his hands. “Intriguing,” he said. “Probably Victorian, pretty high-quality ebony. The kind of thing that British officers smoked.”
“Take a look at the initials on the bowl.”
Jack turned the pipe over and wiped away the dust. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “CRW. It’s Charles Richard Wilson.”
“That’s what clinched it for me,” Rebecca said, her voice taut with pent-up excitement. “I can just see him sitting here after he’d plastered up that hole, contemplating his golden find and the explorations he’d just undertaken beneath the Temple Mount. Smoking a pipe would have been a very British thing to do. Later he realizes he’s left it inside on that ledge, but by then he’s sealed up the entrance to the tomb as well and decides not to bother trying to retrieve it. He was probably having to act covertly as well, wary of men like Abdullah’s great-grandfather and the other tomb robbers and shady characters trying to dig under Temple Mount at that time. He’d found something he wanted to conceal, and he was successful in doing that. What I found in there hadn’t been disturbed since he left it.”
“So how did you make this tomb your own?” Jeremy asked.
“I rediscovered it—so to speak—the next day, after I’d asked to explore this corner of the excavation site, an area that hadn’t yet been cleared. The night before, I’d also discovered this.” She leaned over and carefully lifted the hanging sheet, revealing the remains of an ancient plastered wall with fragments of red fresco adhering to it. “This was once a painted tomb, probably late prehistoric. I played up the fact that wall paintings were my specialty. The excavation director had seen me on TV helping Professor Dillen uncover the painting of the lyre player at Troy. I insisted that if I were to take this on, I’d need to do it alone and without disturbance because of the fragility of the fresco, and he agreed. I even insisted that there should be no electrical extension here, as the light might damage the painting. As a result I was able to break through Wilson’s plaster and rubble fill without being seen, to get beyond and then to rebuild the rubble after returning.”
“And you’re going to take us through there again?” Jeremy asked.
She turned to the rubble face, put her hand on a protruding rock, and glanced at them. “Stay back.” They shifted to the rear of the tomb, and Rebecca gingerly pulled at the stone. Nothing happened, and she tried again, this time more forcibly. Suddenly the entire wall shimmered and collapsed in a grinding roar, narrowly missing Rebecca as she leapt back in a cloud of dust. They all put their shirts to their mouths until the dust settled, and then stared at the black hole left in the wall where the rubble had been. Rebecca looked apologetically at them, her face white with dust. “Whoops.”
A voice called down. “Rebecca. Are you all right?”
“Fine, Danny,” Rebecca shouted back. “Just spilled my bucket.” She turned to Jack, whispering. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I thought I’d balanced the rocks so they’d fall inward.” She scrambled over the rubble, coughing in the dust, and peered through the hole in the wall. “Okay. Everything looks stable beyond here. Headlamps to maximum.”
Jack replaced Wilson’s pipe on the shelf and brought up the rear, crawling forward behind Jeremy and bending to avoid a jagged rock sticking down from above. Any of his old discomfort about enclosed spaces was eclipsed by his concern that Rebecca might be taking them on a reckless adventure, but he was committed now and there was little sense in trying to hold her back unless the way ahead was clearly too dangerous. He came out at the beginning of a tunnel where Rebecca and Jeremy were crouched. “What about the entrance?” he said to Rebecca. “We could be followed.”
“The site director is away until tomorrow, and none of the other excavation teams come down my hole without being invited. It would take too long and be too noisy to rebuild that barrier, and we’d only have to take it down again when we go out. But Danny will see to it that we’re undisturbed. And we don’t need to be in here for more than twenty minutes.”
Jeremy aimed his torch high, revealing an immense block of masonry above their heads. “Are we where I think we are?”
Rebecca nodded, her eyes ablaze. “Directly beneath the Western Wall of Temple Mount.” She pointed back the way they had come. “That way is present-day Jerusalem. This way, we’re crawling into three-thousand-year-old history.”
“That way, we’re legal,” Jack said. “This way, we’re transgressing the strictest religious laws on the planet.”
Rebecca peered at him. “I’ve never known laws of any description to put off Jack Howard.”
He paused for a moment, giving Rebecca a long appraising stare, and then nodded. “Okay. Just this time. We’ll talk about boundaries later. You lead.”
—
Five minutes later they came out of the tunnel into a cavern at least five meters across, their headlamp beams dancing across the walls. Jack had noticed that the tunnel was scored with the marks of picks, whereas the cavern walls were irregular in shape, with cracks and fissures that rose out of sight and showed no obvious signs of being hewn by human hands.
“It’s a natural cave,” Rebecca said, echoing his thoughts. “The rock beneath Jerusalem is riddled with them, where water has eroded away layers of softer rock within the dolomite. I read everything I could about the geology and archaeology of underground Jerusalem in the weeks before I came out here. But this cave is unusually large and well proportioned, the kind of place that could have served as a refuge for several dozen people or as a storeroom. The first thing I noticed was how smooth that outcrop of dolomite is in the center, like the sacred omphalos you showed me inside the Diktaean Cave in Crete. You can see that many hands must have worn it smooth, and that it has enough of a flat surface for objects to be placed on it.”
“It must be an altar,” Jeremy said.
Rebecca nodded excitedly. “That’s what I thought. And if you look around you can see apertures and fissures in the walls that could have served as niches for displaying sacred objects. But what really made my heart leap was seeing a patch of the wall that had been plastered over, with plaster of exactly the same color a
nd composition as the plaster that Wilson used to seal the rubble wall that he put in place in the tomb after he left this area for the last time.”
“Can you be certain he was here?” Jeremy asked.
Rebecca nodded vehemently. “This is where he found that piece of golden chariot decoration. I’m absolutely sure of it. I think he dug around in here and that’s all he found, perhaps concealed in one of those niches. But I’ve no doubt that three thousand years ago there were more—many more—artifacts of similar age and origin, all of them of sacred significance to the people who stored them here. This was their holy of holies.”
“What about the plaster?” Jack asked. “What did that conceal?”
She beckoned them over to the far side of the chamber as she lit up a polished section of wall about a meter wide and half a meter high. Jack could see that it was covered with several dozen lines of written inscription, the letters alphabetic but spidery and difficult to discern. “Fantastic,” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen something similar to this before, in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, taken from Jerusalem when the Ottomans ruled Palestine. It was found in the Siloam Tunnel near the Gihon Spring.”
“Look closer, Dad.”
Jack made his way past the altar stone, and as he did so he saw something else on the stone, faint lines and symbols that appeared to underlie the inscription. He stared, hardly believing what he was seeing. “My God, Rebecca. Now I get it.”
“It’s the Aten sun symbol, the radiating arms,” Jeremy exclaimed, coming alongside.
“And the symbols at the bottom are hieroglyphic cartouches,” Rebecca said. “You can barely make them out, but I’m sure they’re identical to the groupings of symbols that Aysha showed me, one for Akhenaten and the other for Israelites.”
“Of course,” Jack murmured, looking around. “Of course.”
Jeremy peered closely at the words of the inscription. “It’s Palaeo-Hebrew,” he said. “That puts it before the Babylonian period, before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple in the early seventh century BC. I think I recognize some of the words, but I haven’t done Old Hebrew since I was an undergraduate. I’d need some time and some reference material.”
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