Worse, time was passing. The city above us was awake now; half an hour earlier we had been startled by the clop of shod hoofs ten feet over our heads as we went under a lop-sided archway that was holding up the paving stones. Once or twice we caught glimpses of daylight, and the silence of the depths was no longer absolute.
At eight-thirty I flung myself down on a flat stone. “I must stop, Holmes. For ten minutes.” I had not slept for more than a dozen hours in the four days since we had left the Wadi Qelt, and I did not sleep then, but neither was I entirely conscious. Holmes lowered himself slowly onto the floor of whatever this wardrobe-sized space was and leant back gingerly against plaster that had been flaking since the Crusaders captured the city. I closed my eyes and we listened to the vibrations of feet and iron cart wheels.
After five minutes Holmes took out his pipe. I nearly roused myself to object, then decided, The hell with it. The scent of tobacco was a common enough thing, and could enter the nether reaches from any place.
After too few more minutes I heard the familiar sound of the revolver being inspected and given a cursory wipe, then the rustle of the bag. I sighed, and sat up to receive a swallow of the water and a handful of nuts.
“We’re going to be down here forever, Holmes,” I said drearily. I had intended it to be a dry jest, but it came out a flat statement; at least there was no fear in it. I was too exhausted to worry about the roof caving in on me any more.
He spat a date pip into his hand. “I have had failures before, but none quite so spectacular as the Rock of Abraham flying into the air.”
“You haven’t had many failures.”
“Too many.”
“Such as?”
“This is a delightful conversational topic you’ve chosen, Russell. No, no; you wish to know my failures. Very well, let me think. I have had at least four men come to me for help, only to be murdered before I could do a thing for them. Granted, I later solved the murders, but that hardly mitigates the fact that from my clients’ point of view, the cases were not precisely successful. Irene Adler beat me, although that was a silly enough case. And that one with the submarine boat plans, what did Watson call that tale of his? Scott something? Howard?”
“Bruce,” I said. “Partington. And that wasn’t a failure, you did retrieve the plans.”
“I might as well have burnt them, for all the good it did. Twenty-five years ago, that was, and how many submarine vehicles did Britain have in the water during the war? We left the depths of the sea to the U-boat.”
“You think Germany stole the plans later after all?”
“I believe those plans are sitting in the War Office somewhere with a thick layer of dust on them. Yes, I do recall that story now—it also began as an act of treason by a government clerk. Wasn’t that the one into which Watson inserted some romantic claptrap about a rose?”
“I think that was in the story about the naval treaty,” I said.
“Was it? What does that matter? Why on earth are you talking about this nonsense?” He stood up and began to shovel things back into the bag.
“I didn’t—”
“On your feet, Russell. Your present surroundings are bringing out an unpleasantly morbid streak in you.”
“My present—why? Where are we, aside from being buried alive?”
“You are in a tomb, Russell. I believe you’ve been stretched out on top of a sarcophagus.”
Our obstacle course continued, turning west, south, occasionally doubling back north, but maintaining a general direction along the Haram. I thought we must have come right through the city, but Holmes said no, we had not even reached David Street, some three hundred fifty yards (on a direct line) from the Antonia cistern. We went on, and on.
Then in a dry, snug space created by the fall of some huge quarried stones we found a cache of tinned goods, some of them still in their shipping crates. They were thick with dust, those that hadn’t been kicked to one side, though their labels were still bright.
“I thought so,” Holmes muttered. “Bey must have caught himself some smugglers and learnt the route from them. Under interrogation in the Old Serai, no doubt, during the war. Food was scarce, and smugglers sprang up by the dozen—we may find who they were when we investigate the house with the cellar door above the Cotton Grotto. Bey tucked the route away in the back of his mind, waiting until he might need it. By the looks of it, he’s not been down here more than half a dozen times.” He stopped, and held up a hand. “Did you hear a voice?” he asked, then turned out the lamp.
I strained my ears, and was about to say that I hadn’t, when it came again, a high-pitched and unintelligible cry that wafted, not from the street overhead but out of the hole ahead of us. It sounded like a child.
Silently, and using brief bursts from the torch, we gathered our things and began to sidle down the passage, in this case a narrow space between two walls, or rather, what had once been walls and were now foundations. The child sound came and went, and another sound as well: the trickle of moving water. It grew more distinct, and then Holmes stopped.
“We’ve run out of floor,” he breathed at me, and, curling his free hand around the torch to make a tight beam, he flicked it briefly at the ground and again at the space ahead of us, and then we stood in the dark and thought.
There was no space ahead. At our feet, or rather, about four feet below our feet, was a masonry channel with sluggish, unclean-looking water in it. The large, flat covering stone had fallen into the channel, and it was the faint riffling noise from the water as it dribbled over the stone that we had heard.
The voices were definitely travelling down this channel, and now that we were above it, they became clearer: still no words, not that I could make out, but they separated themselves into two, possibly three children, calling and shouting at each other. The normality of the sound was completely unexpected, and I racked my brain to think where…
“The bath!” I said aloud. Ignoring Holmes’ shushing noises, I tried to pull the recollection of my feverish reading of the Baedeker’s guide. I whispered, “This must be the Hamman es-Shifa. It’s a big pool of rain-water set deep in the ground just south of the Souk el-Qattanin. It has a channel leading out of the south-western end of it, three feet by five, something like that.”
“Do you wish to investigate, or shall I?”
“I’ll go,” I said reluctantly.
“I must say I am coming to appreciate this system,” he remarked, the humour in his voice clear despite the low volume. “Why did it never before occur to me to have a vigorous young assistant to do what the Americans call my ‘dirty work’?”
“I’m your partner, not your assistant,” I snapped. “And you’ll have to let me past.”
“There’s a foothold on the other side; I’ll perch there. Ready?”
“Just a moment.” It was not easy to choose between letting myself into the water with no clothes, thus reserving a source of relatively dry warmth for after my immersion, or with clothes on, so as to keep the filthy walls away from my skin. In the end I couldn’t face complete nakedness, so I left my long, loose undershirt on, and dropped everything else into a heap. Holmes shot the light on and stepped forward onto the channel’s opposite side wall; I eased myself down into the freezing water and went instantly numb.
“Do you need the torch?” he asked.
“Actually, there’s a bit of light in one direction. I’ll go that way first.” There was light, beyond a bend in the channel, and I made for it, trying hard to keep my face above the water even if it meant rubbing the back of my turban along the greasy stones overhead. I came to the bend, and I was so entranced by the slice of light that beamed at me from fifty feet away and the simple noises of the two children splashing and shouting that I nearly missed the concealed opening.
What caught my eye was a chip, the fresh gleam of broken stone amidst the black-green slime that covered every surface. I could not see into the hole, but I did not need to. I went back to retrieve
Holmes.
Once safely inside the hidden entrance, we dried ourselves off as best we could, using the cloth bag we carried, though I abandoned my undershirt in the tunnel and wore just trousers and abayya.
We also abandoned some of our caution. Holmes lit the lamp and we went on, faster now. This was another patch of actual passageway, perhaps built as an alternative to the channel, but higher and therefore dry. It ran in the same direction, and then, where I estimated the bath would be, turned right, then left, then in a short time right again. The compass told me I was facing east: we were nearing the Dome of the Rock.
Holmes halted again. I craned to look over his shoulder, first at the floor, then at a piece of wood covering a hole in the roof over our heads. There was a great deal of soil on the floor ahead of it, beginning directly under the hole. Two marks on the ground, the twins to those we had found beneath the door in the grotto, marked where the feet of a ladder had stood. There was no sign of the ladder here either, but whatever they were clearing, it was here, into the Souk el-Qattanin directly above our heads, that they had rid themselves of the débris from this final portion of their path. The presence of the British weaving sheds in the souk must have proved an annoyance, forcing them to haul their equipment all that long way under the city from the Cotton Grotto, but once they were here, the soil from the tunnel ahead of us could be easily disposed of in the streets above, and the occasional solitary man could find entrance from the souk.
There was no time to search the overhead access. We were almost under the wall surrounding the Haram es-Sherîf, and I was intensely aware of how close we were to the Rock that is the heart of the city, the stone that had felt the touch of the Ark of the Covenant, of Father Abraham and his bound son Isaac, of the Prophet Mohammed and his legendary horse. The Talmudic saying, the Rock covers the waters of the Flood, ran through my mind over and over again, along with the Moslem one that says the Rock is the gate to hell. If we did not uncover two hundred fifty pounds of explosive in the next ninety minutes, we might well find that both traditions were true.
There were fresh footprints in the spilt soil, fresher than the two sets of boots that trod each other, back and forth, into obscurity. In two places, water had oozed down the rocks and turned the soil into mud, and in each of those a pair of new boots had walked, once in each direction, less than twenty-four hours before. It had probably been in the still hours of the night, when a twelve-hour timing device could be set to go off at the moment Allenby and his companions would be in the Haram. While we had been searching for one end of the long and laborious path under the city, Bey or one of his men had come and gone through the Souk el-Qattanin at the tortuous path’s short end.
Unfortunately, in neither patch did he step on top of the previous mark, so we could not be absolutely certain that he was not even now waiting at the far end of the tunnel. Holmes doused the lamp, handed it to me, and took up his torch again.
We came upon the source of the soil that had been deposited into the Souk el-Qattanin: a length of roof had given way. Large quantities of rock and soil had been cleared and a few perfunctory wooden supports added to hold up the ceiling.
It is almost exactly three hundred feet from the Bab el-Qattanin—the gate into the Haram from the Cotton Bazaar—to the Dome of the Rock, and we crept, as silent as shadows and with the bare minimum of light, expecting at any instant to be met by sudden violence.
A little less than halfway we came upon the upper arm of the Bethlehem aqueduct, what was left of it. It obviously no longer went anywhere, for the water had no hint of movement about it, and smelt stale beyond words. We went on, under the Haram es-Sherîf now, beneath the platform on which the Dome is set, where Allenby was due to make a speech of brotherhood in less than two hours. Holmes shone the light into every cranny, even pushed at rocks that might possibly conceal the dynamite, thinking it possible that the site for the bomb was here, but there was nothing.
On into the dark we pressed, torn between urgency and caution, between the need for light and the danger of discovery, forty yards, twenty (Holmes had the pistol in one hand now, the torch in the other), and then with a shock like an internal explosion we were looking at the end of the tunnel, where the walls bulged out into a small circular room. There was nothing there.
Until we took two steps into the room, and saw the hole in the floor, and what it held.
An explosive reaction is a curious business. Set loose on an open hillside, a charge will billow out in roughly equal proportions on all sides, and quickly dissipate. Confined, for example inside a gun barrel, all its energy is forced to find release in a single direction, and is thereby vastly magnified.
This man knew his explosives. Karim Bey had burrowed laboriously down into the rock floor of the chamber to direct his charge. He had then piled heavy slabs of rock high around the edges of his hole, shaping them to focus the blast directly upwards. Without that preparation, the explosive force would have shaken the Dome, stripped it of its mosaic tiles, and perhaps even weakened it enough to bring it down. With it, Holmes’ vision of the sacred Rock popping into the air like a champagne cork was all too vividly possible.
I lit the lamp and hung it from a nail that probably had been put in the wall for that purpose, and when I turned, Holmes was lying on the stones, his upper half suspended over the mechanism as his fingers traced diagrams over the tangle of wires below, trying to sort out what went where. I took the torch from him, directing it to where his fingers pointed. The clock hand that would trigger the thing was alarmingly close to its mark, and I tried to comfort my racing heart by telling myself that Bey would have used only a high-quality clock, one that would be quite accurate. In truth, though, it was just as comforting to know that a prayer here was said to be worth a thousand elsewhere.
After several thousand of my fervent prayers, Holmes sat up and took out his pipe. The burning lamp in the corner was bad enough, but his flaring match made my stomach turn to ice.
“Shall we go for Ali? Mahmoud said he could handle bombs.”
“No need, this is quite simple,” he said calmly. “There do not seem to be any tricks. I don’t imagine Bey thought we would ever get this close.” Holmes set his pipe between his teeth and pawed through the bag, coming up with a little cloth bundle of tools which he untied and let unroll on a flattish rock to one side of the hole. He selected a small pair of snips from one of the bundle’s pockets. Holding these in his right hand, he set his pipe down, then stretched out on his stomach over the heap of stone, his head in the hole and his feet sticking into the tunnel. He flexed the snips a few times as if to warm up an instrument, and I shifted around to ensure that the light from the torch fell directly on his work. Extending both hands out over the bomb, he began delicately teasing at the wires with the fingers of his left hand. When the wire he sought was free, he adjusted his right hand on the snips and began to move them over to the mechanism, and with that came three sharp cracks directly over our heads.
I nearly dropped the torch; Holmes nearly closed the snips convulsively on the wrong wire: either would have been equally catastrophic. I gave a startled curse and stared upward, Holmes shuddered once with the effort of not reacting, and nothing else happened.
Slowly he drew back his hands and dropped his face into the crook of his left sleeve to rub the sweat out of his eyes.
“It’s a guide in the small cave beneath the Rock,” he said in an uneven voice, and cleared his throat. “They pound on the floor like that to demonstrate the hollow sound.”
“Bloody hell.” My own voice was none too steady. “Are they going to do it again?”
“Not until the next tour.” He took a deep breath, wiped his eyes again, and extended himself once more over the two and a half hundredweight of dynamite. His hands went still for a moment as he focussed, then he picked up the wire and cut it. As simple as that.
I began to breathe again. Holmes snipped and folded wires back, carefully removed the two detonators that, under
the impetus of the clock’s alarm hand, would have set off the explosion, and carried them down the tunnel. He came back and lowered himself onto the floor, resting his head back against the wall.
“I’m getting too old for this,” he said after a while.
“When I take off this turban, my hair will be white,” I said in agreement.
“I’ve lost track of the time,” he said, a considerable admission.
I took out the old silver pocket-watch I always carried. “It’s twelve-fourteen.”
“Can we reach Mahmoud in sixteen minutes?”
“We can try.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said, half mockingly.
While Holmes swept the tools into his bag, I retrieved the lamp and then, feeling a little self-conscious, held it up so as to illuminate all the corners of the small enclosure, just in case. But there was no sign of the Ark of the Covenant, hidden deep below the sacred Rock, no indication in fact that anyone had ever been here other than Karim Bey or his accomplices. I followed my partner as fast as we could go down the slippery stones, across the moribund aqueduct and on down the tunnel to the hole in the roof that led into the Cotton Bazaar. The door set into the access hole was neither locked nor actually a door, merely a square of blackened wood, which Holmes lifted easily from below and inched gently across the floor of the house above us.
Holmes prepared to boost me up, then he paused and handed me the revolver. “They may have left a guard in the house. Be as silent as you can.”
I tucked the gun into my belt, put my booted toe into his joined hands, and was heaved up and effortlessly through the hole. I rolled instantly to one side; there was no response from the room. Taking the faltering torch from the inner pocket of my abayya, I looked around the filth of centuries that occupied the cellar, and spotted a ladder. I lowered it for Holmes, and once he was inside we brought it back up and put the covering back into place.
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