“Surely this isn’t fresh?” I asked.
“From the guides, when they had tourist groups in here.” Holmes’ voice echoed strangely, and when I turned I saw his head and shoulders emerging from the hole. “Can you get in here, Russell?”
I eyed the black maw. “Must I?”
“By no means, I shall be happy to try. Provided, that is, you agree not to make protestations of horror about the results on my back.”
“Never mind. I’ll go.”
It was a tight and narrow hole, little more than a crack, too small to crawl through on hands and knees. Holmes boosted me up, and I pulled myself in, and I went less than four feet before scrambling out again to strip off the confining coat and abayya, leaving only the long, thin shirt and baggy trousers I wore underneath. The turban I left on, in the hope it might offer a degree of protection to my skull. I pulled myself in again, and wriggled, moved the torch a few inches, pushed with the toes of my boots, and wriggled some more. Occasionally the crack widened enough that I could nearly crawl; other times the walls closed in and I thought I should have to retreat. I inched forward perhaps as much as sixty feet, which seemed like miles, only to have my way blocked by a total collapse of the ceiling. There was no way around it, or through, and I lay half on my side with the sweat in my eyes, and the fingers of panic that had been plucking at my mind suddenly grabbed, and squeezed me, squeezed me in the rock under the city where I lay, waiting for my light to go out, waiting to run out of air, waiting to be stuck, irrevocably.
In another half minute my rational mind would surely have given way to the panic and the horror that was pulling at me, urging me to fling myself against the confining walls and shriek, but Holmes must have heard the cessation of my scrabbling noises, because I heard his voice.
“Russell?” It bounced and echoed, but it was as revivifying as a hand from a lifeboat. I bent my neck and answered loudly in the direction of my feet.
“Yes?” My voice quavered a bit.
“Russell,” he said, slowing his voice so that the echoes did not obscure the words. “It would be very inconvenient if I had to go and fetch someone to bring you out.”
My growing panic flipped instantly into fury. Inconvenient, is it? By God, I’ll give him inconvenient.
I pushed my body backwards, drawing the torch with me, pushed again, drew the light, pushed and scooted the yards back to one of the wider places where, with a flexibility I had not known I could summon, I managed to do a kind of slow, sideways somersault, and made the remainder of the journey facing out.
At the end of the tunnel Holmes took the torch from my hand, put it on the ground, and hauled me bodily out and set me on my feet. I staggered a bit when he let go of me, but I was glad he had taken his hands from my shoulders, because I could feel myself—not trembling, but certainly vibrating. He thrust a water bottle into my hands, and I drank deeply.
“God,” I muttered under my breath. “The one time I could actually do with strong drink. Oh, nothing. Holmes, that tunnel’s a bust. It was certainly used at one time—there are chisel marks all along it—but the roof is down after about twenty yards, with no side openings.” I shivered, and when Holmes handed me my abayya, it occurred to me that I was damp with fast-cooling sweat. It was comforting to know that my reaction was at least in part physical.
Holmes took his lamp and went off into the main cave while I dressed, drank a bit more water, and chewed at some leathery dried fruit. All of which made me feel considerably more substantial.
“So,” I said when he returned. “What next?”
“We have eleven hours.”
I looked at him bleakly. It seemed hopeless. We had agreed with Mahmoud that if he did not hear from us by twelve-thirty, Allenby’s one o’clock meeting with the officials of army and town would be moved elsewhere and the Haram cleared. Lives would be saved, although the resultant turmoil from the destruction of the site alone was bound to be violent.
I stood up. “Then we’d best be going.”
We left the small chamber, which seemed almost homely in comparison with the main cave. On the way out I saw on the wall, in addition to the crosses and some truly ancient Hebrew graffiti, the Square and Compass of the Freemasons. A busy little place, this, over the ages.
Holmes stood in the cave with his lamp held over his head, peering into the gloom. “It would be difficult to discern the tracks of a rampaging elephant, in these circumstances,” he complained. “Still, we can only try. You take that direction, Russell.”
We split up, and began to work our way in opposite directions around the outside walls of the cave, down the finger-shaped extensions and back into the palm of the central cave, down and around. There was less dust here, aside from places where the ceiling was beginning to disintegrate, but some of the pits were dangerous, portions of the floor slick with insalubrious seepage from above. I went carefully, watching for anything out of place, but there were no footprints, no signs of recent digging, no convenient mound of rubble with an arrow in it pointing to the Souk el-Qattanin.
I met up with Holmes before I reached the iron-gated entrance, as my direction had possessed the greater number of fingers. He simply shook his head.
There was nothing for it but to quarter the expanse of the central cave, a process both painstaking and painful: two or three cautious steps forward, examining the ground, then shining our electric torches upwards and craning our necks at the nearly invisible dome of the roof, in hopes of seeing—what? A pair of waving legs protruding from a hole?
Two o’clock passed, two-thirty, and then, at nearly three in the morning, I heard my partner’s unmistakable “Ha!” of triumph. I took my eyes from the rock overhead and trotted across the uneven ground towards his lamp.
He was looking down at a patch of rock like any of the acre or two I had already scrutinised; it took me a moment to see what he had found. Then I dropped to my heels and held the torch directly over it.
“Soil!” I said in surprise. The clot was dry, and crumbled at my touch. Holmes bent down and brushed it into an evidence envelope, which I thought an incongruous thing for him to be carrying in this place, but I suppose habits die hard.
“From a boot-heel,” he said, and turned his attention and his torch on the ceiling. He began to pace up and down again, his light bouncing over the rough stone overhead, so I too returned to my own patch. Twenty minutes later I heard another “Ha!”
He was studying the ground again, standing by the base of one of the supporting columns. Upon joining him, I could see no trace of soil there, but the dust and small stones that littered the whole floor had been scraped away to the underlying rock in two long patches slightly larger than a hand, approximately sixteen inches apart, and a broader patch between them, on the side away from the column. I shone my torch upwards.
A door, cunningly hidden, was nestled into a deep hollow next to the column. It was a small door and very old, its black wood set with numerous rusted iron studs. The marks on the ground were from a ladder that had been let down here.
However, there was no sign of soil on the stone floor.
“Access to a house in the Arab Quarter,” I said.
“I am relieved to see you did not leave your wits behind in that crack in the wall,” he replied drily. I followed him back to where he had found the lump of soil, and we began a minute examination of the rock on an imaginary line drawn between the door, the bit of soil, and the cave wall.
They had been careful. I found one more trace of earth ten feet away towards the wall; Holmes found two places where someone might or might not have swept something from the cave floor. It was now 3:45. We stopped for a rest, and Holmes lit his pipe, staring fiercely at the bland expanse of rock.
“This caution is suggestive,” he said eventually. “The man is little concerned with the intelligence of others, so he rarely bothers to cover his tracks in any but the most cursory of manners. In the past, he has not seriously believed that anyone would think to loo
k for him, regarding himself as invisible to mere mortal eyes. Now, however, he has become careful. I wonder if he would demonstrate the same concern had he not had a prisoner taken from under his nose.”
“I was thinking about that yesterday, how Bey just takes whatever he comes across that might come in useful, regardless of the alarm it might raise. Although of course he’s right, there is very little chance, given the chaotic state of the country at the moment, that the authorities would have noticed anything until it was too late. Assuming he’s reasonably discreet and knows the dress and language well enough to fit in, who would have thought to look for a mastermind behind the disruptions? Allenby was only beginning to have his suspicions, and even Joshua, who I think is considerably more competent than he chose to appear, was only half-convinced.”
“He seems to vacillate between caution and carelessness, depending on which aspect of his unbalanced mind is in the ascendent mode. Now I think we have wasted enough of—”
“Holmes, no!” He froze in the action of preparing to knock his pipe out against a rock. “Your pipe. Puff it again.”
Obediently he put the stem back between his lips and drew rapidly on it three or four times.
The smoke moved.
In an instant he had knocked the half-burnt dottle out and taken a candle from our spelunking bag, lit it, and held it at arm’s length. It flickered faintly, then burnt straight and unmoving. I took another candle from the bag, lit it from his, and we both moved over to the wall.
It was a slow business, holding the candle, waiting for the air from our movements to settle, and, when the flame stood straight upright, moving it again. Then, when Holmes and I were only a couple of feet apart, my flame dashed sideways and blew out. I nearly whooped for joy, until I saw where the air current was coming from: beneath a huge, half-cut block.
We lay on our bellies and shined our torches at the narrow gap between the block and the floor. It appeared no more than a hands-width high. There was no tunnel visible on the far side of the hole, only rock.
“It doesn’t go anywhere, Holmes.”
“It must.”
“I know you wish it to, but—”
“Russell, use your eyes.”
I followed the beam of his light, and realised that of course there would not be cobwebs in a cave with no flies, that what I was seeing were threads and hairs.
And several clods of soil along the sides of the rock across from us.
“But there’s solid rock! I can see it.”
“I do not care what your eyes tell you; I tell you they must have come this way.” He got to his knees and began to remove his abayya, but I stopped him.
“I’ll go first. If I get stuck, you can pull me out by my feet. I’m not certain I could do the same for you.”
Again I stripped down to trousers and undershirt, and for the second time that night I inserted my body into the jaws of the earth, knowing in my bones that at any instant the earth would bite down.
Only it didn’t. What was not visible from the cave was the curvature of the floor. When I pushed under the rock, I found myself going down into a recess, then up again, and when the slope returned to the height of the cavern floor, I had cleared the back side of the block. I moved the beam of my light across the surrounding walls, and found I was standing in a nice large, tidy tunnel, not quite tall enough for me to stand upright, but sufficiently tall and wide to walk in. I got down on my knees and put my face to the hole.
“There’s a tunnel here, Holmes. Plenty of room, the floor drops away. Push the equipment through in front of you.”
I crawled in again, as far as my hips, and took the bag and lamps as he passed them through. I dressed again as Holmes slithered through gingerly and rose to admire the neatly carved rock.
“Very nice,” he said.
“A back door?” I mused. “‘The king with his soldiers fled by night.’”
“May we go? Or do you wish to take measurements for a research paper?”
“After you.”
The tunnel ran south for fifty yards, then gave a jog and turned slightly east. Holmes kept an eye on the compass and map, but it seemed we were making a more or less straight run for the Haram. Keeping in mind the sly entrance, we paused often to peer into uneven bits, particularly those near the floor. We found no alternatives, only the tunnel, five and a half feet high and something less than three across, gouged through living rock by men with chisels two thousand and more years ago.
Abruptly, the smooth track was broken. The tunnel stopped, turned due east, took six steps down, then turned south again. It would appear that there had been two teams of diggers here, as there were at Hezekiah’s Tunnel in Siloam, teams who missed each other slightly and had to compensate with a ten-foot linking tunnel and half a dozen steps to join the two. The more eastern half continued north past the meeting place for a dozen or so feet, clearly the extent of one crew’s work before the diggers realised they had overshot their mark. That truncated section of tunnel had been used to deposit a great heap of rock and slops of soil, some of it so recently added that the pile was still trickling water into the passage.
It did not look quite the same as the soil that had been added to the Souk el-Qattanin, but Holmes had no doubts. He held up a pinch of the stuff between his fingers and brought it up to his eyes. “I believe a microscopic examination would show this to be identical to the traces in the basket of the widow of Abdul the Ugly,” he said, and wiped his fingers on his robes. I did not think it worth the effort to argue.
We continued along the featureless tunnel, going steadily downwards, and had travelled perhaps one hundred fifty yards from the cave when something in the air changed. Holmes stopped, played his light ahead into the passage until it disappeared, then turned it off. The blackness once again closed around us.
“Hear anything?” he whispered after a while.
“No. But the air smells different.”
“Does it? You’re right.”
Other than the occasional whiff of a leaking privy, the only smell the tunnel had contained thus far was from the heap of damp soil back at the join of the two tunnels. This smell was similar, sharp and slightly rotten; not offensive, just earthy, particularly after hours of nothing more organic than naked stone.
We went on with even greater caution than before. After a time I decided that yes, I heard a sound, but it was not clear enough to determine what it was, beyond a faint flutter against the inner membranes of the ear.
Without warning, the tunnel came to an end, to all appearances debouching halfway up a stone wall. Peering over Holmes’ shoulder, I glimpsed water below us, black water with no way of telling its depth. Into it water dripped steadily from several places, a continuous, musical echo that explained the unidentifiable sounds in the tunnel. There was also, somewhere, an opening to the sky above: I smelt bats.
Holmes drew back and handed me the torch; I shined it into the space ahead of us. To our left, massive stone arches held up a vaulted ceiling, with a similar flooded room beyond. Stones protruded from the wall around us at regular and rising spaces to form a stairway climbing over our heads. The wall to our right was featureless except for the very tops of three nearly submerged arches, much shorter than those on our left. I pulled my head in and whispered to Holmes.
“Up the stairs?”
“And to the surface, after all the effort they went to to remain hidden? Not likely. The stairs are for general access.”
“Why? What is this place?”
“A rain cistern.”
“It’s huge. And ancient.” Herodian, even—but of course: this would be Herod’s vast cistern, the rock from which went to rebuild the tower at the corner of the Temple Mount, forming the fortress called the Antonia (after Herod’s friend Marc Antony). Somewhere down here, according to Josephus, in a dark underground passageway between the tower and the Temple, Antigonus, the brother of Aristobulus I, was assassinated. “We must be at the foot of the Antonia,” I said
, and reached for my compass. Holmes stopped me.
“It’s approximately the right distance. Let us try those low arches.”
Before I could object he had hoisted his skirts and lowered himself into the dank water. It came barely to his knees. I handed him the bag, removed my boots, and followed him.
The rock underfoot was slick and dropped dangerously off to the left, but it was solid and fairly even. Holmes was leaning over to examine the first of the nearly submerged arches on our right, and as I waded towards him I was struck by how closely he resembled an old-fashioned housewife looking under the furniture for a mouse, her skirts hiked up and her head covered by a scarf. I began to giggle, and he turned and shushed me in irritation, which only made it worse. I snorted into the palm of my hand and dropped one of my boots into the water, and only with difficulty, blinking the tears from my eyes, followed Holmes through the middle arch and into the passage beyond. I pulled myself up onto the dry shelf, sat down, and took a deep, shaky breath. Prolonged stress can take the oddest outlets.
The youths sought refuge in the Cave, saying “Allah will have mercy and bring us out of this ordeal.”
—THE QUR’AN, xviii: 10
ober now, I pulled on my boots and crawled down the narrow shaft after Holmes. From here on there was no neat passageway carved into the rock, no single track without choices. We were now in the position of creeping from one unpleasant hole to another; twice, we took wrong turnings that ended in a tomb or cistern leading nowhere. Fortunately, our predecessors had done a fair amount of clearing. Often we could choose the proper length of aqueduct or entrance to a collapsed street by the piles of rubble they had left at the entrance. They were not hiding their tracks. The farthest they had carried their clearings was from the tunnel entrance at the Antonia cistern to the abandoned scrap of tunnel at the meeting place of the two teams of diggers off the grotto, a distance of some one hundred feet, and that they had been forced to do lest someone notice the addition of several cubic yards of muck in the cistern. Now they just shovelled the rock and soil to one side or into the nearest hole.
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