O Jerusalem (43 page)

The cave we stood in was vast. Our lamps made small patches of light as we picked our way forward, only rarely reaching as far as the perimeter walls. Massive pillars had been left by the cautious stone-cutters millennia before, to support the immense weight of the cave roof and the city on top of that, although in one place the fallen litter was considerable, and the roof seemed to sag. Niches had been cut into the walls for the lamps of the quarrymen. The floor sloped continuously, in some places rapidly, towards what the brass compass I carried said was the southern end. We walked at a distance from one another, so as to examine the widest possible expanse of ground, but we reached the end having seen nothing other than stone and trickling water and a few Crusader crosses carved into the walls.

The cave ended in a chamber perhaps twenty feet square which demonstrated clearly the method used for extracting blocks of stone: chisel marks on the walls, several ledges left when the stone above had been cut away, one half-cut block, abandoned to eternity. One could not help speculating why it had been left. Interrupted by some invasion or other? Made unnecessary by peace? One stone more than was needed for the job at hand? Or was it just deemed unsuitable, the stone too soft and permeable, and the quarrymen gone elsewhere?

I sat on a stone ledge trying to distract my mind with these thoughts so as not to think about where I was, about the huge expanse of stone hanging over my head, yearning for the pull of gravity to re-unite it with its lower half, with me in the middle, about the continuous
tremble of lorries and feet that contributed to the inevitable—

“Russell, I trust you are not about to succumb to an attack of the vapours.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I stood and forced my eyes to focus. A thin layer of dust lay over everything (raised by falling stones, my brain whispered at me), including the shelf I had used as a seat. Holmes looked closely at the top of a free-standing block, poked once or twice at the surface, then turned to look at a hole in the wall behind him. I went over and examined the block. There was wax on it, the wax of numerous candles, but it was all covered with dust.

“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 look 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.