The utter absence of light or sound pressed upon us as if we had been immersed in a great black lake. I felt the pressure of it on my eardrums, against my eyes, and it was difficult to breathe. It smelt… dead. Cold and stale and smelling of nothing more alive than raw stone. Not even bats made their way in here. I nearly leapt out of my boots when Holmes spoke.
“I don’t hear a thing. I believe we may risk a light.”
My heart skittered about in my chest for a few beats, and then it settled again. I cleared my throat and quoted in Arabic, “ ‘Take refuge in the cave, and Allah will have mercy on you and bring about a kindly solution to your affairs.’ ” It was a poor attempt at whistling in the dark: the cavern swallowed the orotund phrases, giving them all the power and reverberation of a dried pea rattling about in a bottle. I continued more prosaically and in a smaller voice, “I think going forward with no light would be the larger risk,”
The truth of this was demonstrated immediately he had the lamp going: The floor was pitted with holes, some of them both deep and abrupt. It was not a place to explore unprepared.
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 stonecutters 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 officiais 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.”