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.
TWENTY-SIX
ه
The youths sought refuge in the Cave, saying “Allah will have mercy and bring us out of this ordeal.”
—
THE QUR’AN
xviii:10
Sober 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.
We were going south-east, the compass assured us, parallel to the Haram, but the journey was far from the calm walk through rock tunnels with which we had begun: into a broken tomb and up some steps; a squeeze through a tumble of immense and terrifyingly precarious fallen stones; under a column (braced by some very inadequate-looking planks); a sheer drop into a nice dry Mediaeval tank and a scramble up the other side; into an ominously snug bit of aqueduct that I should never have entered had I not known it had been recently traversed by others; on our bellies across an utterly unexpected segment of Roman roadway, its stones scored to save horses from slipping; through an intact doorway and across half of a room with a mosaic pavement and scorched plaster walls that seemed to be someone’s cellar; through a trickle of water that appeared oddly like a stream, which I judged to mark the long-submerged Tyropoeon Valley; down a shaft and through a bit of Solomonic masonry; picking our way along the ledge that ran around yet another cistern…
It was a nightmare journey. To save our torches we were using a lamp, and only one so as to conserve paraffin. The compass was useless, as we never progressed in the same direction for more than a few feet. We were wet to our thighs with slimy, musty-smelling water from a misjudged cistern, my head was throbbing, Holmes was moving in a stiff manner I knew all too well, there was a disagreeable number of complacent rats living down here, and at each step forward the chance that we would simply stumble into the arms of our enemies grew greater.