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.