Where does it lead? asked Joe quietly.
Always having wet feet?
No, the shaft below the safe. It is a bottomless safe, isn’t it?
Well not really. Deep but not bottomless.
How deep?
Right here about fifty feet.
And there’s a ladder?
Yes.
To where?
A tunnel that leads to the caverns.
How deep are the caverns?
Hundreds of feet? Thousands of feet?
Joe whistled softly. He sat down beside the safe and pressed his ear to the iron door. Far away a wind hummed. Haj Harun was retying the green ribbons under his chin.
What’s down there?
Jerusalem. The Old City I mean.
Joe looked out at the alley. A lean cat was sneaking in front of the shop with some kind of wire clamped between its teeth.
Isn’t that Jerusalem out there? The Old City I mean?
One of them.
And down below?
The other Old Cities.
O’Sullivan Beare whistled very softly.
How’s that now?
Well Jerusalem has been continually destroyed, hasn’t it. I mean it’s been more or less destroyed several hundred times and utterly destroyed at least a few dozen times, say a dozen times that we know of since Nebuchadnezzar and before that another dozen times that we don’t know of. And being on top of a mountain no one ever bothered to dig away the ruins when it was rebuilt, so the mountain has grown. Do you see?
So I do. And down there where your ladder goes?
What’s always been there. A dozen Old Cities. Two dozen Old Cities.
With some of their treasures and monuments still?
Some. Things that are buried tend to be overlooked, and then in time they’re forgotten altogether. Look here, in my lifetime I’ve seen a great many things forgotten, the dents in my helmet for example. Does anyone remember how I got those dents?
The wizened Arab paced aimlessly around the room.
Jaysus, thought Joe. Haj Harun’s ladder. We are descending.
Being a native of the city, which had always been thronged with conquerors or pilgrims, Haj Harun had quite naturally spent most of his life in the service trades. During the Hebrew era he had begun his career by raising calves and later lambs. Under the Assyrians he was a stonecarver specializing in winged lions. He was a landscape gardener under the Babylonians and a tentmaker under the Persians.
When the Greeks were in power he ran an all-night grocery store and when the Maccabees were in power he poured candles. During the Roman occupation he was a waiter.
For the Byzantines he painted ikons, for the Arabs he sewed cushions, for the Egyptians he cut stones again but this time with emphasis on square blocks. He was a masseur for rheumatic ailments during the Crusader occupations, shoed horses for the Mamelukes and distributed hashish and goats for the Ottoman Turks. In the beginning he had also spent intervals as a sorcerer and prophet and in the less demanding field of general medicine.
To succeed in sorcery he had shaved his head and had his credentials engraved on his skull with a stylus, so that in moments of crisis he could ask that his head be shaved and thereby prove his authenticity.
As a prophet he didn’t wear a collar and have himself led around on a rope from customer to customer as was the common practice, preferring instead to sit in the bazaar shouting unsolicited warnings to passersby.
In medicine he dealt entirely with the pasty residue of a plant with star-shaped flowers known as Jerusalem cherry, a form of nightshade. These mixtures he prepared by mashing them on the filthy cobblestones around Damascus Gate, where he was frequently seen down on his hands and knees, doing a kind of dance to escape the feet of the crowds.
He also used a more potent juice from the wilted leaves of deadly nightshade, an effective narcotic which also caused severe vomiting. This left Haj Harun weak most of the time, since by necessity he had to take his own cures several times a day. To give some substance to his vomit he consumed large bowls of mush made from Jerusalem artichokes.
During that period he still had the ability to address all men in their own tongues even when he himself didn’t understand the language, a great advantage in Jerusalem. In this manner he soon acquired a reputation for being able to transform a loquat or a jackass or even the unintelligible cries of hawkers into astonishing portents of grandiose events.
In the course of time he had been known by many names he couldn’t now remember, but after his first haj in the eighth century he had permanently taken the name Aaron, or Harun as the Arabs pronounced it, in honor of Harun al-Rashid who figured so prominently in the tales he loved above all others, the Thousand and One Nights. It was also after his first haj that he had dedicated himself to defending Jerusalem and its past and future inhabitants against all enemies. Yet despite his good intentions he had to admit his accomplishments remained vague.
Perhaps, as he said, because such a task is both immense and perpetual. Am I making myself clear?
Not quite, replied Joe dizzily. Could you be just a little more specific?
Haj Harun looked embarrassed.
I doubt it but I’ll try. What about?
Oh I don’t know. How about that time when you were practicing medicine. That’s a good profession, why did you give it up?
Had to. The market for deadly nightshade disappeared overnight.
Why?
Someone started a rumor that wiped out the business. You see most of it was bought by women to enlarge the pupils of their eyes, to make them more beautiful. Well a young man whose wife was a customer of mine came to confide in me. They’d only been married a short time and it seems she wouldn’t take him in the mouth. She thought it was unnatural or unsanitary or both. So I advised him.
What advice for such a problem?
I told him to tell her it was perfectly natural and sanitary and furthermore there was no better substance in the world for instantly enlarging the pupils of the eyes. For best results, I said, the dosage should be repeated every few hours. It was only a little lie to help their marriage you see, or maybe it wasn’t a lie at all. Maybe it works, who knows. Do you know?
It is true that I do not. What subsequent developments in the matter?
Well he told her all that and she asked me, as her physician, if it was true and I said it was, and after that her husband went around looking so happily exhausted his friends began to wonder what was going on and asked him.
And?
And he told them, and they told their friends, and overnight all the men in Jerusalem were looking happily exhausted and I couldn’t sell any more deadly nightshade because the women were getting too much of the other substance.
So the rumor that drove you out of business was started by yourself?
Haj Harun moved his feet uneasily.
It seems so.
Not exactly the way to maintain yourself in a profession is it, would you say?
No I guess not but look at it the other way. Didn’t I help to make a lot of marriages happier?
Agreed, that help you must have been. Well what else?
What else what?
What else can you be specific about?
Let’s see. Did you know that when the bedouin are starving they cut open the vein of a horse, drink a little and close the vein? I learned that on a haj.
I did not know it. And if they’re horseless?
They make the camel vomit and drink that.
I see. I won’t ask about camel-less days.
And that bedouin girls wear clusters of cloves in their noses? That they paint the whites of their eyes blue? That the hills around Kheybar are of volcanic origin? I learned all that on different hajes.
I see. Where’s that?