Gerald went up to the mosaic and touched it, running his fingers gently over the tesserae.
‘It’s as if it was made yesterday,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘As if the artist had walked away moments ago and is still in hailing distance. Look at the gold. The tiles are glass with gold foil behind. This was made in the middle of a desert.’
Max was still staring at the mosaic from a few feet away.
‘It’s the Temple,’ he said.
‘Temple?’
Max hesitated. He stepped closer to the mosaic and, like Gerald, ran his fingers over the gold and shining tesserae. He spoke in a quiet voice, but they all heard him clearly.
‘“And now Herod, in the eighteenth year of his reign…undertook a very great work, that is, to build of himself the temple of God, and make it larger in compass, and to raise it to a most magnificent altitude, as esteeming it to be the most glorious of all his actions to bring it to perfection; and that this would be sufficient for an everlasting memorial of him.”
‘This is the second Temple, built over Solomon’s Temple. The Romans burnt it to the ground when they destroyed Jerusalem in the year seventy — about thirty years before the inscription outside. The people who built this would have been Jews who fled from the city. A great many wound up in Egypt and Cyrenaica. And if I remember correctly, they came south.’
‘What’s the cross about, then?’ asked Donaldson.
‘I think that’s your answer,’ Max said, and turned his torch to a nearby panel on the same wall. This mosaic showed a very different scene: a man bent beneath a Roman cross, stumbling as he carried it, with bystanders, some jeering, some running to help.
‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ the doctor exclaimed. His Calvinist upbringing in Aberdeen had given him an allergy to icons. His father would have called the mosaic a ‘work of the de’il’, and his mother would have sat sucking her thumbs and muttering ‘idol worship’ beneath her breath. ‘Why would Jews put a picture of the good Lord on the wall of their synagogue?’
‘Ah!’ said Max, trying to keep any hint of smugness out of his voice. ‘But that’s not Jesus Christ in the mosaic.’
‘Who else could it be?’
‘Haven’t you read your Bible? “They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus.” There were Jews from Cyrenaica in Jerusalem at Pentecost, and some of the first Christians were converts from Libya, also from Cyrenaica. Simon and his sons were among them.’
‘How do you know this is Simon?’
Max pointed to an inscription at the base of the picture.
‘Because it says so. That’s Jesus standing behind him.’
4
Simon of Cyrene
As Max finished speaking, there was a sound behind them. It was Teddy Clark.
‘Sir, the woman who came with us…’
Gerald turned, fearing A’isha had betrayed them after all.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s back, sir. With a friend. They’ve brought lamps with them. I’ve told them to go in, but they won’t budge, and I don’t know what to do with them.’
They stepped outside. A’isha and a second woman stood some yards away, shivering like ghosts. Each carried a basket woven from palm fronds, and in the baskets were terracotta lamps filled with olive oil.
As Gerald approached them, his torch beam caught their eyes and they flinched away. Lowering it, he greeted A’isha.
‘These are for you,’ she said. ‘They will help you see in that place.’
‘Will you not come inside? There are beautiful things in there.’
‘Is there treasure? The Old Ones used to say there is treasure, gold and jewels that belonged to the king and queen who are buried there.’
‘I’ve seen nothing like that. If you come inside…’
The women thrust their baskets at him, but refused to be inveigled inside the structure.
They took the lamps inside and lit them one by one. They burnt steadily, revealing yet more mosaics on the floor and ceiling. Between the picture of the Temple and the portrait of St Simon stood a two-sided wooden door carved with finely chiselled images. Each register bore an elongated cross, and around it were fish swimming in deep waves, angels vanquishing demons, lions beneath palm trees, and lilies swaying in a breeze that had passed by long centuries ago.
Gerald pushed hard on the right-hand side, and the door opened to a shrill creaking and groaning of ancient hinges. He went inside, and the others followed, bringing some lamps with them, then returning for more. As the light grew in volume, they saw a world of long-forgotten shadows come to life, shadow by shadow, light by light, ghost by ghost. All around them, phantoms whispered, as if the dead of centuries were coming back to life.
On three sides, banks of seats, like the benches in a Roman amphitheatre, sloped back to mosaic-covered walls. Above, a dome of gold and glass twinkled as they let their torch beams play across it. Two angels held the dome, their pure white robes and golden wings occupying all but a tiny part of its glistening surface, vast and rimmed with flames.
‘Whose appearance was as lightning, and their garments glistening and white…’ said Max.
At the far end was a wooden desk, the bimah, where the Torah is read, and behind it the Ark, where the Torah scrolls are kept, and it seemed as though the congregation had just got up and left, and gone outside, back to the bright sun and the palm trees and the blue sky. Gerald fancied he could detect a faint smell as of incense, of myrrh, perhaps, or sandalwood or amber or opopanax of Solomon.
A synagogue, then. But above the Ark, where there should have been set the Tables of the Law, stood instead a golden cross whose beaten arms coruscated in the flickering light of the lamps.
‘What does all this mean, Max?’ Gerald asked, all sense of military hierarchy lost in this place beyond war. ‘It’s not a synagogue, it’s not a church. I don’t understand.’
Max was silent for a while, looking all round him, scarcely knowing where to start or where to stop.
‘I find no contradictions here,’ he said. ‘The first Christians were all Jews. This place was built by Jews who believed in the Laws of Moses, but recognised Jesus as the last of the prophets, a miracle-worker sent by God, an archangel who rules over the angels. They regarded the family of Jesus as a sacred lineage. Don’t forget that the church in Jerusalem was headed by James, the brother of Jesus. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, one of their leaders must have led a band of Ebionites out west, along with the other Jews who headed this way. I wouldn’t think it at all unlikely that St Simon of Cyrene was one of them, maybe even their leader. If that’s the case, this could be the most important archaeological find of the century, maybe of all time. It makes King Tut look pretty tame, don’t you think? And we’ve only scratched the surface. Look there.’
He pointed towards the central area, an open rectangle flanked by pillars. Shadows had dimmed it, but as they looked closely they could see at its heart an opening in the ground, an opening that led onto steps.
‘Whatever this place is about,’ said Max, ‘that’s where we’ll find it. Down those steps. Would any of you gentlemen like to go down with me?’
Max led the way, breaking through a net of fine cobwebs as he set his foot firmly on the first step. Things scuttled away from the light. The torch beam picked out about a dozen steps leading down into some sort of basement beneath the synagogue. Gerald followed, holding his breath, scared out of his wits, fearing what they might find, what secrets they had stumbled so inadvertently into.