"… when a horse with a woman's face and a peacock's tail transported him at lightning speed to Jerusalem. He tethered it to the Wailing Wall down below and came up the same way as you, after which he undertook his nocturnal journey to heaven."
"We assume he was dreaming?" asked Onno cautiously.
"There are scholars who assume that." Ibrahim nodded. "There are also scholars who assume that he came here physically but that his journey to heaven was a vision?"
"And as a poet, what do you assume?"
"That there is no difference between dream and action, of course," said Ibrahim with a smile. "The dreams of a poet are his deeds."
"Bravo, Mr. Ibrahim!"
"Did Mohammed ascend from that exact spot?" asked Quinten, nodding toward the mosque.
Ibrahim pointed to the building with the golden cupola. "From that spot. He didn't ascend, come to that. He climbed, up a ladder of light. And he came down that way too, and before day broke al-Buraq took him back to Mecca."
"Lightning?" asked Onno. "He went there on a horse and returned on the lightning?"
"That was the name of the horse: Lightning." Ibrahim beckoned them. "Shall we first have a look at the mosque? This Gothic gate was built against it nine hundred years ago by the Crusaders; they made it a temporary church, which they called Templum Salomonis."
Quinten glanced at the pointed arches without interest. "And the real Jewish temples — where were they?"
Ibrahim again pointed at the golden cupola. "There."
"There too?" asked Quinten with raised eyebrows. Ibrahim looked at him with his dark eyes and again cleared his throat. "Everything is there."
"That's a lot, Mr. Ibrahim," said Onno.
"You know of course what the Jews usually say: 'Jews always exaggerate, Arabs always lie.' Judge for yourself. You obviously have no interest in the mosque."
They walked past a deeply inset basin for ritual washing, surrounded by stone armchairs, straight toward the wide staircase, which led up about twelve feet to the terrace; at the top of the stairs there was a free-standing row of arcades of four weathered arches. Quinten felt the gold-domed building becoming more and more forbidding the closer it came, like a lighthouse, which is also meant to be seen only from a distance. The bottom half of the base, covered in white marble, gave way to exuberantly colored tiled ornaments, crowned at the eaves by verses from the Koran in decorative Arabic script.
Ibrahim told him that the cathedral, called The Dome of The Rock, was usually regarded as a mosque, but it wasn't one; it was a shrine, built in the seventh century by Caliph Abd al-Malik — but, thought Quinten as he took off his shoes at the entrance, according to the design of a Christian architect, because that octagonal style didn't seem very Muslim to him. The octagon was the shape that baptismal chapels had, such as he had seen in Florence and Rome; he remembered Mr. Themaat telling him that this was connected with the "eighth day": the resurrection of Christ — which had also taken place somewhere near here. But Mr. Themaat had never told him anything about this building. They entered across the carpets in their stocking feet. Quinten stopped after a few steps. He caught his breath. Could what he was seeing be true?
A stone. In the center of the dimly lit space, within the ring of columns bearing the dome, surrounded by a wooden balustrade, there was nothing except a huge boulder, as tall as a man, with a rugged surface. As he looked at it, he felt his father's eyes trained on him, but he did not return his gaze. The stone, shaped a little like a trapezoid, was golden-yellow, like the whole of Jerusalem; obviously it was the summit of the Temple Mount. How heavy might such a thing be? In the past three weeks everything had gotten much heavier: after the lightness of Venice, the somber house fronts of Florence, then the sunken Roman ruins, just now the enormous blocks of the Wailing Wall, and now he stood eye to eye with the heaviest thing of alclass="underline" the earth itself — but at the same time, Max had once told him, it was actually weightless, as it orbited the sun.
It was sacred here — or was that feeling only caused by the way the spot was represented, like a jewel in a golden setting? Could you turn everything into something sacred like that? Why were there no more than two or three tourists? In the wide gallery on the other side of the circle of arcades Arab women were sitting on the ground here and there, with their faces averted, in long white robes that also covered their heads.
At one corner of the balustrade was a tall structure in the shape of a tower, in which, according to Ibrahim, three hairs from the beard of the Prophet were kept. Then he pointed to a hollow in the stone and said:
"This is his footprint as he took off on his nocturnal journey. And here," he continued, pointing to a number of wide corrugations in the side of the stone, "you see the fingerprints of the archangel, who held back the rock, because it too wanted to go to heaven. That was Gabriel, as you call him, who dictated the Koran to the Prophet."
Quinten let his eyes wander over the stone. "So were the temples of Solomon, Zerubbabel, and Herod here too?" he asked.
"So we assume."
"But surely that's easy to check? Why don't the Jews do a bit of excavating around here?"
Ironic wrinkles appeared on Ibrahim's forehead. "Because our religious authorities don't like Jews doing a bit of excavating around here."
"And so they don't?"
"Not up to now."
"You could even prove it to some extent on the basis of the New Testament," said Onno in Dutch. "Do you remember that text in the dome of St. Peter's: 'Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church'? Christ probably said it with very special accents: 'Thou art Peter and on this rock I shall build my temple.' That means," said Onno, pointing to the rock, "distinct from the temple on this rock."
Ibrahim waited politely until Onno had finished.
Quentin saw that he didn't like being excluded, and as they walked on, in a clockwise direction, he asked: "Is this where the Holy of Holies was?"
"According to some people. According to others, this was the spot where the altar for burnt offerings stood." He pointed to a glimmer of light coming out of the rock on the other side. "There's a hole in the stone there, which leads to a cave; perhaps the blood of the sacrificial animals ran out through that. In that case, the Holy of Holies would have been more toward the west."
Quinten groped under his shirt for his compass, and first felt his new Star of David. The entrance through which they had come faced due south, in line with the al-Aqsa mosque, which, naturally, pointed toward Mecca. So that west was in the direction of the Wailing Wall, east in the direction of the Mount of Olives. The chapel had doorways there too.
"But surely," he said, as they walked on, "Mohammed didn't come precisely to this spot for his heavenly journey because there were Jewish temples here?"
"No," said Ibrahim with a smile. "Things are still not like that."
"Why, then?"
"For a reason that is also connected with the buildings of the Jewish temples on this spot."
"Which was?" asked Onno. It was as though the inquisitorial manner in which Quinten was again trying to get to the bottom of things had infected him.
Rather surprised, Ibrahim looked from one to the other. "This is like a cross-examination."
"So it is," said Onno decidedly.
"There are all kinds of traditions connected with this place," said Ibrahim formally. "Will you be satisfied with four? The first is that King David saw the angel standing on this rock on the point of destroying Jerusalem. When that danger had been averted, he built an altar here. Solomon, his son, subsequently erected the first temple here."