‘Next time I’ll cook you dinner at my place. Sleep well,’ he said, and he kissed her lightly on the lips. As he drove off, he blew her another kiss.
She’d hardly slept. Allegra had tossed and turned, thoughts keeping her awake all night. Perhaps a relationship with another man might be a possibility after all. Ever since that terrible night in Milano she had buried herself in her studies and her research. Until now. From the day she had met David he had made her laugh and gradually she had been able to relax and not take life quite so seriously. Dinner at his place. Maybe it was time to trust again.
‘Sorry about the early start,’ David said as Onslow ground up the Mount of Olives towards the Jericho road. ‘It gets bloody hot out here so it’s best to do our walking around before the sun gets too ferocious.’
‘I’m surprised you’re on time,’ Allegra responded.
‘Hurtful and unnecessary.’
‘So what are we going to see today, “tour guide”?’
‘Qumran, Ladies and Gentlemen. Gateway to the Dead Sea and the site of much mystery and intrigue. Don’t give up my day job?’ he asked, feigning a downcast look as Allegra rolled her eyes.
‘I shall make that assessment at the end of the day, David Kaufmann. Is Qumran really full of that much intrigue or is it just Vatican spin?’
‘I suspect it’s a bit of both, although there’s certainly a healthy dose of the latter, and locking the scrolls away from public view for a quarter of a century hasn’t helped.’
‘Do you really think they’re hiding something?’
David nodded. ‘I think so. Judging from the enormous effort they’ve gone to in disguising the dates, I think it’s something pretty serious.’
Onslow roared past the Bedouin Arabs’ dirty white tents clumped amongst the sand dunes by the side of the road. David and Allegra reached the last crest and started down the long, steep winding road that dropped 1200 metres to the shores of the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, 400 metres below sea level. The air was not only hot, it was thick and oppressive and the morning sun had a fierce bite to it. The heat haze was rising and through it Allegra could just make out the wadis and cliffs of Jordan on the far shoreline. Big trucks thundered past carrying cargoes from Israel’s southernmost settlement of Eilat along the lifeline to Tiberias in the north, protected by Israeli military patrols, armed to the teeth and moving slowly up and down the road, suspicious of everyone and everything that moved in the West Bank.
‘Is the sea very deep?’ she asked David.
‘Not down south. It’s only about 6 metres or so but the northern basin up here is very deep, over 400 metres in parts. The sea lies on a fault line that stretches from here all the way to the Zambesi River system in East Africa, and the salinity is so high that if the fish happen to get washed into it from the Jordan River they die instantly.’
‘It makes you wonder why anyone would have wanted to live out here,’ Allegra mused.
‘It’s not my cup of tea but the Essenes seemed to like it.’
‘And I seem to remember that Sodom and Gomorrah were not far away.’
‘They’ve never found any evidence of those two cities but there’s a very strong theory they were buried in a violent earthquake about four thousand years ago.’
‘Around the time of Abraham,’ Allegra said, remembering the description in Genesis 19 of a destructive earthquake at the same time the father of the three faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was treading the very desert they were venturing into.
‘I guess so,’ David said. ‘In any case the archaeology supports the story because there is evidence of a big quake around 1900 BC that destroyed the cities on the Moab plain and the ruins are probably somewhere beneath the waters of the southern basin.’
Once they passed the turnoff to Jericho the main road continued on to the Jordan River and the site of Christ’s baptism, but before they reached the river itself, David turned off and headed south towards the arid orange-yellow cliffs that soared 365 metres to the Judaean plateau above. At the base of these cliffs stood Qumran, about 30 metres above the road on the side of a rocky ravine. A wadi that was scarred and barren. In amongst the rocks and the cliffs Allegra managed to pick out some of the caves that had hidden the scrolls from civilisation for so long.
If they had been around at the time of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, David and Allegra would have had to grind their way up an old Roman road that led towards the ancient settlement. Now there was a car park for tourist buses and the inevitable air-conditioned coffee house packed to the gunwales with T-shirts, key rings, wooden statues and every other conceivable biblical trinket that a passing tourist might be enticed to buy for ten times what it was worth. Today, save for one car, the car park was empty, its driver the only visitor in the coffee house. Yusef Sartawi buried his head in his newspaper. The waves of killing that had engulfed the modern successors to the Israelis and Palestinians of the ancient biblical lands had made tourism a high-risk business and the tourists were staying away in droves.
As Allegra and David got out of the Land Rover two American-built F-16 fighters screamed in low over the Dead Sea, the pilots clearly visible as they patrolled the border with Jordan.
‘No tourists. We’re in luck,’ David said, shrugging a faded canvas backpack onto his shoulders.
‘What’s in the bag?’ Allegra asked.
‘Normally I carry all my equipment. Today, just a small pick and a brush, and lunch. Smoked salmon and chicken rolls and a bottle of Israel’s finest chardonnay. All chilled with an ice pack,’ he yelled over his shoulder as he set off for the ruins.
Allegra followed David up the narrow rocky path to the top of the salty barren outcrop the Essenes had chosen for their settlement. It overlooked the hazy shores of the Dead Sea a couple of kilometres in the distance.
Yusef Sartawi picked up his mobile, dialled a preset encrypted number and gave a quick update. ‘Subject has arrived at the ruins.’
When they reached the top they climbed onto the remains of an old stone wall and Allegra looked around.
‘The Romans sacked this place in 68 AD on their march to attack Jerusalem and destroy the second temple,’ David explained. ‘If you look around the ruins you can still see the layout of the stone walls and the inner courtyards. Over there is the big defence tower that dominated the landscape and closer to the wadi is the cistern that held their water.’
For the next two hours David and Allegra walked around the ruins that had been excavated by Roland de Vaux and others from the international team, the authors of the Vatican’s consensus on the dates and origin of the scrolls.
‘They really have gotten away with archaeological blue murder here,’ David muttered as they walked into a long oblong area enclosed by rough stone walls. ‘When they dug here, I suspect the Vatican already had their consensus well planned and it became a case of making the site fit the dogma. When L’Ecole Biblique finally got their act together and published the raw material from the dig, we discovered that none of the rules of stratigraphy had been followed. Qumran had been occupied for a long period of time, so they should have known that the layers of civilisation had to be pretty carefully labelled and correlated.’
‘That’s about as damning as it gets,’ Allegra agreed. ‘How could they date the occupation without it?’
‘They couldn’t, but then I don’t think dating was something the Vatican was too keen on. Not only has the Vatican refused to budge from their line that the scrolls date well before Christ, but the boys from the Vatican have always insisted the Qumran Essenes were peaceful, remote and celibate a la those described by the ancient historians Josephus, Philo, Pliny and company. If you have a look over here,’ he said, taking her through a small passageway near the defence tower, ‘you can see the remains of a pretty substantial forge. And here are the remains of the water supply they used to temper the metal. You could argue that they needed it to make tools, but that wouldn’t explain a heap of arrowheads that were found inside the fortress.’