Amit trailed close behind her, bending slightly at the waist to avoid the low ceiling while twisting his torso to prevent jamming his broad shoulders in the narrow channel. Within seconds, what little sunlight penetrated the tunnel had dissipated. The subterranean air chilled his damp neck and the redolence of minerals stirred up into his nose—what he liked to call “Bible smell.”
A few meters up the grade, the glow from work lights pierced the darkness. Amit could hear echoing voices and the dry sound of gravel being scooped into buckets. He detected a swish swish swish—a brush dusting stone. “Stop what you’re doing!” His scream rippled along the tunnel.
The outburst made Ariel flinch and hit her head on the ceiling. She stopped, cupped her hand over the tender spot, then checked it under the light. Only dirt.
“It’ll only be a bruise,” Amit said, noting the lack of blood on her hand.
Shaking her head, Ariel proceeded upward. The sounds of work had stopped, but the mumbling had just begun, mixed with some giggles.
The tunnel reached its high point and flattened out, yielding to a wide hollow. Amit straightened with half a meter to spare overhead. Immediately his eyes found the cleared section in the chamber’s rear, a square meter, he guessed, crisply lit by two pole lights. Three more eager students stood in silence around the spot, buckets and tools at their feet, looking like they’d just been called to the principal’s office.
Huffing, he made his way closer. He fumed, “I can’t tell you again how critical it is to—” But the words were lost as his eyes took in the remarkable sight set before him. Moving forward and dropping to his knees, he pressed his face close to a neat patchwork of angular bricks the students had mindfully exposed. His heart seemed to skip a beat. Early on, Amit had given Mother Nature full credit for this chamber, since its interior surfaces displayed no telltale scarring from tools. Now that hypothesis had to be completely discounted. “Oh my,” he gasped.
4
******
A radargram was a far cry from a Polaroid. But as Amit studied the wild undulations in the GPR’s frequency patterns, he concurred with young Ariel. These deflections were definitely deep. He rolled the scanner away from the bricks and patted his fingers against his lips in rapid motion.
“What do you think, Professor?” Ariel finally said.
Mind racing, Amit stared at the brickwork a few seconds before answering. “This wall isn’t very dense. Probably less than half a meter.” For scale, he propped a ruler and a chisel against the bricks, then proceeded to snap some digitals with his trusty Nikon. After twice reviewing the images on the camera’s display, he was pleased. He turned to Ariel and said, “I need a detailed diagram of this space, with laser measurements all around.”
“I can do it,” she confidently replied.
“I know you can.” The kid not only had a knack for academia, but she was an excellent artist. Extremely useful for field study and precisely why she’d been handpicked to join his team. “Take some video too. Use plenty of light.”
Beaming, Ariel nodded in fast motion.
Then he addressed the others. “The rest of you start tagging the bricks. Then we’ll see what they were looking to hide.”
“They,” the students immediately understood, were the Essenes— the reclusive Jewish sect that had inhabited these hills for two centuries beginning in the second century b.c.e., until their mass genocide by the Romans in 68 c.e. Their primary settlement was set along the shore of the Dead Sea, a cluster of crude clay brick dwellings that included sleeping quarters, a refectory, and ritual bathing pits called mikvahs. But the site’s dominant building had been a long hall furnished with drafting tables—a scriptorium where multiple copies of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, as well as a plethora of apocryphal texts, had been fastidiously transcribed. The Essenes had been the scribes, librarians, and custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“Think we’ll find scrolls, Professor?”
Irritated by the ask-it-and-kiss-your-fortunes-good-bye query, Amit turned to the nineteen-year-old Galilean named Eli, who was all nose and ears beneath a tight knit of black curls topped off by a brightly embroidered kippah. A spasm rippled Amit’s lower left eyelid as he agitatedly replied, “Anything’s possible.”
An hour later, when Amit nudged free the brick pin-tagged “C027,” he saw a black space open up behind the wall’s final layer. Grinning ear to ear, he carefully handed the block to the Galilean kid, who used it to start a new column in the ordered matrix of bricks laid neatly on the chamber floor.
Amit held a tape measure along the top of the recess. The radargram had been right on the shekels. “Half a meter.”
“Exciting stuff,” Eli said, rubbing his hands together and crouching to peek through the hole.
“You getting all this?”
“Every brick,” he assured Amit as he grabbed his clipboard and wrote “C027” on the inventory sheet.
Grabbing a flashlight, Amit shone the beam through the gap, moving it side to side, up and down. The light clung to two meters of tight walls and ceiling—another passage?—before being swallowed by a much larger void. A second chamber? His knees popped as he stood. “Let’s get the rest of this cleared away,” he instructed the interns.
5
******
After another two hours, under Amit’s close supervision, the ancient wall had been completely dismantled.
He reclaimed his kneeling spot.
“Let’s have a look.” Crouching, he shone the flashlight into the rocky gullet while trying not to inhale the stagnant air spilling out of the breach. Just beyond the opening, he studied the angular passage and ran his fingers over its scooped chisel hashes. Definitely quarried. A tap on his shoulder made him turn. It was Ariel, holding out a silver-cased Zippo lighter.
“To check for oxygen,” she explained.
“Right,” Amit said, taking it from her. She’d obviously noticed that he’d left his fancy digital oxygen sensor back at the tent. So the crude method would have to suffice. Flicking the top open with a small ting, he lit it up. The tang of butane filled his nostrils as he extended the Zippo into the passage. The robust flame held steady. All clear. “Here goes.”
Crawling through the short passage, flashlight in his left hand, Zippo in his right, Amit hesitated when he quickly reached the end. A large void opened up in front of him.
Craning his neck, he swung the light in wide arcs through the black soup. The light melted deep into the space—a sizable angular chamber hewn from the mountain’s innards.
Confusion came fast. The space seemed to be empty. But there was lots of Bible smell here.
Working his way inside, Amit stood and rolled his neck. Though the Zippo’s quivering taper suggested questionable air quality, he wasn’t about to vacate the chamber. He hadn’t felt this exhilarated in years. Pulling in shallow breaths, he paced the level floor and examined the symmetrical walls and ceiling—a ten-meter cube, he guesstimated, every surface blank. Why would the Essenes brick up an empty cubicle?