The Sacred Blood

away the clay—”

“You what?”

“I know, I know.” She raised her palms up as if to tame a lion. “We were going to come get you, but we needed to be sure about— Anyway, we found something. Bricks.”

A rush of cold ran up his spine. “Show me. Now.”

These days, when Amit pushed his body to anything beyond a light trot, he felt like a rhinoceros on a treadmill. But as he trailed close behind Ariel, there was a fluidity in his stride that he hadn’t felt since he was dodging hostile gunfire in Gaza over twenty years earlier. As seren, or company commander, he could easily have pursued a military career with the Israel Defense Forces, but by then he’d had enough of Israel’s gummy politics concerning the occupied Palestinian territories. So Amit set his sights on a much different pursuit at Tel Aviv University that swapped a Ph.D. in biblical archaeology for his three-olive-branched epaulets.

A hundred yards from the tent, Ariel led him through a ravine, into a cool wash of shade. Ahead, the crevasse narrowed and dipped over the cliff where winter flash floods would rage down to the sapphire-blue Dead Sea. Just over the rise, she stopped at the foot of a tall ladder propped at an angle against the vertical rock.

Catching his breath, Amit glanced at the cave opening—a good four meters up.

His mind rewound four weeks, when the GPR registered this subsurface anomaly buried behind what amounted to almost two meters of rubble, clay, and silt. It had taken ten days to clear it all out; every ounce of soil was thoroughly screen-sifted for the slightest commingled artifacts. Nothing found. What lay beyond, however, wasn’t a cave per se, but a tunnel that rose sharply into the cliff ’s belly.

Ariel went up the ladder first—an effortless ascent. At the top, she pulled herself into the darkened opening.

Drawing breath, Amit clutched the sides of the ladder with his meaty paws. His heartbeat quickened. Keeping his eyes on the opening, he started cautiously upward, the aluminum rungs groaning. Feeling suddenly vulnerable— it happened any time his feet left earth—he fought the urge to look down. Keep moving. Eyes on the prize.

At the top, he clawed the opening’s stone rim and heaved himself up and in.

“Show me.”

“It’s far in . . . at the end, actually,” she said, waving for him to follow. Snatching a flashlight off the floor, she flicked it on, then made her way up the tight passage in short steps.

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