the pilgrims were already on their knees.
'What's everybody kneeling for?' asked Robin.
'First Station of the Cross,' said the Colonel. 'In point of fact, we're on the site of the Praetorium, padre, this was all part of the old Antonia fortress. We can get a better idea of it inside the Convent of the Ecce Homo.'
He was not sure, though. Things seemed to have altered since '48. Men were seated at a table taking tickets. He had a murmured consultation with Babcock.
'How many of us are there?' he asked, searching the eyes of strangers.
He could see none of his party except himself, Robin and the padre. The place seemed to be full of nuns. The pilgrims were being divided into groups.
'Better do what they tell us,' he muttered to Babcock. 'Call themselves the Soeurs de Sion, can't understand a word they say.'
They were descending to a lower level, and this, thought Robin, must be what Miss Dean didn't want to do. It's not particularly frightening, though. Not nearly as bad as the Ghost Train at a fair.
The nun in charge of their party was explaining that they were descending to the lithostratus or, as the Hebrew had it, the Gabbatha, the stone-paved judgement-place of Pilate. The pavement had only recently been discovered, she told them, and perhaps the most striking proof that it was indeed the site of the place where the Seigneur had been held by Pilate, and scourged and mocked, was furnished by the curious markings on the flagstones themselves, the criss-cross lines and pits which, the experts told them, the Roman soldiers used for games of chance. Here in this corner they would have sat, dicing, guarding their prisoner, and we now know too, she said, that it was a Roman custom to play a game called The King, when a condemned prisoner was crowned king during his last few hours, and treated with mock ceremony.
The gaping pilgrims stared about them. The place was low, vaulted, like an immense cellar, the flagstones hard and rugged beneath their feet. The whispering voices died away. The nun herself was silent.
'Perhaps,' thought Robin, 'the soldiers didn't actually mock Jesus at all. It was just a game, which they let him join in. He might even have thrown dice with them. The crown and the purple robe were just dressing-up. It was the Romans' idea of fun. I don't believe when a prisoner is condemned to death the people guarding him are beastly. They try and make the time go quickly, because they feel sorry for him.'
He could imagine the soldiers squatting on the flagstones, and with them, chained to a fellow-prisoner, a thief, was a young man, smiling, who threw his dice with greater skill than his gaolers, and so won the prize and was elected king. The laughter that greeted his skill was not mockery, it was applause.
'That's it,' thought Robin. 'People have been teaching it all wrong through the years. I must tell Mr Babcock.'
He looked about him, but he could see none of his party except his grandfather, who was standing very still, staring towards the far end of the vaulted room. People began to drift away but the Colonel did not move, and Robin, content to squat on the flagstones and trace the curious lines and markings with his finger, waited until his grandfather was ready.
We only acted under instructions, the Colonel told himself. They came direct from High Command. Terrorism was rife at the time, the Palestine Police Force couldn't deal with it, we had to take control. The Jews were laying mines at street corners, the situation was deteriorating daily. They had blown up the King David Hotel in July. We had to arm the troops, and protect them and the civilian population against terrorist attack. The trouble was, there was no political policy back at home, with a Labour government in power. They told us to go soft, but how can you go soft when people on the spot are being killed? The Jewish Agency insisted that they were against terrorism, but it was all talk and no action. Well, then we picked up this Jewish boy and flogged him. He was a terrorist, right enough. Caught him in the act. Nobody likes inflicting pain… There were reprisals afterwards, of course. One of our officers and three N.C.O.'s kidnapped and flogged. Hell of a row about it at home. I don't know why standing here should bring the whole scene back so vividly. I haven't thought of it since. Suddenly he remembered the expression on the boy's face. The look of panic. And his mouth twisting as the lashes fell. He was very young. The boy was standing there in front of him once again, and his eyes were Robin's eyes. They did not accuse him. They simply stared at him in dumb appeal. Oh God, he thought, oh God, forgive me. And his years of service fell away, became as nothing, were wasted, useless.
'Come on, let's go,' he said abruptly, but even as he turned on his heel and walked across the flagged stones be could hear the sound of the blows, could see the Jewish boy writhe and fall. He pushed his way through the crowd up into the open air, Robin at his heels, and so out into the street, looking neither to right nor to left.
'Hold on, Grandfather,' called Robin. 'I want to know exactly where Pilate stood.'
'I don't know,' said the Colonel. 'It doesn't matter.'
Another queue was already forming to descend to the paved Gabbatha, and here outside the pilgrims were thicker than ever. A new guide was standing at his elbow, who plucked at his sleeve and said, 'This way, the Via Dolorosa. Straight on for the Way of the Cross.'
Lady Althea, wandering within the Temple area, was doing her best to shake off Kate Foster before they met the Chase-boroughs.
'Yes, yes, very impressive,' she said vaguely as Kate pointed out the various domes, and began reading something out of a guidebook about Mameluke Sultan Quait Bai who had built a fountain over the Holy of Holies. They wandered from one edifice to another, mounted row upon row of steps, descended them again, saw the rock where Isaac was sacrificed by Abraham and Mohammed rose to Heaven, and still no sign of her friends. The sun, directly overhead, blazed down upon them.
'I think I've had enough,' she said. 'I really don't think I want to fag right over there and see the inside of that mosque.'
'You'll be missing the finest sight in the whole of Jerusalem,' retorted Kate. 'The stained-glass windows of the Al Aqsa mosque are world-famous. I'm only hoping they weren't damaged in the bomb explosions one read about.'
Lady Althea sighed. Middle East politics bored her, except when they were being discussed in an authoritative manner by a member of Parliament over dinner. There was so little to distinguish between Jews and Arabs anyway. They all threw bombs.
'Go and look at your mosque,' she said. 'I'll wait for you here.'
She watched her companion disappear and then, loosening her chiffon scarf, strolled back again towards the flight of steps leading to the Dome of the Rock. The one great advantage in being in this Temple area was that there were fewer crowds than in that narrow, stifling Via Dolorosa. So much more space in which to move about. She wondered what Betty Chaseborough would be wearing-she had only caught sight of her white hat in the car. Pity she had let her figure go these last few years.
Lady Althea installed herself against one of the triple pillars above the flight of steps. They surely would not miss her here. She felt rather empty; coffee and breakfast seemed a long time ago. She opened her bag, remembering the piece of ring-shaped bread that Robin had pressed her into buying from some vendor who had been standing with a donkey outside the Church of All Nations. 'It's not unleavened bread,' he had told her, tut the next best thing to it.' She smiled. His little ways were so amusing.
She bit into the bread-it was a lot harder than it looked-and as she did so she saw Eric Chaseborough and his wife emerging with a group of sightseers from some building Kate had said was Solomon's Stables. She waved her hand to attract their attention, and Eric Chaseborough waved his hat in reply. Lady Althea dropped the piece of bread back into her bag, and was instantly aware, from the odd sensation in her mouth, that something was terribly wrong. She thrust her tongue upwards. It pricked against two sharp points. She looked down again at the piece of bread, and there, impaled in the ring, were her two front teeth, capped by her dentist just before she left London. She seized her hand-mirror in horror. The face that was hers belonged to her no longer. The woman who stared back at her had two small filed pegs stuck in her upper gums where the teeth should have been. They looked like broken matchsticks, discoloured, black. All trace of beauty had gone. She might have been some peasant who, old before her time, stood begging at a street corner.
'Oh no…' she thought, 'oh no, not here, not now!' And in an agony of shame and humiliation she tried to cover her mouth with her blue chiffon scarf as the Chaseboroughs, smiling, advanced towards her.
'Run you to earth at last,' called Eric Chaseborough, but she could only shake her head, gesticulating, trying to wave them off.
