The boy cried out but soon fell silent under the weight of the blows. One of his pursuers reached down and grasped a cloth pouch. He displayed a brief expression of triumph; then both men trotted back down the street without giving the child a second thought.
Bryson stood aghast. “We’ve got to help him.”
The crowd, however, continued to push us forward, and no one else expressed the slightest concern over the boy’s fate. A street urchin, they had most likely concluded; and good riddance.
Lavon tugged Bryson’s robe. “Come on; there’s nothing we can do.”
***
After we passed the City of David, our pace slowed even more as side streets fed additional pilgrims onto the primary thoroughfare. Given that we had a little time, I finally had a chance to ask Bryson a question that had been bothering me since the beginning of our excursion.
“Professor,” I asked. “How did you know where to find the tomb?”
He hesitated briefly.
“Its location is well-accepted, is it not? Ironically, we can thank Hadrian. The emperor was so fervently anti- Christian that he razed the impromptu shrine the early believers had built on the site and erected a pagan temple in its place, inadvertently marking the spot for all time.
“When Constantine legalized Christianity two centuries later, all the followers of Christ had to do was tear down Hadrian’s monstrosity and build their own church.”
That sounded plausible enough, though I could read the skepticism on Lavon’s face. He told me later that this theory was probably correct, with an emphasis on
But that wasn’t the most pressing issue.
“How do you plan to find it today?” I asked.
“I just told you.”
“No,” said Lavon. “You told us how a twenty-first, or a fourth, or even a second century man would locate it; but there’s nothing there now. According to the Gospels, it’s Joseph of Arimathea’s family plot. Did you plan on walking into a meeting of the Sanhedrin and asking him to show you where it is?”
“I’ve taken satellite photos and overlapped the Holy Sepulcher with known archaeological coordinates from this era. We can triangulate between the Damascus Gate and the Phasael Tower. Both of those structures survived into modern times.”
“Triangulate how?” I asked. “Did you bring a compass?”
Even if he had, the reading wouldn’t necessarily be accurate. The earth’s magnetic field had shifted considerably over the intervening two thousand years.
“You’ve got another problem, too,” said Lavon. “Only the foundation of the Phasael Tower remains in our world. This covers a fairly broad area, not the pinpoint location you’d need to triangulate something as small as the tomb.”
Bryson didn’t reply. Instead, he muttered something about getting close as he stared off to the west.
I couldn’t figure it. He seemed too much the careful scientist to go off half-cocked. Either he knew something he wasn’t telling us or I had completely misread the man. The truth, as it turned out, was a little bit of both.
Chapter 33
At that moment, the logjam in front of us — caused by another recalcitrant donkey, we finally saw — cleared away, and the crowd surged forward, sweeping us along for the ride.
As we came closer to the Temple Mount, we felt an electric energy surge through our fellow travelers, a sensation I found akin to fans going into a rock concert or a championship football game.
“Stay together,” Lavon ordered.
I didn’t argue. Religious gatherings have no exemption from the forces of crowd dynamics. Hundreds of modern pilgrims die almost every year in stampedes at the Hajj in Mecca; and worshipers are trampled so regularly during Hindu festivals that the Indian media have invented a distinctive term for such events: “temple crushes.”
I didn’t need an overly active imagination to picture the same thing happening here. Lavon must have thought so, too; for the first chance he saw, he ducked into a narrow side alley and led us along a circuitous path that ended at the southeast corner of a broad plaza.
There, we all stopped and stared upward, gawking the way we had when we had first spotted the city from a distance.
From our perspective at the base of the retaining wall, the red-tinted roof of the Temple’s royal colonnade must have risen at least two hundred feet above our heads — the height of a twenty-story building. I, for one, stood in awe, which was, as I realized later, the whole point.
“Incredible,” said Markowitz.
Then he charged forward.
We had to sprint to catch up, which we did just as he pushed his way into a stream of pilgrims heading up the broad stairway to the Temple entrance.
At this point, we had no option but to fall in with a line of men inching toward the eastern set of double doors. Once inside, additional passages opened into a broad network of shallow pools, known as
Markowitz disappeared for a moment before Lavon managed to spot him going into the closest body of water. He reached out and pulled him back.
“Not yet,” he said. “Let’s stay together and get the lay of the land first.”
Markowitz complied, though not for long. Once more, the incoming throng surged behind us and pushed us apart.
The next time I spotted him, he had already traveled a fair distance and was making a beeline up the steps toward the open plaza of the Temple Mount, with the Professor and Lavon trailing close behind.
***
By then, I couldn’t do much else than go along with the general flow of the crowd, and after a few minutes of being jostled about, I found myself in the animal market.
The moneychangers had returned to business with a vengeance, and this morning they were taking no chances.
Guards of the Temple police, conspicuous in their black helmets and armed with spears and cudgels, stood roughly ten feet apart behind each row of tables. Disturbances today would prove remarkably unhealthy, something I was to observe all too clearly later on.
I made one more quick search for the others before turning my attention back to the marketplace itself. Though appearing chaotic at first glance, I could see, upon closer inspection, that the Temple authorities possessed a firm grasp of operational logistics.
Servants traveled in a one-way path through specially designated corridors, carrying fresh sacrificial inventory to the vendors from the lower levels and then removing the empty cages to a holding area, where other attendants gathered them and returned them to stocking pens below.
I found the overall layout quite clever as well. Worshipers emerging from the
Taken as a whole, the place bore an uncanny resemblance to the departure terminals of modern international airports, whose designers shamelessly funnel passengers through a maze of duty free stores before allowing them to reach their destination gates.
In truth, the only real difference was the smell.
I had stepped aside to avoid two boys wrestling with a recalcitrant lamb when I heard shouting in the direction of the Temple itself.
