old, its black wood set with numerous rusted iron studs. The marks on the ground were from a ladder that had been let down here.
However, there was no sign of soil on the stone floor.
“Access to a house in the Arab Quarter,” I said.
“I am relieved to see you did not leave your wits behind in that crack in the wall,” he replied drily. I followed him back to where he had found the lump of soil, and we began a minute examination of the rock on an imaginary line drawn between the door, the bit of soil, and the cave wall.
They had been careful. I found one more trace of earth ten feet away towards the wall; Holmes found two places where someone might or might not have swept something from the cave floor. It was now 3:45. We stopped for a rest, and Holmes lit his pipe, staring fiercely at the bland expanse of rock.
“This caution is suggestive,” he said eventually. “The man is little concerned with the intelligence of others, so he rarely bothers to cover his tracks in any but the most cursory of manners. In the past, he has not seriously believed that anyone would think to look for him, regarding himself as invisible to mere mortal eyes. Now, however, he has become careful. I wonder if he would demonstrate the same concern had he not had a prisoner taken from under his nose.”
“I was thinking about that yesterday, how Bey just takes whatever he comes across that might come in useful, regardless of the alarm it might raise. Although of course he’s right, there is very little chance, given the chaotic state of the country at the moment, that the authorities would have noticed anything until it was too late. Assuming he’s reasonably discreet and knows the dress and language well enough to fit in, who would have thought to look for a mastermind behind the disruptions? Allenby was only beginning to have his suspicions, and even Joshua, who I think is considerably more competent than he chose to appear, was only half-convinced.”
“He seems to vacillate between caution and carelessness, depending on which aspect of his unbalanced mind is in the ascendent mode. Now I think we have wasted enough of—”
“Holmes, no!” He froze in the action of preparing to knock his pipe out against a rock. “Your pipe. Puff it again.”
Obediently he put the stem back between his lips and drew rapidly on it three or four times.
The smoke moved.
In an instant he had knocked the half-burnt dottle out and taken a candle from our spelunking bag, lit it, and held it at arm’s length. It flickered faintly, then burnt straight and unmoving. I took another candle from the bag, lit it from his, and we both moved over to the wall.
It was a slow business, holding the candle, waiting for the air from our movements to settle, and, when the flame stood straight upright, moving it again. Then, when Holmes and I were only a couple of feet apart, my flame dashed sideways and blew out. I nearly whooped for joy, until I saw where the air current was coming from: beneath a huge, half-cut block.
We lay on our bellies and shined our torches at the narrow gap between the block and the floor. It appeared no more than a hand’s-width high. There was no tunnel visible on the far side of the hole, only rock.
“It doesn’t go anywhere, Holmes.”
“It must.”
“I know you wish it to, but—”
“Russell, use your eyes.”
I followed the beam of his light, and realised that of course there would not be cobwebs in a cave with no flies, that what I was seeing were threads and hairs.
And several clods of soil along the sides of the rock across from us.
“But there’s solid rock! I can see it.”
“I do not care what your eyes tell you; I tell you they must have come this way.” He got to his knees and began to remove his
“I’ll go first. If I get stuck, you can pull me out by my feet. I’m not certain I could do the same for you.”
Again I stripped down to trousers and undershirt, and for the second time that night I inserted my body into the jaws of the earth, knowing in my bones that at any instant the earth would bite down.
Only it didn’t. What was not visible from the cave was the curvature of the floor. When I pushed under the rock, I found myself going down into a recess, then up again, and when the slope returned to the height of the cavern floor, I had cleared the back side of the block. I moved the beam of my light across the surrounding walls, and found I was standing in a nice large, tidy tunnel, not quite tall enough for me to stand upright, but sufficiently tall and wide to walk in. I got down on my knees and put my face to the hole.
“There’s a tunnel here, Holmes. Plenty of room, the floor drops away. Push the equipment through in front of you.”
I crawled in again, as far as my hips, and took the bag and lamps as he passed them through. I dressed again as Holmes slithered through gingerly and rose to admire the neatly carved rock.
“Very nice,” he said.
“A back door?” I mused. “ ‘The king with his soldiers fled by night.’ ”
“May we go? Or do you wish to take measurements for a research paper?”
“After you.”
The tunnel ran south for fifty yards, then gave a jog and turned slightly east. Holmes kept an eye on the compass and map, but it seemed we were making a more or less straight run for the Haram. Keeping in mind the sly entrance, we paused often to peer into uneven bits, particularly those near the floor. We found no alternatives, only the tunnel, five and a half feet high and something less than three across, gouged through living rock by men with chisels two thousand and more years ago.
Abruptly, the smooth track was broken. The tunnel stopped, turned due east, took six steps down, then turned south again. It would appear that there had been two teams of diggers here, as there were at Hezekiah’s Tunnel in Siloam, teams who missed each other slightly and had to compensate with a ten-foot linking tunnel and half a dozen steps to join the two. The more eastern half continued north past the meeting place for a dozen or so feet, clearly the extent of one crew’s work before the diggers realised they had overshot their mark. That truncated section of tunnel had been used to deposit a great heap of rock and slops of soil, some of it so recently added that the pile was still trickling water into the passage.
It did not look quite the same as the soil that had been added to the Souk el-Qattanin, but Holmes had no doubts. He held up a pinch of the stuff between his fingers and brought it up to his eyes. “I believe a microscopic examination would show this to be identical to the traces in the basket of the widow of Abdul the Ugly,” he said, and wiped his fingers on his robes. I did not think it worth the effort to argue.
We continued along the featureless tunnel, going steadily downwards, and had travelled perhaps one hundred fifty yards from the cave when something in the air changed. Holmes stopped, played his light ahead into the passage until it disappeared, then turned it off. The blackness once again closed around us.
“Hear anything?” he whispered after a while.
“No. But the air smells different.”
“Does it? You’re right.”
Other than the occasional whiff of a leaking privy, the only smell the tunnel had contained thus far was from the heap of damp soil back at the join of the two tunnels. This smell was similar, sharp and slightly rotten; not offensive, just earthy, particularly after hours of nothing more organic than naked stone.
We went on with even greater caution than before. After a time I decided that yes, I heard a sound, but it was not clear enough to determine what it was, beyond a faint flutter against the inner membranes of the ear.
Without warning, the tunnel came to an end, to all appearances debouching halfway up a stone wall. Peering over Holmes’ shoulder, I glimpsed water below us, black water with no way of telling its depth. Into it water dripped steadily from several places, a continuous, musical echo that explained the unidentifiable sounds in the tunnel. There was also, somewhere, an opening to the sky above: I smelt bats.
Holmes drew back and handed me the torch; I shined it into the space ahead of us. To our left, massive stone arches held up a vaulted ceiling, with a similar flooded room beyond. Stones protruded from the wall around us at regular and rising spaces to form a stairway climbing over our heads. The wall to our right was featureless except for the very tops of three nearly submerged arches, much shorter than those on our left. I pulled my head in and whispered to Holmes.
“Up the stairs?‘’
