“And to the surface, after all the effort they went to to remain hidden? Not likely. The stairs are for general access.”
“Why? What is this place?”
“A rain cistern.”
“It’s huge. And ancient.” Herodian, even—but of course: this would be Herod’s vast cistern, the rock from which went to rebuild the tower at the corner of the Temple Mount, forming the fortress called the Antonia (after Herod’s friend Marc Antony). Somewhere down here, according to Josephus, in a dark underground passageway between the tower and the Temple, Antigonus, the brother of Aristobulus I, was assassinated. “We must be at the foot of the Antonia,” I said, and reached for my compass. Holmes stopped me.
“It’s approximately the right distance. Let us try those low arches.”
Before I could object he had hoisted his skirts and lowered himself into the dank water. It came barely to his knees. I handed him the bag, removed my boots, and followed him.
The rock underfoot was slick and dropped dangerously off to the left, but it was solid and fairly even. Holmes was leaning over to examine the first of the nearly submerged arches on our right, and as I waded towards him I was struck by how closely he resembled an old-fashioned housewife looking under the furniture for a mouse, her skirts hiked up and her head covered by a scarf. I began to giggle, and he turned and shushed me in irritation, which only made it worse. I snorted into the palm of my hand and dropped one of my boots into the water, and only with difficulty, blinking the tears from my eyes, followed Holmes through the middle arch and into the passage beyond. I pulled myself up onto the dry shelf, sat down, and took a deep, shaky breath. Prolonged stress can take the oddest outlets.
TWENTY-SIX
?
—
THE QUR’AN
Sober now, I pulled on my boots and crawled down the narrow shaft after Holmes. From here on there was no neat passageway carved into the rock, no single track without choices. We were now in the position of creeping from one unpleasant hole to another; twice, we took wrong turnings that ended in a tomb or cistern leading nowhere. Fortunately, our predecessors had done a fair amount of clearing. Often we could choose the proper length of aqueduct or entrance to a collapsed street by the piles of rubble they had left at the entrance. They were not hiding their tracks. The farthest they had carried their clearings was from the tunnel entrance at the Antonia cistern to the abandoned scrap of tunnel at the meeting place of the two teams of diggers off the grotto, a distance of some one hundred feet, and that they had been forced to do lest someone notice the addition of several cubic yards of muck in the cistern. Now they just shovelled the rock and soil to one side or into the nearest hole.
We were going south-east, the compass assured us, parallel to the Haram, but the journey was far from the calm walk through rock tunnels with which we had begun: into a broken tomb and up some steps; a squeeze through a tumble of immense and terrifyingly precarious fallen stones; under a column (braced by some very inadequate-looking planks); a sheer drop into a nice dry Mediaeval tank and a scramble up the other side; into an ominously snug bit of aqueduct that I should never have entered had I not known it had been recently traversed by others; on our bellies across an utterly unexpected segment of Roman roadway, its stones scored to save horses from slipping; through an intact doorway and across half of a room with a mosaic pavement and scorched plaster walls that seemed to be someone’s cellar; through a trickle of water that appeared oddly like a stream, which I judged to mark the long-submerged Tyropoeon Valley; down a shaft and through a bit of Solomonic masonry; picking our way along the ledge that ran around yet another cistern…
It was a nightmare journey. To save our torches we were using a lamp, and only one so as to conserve paraffin. The compass was useless, as we never progressed in the same direction for more than a few feet. We were wet to our thighs with slimy, musty-smelling water from a misjudged cistern, my head was throbbing, Holmes was moving in a stiff manner I knew all too well, there was a disagreeable number of complacent rats living down here, and at each step forward the chance that we would simply stumble into the arms of our enemies grew greater.
Worse, time was passing. The city above us was awake now; half an hour earlier we had been startled by the clop of shod hoofs ten feet over our heads as we went under a lop-sided archway that was holding up the paving stones. Once or twice we caught glimpses of daylight, and the silence of the depths was no longer absolute.
At eight-thirty I flung myself down on a flat stone. “I must stop, Holmes. For ten minutes.” I had not slept for more than a dozen hours in the four days since we had left the Wadi Qelt, and I did not sleep then, but neither was I entirely conscious. Holmes lowered himself slowly onto the floor of whatever this wardrobe-sized space was and leant back gingerly against plaster that had been flaking since the Crusaders captured the city. I closed my eyes and we listened to the vibrations of feet and iron cart wheels.
After five minutes Holmes took out his pipe. I nearly roused myself to object, then decided, The hell with it. The scent of tobacco was a common enough thing, and could enter the nether reaches from any place.
After too few more minutes I heard the familiar sound of the revolver being inspected and given a cursory wipe, then the rustle of the bag. I sighed, and sat up to receive a swallow of the water and a handful of nuts.
“We’re going to be down here forever, Holmes,” I said drearily. I had intended it to be a dry jest, but it came out a flat statement; at least there was no fear in it. I was too exhausted to worry about the roof caving in on me any more.
He spat a date pip into his hand. “I have had failures before, but none quite so spectacular as the Rock of Abraham flying into the air.”
“You haven’t had many failures.”
“Too many.”
“Such as?”
“This is a delightful conversational topic you’ve chosen, Russell. No, no; you wish to know my failures. Very well, let me think. I have had at least four men come to me for help, only to be murdered before I could do a thing for them. Granted, I later solved the murders, but that hardly mitigates the fact that from my clients’ point of view, the cases were not precisely successful. Irene Adler beat me, although that was a silly enough case. And that one with the submarine boat plans, what did Watson call that tale of his? Scott something? Howard?”
“Bruce,” I said. “Partington. And that wasn’t a failure, you did retrieve the plans.”
“I might as well have burnt them, for all the good it did. Twenty-five years ago, that was, and how many submarine vehicles did Britain have in the water during the war? We left the depths of the sea to the U-boat.”
“You think Germany stole the plans later after all?”
“I believe those plans are sitting in the War Office somewhere with a thick layer of dust on them. Yes, I do recall that story now—it also began as an act of treason by a government clerk. Wasn’t that the one into which Watson inserted some romantic claptrap about a rose?”
“I think that was in the story about the naval treaty,” I said.
“Was it? What does that matter? Why on earth are you talking about this nonsense?” He stood up and began to shovel things back into the bag.
“
“On your feet, Russell. Your present surroundings are bringing out an unpleasantly morbid streak in
