you.”
“My present—why? Where are we, aside from being buried alive?”
“You are in a tomb, Russell. I believe you’ve been stretched out on top of a sarcophagus.”
Our obstacle course continued, turning west, south, occasionally doubling back north, but maintaining a general direction along the Haram. I thought we must have come right through the city, but Holmes said no, we had not even reached David Street, some three hundred fifty yards (on a direct line) from the Antonia cistern. We went on, and on.
Then in a dry, snug space created by the fall of some huge quarried stones we found a cache of tinned goods, some of them still in their shipping crates. They were thick with dust, those that hadn’t been kicked to one side, though their labels were still bright.
“I thought so,” Holmes muttered. “Bey must have caught himself some smugglers and learnt the route from them. Under interrogation in the Old Serai, no doubt, during the war. Food was scarce, and smugglers sprang up by the dozen—we may find who they were when we investigate the house with the cellar door above the Cotton Grotto. Bey tucked the route away in the back of his mind, waiting until he might need it. By the looks of it, he’s not been down here more than half a dozen times.” He stopped, and held up a hand. “Did you hear a voice?” he asked, then turned out the lamp.
I strained my ears, and was about to say that I hadn’t, when it came again, a high-pitched and unintelligible cry that wafted, not from the street overhead but out of the hole ahead of us. It sounded like a child.
Silently, and using brief bursts from the torch, we gathered our things and began to sidle down the passage, in this case a narrow space between two walls, or rather, what had once been walls and were now foundations. The child sound came and went, and another sound as well: the trickle of moving water. It grew more distinct, and then Holmes stopped.
“We’ve run out of floor,” he breathed at me, and, curling his free hand around the torch to make a tight beam, he flicked it briefly at the ground and again at the space ahead of us, and then we stood in the dark and thought.
There was no space ahead. At our feet, or rather, about four feet below our feet, was a masonry channel with sluggish, unclean-looking water in it. The large, flat covering stone had fallen into the channel, and it was the faint riffling noise from the water as it dribbled over the stone that we had heard.
The voices were definitely travelling down this channel, and now that we were above it, they became clearer: still no words, not that I could make out, but they separated themselves into two, possibly three children, calling and shouting at each other. The normality of the sound was completely unexpected, and I racked my brain to think where…
“The bath!” I said aloud. Ignoring Holmes’ shushing noises, I tried to pull the recollection of my feverish reading of the Baedeker’s guide. I whispered, “This must be the Hamman es-Shifa. It’s a big pool of rain-water set deep in the ground just south of the Souk el-Qattanin. It has a channel leading out of the south-western end of it, three feet by five, something like that.”
“Do you wish to investigate, or shall I?”
“I’ll go,” I said reluctantly.
“I must say I am coming to appreciate this system,” he remarked, the humour in his voice clear despite the low volume. “Why did it never before occur to me to have a vigorous young assistant to do what the Americans call my ‘dirty work’?”
“I’m your partner, not your assistant,” I snapped. “And you’ll have to let me past.”
“There’s a foothold on the other side; I’ll perch there. Ready?”
“Just a moment.” It was not easy to choose between letting myself into the water with no clothes, thus reserving a source of relatively dry warmth for after my immersion, or with clothes on, so as to keep the filthy walls away from my skin. In the end I couldn’t face complete nakedness, so I left my long, loose undershirt on, and dropped everything else into a heap. Holmes shot the light on and stepped forward onto the channel’s opposite side wall; I eased myself down into the freezing water and went instantly numb.
“Do you need the torch?” he asked.
“Actually, there’s a bit of light in one direction. I’ll go that way first.” There was light, beyond a bend in the channel, and I made for it, trying hard to keep my face above the water even if it meant rubbing the back of my turban along the greasy stones overhead. I came to the bend, and I was so entranced by the slice of light that beamed at me from fifty feet away and the simple noises of the two children splashing and shouting that I nearly missed the concealed opening.
What caught my eye was a chip, the fresh gleam of broken stone amidst the black-green slime that covered every surface. I could not see into the hole, but I did not need to. I went back to retrieve Holmes.
Once safely inside the hidden entrance, we dried ourselves off as best we could, using the cloth bag we carried, though I abandoned my undershirt in the tunnel and wore just trousers and
We also abandoned some of our caution. Holmes lit the lamp and we went on, faster now. This was another patch of actual passageway, perhaps built as an alternative to the channel, but higher and therefore dry. It ran in the same direction, and then, where I estimated the bath would be, turned right, then left, then in a short time right again. The compass told me I was facing east: we were nearing the Dome of the Rock.
Holmes halted again. I craned to look over his shoulder, first at the floor, then at a piece of wood covering a hole in the roof over our heads. There was a great deal of soil on the floor ahead of it, beginning directly under the hole. Two marks on the ground, the twins to those we had found beneath the door in the grotto, marked where the feet of a ladder had stood. There was no sign of the ladder here either, but whatever they were clearing, it was here, into the Souk el-Qattanin directly above our heads, that they had rid themselves of the debris from this final portion of their path. The presence of the British weaving sheds in the
There was no time to search the overhead access. We were almost under the wall surrounding the Haram es-Sherif, and I was intensely aware of how close we were to the Rock that is the heart of the city, the stone that had felt the touch of the Ark of the Covenant, of Father Abraham and his bound son Isaac, of the Prophet Mohammed and his legendary horse. The Talmudic saying, the Rock covers the waters of the Flood, ran through my mind over and over again, along with the Moslem one that says the Rock is the gate to hell. If we did not uncover two hundred fifty pounds of explosive in the next ninety minutes, we might well find that both traditions were true.
There were fresh footprints in the spilt soil, fresher than the two sets of boots that trod each other, back and forth, into obscurity. In two places, water had oozed down the rocks and turned the soil into mud, and in each of those a pair of new boots had walked, once in each direction, less than twenty-four hours before. It had probably been in the still hours of the night, when a twelve-hour timing device could be set to go off at the moment Allenby and his companions would be in the Haram. While we had been searching for one end of the long and laborious path under the city, Bey or one of his men had come and gone through the Souk el-Qattanin at the tortuous path’s short end.
Unfortunately, in neither patch did he step on top of the previous mark, so we could not be absolutely certain that he was not even now waiting at the far end of the tunnel. Holmes doused the lamp, handed it to me, and took up his torch again.
We came upon the source of the soil that had been deposited into the Souk el-Qattanin: a length of roof had given way. Large quantities of rock and soil had been cleared and a few perfunctory wooden supports added to hold up the ceiling.
It is almost exactly three hundred feet from the Bab el-Qattanin—the gate into the Haram from the Cotton Bazaar—to the Dome of the Rock, and we crept, as silent as shadows and with the bare minimum of light, expecting at any instant to be met by sudden violence.
A little less than halfway we came upon the upper arm of the Bethlehem aqueduct, what was left of it. It obviously no longer went anywhere, for the water had no hint of movement about it, and smelt stale beyond words. We went on, under the Haram es-Sherif now, beneath the platform on which the Dome is set, where Allenby was
