presence, aircraft overhead, gunfire, and explosions would have been much greater. Come now, if you want to see what we’ve found.”

Mazare, his face still a rash of cuts, drove; Tomas sat beside him and a third man got in the back with me.

“Before we go to the temple, we’re taking a short detour,” Tomas said.

“Why’s that?”

“When we first met, you questioned whether the prophet Nahum lived in Assyria. I’ll prove it to you.”

He could read the skepticism in my voice. “And how are you going to pull that off?”

In answer, he gave a self-satisfied smile. “You’ll see.”

Half an hour later we entered a town nestled against a small mountain. “The village of Alqosh,” Tomas said.

“I thought we’d be going somewhere near the Nineveh site.”

“A thriving Jewish community existed here for thousands of years. Originally, Hebrew people the Assyrian kings had forced into exile. It was Nahum’s community, among them his confidants, the ones he hoped would lead the caravan from Judah to Ashurbanipal’s treasure.”

We entered the town and negotiated successively smaller streets, eventually bumping down a narrow lane enclosed on either side by buildings. We pulled up near an ancient building constructed of masonry and small boulders similar to the honey-colored stone in the rest of the town. The structure looked so old you’d almost think it had grown out of the underlying rock. Deep arches along one side formed a sort of rough cloister; rectangular holes in the walls had once been windows. One side had caved in. “When our country is stable again our State Board of Antiquities will protect this site and restore it,” Tomas stated with a clear note of pride.

Tomas went next door and knocked. A man greeted him and handed him something. When he returned he held up a ring of keys. “This is an ancient synagogue,” he said. “The last Jewish people left in 1948, and their rabbi entrusted the keys to their next-door neighbor. The family has acted as caretakers ever since.”

He took us to a wooden doorway banded by corroded metal with a green patina. Carved stone reliefs framed the door, but they had been so eroded that I couldn’t make out the designs. Inside, daylight filtered through the window openings, allowing us to see a large worship space. Tomas showed us various inscriptions, plaques, and Judaic symbols on the walls. He translated one of them: “He who has not witnessed the celebration of pilgrimage to Nahum’s tomb has not seen real joy.”

“Nahum’s actual tomb is here? I can’t believe that.”

“Ever the skeptic, Madison. Look a little further.”

In the center of a small room leading off the main worship area sat a simple plaster sarcophagus draped with a pleated green silk cover. “The prophet’s tomb,” Tomas said. “The Book of Nahum refers to him as Nahum the Elkoshite. That’s a variation of the name of this place. You could just as easily say, ‘Nahum of Alqosh.’”

One thing Samuel had always impressed upon me was the value of local narratives. Science had allowed for great advances in archaeology, but that was only one tool. The historic memory of village people carried its own kernel of truth. Nahum may well have found his final resting place here, and it seemed a fitting end in this peaceful old synagogue.

Back on the road we climbed hills, making sharp turns and stopping abruptly to negotiate steep drops. At one point we turned off the smoother surface of asphalt and slowed to enter a bumpy road. Mazare brought the car to a halt. The light had dimmed. Evening was fast approaching.

We’d stopped on a rough track cut into the side of a small mountain. Huge outcroppings of rock broken up by sage-hued swaths of vegetation had turned rosy in the sunset.

“We’ll walk from here,” Tomas said. “Not so long ago, you couldn’t even reach this destination by road. It’s dry here now. In the spring when the rains come it’s beautiful; wildflowers grow everywhere.”

He pulled out a heavy gold chain with a pendant in the shape of a cross, its horizontal and vertical bars ending in three-pointed flutes. “Put this on. It’s the Salib-Siryani, the Assyrian cross, like the ones we wear.” He undid the top buttons of his shirt. “Do likewise, so if we come across anyone, they’ll see it dangling. I’ll explain that we’re pilgrims. Don’t under any circumstances speak yourself.”

“Wouldn’t people know you anyway?”

“Farther south, not around here.”

The steep, uneven path would have challenged a nimble goat.

In places it had crumbled away and we had to use our hands and feet to scramble up. After about half an hour we rounded a high rock face. The vision greeting us stopped me in my tracks.

Close to its crown, an ancient citadel clung to the mountain’s face. It looked like a crusader’s fort or one of those age-old Tibetan monasteries. Masonry walls at least sixty feet high formed the base. Above, Moorish-arched stone buildings soared, pink in the last glimmers of sunset. High in the sky a pair of vultures wheeled, their outstretched wings black shapes against pale violet.

“Dair Rabban Hurmiz,” Tomas said, sweeping his arm toward it, “the most famous monastery in Iraq. It dates to A.D. 640, built on the ruins of an ancient pagan cult center by two princes who witnessed the miracles of our legendary healer and spiritual leader Rabban Hurmiz. Over the ages the monastery has changed hands between the Syriac Church of the East and we Catholic Chaldeans.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It looked like a phantom castle, like something out of One Thousand and One Nights.

“The monastery has literally been carved into the mountain-side. Inside, a great dining hall was hewn out of the mountain, its pillars formed from verticals of uncut rock. The church has five altars, one room with a floor of stone coffins, and a saint’s burial chamber. The library has documents going back to the fifteenth century.”

“Is it still occupied?”

“The Chaldean Church reclaimed it in 1975. A caretaker community lives on here.”

“Is this where you studied for the priesthood?”

“No, in Baghdad. My grandparents lived in Alqosh. As boys, Ari and I often played among the grottos here, secretly, of course. You couldn’t imagine a better place for hide-and-seek. When I saw the inscriptions on Nahum’s engraving, I recalled seeing the same ones on the wall of one of the caves.”

He indicated the terrain below the structure, a scattering of boulders, plants, and small cave-like openings. The monks had probably meditated and fasted in the black holes of these grottos. In the distance a phantom-like figure robed in black appeared for a moment in an arched doorway, then turned and vanished. Otherwise, I could see no one else around.

Before approaching the monastery grounds, Tomas and his men knelt and bent their heads in prayer. I felt awkward, wanting to respect their faith but unsure of what to do. I crossed a patch of sandy soil to lean against an outcropping of rock. After a few minutes Tomas rose and beckoned to me.

I could make out a shadowy hole in front of us. Was I marching toward my execution? My rational side argued against that. They could have killed me any number of times, any number of ways, at Tomas’s house. I crept forward into the recess.

We’d gone about thirty feet when a light suddenly flared ahead. Turning a corner, I found a cavity with a roughly rounded ceiling and square-cut stone floor. Tomas held a jacklight with a beam as strong as a searchlight; it lit up every crevice and cranny. I could see niches cut into the rocky surface and sanded smooth. They must have once held figurines, perhaps magical talismans, but now they were empty.

Tomas pointed to one of them. “This once held a small relief of a lion and his cubs. It was plastered over a long time ago. Below it, a cuneiform inscription has been incised into the rock.” He shone his light so I could see. “On Nahum’s engraving an inscription appears after the words ‘Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold.’ It says, ‘By the bond of heaven and earth, from the great above to the great below.’”

“Like the quote used by the Hermetics—as above, so below. But that was Egyptian I thought.”

“Indeed it is the Hermetic quote,” Tomas said. “But the phrase is a magical Mesopotamian incantation seen on many tablets and used to introduce their texts. It goes back to early written documents. Orally probably longer. The quotation came originally from Mesopotamia, not Egypt.”

“Why was it attributed to the Egyptians then?”

“Because it first became known to the Greeks in Alexandria.

Active trade between Egypt and Mesopotamia grew enormously in the Neo-Assyrian period. Caravans

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