The Moses Stone

The traffic was still fairly heavy, even after they'd escaped the snarling jams that plagued Jerusalem's crowded streets, and there were several cars both ahead and behind them. What Bronson hadn't noticed was that one of these vehicles – a white Peugeot with two occupants – had been behind them ever since they'd left Tel Aviv, never approaching closer than about seventy metres, but never losing sight of them.

As they'd driven through the territories of the West Bank, the scenery had changed, the generally fertile land to the west of Jerusalem giving way to a more rugged and inhospitable landscape, and as they approached Qumran it changed yet again, becoming ranges of rocky hills punctuated by deep gullies.

Qumran itself was located partway up a hillside, on a plateau about a mile to the west of the shore of the Dead Sea, offering spectacular views over the flat desert below. The ancient site was partially surrounded by beige-brown hills, banded with subtle shades that indicated different levels of strata. Some of them were pockmarked by dark, mainly irregular oval, openings. It was, Bronson thought, an extraordinarily forbidding place.

'The caves?' he asked, pointing to the west when they reached the plateau.

'The famous caves,' Angela agreed. 'There are around two hundred and eighty in all, and most are between about one hundred yards and a mile from the settlement. Ancient remains have been found in nearly sixty of them, but the bulk of the Dead Sea Scrolls came from just eleven.

'The closest cave is only about fifty yards from the edge of the plateau, which is probably one reason why Father Roland de Vaux believed the inhabitants of Qumran were the authors of the scrolls. He simply didn't believe that the Essenes – or whoever it was who lived here – wouldn't have known about the caves and what was inside them. What could have been the remains of a series of shelves was found in one cave, and that led to a theory that the caves might have been used by the inhabitants of Qumran as their library. But, as I said before, there are a lot of problems with the whole Qumran–Essene hypothesis.' She took off her hat and mopped her forehead with a handkerchief that was already damp.

The heat was brutal. They were both sweating after the climb up from where they'd parked their car, and Bronson was glad they'd stopped at a shop near their hotel in Tel Aviv and bought wide-brimmed hats and several bottles of water. Dehydration would be a very real possibility if they weren't careful.

'If the caves are that close,' Bronson said, 'it would be surprising if the people who lived here didn't know what was in them.'

'Agreed, but that doesn't mean they were responsible for writing them. At best, they might perhaps have seen themselves as the guardians of the scrolls.'

Bronson looked down at the desolate landscape below the plateau, the featureless desert relieved only by occasional patches of green where small groups of trees of some kind barely clung to life. In the middle distance, the Dead Sea was a slash of brilliant blue, a vivid band of colour that hid the desolate reality of the lifeless waters.

'Hell on earth,' he muttered, mopping his brow. 'Why would anyone want to live in a place like this?'

Angela smiled at him. 'At the start of the first millennium, this was an extremely fertile and very prosperous area,' she said. 'You see those trees down there?' She pointed at the scattering of green patches on the desert floor that Bronson had already noticed. 'Those few trees are all that's now left of the old date plantations. History records that in biblical times the entire area stretching from the shores of the Dead Sea all the way up to Jericho and beyond was carpeted with date plantations. Jericho itself was known as the 'town of dates', and Judean dates were enormously coveted, both as a foodstuff and for their alleged medicinal properties. In fact, the tree became accepted as a kind of national symbol of Judea. You can see that very easily on the Judea Capta coins the Romans minted after the fall of Jerusalem and the conquest of the country. They all show a date palm as part of the design on the reverse. But it wasn't just dates. This area also produced balsam, apparently the best in the entire region.'

'And balsam is what, exactly?'

'It can be a lot of things, actually, from a flower up to a tree, but in Judea the word referred to a large shrub. It produced a sweet-smelling resin that had numerous applications in the ancient world, everything from medicine to perfume. And the region was also a major source of naturally occurring bitumen. One of the ancient names for the Dead Sea was Lacus Asphaltites, or Lake Aspaltitus, the lake of asphalt. That's a pretty strange name for any body of water, and the reason it was called that was because large clumps of bitumen – also known as asphalt – could be recovered from its waters.'

'You mean bitumen and asphalt as in road-building? The black sticky stuff that holds everything together? What on earth use was that two thousand years ago?'

'For a seafaring nation it was vital, because they could use it to caulk the bottoms of their boats to make them watertight, but the Egyptians were the main customers of Dead Sea bitumen, and they had a very different use for it.'

'What?' Bronson asked.

'As part of the embalming process, the skull was filled with molten bitumen and aromatic resins. Bearing in mind that by about 300 BC the population of Egypt was nudging seven million, there was a lot of embalming going on and the bitumen trade was highly lucrative. Take my word for it, this was a really important part of Judea.'

Bronson looked round at the alien landscape. He found this hard to believe. To his untrained eyes, Qumran looked like nothing more than a confused jumble of stones, only some of which appeared to form walls. He thought of the turbulent history of the region, of the terrible privations the Essenes must have suffered as they tried to cope with the extreme heat, the lack of fresh water, and what had to be one of the most implacably hostile environments on the planet. To him, and despite the brilliant sunshine, Qumran and the whole surrounding area seemed sinister, perhaps even dangerous, in some indefinable way. He shivered slightly despite the baking temperature.

'Well, I'm ready to leave here and get back to the comforts of civilization,' he said.

Angela frowned and put her hand on his arm. 'I know how you feel – I don't like this place very much either. But before we leave here, I would just like to take a quick look in one or two of the caves, if you don't mind.'

'Do we really have to?'

'Look, you could go back to the car and get the air con started if you like, but I'm going on up. I've read about the caves and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so much of my work has involved this area, but it's the first time I've ever been able to visit an ancient Judean site. We've come all this way, and I'm desperate to have a look inside a couple of them, just to see what they're like. I won't be long, Chris, I promise.'

Bronson sighed. 'I'd forgotten how determined you can be,' he said with a smile. 'I'll come with you. It'll be good to get out of the sun, even if it is only inside a cave for a few minutes.'

53

Yacoub held his mobile phone to his ear and listened as Hassan provided a running commentary while he shadowed Bronson and Angela around the old settlement. Although he was used to the high temperatures in Morocco, Yacoub was finding the heat unbearable, even though he was wearing the lightest jacket and trousers he'd been able to find. He would have preferred a jellaba and keffiyah, but that style of dress would have marked him as an Arab, and in Israel that was something he wanted to avoid, because of the attention he might have attracted.

'They're acting just like tourists,' Hassan reported.

'They've walked around the ruins, but now it looks like they're going to leave.'

There was silence for a few seconds, then the man spoke again. 'No, they're not heading for the car park. It looks as if they're walking up to the caves.'

'Right,' Yacoub said. 'There was a reference to Qumran on my tablet, so it's possible they think the relics are hidden somewhere here. Follow them; try to get close enough to hear what they're saying. If they go into a cave, follow them in unless it's really small. You're just another tourist, and they don't know your face, so there should be no danger.'

'And if they find the relics?'

'That's obvious,' Yacoub said. 'You kill them and then you call me.'

'It's not very deep,' Bronson remarked, as they stood up cautiously just inside the entrance to one of the caves close to the Qumran plateau. 'It's more like a crack in the rock than a cave.'