mikvahs. But the site’s dominant building had been a long hall furnished with drafting tables—a scriptorium where multiple copies of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, as well as a plethora of apocryphal texts, had been fastidiously transcribed. The Essenes had been the scribes, librarians, and custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“Think we’ll find scrolls, Professor?”

Irritated by the ask-it-and-kiss-your-fortunes-good-bye query, Amit turned to the nineteen-year-old Galilean named Eli, who was all nose and ears beneath a tight knit of black curls topped off by a brightly embroidered kippah. A spasm rippled Amit’s lower left eyelid as he agitatedly replied, “Anything’s possible.”

An hour later, when Amit nudged free the brick pin-tagged “C027,” he saw a black space open up behind the wall’s final layer. Grinning ear to ear, he carefully handed the block to the Galilean kid, who used it to start a new column in the ordered matrix of bricks laid neatly on the chamber floor.

Amit held a tape measure along the top of the recess. The radargram had been right on the shekels. “Half a meter.”

“Exciting stuff,” Eli said, rubbing his hands together and crouching to peek through the hole.

“You getting all this?”

“Every brick,” he assured Amit as he grabbed his clipboard and wrote “C027” on the inventory sheet.

Grabbing a flashlight, Amit shone the beam through the gap, moving it side to side, up and down. The light clung to two meters of tight walls and ceiling—another passage?—before being swallowed by a much larger void. A second chamber? His knees popped as he stood. “Let’s get the rest of this cleared away,” he instructed the interns.

5

******

After another two hours, under Amit’s close supervision, the ancient wall had been completely dismantled.

He reclaimed his kneeling spot.

“Let’s have a look.” Crouching, he shone the flashlight into the rocky gullet while trying not to inhale the stagnant air spilling out of the breach. Just beyond the opening, he studied the angular passage and ran his fingers over its scooped chisel hashes. Definitely quarried. A tap on his shoulder made him turn. It was Ariel, holding out a silver-cased Zippo lighter.

“To check for oxygen,” she explained.

“Right,” Amit said, taking it from her. She’d obviously noticed that he’d left his fancy digital oxygen sensor back at the tent. So the crude method would have to suffice. Flicking the top open with a small ting, he lit it up. The tang of butane filled his nostrils as he extended the Zippo into the passage. The robust flame held steady. All clear. “Here goes.”

Crawling through the short passage, flashlight in his left hand, Zippo in his right, Amit hesitated when he quickly reached the end. A large void opened up in front of him.

Craning his neck, he swung the light in wide arcs through the black soup. The light melted deep into the space—a sizable angular chamber hewn from the mountain’s innards.

Confusion came fast. The space seemed to be empty. But there was lots of Bible smell here.

Working his way inside, Amit stood and rolled his neck. Though the Zippo’s quivering taper suggested questionable air quality, he wasn’t about to vacate the chamber. He hadn’t felt this exhilarated in years. Pulling in shallow breaths, he paced the level floor and examined the symmetrical walls and ceiling—a ten-meter cube, he guesstimated, every surface blank. Why would the Essenes brick up an empty cubicle?

“Speak to me,” he muttered.

On cue, his Doc Martens scuffed across an uneven surface in the center of the floor—a variation so slight he could easily have dismissed it. Then the ground seemed to shift slightly beneath his weight. He dipped the flashlight onto the spot and eased onto his knees. Flicking the Zippo shut, he slid it into his shirt pocket. He trailed his fingers through a dust layer blanketing the floor and detected a ridge. Pressing his face close to the floor, he gently blew away the dust to reveal a tight seam that cut a hard angle. He repeated the process until he’d uncovered a sizable rectangle cut into the floor.

A stone slab?

He tried working his meaty fingers into the seam. Nothing. Snapping to his feet, he paced to the passage opening, crouched down, and called to Ariel. “Bring in the tools . . . a pry bar too. And let’s get some lights in here. Quickly!”

“I’m on it,” she called back.

Once the interns funneled in with the gear, Amit had them set up batteryoperated pole lights around the chamber’s center. He momentarily mused on their lit faces, their untamed excitement. It brought back pleasant memories of his first student excavation at Masada.

Working a pry bar into the seam, Amit instructed Eli to mirror the action on the slab’s opposite side. He could see that the gangly kid was a bundle of nerves. “On three,” he said. Eli nodded. “One . . . two . . .”

The first attempt was sloppy but managed to unseat the slab. The second pinched Amit’s fingers when he prematurely slipped them beneath the stone—hard enough to take some skin and elicit what he considered a rather girlish yelp. A third tandem try levered the stone up enough for Ariel to wedge a pry bar into the opening, enabling Amit to fully grip the thing and drag it off to the side.

Catching his breath, Amit knelt along the edge, where carved steps dropped down into the hollow they’d uncovered. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Ariel immediately handed over his flashlight. Then the video camera was back in her hand and she started humming the theme to the Indiana Jones movies. “Da da da-dah, da da dah . . .”

The other students laughed, and Amit allowed himself a chuckle too as he clicked on the light and aimed it down the steps. He counted twelve treads cascading to a stone floor. “All right. Let me get a look down there, see what we’ve got.” These were the moments that defined the quest, he thought. He stood, dropped his left foot onto the first carved tread, and began his steady descent.

It was another tight fit for the Israeli as he folded and tucked himself against the hewn walls, the light playing shadow dances along the chiselscarred rock.

When Roman legions had swarmed over Qumran, they’d torched the village and slaughtered its inhabitants. Though there’d been little warning, the Essenes had managed to stash their most vital scrolls in these desert hills

Вы читаете The Sacred Blood
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату