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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
å
The youths sought refuge in the Cave, saying Allah will have mercy and bring
us out of this ordeal.
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the qur an xviii:10
« ^ »
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
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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.
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