O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [124]
“I should like to look at the entrance.”
I abandoned any hope of sleep that night.
Holmes and I had two scares crossing the bazaar in the small hours of Saturday morning. On the second we were forced to take to the roofs, but when we eventually reached the Damascus Gate, a pair of loud Yorkshiremen were standing guard. We retreated east to Herod’s Gate and, finding that conveniently deserted, we slipped out of the city and worked our way back outside of the walls. However, uncovering the grotto proved hopeless at night with the moon into its final quarter and no chance to use lights: one tangle of brush growing over stone was much like another, and further complicated by an accumulation of rock fall and débris left during the years since the last tourist had entered Solomon’s Quarries. We tried. For half an hour we beat the bushes (silently) for the iron-gated entrance to the grotto, but even Holmes had to admit defeat. Back at Herod’s Gate we discovered that the two jovial Yorkshiremen had moved there. Breathing curses in various tongues we retreated to the Damascus Gate, found it unguarded, and entered the city—only to be spotted by a patrol and forced to take to the rooftops again. Trying hard to look on the positive side of this harassment, I decided it proved, at any rate, that anyone bent on criminous activity would have a difficult time moving men and equipment about the city at night.
It was five in the morning before we passed back through the gates of the inn, which was already beginning its day, the breakfast fires going strong. We were heavy of foot, our clothes and skin were torn from the bushes, and we both felt gaunt with hunger—Holmes looked positively grey in the light of the cook’s paraffin lamp. We ate something hot, and fell into our beds just as the rest of the city was coming to life.
By light of day, on the other hand, the Damascus Gate proved quite a pleasant place. The afternoon sun sloped benevolently down on the graceful women with loads on their heads and illuminated the fiendish brambles that had done us such violence the night before. For the past two hours we had been sitting on our heels across from the city walls with a bag of pistachios on the ground between us, cracking nuts with our teeth and watching, with mingled amusement and apprehension, the activity in those bushes.
We had seen it immediately we came out of the gate: half a dozen Arabs swinging long knives, under the supervision of Jacob the archaeological adoptive son of the American Colony. He had since left, upon which the workmen promptly stopped work for a smoke. Eventually they had set again to hacking at the bushes, although with noticeably less energy than they had shown before.
Still, the top portion of the gate slowly appeared, and some of the men casually tossed their brush-knives away and took up spades. It was quite apparent that no-one had gone this way in some long time; however, we intended to, when darkness fell.
Jacob came back after a couple of hours, when the gate was almost clear. With his presence the rate of digging picked up again, and the iron door soon stood revealed. Jacob had a key, which he tried in the door. He tried it for so long that the Arabs’ anticipation waned and they wandered away to smoke and gossip, keeping one eye on this man in European clothing bent over a keyhole, patiently twisting and wiggling. Every so often he would take up an oilcan and squeeze some oil into the keyhole, and wiggle it again, but finally, at about five in the afternoon, he gave up. Squeezing the oil liberally over hinges and hole, he gathered up his workmen and departed. As he walked his way along the busy road towards the American Colony, he passed three feet from where his dinner companions of the previous night sat, pistachio shells scattered around their feet, faces bent to the ground. Jacob paused; my heart stopped. A small coin landed in the lap of my robes; he passed on.
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