O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [125]
And the oil had worked a treat by the time Holmes got to work with the sturdiest of his picklocks, six hours later.
* * *
TWENTY-FIVE
ن
One quality of the human soul is the wish to know what is to come, be it life or death, good or evil.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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The utter absence of light or sound pressed upon us as if we had been immersed in a great black lake. I felt the pressure of it on my eardrums, against my eyes, and it was difficult to breathe. It smelt… dead. Cold and stale and smelling of nothing more alive than raw stone. Not even bats made their way in here. I nearly leapt out of my boots when Holmes spoke.
“I don’t hear a thing. I believe we may risk a light.”
My heart skittered about in my chest for a few beats, and then it settled again. I cleared my throat and quoted in Arabic, “ ‘Take refuge in the cave, and Allah will have mercy on you and bring about a kindly solution to your affairs.’ ” It was a poor attempt at whistling in the dark: the cavern swallowed the orotund phrases, giving them all the power and reverberation of a dried pea rattling about in a bottle. I continued more prosaically and in a smaller voice, “I think going forward with no light would be the larger risk,”
The truth of this was demonstrated immediately he had the lamp going: The floor was pitted with holes, some of them both deep and abrupt. It was not a place to explore unprepared.
The cave we stood in was vast. Our lamps made small patches of light as we picked our way forward, only rarely reaching as far as the perimeter walls. Massive pillars had been left by the cautious stonecutters millennia before, to support the immense weight of the cave roof and the city on top of that, although in one place the fallen litter was considerable, and the roof seemed to sag. Niches had been cut into the walls for the lamps of the quarrymen. The floor sloped continuously, in some places rapidly, towards what the brass compass I carried said was the southern end. We walked at a distance from one another, so as to examine the widest possible expanse of ground, but we reached the end having seen nothing other than stone and trickling water and a few Crusader crosses carved into the walls.
The cave ended in a chamber perhaps twenty feet square which demonstrated clearly the method used for extracting blocks of stone: chisel marks on the walls, several ledges left when the stone above had been cut away, one half-cut block, abandoned to eternity. One could not help speculating why it had been left. Interrupted by some invasion or other? Made unnecessary by peace? One stone more than was needed for the job at hand? Or was it just deemed unsuitable, the stone too soft and permeable, and the quarrymen gone elsewhere?
I sat on a stone ledge trying to distract my mind with these thoughts so as not to think about where I was, about the huge expanse of stone hanging over my head, yearning for the pull of gravity to re-unite it with its lower half, with me in the middle, about the continuous tremble of lorries and feet that contributed to the inevitable—
“Russell, I trust you are not about to succumb to an attack of the vapours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I stood and forced my eyes to focus. A thin layer of dust lay over everything (raised by falling stones, my brain whispered at me), including the shelf I had used as a seat. Holmes looked closely at the top of a free-standing block, poked once or twice at the surface, then turned to look at a hole in the wall behind him. I went over and examined the block. There was wax on it, the wax of numerous candles, but it was all covered with dust.
“Surely this isn’t fresh?” I asked.
“From the guides, when they had tourist groups in here.” Holmes’ voice echoed strangely, and when I turned I saw his head and shoulders emerging from the hole. “Can you get in here, Russell?”
I eyed the black maw. “Must I?”
“By no means, I shall