O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [127]
We split up, and began to work our way in opposite directions around the outside walls of the cave, down the finger-shaped extensions and back into the palm of the central cave, down and around. There was less dust here, aside from places where the ceiling was beginning to disintegrate, but some of the pits were dangerous, portions of the floor slick with insalubrious seepage from above. I went carefully, watching for anything out of place, but there were no footprints, no signs of recent digging, no convenient mound of rubble with an arrow in it pointing to the Souk el-Qattanin.
I met up with Holmes before I reached the iron-gated entrance, as my direction had possessed the greater number of fingers. He simply shook his head.
There was nothing for it but to quarter the expanse of the central cave, a process both painstaking and painful: two or three cautious steps forward, examining the ground, then shining our electric torches upwards and craning our necks at the nearly invisible dome of the roof, in hopes of seeing—what? A pair of waving legs protruding from a hole?
Two o’clock passed, two-thirty, and then, at nearly three in the morning, I heard my partner’s unmistakable “Ha!” of triumph. I took my eyes from the rock overhead and trotted across the uneven ground towards his lamp.
He was looking down at a patch of rock like any of the acre or two I had already scrutinised; it took me a moment to see what he had found. Then I dropped to my heels and held the torch directly over it.
“Soil!” I said in surprise. The clot was dry, and crumbled at my touch. Holmes bent down and brushed it into an evidence envelope, which I thought an incongruous thing for him to be carrying in this place, but I suppose habits die hard.
“From a boot-heel,” he said, and turned his attention and his torch on the ceiling. He began to pace up and down again, his light bouncing over the rough stone overhead, so I too returned to my own patch. Twenty minutes later I heard another “Ha!”
He was studying the ground again, standing by the base of one of the supporting columns. Upon joining him, I could see no trace of soil there, but the dust and small stones that littered the whole floor had been scraped away to the underlying rock in two long patches slightly larger than a hand, approximately sixteen inches apart, and a broader patch between them, on the side away from the column. I shone my torch upwards.
A door, cunningly hidden, was nestled into a deep hollow next to the column. It was a small door and very old, its black wood set with numerous rusted iron studs. The marks on the ground were from a ladder that had been let down here.
However, there was no sign of soil on the stone floor.
“Access to a house in the Arab Quarter,” I said.
“I am relieved to see you did not leave your wits behind in that crack in the wall,” he replied drily. I followed him back to where he had found the lump of soil, and we began a minute examination of the rock on an imaginary line drawn between the door, the bit of soil, and the cave wall.
They had been careful. I found one more trace of earth ten feet away towards the wall; Holmes found two places where someone might or might not have swept something from the cave floor. It was now 3:45. We stopped for a rest, and Holmes lit his pipe, staring fiercely at the bland expanse of rock.
“This caution is suggestive,” he said eventually. “The man is little concerned with the intelligence of others, so he rarely bothers to cover his tracks in any but the most cursory of manners. In the past, he has not seriously believed that anyone would think to look for him, regarding himself as invisible to mere mortal eyes. Now, however, he has become careful. I wonder if he would demonstrate the same concern had he not had a prisoner taken from under his nose.”
“I was thinking about that yesterday,