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By Root 437 0

how Bey just takes whatever he comes across that might come in useful, regardless of the alarm it might raise. Although of course he’s right, there is very little chance, given the chaotic state of the country at the moment, that the authorities would have noticed anything until it was too late. Assuming he’s reasonably discreet and knows the dress and language well enough to fit in, who would have thought to look for a mastermind behind the disruptions? Allenby was only beginning to have his suspicions, and even Joshua, who I think is considerably more competent than he chose to appear, was only half-convinced.”

“He seems to vacillate between caution and carelessness, depending on which aspect of his unbalanced mind is in the ascendent mode. Now I think we have wasted enough of—”

“Holmes, no!” He froze in the action of preparing to knock his pipe out against a rock. “Your pipe. Puff it again.”

Obediently he put the stem back between his lips and drew rapidly on it three or four times.

The smoke moved.

In an instant he had knocked the half-burnt dottle out and taken a candle from our spelunking bag, lit it, and held it at arm’s length. It flickered faintly, then burnt straight and unmoving. I took another candle from the bag, lit it from his, and we both moved over to the wall.

It was a slow business, holding the candle, waiting for the air from our movements to settle, and, when the flame stood straight upright, moving it again. Then, when Holmes and I were only a couple of feet apart, my flame dashed sideways and blew out. I nearly whooped for joy, until I saw where the air current was coming from: beneath a huge, half-cut block.

We lay on our bellies and shined our torches at the narrow gap between the block and the floor. It appeared no more than a hand’s-width high. There was no tunnel visible on the far side of the hole, only rock.

“It doesn’t go anywhere, Holmes.”

“It must.”

“I know you wish it to, but—”

“Russell, use your eyes.”

I followed the beam of his light, and realised that of course there would not be cobwebs in a cave with no flies, that what I was seeing were threads and hairs.

And several clods of soil along the sides of the rock across from us.

“But there’s solid rock! I can see it.”

“I do not care what your eyes tell you; I tell you they must have come this way.” He got to his knees and began to remove his abayya, but I stopped him.

“I’ll go first. If I get stuck, you can pull me out by my feet. I’m not certain I could do the same for you.”

Again I stripped down to trousers and undershirt, and for the second time that night I inserted my body into the jaws of the earth, knowing in my bones that at any instant the earth would bite down.

Only it didn’t. What was not visible from the cave was the curvature of the floor. When I pushed under the rock, I found myself going down into a recess, then up again, and when the slope returned to the height of the cavern floor, I had cleared the back side of the block. I moved the beam of my light across the surrounding walls, and found I was standing in a nice large, tidy tunnel, not quite tall enough for me to stand upright, but sufficiently tall and wide to walk in. I got down on my knees and put my face to the hole.

“There’s a tunnel here, Holmes. Plenty of room, the floor drops away. Push the equipment through in front of you.”

I crawled in again, as far as my hips, and took the bag and lamps as he passed them through. I dressed again as Holmes slithered through gingerly and rose to admire the neatly carved rock.

“Very nice,” he said.

“A back door?” I mused. “ ‘The king with his soldiers fled by night.’ ”

“May we go? Or do you wish to take measurements for a research paper?”

“After you.”

The tunnel ran south for fifty yards, then gave a jog and turned slightly east. Holmes kept an eye on the compass and map, but it seemed we were making a more or less straight run for the Haram. Keeping in mind the sly entrance, we paused often to peer into uneven bits, particularly those near the floor. We found no alternatives, only the tunnel, five and