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By Root 454 0

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

ه

The youths sought refuge in the Cave, saying “Allah will have mercy and bring us out of this ordeal.”

—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