by Brad Ricca
“We sent him off by himself down the hill,” said Cyril. “Him and his notes.” Cyril motioned in the general direction, but Juvelius was already gone. Probably lost in his own head, thought Cyril. He found Juvelius to be somewhat of a boor, but not as much as Von Bourg was. At a recent conference, Von Bourg had suggested that the Ark was actually on Mount Ararat and that they should move the entire works, planks and all, based solely on his psychical impression. Von Bourg was banned from speaking on the subject again. Cyril didn’t have anything against mystics, but he supposed this group had tipped their quota. Rumor had it that Juvelius was going to be joined soon by a friend from Finland. Cyril hoped he had no psychic powers.
The early days had been going well, practically speaking, though they were not without incident. Two days after sinking the shaft, on August 16th, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem died. Cyril walked up the hill and watched from afar as all the Jewish women collected on the Women’s Wailing Ground. They arrived slowly, wearing long patterned shawls wrapped down over their heads. They clutched their prayer books across their chests.
“My word, they really did wail,” Cyril told Walsh later. “It was really so impressive as to be unforgettable.”
The current aim of the expedition was to clear out the fountain area. At the bottom of the stairs was a cave, with a long tunnel leading out from it. Another side led to a dead end, a sheer vertical tunnel that was unclimbable. This was Warren’s Shaft (since he discovered it), but the locals called it by its much older name: the Dragon Shaft. One of the expedition’s long-term goals, at least engineering-wise, was to connect the tunnels in the ground with the shaft on top. They had old maps to guide them, but those were sketches at best, two-dimensional representations of the hard dirt and rock that spread out below in three directions.
On August 20th, Monty and Duff had gone home to England for a month’s holiday. Cyril and Walsh stayed behind to watch the seemingly endless parade of diggers bring dirt from the tunnels. Cleaning out the fountain was necessary work, but it quickly outpaced their patience. It was repetition of the infinite. Cyril chastised himself because he was actually—while looking for the Ark of the Covenant in Palestine—feeling the pangs of boredom.
The next Sunday, Cyril jumped off his perch, motioned Macasdar to come over, and approached one of the head Arab workers. After the incident on the yacht, Macasdar feared the worst.
“Please tell this good man that I have a wager for him,” said Cyril. Macasdar sighed but then spoke some words in the husky, gurgling language. The worker tipped his head, then looked at Cyril.
“Tell him my fellows and I have just made a bet that he and his men can’t clear one hundred and fifty buckets of earth in one hour,” Cyril said. He knew that the buckets had to be filled and manhandled for one hundred yards in a tunnel four and a half feet high. Cyril knew it was a sure thing.
The man squinted at him and nodded.
“All right boys,” said Cyril, walking back. “Start counting.”
Fifty-one minutes later, the workers had won. Cyril was truly astonished, and promptly doubled that hour’s wages. When the victorious group ended their shift, looking only slightly more spent and quite a bit richer, their replacements did not look pleased.
One night, at their rented house on the main floor, Cyril sat with Walsh, who was trying to read a book. The house was old and dark, almost like a castle, but Cyril liked it much more than the horrid hotel they had first stayed at. Cyril had demanded a change, for comfort if not their own reputations. Cyril looked around and, as always, started talking.
“No offense, Walsh, but this place could use some members of the fairer sex, though I daresay they would be horrified by our conditions here.”
Walsh offered a glance, possibly. It was enough.
“So, I was at one of the castle balls,” said Cyril, getting comfortable, “spending time with a Miss Gore-Booth, who was considered the outstanding star of that season. She has since become Countess Markievicz. Anyway, she had danced quite a bit, so that I was seated at one of the tables and a well-known gossip said to me, ‘I saw you dancing a great deal last night with Miss Gore-Booth; how does she dance, and has she much to say for herself?’ I said, ‘She is a very nice girl,’ but this would not satisfy the inquisitive old woman.
“She wouldn’t stop pressing! ‘Now, Captain, tell me, would you prefer Miss Gore-Booth as a dancing partner or as a talking partner?’ Annoyed by this inquisitive persistence, I said, ‘I should personally prefer her as a sleeping partner.’ There was a dreadful silence, only broken by bubblings from the man next to me.”
Cyril set back into his chair. “I was duly reported to and spoken to by Lord Houghton during our daily ride in the Phoenix before breakfast the next morning, but I fancy he was really more amused than angry.”
Walsh continued to read. After a long sigh, and a rare quiet moment, Cyril shot up like a thunderbolt. He looked at Walsh with a fixed eye. It took a moment for Walsh to fall for it.
“Let’s have it,” said Walsh, dreading the answer.
“The Dragon Shaft!” shouted Cyril.
Walsh raised his eyebrows, then got back to his book.
“No,” he said.
Not only did the Dragon Shaft appear to be unconquerable, but even the workers kept clear of it. That, they said, muttering and pointing to the tunnel, was where a monster lived. There were stories that back in the ancient days, the beast issued steam and all sorts of growls from its lair in the earth. But Cyril did not believe that the workmen were scared of the place because of some antediluvian reptile. Cyril believed that they had not attempted it yet because it looked exceedingly steep and dangerous.
“No,” said Walsh again.
“Monty is gone. Juvelius is staying in the city, so he won’t stop us,” said Cyril, trying to persuade him. “Think of it, Walsh. A difficult athletic and engineering task, to be sure. But let’s get down to it. What better place to hide the Ark?”
Walsh looked up, then closed his book.
They gathered up all the six-foot ladders they could, ten of them, and dragged them out to the site. They clattered the ladders down the stone stairs and into the underground. The way through the cave was winding and their ladders could barely navigate the curves, but they eventually pushed them all through the square tunnel toward their destination. The only light was their candles, and they wore waders through the small stream. The water was up this night, as they had not yet completely dammed it up yet. Except for the work and the echo of the water, it was dead quiet. They were underground, the workers were gone, and no one knew they were there.
Cyril thought of his island again, calm and bright.
As they pushed forward through the main tunnel, Cyril watched as Walsh looked at the walls with a mixture of professional respect and romantic love. Cyril could not believe that this tunnel was man-made. Clearing it out was the expedition’s ultimate goal, as they believed it led to the Ark. All the tunnels were connected somehow, but this long burrow, Hezekiah’s Tunnel, was the key.
“Can you imagine it?” asked Cyril. “Old King Hezekiah tells his commanders, ‘You must divert the waters at Gihon through a tunnel, which I wish you to cut right through the hill, and bring it out under the wall of the city into the Pool of Siloam. You can begin it at both ends to save time, though I suppose you will be at least twenty feet out when you try to meet in the middle. Let me have your plans by sundown! And by the way, we’re at war with the Assyrians.” He looked at Walsh. “Now that is, I take it, what happened.”
This had long been the legend of Hezekiah’s Tunnel, that during the war with Assyria in the eighth century BC, the king had ordered a tunnel dug to safeguard their water supply from the enemy. But Cyril shook his head. “I would not say that the Jewish historians told deliberate untruths, but there is no doubt they were prone to exaggeration. The historians make one imagine that Hezekiah gave an order, and hey, presto! The thing was done. I guess it would have taken them five years at le
ast. How long would it take you to cut this tunnel?”
“With modern implements?” Walsh looked around. “Eight or nine months.”
“Time and space meant nothing to the Jewish historians,” said Cyril.
They stopped and let go of the ladders. Cyril stretched into the small space he was given and raised his candle as high as he could. It flickered against the smooth walls. He swept its light slowly to the right and then the left. Nothing. He raised it higher.
There. The Dragon’s Shaft yawned above them.
Cyril could see a ledge about ten feet up. It was wide enough for the ladders. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Let’s get the ladders together,” he said.
For the next four hours, they managed to join seven ladders together and with great difficulty hoisted their monstrous creation onto the ledge above them. They pushed it up slowly through the darkness, all the while waiting to hit an obstacle that never came. The ladder kept rising. It finally reached its full, almost impossible height somewhere in the void above them. Though they had entered the tunnels somewhat even with the ground, they were now under the mountain itself, meaning the space above them was now much greater. It was disconcerting, this feeling, that it was all bigger on the inside. They leaned the ladder against the stone.
Walsh raised his candle again to inspect their invention. The work was not up to his usual requirement, and Cyril feared the man might demand a complete redesign. They could both see that the ladder was swaying somewhere, up in the dark. Walsh narrowed his eyes.
“It’ll do,” he said.
Suddenly, Cyril was not very keen on ascending those thin dowels into the mystery of the void and possibly a dragon’s stomach. Cyril looked at Walsh.
“Let’s toss for it, old man.”
Cyril dug into his pocket and produced a coin. He flipped it in the air, and in the pool of candlelight, it slivered in gold.
Walsh won and was the first to attempt the summit. Cyril didn’t say it out loud, but he thought his friend was really the one who had lost. Walsh spit on his palms, took a breath, and started up, his candle in his mouth. Cyril stood underneath him as Walsh’s boots dripped water onto his head.
Within moments, Walsh had disappeared into the gloom.
Cyril stood there, steadying the ladder, though he didn’t know what precious good it would do. He felt the ladder groan with each steady footstep, like a creaky heartbeat, somewhere high above him. Cyril did not shout out to his friend; he didn’t want to scare him. Cyril raised his wavering candle up as high as he could. He could not see Walsh’s light anymore. There was nothing there above him, only emptiness. No, not that—it was darkness. A total darkness. It felt colder than it was. He tried to think of his island.
The ladder stopped moving. Cyril looked up. He braced himself for Walsh’s large body crashing onto him after a long, murderous fall, but nothing happened.
Cyril knew the story about the dragon was utter nonsense, probably. But he also knew that the Bible had mentioned it more than once. Jeremiah said that when Jerusalem was finally conquered, that it would be overrun with dragons. The Virgin’s Fountain itself had been called the Dragon’s Well by Nehemiah. The old stories seemed to repeat themselves in one fashion or another.
The ladder creaked again, and suddenly, Cyril could feel the weight moving again, but this time in the opposite direction. His friend was coming down. After several minutes, Cyril saw a yellow glow moving down toward him.
“I’ve had rather an exciting time,” Walsh said, as first his boots, then his legs, then his candle (and the rest of him) emerged from the shadow and he plunked down to the ground. He dusted off his shirt and took a drink of water. “There’s a slope of rock at the top of the shaft, and I got on to it, but it was so slippery I slid back.” He took another swig. “If I had not luckily struck the top of the ladder, you would have seen me much sooner.” He paused, as if trying to convince himself of something. “There’s an iron ring up there, set into the wall. They probably used it to pull something up.”
“Something heavy.”
Cyril looked up and swallowed. The whole trip up and down had taken about twenty minutes. And it was now his turn. Cyril put his boot on the first rung and began to ascend with his heart in his mouth as well as a melting candle.
When he got to the top, Cyril found that Walsh had spoken true. The tunnel moved abruptly away from him, at an angle of even less than forty-five degrees, with the top of the ladder extending above the slope, under a domed ceiling. Cyril moved his candle and saw huge boulders stopping up a half-filled passage to the right. They looked very precarious, and Cyril wondered if they might be part of some elaborate booby trap. He looked ahead to the long slope. By the dim light of the candle it looked a grim and ghostly spot. Cyril clutched the ladder as tightly as he could. He realized two things: one, he was not going to leave that ladder for anything, and two, he was probably the fourth human being who had looked on this place in eighteen hundred years, the first and second being Sir Charles Warren and Sergeant Birtles, who made the ascent in 1867. He had read Warren’s work, of course, and it was vivid, but it was nothing like being in the place, standing on a ladder, deep underground, looking into a place that breathed pure mystery.
Cyril stopped there for a moment, in the near dark. He had moved his foot slightly off the rung to begin his descent when he heard something shift from up in the passage. He slowly moved his candle forward. Before he could move, he felt a motion, like wind but of much greater substance. A dreadful shape hit Cyril full on the shoulder, knocking the candle out of his hand. As he watched it fall straight down, Cyril was gripped by a sheer terror he had not felt since Africa. He took one short breath before he immediately fled down the ladder as if he were trying to break a record. When he struck the ledge at the bottom, not having even known it was there, he turned a complete somersault, and landed with a sickening splash into two feet of water.
“I was attacked,” said Cyril, as Walsh helped him up. “By a bat!” He caught his breath. “It was attracted to the candle.” He sputtered out some water. “And no second-class bat, either.”
After seven hours on the job, Cyril and Walsh walked home. They left the ladder in the tunnel. Cyril was now convinced that he knew exactly what the Dragon Shaft really was. In Chronicles, during the siege of Jerusalem (then called Jebus), around 1000 BC, the city was held by the enemies of Israel. King David had the plan of sending someone to go through these tunnels and “get up the gutter” to make a surprise attack on the Jebusites from within their walls. David’s nephew Joab volunteered, slipped in undetected, and led the way to a rout and the capture of the city. He was made commander in chief for his bravery. When Cyril was on top of that ladder, he knew he was looking at that very same gutter. Walsh was, as always, impressed with his friend’s knowledge of the Bible, and they retired to a well-earned supper.
The next day, Clarence Wilson could not believe what his friends had done. Cyril and Walsh took him down to the ladder to show him. Wilson gave a look, then climbed up himself. On returning, he said nothing, but quietly picked up an eighty-foot rope that they had brought with them and ascended again. Cyril didn’t rightly know how, but Wilson not only carried the dead weight of fifty feet of rope up, but he actually got onto the forty-five-degree slope and, with the rope, crawled up the “Bat Passage” (which Cyril had now named). Inspired, and perhaps less leery of bats now, Cyril set his teeth and went up next. When he reached the top of the ladder, he heard Wilson’s voice out of the distance telling him to throw him a candle. Cyril knew that, even though he had once thrown a cricket ball 107 yards, he did not feel equal to throwing a candle with his left hand round a corner from the top of a ladder, balanced in a fifty-foot underground shaft. He politely declined.
“Are you ever coming up?” asked Wilson’s voice, from the Bat Passage.
“Probably never,” replied Cyril. “Is the rope tied to anything?”
“It is not,” said Cyril. “I�
��ll tie it around my body.” The rope appeared and rapidly slid toward him like a snake.
“Don’t shake the rope coming up,” shouted Wilson. “There are a lot of boulders, and if you start them rolling, God help you!”
“Thank you!” said Cyril, who was already starting down the ladder. Wilson spoke up again.
“I’ve come up, and so can you,” he said.
Cyril stopped. He looked over at the smooth slope, shining in the light. Cyril took his hand off the ladder and sidled onto the rock somehow. He grabbed the rope and worked his way up the steep passage. He scuttled over great rocks of a kind that the Jebusites used to roll down the shaft on their enemies. He saw the ring fixed in the wall, gleaming in the wet. When he reached Wilson, it was at a small cave that seemed to go up higher, though it was covered by stones that looked familiar. Cyril had seen them, from the other side, when they sank the shaft from the surface. If they knocked those stones out, they could join the tunnels together. There was no Ark in this cave; it was empty. But it was full of other things. There were fragments of pottery. People had been here. Cyril and Wilson made their way back down the slope, though it was much more difficult. The rope was greasy, and its natural hang was some six feet away from the ladder.
On September 24th, Monty and Robin Duff returned, bringing with them a new member, Cyril Ward, a black-haired gentleman and the uncle to Lord Dudley.
“Any news?” asked Monty, as he walked into the house and brushed off his hat.
“Cyril and Walsh went up the Dragon Shaft.”
Monty paused.
“What?”
After lunch, the new arrivals rushed off to go up the ladder themselves. Cyril stayed at the house. When they returned, Duff came into Cyril’s room with a stunned look on his face.
“Who took the rope up the shaft?” he asked, almost out of breath.
“Wilson,” Cyril said. Duff walked straight across the hall into Wilson’s room and gave the man a hearty handshake. Cyril never saw his friend so moved.