by Brad Ricca
Great and serious things.
Fifteen
Dr. Juvelius
THE DEAD SEA VALLEY, 1909
Wake up!” said Juvelius.
Uotila opened his eyes halfway, but once he felt the pain of the bright sun, he closed them again with a groan.
“Come on!” said Juvelius. “We are going on an excursion to Mount Nebo! I’ve hired a dragoman and everything!” Juvelius began packing for his friend.
“Where are we going?” Uotila mumbled.
“You’ll see,” said Juvelius. “Look … They are here!”
Uotila opened his eyes again and climbed to his feet. He looked out the window. There, on the ground, there were mules, a guide, and two Bedouins. Their cart was packed with a tent and supplies. Uotila closed his eyes, just for a moment more.
Several minutes later, they set off on the road east. The hills gave way to villages, which soon receded to flat ground and smaller groups of travelers. Within an hour or so, they seemed alone, on a landscape that was growing wilder and more desolate with each succeeding step. In the distance, they could see the reddish mountains they were riding toward.
They passed through a place where the remnants of a grass-covered stone foundation merged in and out of the landscape. There were some smaller houses and a larger, more modern three-story building in white.
“This is Jericho,” said Juvelius. “The Ark was here, a very long time ago.”
Juvelius knew that Uotila was familiar with the story, but like many stories it grew stronger in the retelling. Though they were going somewhere, they had nowhere to go, so Juvelius told the story of how Joshua, the son of Moses, took his people into the Promised Land. At the end of their long exodus, Joshua invited the Israelites to choose between serving the Lord who had delivered them from Egypt, the gods of their ancestors, or the new gods of the land they now occupied. The people chose to serve the Lord. Joshua was pleased.
God then told Joshua to conquer the Canaanites, who lived outside Jerusalem.
For six days the Israelites marched around the walls of Jericho with the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant. On the seventh day, they marched seven times around the walls, and then the priests blew their rams’ horns, the Israelites raised a great shout, and the walls of the mighty city cracked into great fissures, then fell into stones.
As Juvelius spoke, Uotila looked back. The silence of the place, with its crumbled rocks and bright green grass, was altered only by the creak of their cart.
Juvelius continued: After Jericho fell, the Lord gave Joshua a grim command: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes.” The Israelites killed every man, woman, and child, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. Only Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who sheltered Joshua’s spies, was spared, along with her family. Joshua said that anyone who rebuilt the gates of Jericho would be cursed with the deaths of their firstborn and youngest child. It was the Lord’s land to give or take.
As the day grew long and Juvelius and Uotila rode on, the ground grew very flat. They came upon a river, wide but not tumultuous.
“The Jordan,” said Juvelius.
They dismounted and led their donkeys through the wide pane of water. Its depths felt infinitely refreshing, even as the sun was beginning to fall.
Juvelius kept telling the story, though now from an earlier point. After forty years in the wilderness, Moses had died, and Joshua bade them to cross the river. But it was the flood season and the waters raged. Joshua told the horde to stay back. And then the priests appeared, carrying the shining Ark, lifted up above them.
“And the waters shall stand upon a heap,” said Juvelius, quoting the Scripture.
Though he was nearing the other bank, Juvelius stopped himself. He could almost picture it. The priests, robed in white, carried the Ark—the most precious thing the tribes had—silently toward the current. Juvelius looked back over the river, letting the scene unfold in his mind.
And the priests that bare the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.
Leaving their animals on the banks in the care of the men, Juvelius and Uotila swam in the Jordan, washing away an infinity of sand. They then set up camp on the eastern beach of the river. The Bedouins made their own up the bank. Juvelius picked thistles and placed them on the fire. He and Uotila, the two friends, then sat beside the flames, thinking of childhood, under the stars.
“I fear they do not get my meaning,” said Juvelius.
“They will,” said Uotila.
The next morning, they pulled up their sleepy mules and headed down the shoreline. They rode across the southeast, over the salt- and gypsum-covered earth, finally reaching a new gorge with a half-dry brook.
As they rode, a prickly sweat began creeping over them. They were in the valley of the Dead Sea. The atmosphere was hot and leaden; they were almost four hundred meters below sea level. Juvelius thought he could smell sulfur. They missed the Jordan terribly.
“Hold on,” said Juvelius, looking at a map. They were near Har Megiddo and Petra, the city carved of stone. “Ah,” said Juvelius. “We are close now.”
A couple of hours later they were riding into a valley between three mountains. They were red with sunburn, tired, and wrung with thirst. The Bedouin scout, who was riding ahead, shouted:
“Ayun Mûsâ!”
They descended from their saddles. The Bedouin cried out again; he was pointing at something. Three light-footed gazelles caught the slope of the mountain, already out of sight. Opposite them, they saw the bright rise of Mount Nebo, where Moses had looked out from the summit to see the Promised Land, only to be told by God that he would never get there. Juvelius felt as if they were traveling backward through the old stories, seeing them unfold in reverse.
The Bedouin was pointing to what looked to be a large circular well framed with stones. It was a spring! Juvelius and Uotila drank from it and looked up at the mountain. The Bedouins took the mules off to get water. Juvelius and Uotila set up their tent in a rut and ate their modest half-day meal.
“Well, dear brother, now we can talk,” Juvelius said. “This is Wadi Ayun Mûsâ, the Valley of Moses. And it is where he is buried.”
“This,” Juvelius said quietly, “is what we should really be looking for.”
Juvelius continued the story. When Moses died, he was one hundred and twenty years old. The version of the story in the Book of Moses revealed more than the Old Testament. Moses spoke with God, who was his friend. “Treat me also with love,” said Moses, “and deliver me not into the hands of the Angel of Death.” A heavenly voice sounded and said, “Moses, be not afraid.”
Three angels descended from heaven and arranged Moses’s bed with a purple garment and a woolen pillow. God stationed Himself over Moses’s head and told him to cross his arms and feet. “I Myself shall take thee to the highest heavens,” He said. God then took Moses’s soul by kissing him on the mouth.
God then hid his body, for Satan wanted it, as did the enemies of the Israelites. God did not want others to use his body as an idol or symbol. There was something else about Moses that certain learned people coveted, a powerful word that was written upon the shield he was buried with.
“It was called the unspoken name,” said Juvelius. “The very name of God, told only to him.” He stopped himself from talking further.
“The most important thing,” said Juvelius, “is that if we found the tomb of Moses, it would prove that he was real! There would be no denying it!”
“But how?” asked Uotila.
“The secret of Moses’s burial place was known to a select few and was passed on from one generation to another. When the Bible was committed to paper, the secrets were codified and incorporated into the text. Again, only very few knew how to interpret the open text. We just need the right key.”
As he always did, Juvelius pulled out his notes
. Uotila had never seen these before.
“Let me guess,” said Uotila. “You have the key.”
Juvelius shuffled his papers. “I have three ciphers here, three of them in Hebrew that writers have been hiding in the text at different times. It is clear from the writings that the place is in the Moab area. Listen!” Juvelius began to read from the papers:
Introduce / A ridge near the sublime body. And wake up six measures the mask at the point of discharge. The foundation of the cracked rock clump tore off, crush! Look, the lofty place.
Deliver two Dimensions! Destroy at that point! And notice cave corridor! Go ahead ten!
Clear! Intellectual trouble: Fraudulent eight!
The entrance is noisy.
Juvelius looked up at the mountain ahead of them and continued speaking: “From that mountain wall immediately facing us, at that time from the bottom of the valley, a small watercourse came inside the mountain from the cave. There was another, probably bigger one that went to a cave corridor that also had water. Through these corridors, the body of Moses was buried in the mountainside. The cipher says that it was buried in a special ‘dry’ cave that was ten feet high.”
“What are we waiting for?” asked Uotila.
“Ah,” said Juvelius, “would that it were that easy. After the body was buried, the exterior was plugged with stones and gravel. At the end, a large block of stone was beaten and placed to completely close the outside opening from the valley side. Only if this block of stone is torn off and crushed will the waters stagnating behind it burst forth! Then the way will be open!”
Juvelius took out his binoculars, and for a good half hour under purpling skies, he and Uotila took turns scanning the mountainside for such a boulder in the wall.
Sixteen
Father Vincent
JERUSALEM, 1909
Father Vincent stood very still. His candle was working hard in the dark, as if it were trying to breathe. Father Vincent had gone ahead of some of the workers into a new tunnel—a “gallery”—below the Virgin’s Fountain. But the air was so thin that the workers had gone back, leaving him alone. He closed his eyes and controlled his breathing down to shallow exchanges. He was not afraid. He knew that he was not alone. He was in the presence of the Architect again. Even there, in the dark, Father Vincent could sense the work of the past in every notch of the caves. He was not afraid, but he was hoping that the workers would come back soon.
For three days each week, Father Vincent had gone excitedly down the dusty road from Jerusalem to the excavation site on Mount Ophel, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by Father Raphaël Savignac, his good friend and photographer from the École Biblique. Captain Parker had only two rules: never interfere with the diggers and don’t disclose or publish anything until he said so. Father Vincent agreed and filled the space between those edicts with the gospel of work. On his days with the excavators, Father Vincent spent nearly all his hours in the sunless gloom of the underground. On those days he was away, Father Vincent stayed in his room and transcribed notes, worked on drawings, and stared at measurements until they blurred. These were perhaps not the normal tasks of a Dominican priest, and Father Vincent didn’t always wear his habit in the tunnels, but it was his relentless curiosity that marked him. Dominicans were not called the “hounds of God” for nothing.
Father Vincent knew that there was an entire network of tunnels that were connected to the Virgin’s Fountain. There were so many nooks and turns that it was difficult to keep them straight. Father Vincent focused on the Warren’s Shaft system, which moved upward, and the Siloam Tunnel, or Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the long passage that led from the fountain to the Pool of Siloam. This was the tunnel that he was most looking forward to delving into once it had been cleared of debris.
In the past week, Father Vincent had been investigating the galleries that connected to the cave at the bottom of the stairs; in his notebook, Father Vincent numbered them with Roman numerals. Every time Father Vincent strolled in to do his work, usually in pools of water, the workers, now familiar to him, raised a chorus to greet him. He shouted his own greeting in response and patted some of them on the back. Holding his paper and measuring instruments high to save them from a prolonged immersion, Father Vincent moved between the men like an eager friend. He believed that shared labor in the trenches of an excavation grew great companions.
Father Vincent, swallowing at air and trying to occupy his thoughts by thinking about how he got there, was currently in an area designated gallery II, discovered along the second flight of steps into the cave, around the sixth going down. The passage was only half a meter across. After about ten meters in, the candle in his hand began to flicker. The lack of air became more prevalent the farther they got from the fountain. The Architect was working perfectly in accord with the natural rock to make his work nearly invisible. They had found bits and pieces of things along the way: ceramics, a broken flowerpot, and other small artifacts. They had also found a strange mark that looked like an arrowhead cut into the rock near gallery XV. Father Vincent sketched it into his notebook and later showed it to Captain Parker, who looked at it for a long time.
Gallery IV was also very mysterious. When it was first discovered by the workers, Father Vincent immediately moved up the line to investigate. He was in a canal that was filled with rubbish to about a third of its height. They quickly arranged some drainage tubes to try to keep the water level down so that they could examine further, but whenever the fountain rose—which was always accompanied by a loud rushing sound from behind the rock—the water splashed everywhere, making further inspection impossible. They eventually dug ahead to a strange round chamber but were so afraid that the water might cause the wall of rubbish to slide right onto them that they left it there, thinking that an attempt from the other end—if they even found it—might be more practical. But as the workers abandoned the task, Father Vincent valiantly stood fast.
“Wait,” he said. He had not moved an inch.
His keen eye had spied something—a thin line carved into the wall. It was too straight to be natural. He dropped to a crouch and began following it, first with his eyes, then with his finger, his candle always one step ahead of it. When his finger stopped, so did his breath. There was no mistaking what he had found.
He was looking at the base of a tablet.
Father Vincent thought immediately of the inscription that the boy had found, so many years ago, in these same caves. That inscription had been monumental to the study of these places and another find of its significance had yet to be duplicated, if it ever could be. Father Vincent looked closer. There was a giant chunk of clay that covered the top of the tablet. Father Vincent studied it with his eyes. The slab, it seemed, also rested against part of what looked to be a large boulder. Father Vincent raised his hands and tested the boulder very lightly; it was already loose. Father Vincent, who was normally very careful, was seized by the possibility of what he was seeing and let his notebook fall into the mud. He then tore away the clay from underneath the boulder. He did not seem worried whether it would fall, though the other workers clearly disagreed as they rushed up to hold it above him. Father Vincent scrabbled off the clay with his hands and began looking for the thin, telltale angles of Hebrew.
But there was nothing. They cleaned up the rock, brought up a stronger light, and searched it from every angle.
Nothing.
Father Vincent pulled at his beard. It was clearly a tablet, but it had never been engraved. Why?
The tablet had only been lightly cut out, and had not been polished or even prepared with the usual care to allow an inscription. But this led to another question: in the center of a deep tunnel, in an inconvenient and dark passage, what was the good of writing anything where no one would ever see it? The Siloam inscription was near the entrance and easily seen, though it had escaped detection for centuries. But this? This was different. What did it mean to prepare to say something—and then say nothing at all?
&n
bsp; In all the days they worked around the Fountain, Father Vincent would often pause in his measurements and catch himself looking down the main tunnel, the subject of the Siloam inscription. The strangely rectangular tunnel filled with rubble and chaff was a great mystery. Captain Warren’s heroic traversal of it forty years ago was still a legendary feat, but it had left many questions. In his spare time, Father Vincent waded about in its opening, each time advancing a bit farther. There was something—he couldn’t say exactly what—that drew him back to this tunnel, even as other work begged to be finished. Was it related to the blank tablet? He was worried that he had missed something.
As the tunnel’s mysteries occupied his mind, the workers finally returned with oxygen capsules and portable electric lanterns that they passed up the line. They eventually pushed a protesting Father Vincent out and back into the open air. As he sat down, gulping in great breaths, Father Vincent caught Monty smiling at him.
“Are you well, Father?”
“Of course! I love tunnels,” he said, drinking some water. He raised his hand to signal that he wanted to continue, but he had to wait for his swallow to catch up.
“Tunnels are not just tunnels,” he said. “They are stories. Everyone has a grandfather who knows of some legendary tunnel that connected two places.… This person, who always seems to live to the absolute apex of human life, knows of the draw, the oriental romance, of a simple hole in the ground. Sometimes it is rather difficult to distinguish between the truth and the superimposed tissue, but in no cases of the kind would it be wise to deny the existence of any subterranean mysteries at all.” He stopped and smiled.
A few days later, Father Vincent was sitting outside the dig again, mopping his gleaming head, when a worker came out cupping something small and delicate in his dirty hands. The man, who looked scared, told Macasdar that he had found it. Father Vincent strapped on his glasses and walked over. The two Turks also noticed the commotion. Father Vincent beat them to it, getting the first look at the small object that was lain out upon a kerchief on a rock.