True Raiders

by Brad Ricca

  “Naturally, I signed up. In fact, I was only the sixteenth living person to hear of it. I have to say, it takes a lot to take your breath away when you are in good health and only twenty-five years of age, but that cockamamie plan did it. They said we would be disavowed by England if we were caught, but that was enough for me. ‘Put my name down right now,’ I said.

  “We marched toward Johannesburg. Halfway down, Dr. Jameson was summoned back. He even received a telegram, but famously ripped it up. It was recovered after it all ended, from soggy pieces in the road, but it was hard to say what it really meant. Either way, we were in it. On New Year’s Eve, the Boers opened fire on us. My wristwatch stopped.

  “We lay in at Krugersdorp, a ridge about twenty miles from Johannesburg, and waited, knowing that they were close. One of my recollections of that terrifying night was its intense darkness. It was literally impossible to see your hand in front of your face. At about midnight, someone lit a match in the hospital wagon. That was the signal. They opened fire. I was more frightened than I have ever been in my life. For some reason, I spent the entire night looking for my horse because I thought he might be frightened. I didn’t find him until the next morning.

  “I ended up the target of three Boers. But it was then I saw one of our boys jump on a Maxim gun and let off half a belt at a thousand yards. It shredded the Boers, and they lay there, on the ground, with their horses.

  “They were shelling us, and we were overrun. A few of our number and I ran to a white farmhouse at Vlakfontein, behind which we took cover. There was a black mammy there, who was feeding her baby some mealie-pap, the yellow corn porridge that everyone ate there. Not having had anything to eat for thirty-six hours, we shared the disgusting mess with the child, who screamed her disapproval. Her mother just stared at us, shaking. That is the only time I have ever taken food from a child.

  “She wore a white apron. My friend Harry White took it. I asked him what we should do, and he said, ‘Oh, put the damn thing up, I suppose. I’m going to blow my brains out.’ He then rose and disappeared into an orchard behind the farmhouse. In spite of being very fond of him, I was much too tired and hungry to care.

  “We raised the flag and surrendered. They still kept shooting. But I was genuinely glad when old Harry came out of the orchard five minutes later, munching an apple.

  “After that, it was quite strange. Shooting continued even as our leaders negotiated our safety. Melton Prior, the famous war correspondent, ran by and saw a man covered with a blanket who was kicking like a shot hare. It was Charlie Coventry, the son of Lord Coventry, and if anyone ever looked in articulo mortis, it was he. Prior reported him dead and ran off, even though he was not. When his family got the telegram that Charlie was alive—which they received at his own memorial service—they danced on the green, top hats, frock coats, and all.

  “We went to jail, then court, and eventually got traded home to face punishment. We rode back to England on the troopship Victoria. A major there was put in charge of us; he gave us ten indestructible orders. The biggest one was that on no account were we to speak to any of the officers’ wives who were there on the ship. ‘They have been warned not to speak to any of you!’ he said. That was a mistake. If you order a woman not to speak to a man, the result is almost inevitable.” Here Cyril finally laughed. “Within forty-eight hours, every one of us had an officer’s wife under our wing. The major was furious, but we had sized him up immediately. He had not realized that we were criminals of a certain social status. We violated all ten regulations the very first day.

  “When we arrived on British soil, we were taken to court. And we were a sight, having not changed clothes in weeks. I myself wore a khaki tunic (that was filthy), a Stetson hat, and bell-shaped corduroy trousers that were not mine. When we got to the courthouse, we were mobbed by people. We thought at first it might be a rescue. They thought we were heroes. But we were quite a sight. We were raiders, and we looked the part.

  “We ended up out on bail, though our leaders had to serve some time. We eventually found out that the African government was seeking a great amount of damages because of the raid: 677,938 pounds, 3 shillings, and 3 pence, to be exact. Personally, I thought that the strangely precise 3 shillings, 3 pence was directed straight at my stolen trousers.

  “Speaking of, at my first visit to White’s Club after the raid, I was asked by the proprietor if I would give him my Kruger trousers. I sent them round by my servant. Some two days later, I happened to go to the club and saw them exhibited in a case over the fireplace in the lounge. It really was the limit. They remained up just as long as it took me to remove them, which was not a lengthy period.”

  Cyril looked out over the pool. Nothing had changed, but a few minutes had passed, with the help of a story. “They didn’t listen to me after that. The officers, I mean. I told them that war with the Boers would need a lot of men.” He continued looking off. “They didn’t agree.” He nodded toward Monty. “And men like him paid the price.”

  “What happened to Monty?” asked Walsh.

  “Does it matter?”

  Another, farther BOOM! sounded, and they could see smoke over the hillside. Cheers broke out among the crowd.

  It seems that the wall took longer to blow up than they had reckoned on. In fact, before the long-awaited blast, the good mayor thought he would walk into the tunnel in the pool, which at the Siloam end is tall, and have a look round. He had been accustomed to seeing a trickle of dirty water come through only rarely and never anticipated anything else.

  When the dam finally blew, the wave of water was, thought Cyril, more of a miniature Niagara than a rivulet, traveling at twenty miles per hour and over four feet in depth. Cyril watched, gape-eyed, as the mayor was slammed by a palisade of water and swept past the terrified villagers. He was recovered downstream and hobbled back, but unfortunately never retrieved his hat, which was a pity. This unfortunate incident rather spoilt the show, thought Cyril, but the villagers, who washed their clothes in the Pool of Siloam, were genuinely grateful to the party for supplying them with clear spring water undefiled by the silt of three thousand years.

  As the pool filled and people laughed and splashed, Cyril Foley looked over at Monty, who was smiling. The water that now flowed through those ancient caverns, which they had spent over a year excavating, had been given back to the valley.

  Cyril would leave within days, so there was only one thing left to do. One last adventure to have. He raised his hands to his friends and workmen alike.

  “How about a match, lads?”

  As they prepared the field, Cyril looked over to his man, Walsh.

  “Next time I’ll tell you about the time I fought Dracula.

  “I’m not kidding!” he said, on his heels, his voice trailing off as he ran toward the game. It was then that Cyril Foley, smiling from ear to ear, played in one of the more disorganized but satisfying cricket matches of his life. At one point, he hit a six into the Pool of Siloam itself, which caused him to whoop with joy.

  “That is a thing,” he shouted, “which has never been done before!”

  “Not even by the Hittites!”

  Twenty-Nine

  Monty Parker

  JERUSALEM, CHRISTMAS 1910

  Monty Parker stood at his balcony window and watched an almost unthinkable phenomenon: for the first time in decades, snow was falling over Jerusalem. It had done so for seven straight days, in fact, heavy and white. The snow had piled itself into curves along the streets of the old city. Boys near the school had built sleds out of crates and wooden planks. There was not a pair of feet in Jerusalem that were not wet with cold.

  Monty turned and walked back into his room, shutting the glass doors with their leaden panes closed. He took his hat off and placed it on the chair. The fire was roaring and just holding its own against the winter outside the door. He heard clanking and bustling downstairs. Because it was Christmas (and with the unspeakable snow), Monty and his men had opened a makeshift s
oup kitchen downstairs. Amid the potsherds and relics were now tureens and ladles, set at attention to feed the people of Silwan. They had even managed a spindly tree.

  Monty clamped his pipe in his mouth and paced. The expedition was in trouble. Real trouble, for the first time since they had first arrived. Their hope of slipping in unnoticed under the pretense of constructing a hospital or school—what were they thinking?

  They had been found out.

  Members of the Syndicate back home had warned Monty that short articles had begun to appear in the newspapers. A few came, as Monty suspected they would, when they first left for Jerusalem, but they had little to no information, though some of them referred to their expedition as “mysterious.” More concerning were these new reports. They were short and not overblown in terms of headline, but there was something much more alarming about them: they were true. Monty looked through the clipped articles the Syndicate had sent him. One was titled “Strange Treasure Hunt” and had details of their work in the Dragon Shaft and in Hezekiah’s Tunnel. The article even mentioned their Turkish observers—by name! Luckily, these articles did not mention the Ark, opting for “King Solomon’s treasure” and “the crown of David,” instead.

  The other item of concern from London was, of all things, a book of fiction. The author William Le Queux had come out with a new potboiler titled Treasures of Israel. The Syndicate had sent Monty a few of the summaries from various newspapers. One reviewer wrote that the book was about “the whole science of textual criticism of the Bible, for there is a cipher readable only by the most learned professors of ancient Hebrew,” as he and his companions sought “nothing less than the Ark of the Covenant.” Monty hurriedly grabbed another review. In the book, the Ark was apparently “hidden in a secret chamber concealed by water tunnels somewhere in the vicinity of Jerusalem.”

  “The story,” the reviewer wrote, “is one of frankly melodramatic mystery and treasure hunting, with lovers, and a villain of the deepest dye. If marked by imperfection when regarded as history or revelation, it is delightfully convincing in its own way.”

  Monty clenched his hand into a fist.

  Treasures of Israel stood, according to the reviewer, “among his best work.”

  This man, this Le Queux, had obviously talked to someone in the Syndicate. But there was nothing to be done now. There was an even greater threat. Someone else had also found out about their expedition. Someone far more dangerous than any author.

  The Baron Edmond de Rothschild was president of the French branch of the most powerful banking family in the world. He was rich beyond measure and collected rare artifacts. He was perhaps the one opponent they could not outfox or bribe. He had already bought up some of the land around the works so that they could no longer venture far past the fountain. In some places, he had even put fences up. What had taken them months of negotiation to accomplish seemed to take the baron mere days. And as far as they knew, he had not even set foot in Palestine, relying on personal agents and provocateurs. He had also officially approached the government and made a proposal for digging rights. The Syndicate had until next year to finish—finish!—so that there would be no overlapping contract concerns. This was personal to Rothschild—he was a Jew and a Zionist. There were rumors too of a Frenchman haunting the Jewish quarter and at some of the hotels, looking for information for the baron. Monty knew it was probably Raymond Weill, the French archaeologist. And who knew how long the Turkish government would last? Who knew how long any of it would?

  Monty turned and walked again, his pipe glowing.

  That, and they had found nothing in the tunnels. Pots, bits of pots, dust from pots, and finally some water. Father Vincent was ecstatic about all of it, but he didn’t know what they were really looking for.

  In a desperate gambit, they agreed to stay on through the rainy season. They knew it would be an impossible slog. And that was before the snow came. Monty looked out at the city again. It was calming and quiet. But it was all a disguise.

  Monty took a drink. The cipher had failed them, of course. Catastrophically so.

  He was on his own.

  Monty picked up the latest batch of letters, still sitting in the envelope he had raggedly torn open with his thumb. Juvelius, though no longer with them in Palestine, continued to send him letters. They mostly took the form of new ciphers that Juvelius had uncovered since returning home. They were typewritten in a bleary blue ink and covered in typographic errors, marked-out sections, corrections, and squiggling notes. Juvelius had written these, then sent them to Millen, who translated them into English before forwarding them to Monty. It was unclear who wrote what without some amount of wishful deduction. That is what the whole thing had become: a wish.

  Monty looked through the most recent set. Juvelius had given up his biblical analysis in favor of a stream of raw cipher messages, alongside some minor notes and drawings. Some of the same places were mentioned—“the hollow staircase,” “the asylum”—but unlike the first ciphers, these (now mostly from Chronicles) seemed to give more actual direction:

  (Six spearlengths, entrance the Ark’s, the abode’s, the black tunnel’s, entrance of the mother’s arms: break through!)

  And seek! And the water 2 spearlengths addition. And behold like water!

  (invoke “the cross”!)

  Seek the entrance, seek! (Jerusalem!)

  Monty was at least getting more adept at reading it all, though a fat lot of good it seemed to do him. “Mother’s arms” was the Virgin’s Fountain; “the black tunnel’s” had to be Hezekiah’s—but they had cleared both out. There had found some dummy tunnels, but there were no secret passageways, no lost mysterious chambers. And no Ark. Had they missed something? Or, the old thought raised its head again, was it all nonsense to begin with? Monty read on. The words seemed stranger, less coherent, even.

  Seek indefatigably!

  (Just the valley glen dale!) The hooks of the forhangings? Are enclosed by MOLOK SILOA, in the opening the swelling spring’s. 4/

  4/ SHILOA (The pond of SHILOA.) The swelling spirit (the spring of the Virgin.) and the cave of MOLOK are given as the entrances. As the last-mentioned was “the entrance” to the “infernal regions”, it appears, that the channels of blood from the temple have debouched into the lowest labyrinth of cave.

  /*”hump”, blood-path’s water = gibbous tunnel (?) Compare II. Chron. 33,6.

  !! “28, 3

  /** “The valley” = “The valley of JOSAFAT. (?)

  /*** MOLOK = The ancient temple of MOLOK in the valley of “HINNON”. (JEREM. 32,35) seems to have been the cave of “HAKELDAMA”, where the entrance to “GEHENNA” (the infernal regions) also was found.

  Monty was glad that Juvelius was no longer in Jerusalem. This new cipher only confirmed that to him. But something was intriguing here. The cipher said that the “cave of MOLOK” was one of “the entrances” with “channels of blood.” Could it be the canal that was used to carry the blood of the sacrifice away from the Temple? Even more intriguing was that it finally had a location, in “the valley of HINNON” in the cave of “Hakeldama,” where the entrance to Gehenna “was found.” After his last conversation with Juvelius, Monty wanted nothing to do with Molok, but the blood canal, the supposed passageway from the Temple that carried away the blood of the animals sacrificed to the Lord, was intriguing.

  Was it the third way?

  Monty knew that Warren thought the blood canal was on top of the actual Foundation Stone in the Dome of the Rock. There was a line or two in one of his accounts of him jumping up on the stone to inspect it. But that seemed like a story. Monty knew they could not dig there. Especially after the shootings.

  Juvelius also discussed the prophet Nehemiah, who, many years after the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, was dispatched to the remains of the city to assess its rebuilding. Juvelius seemed to agree with biblical scholars that the parts of the Book of Nehemiah written in the first person were totally historically reliable, that the
prophet was an actual person, not some kind of clay sculpture of several different authors.

  When Nehemiah reached Jerusalem, he secretly left the city to check the state of the city’s walls. But Juvelius did not believe that; he claimed that Nehemiah had a more clandestine mission. For one, he took a long, circuitous route that would have been unnecessary to inspect the walls. More telling was Nehemiah’s own admission that “He told no man what God had put in his heart to do.” Juvelius believed that Nehemiah, on his night trip, traveled through a secret underground gate that led from the city into the outer valley.

  Juvelius was certain that Nehemiah knew where the hiding place of the Ark was and that his job was to confirm that it had survived the fall of Jerusalem. He rode out by the “gate of the valley” and onto the “Dragon Well” and to the “dung port” and “viewed the walls of Jerusalem.” He went on to the “gate of the fountain” and up in the night to the “brook.” And he got away with it: “And the rulers knew not whither I went or what I did.”

  Monty saw the mail on his table. It was all from the Syndicate. He sat for a minute, before opening one of the letters. There was an article clipped from the Gentlewoman from last July. It read:

  An enterprising, and may one add, imaginative relative of Lord Morley … is in search of King Solomon’s crown and treasure of Biblical fame. Of course “one can never tell,” but it seems that they stand a good chance of “drawing a blank.”

  Juvelius had drawn a small map in the cipher that showed “the asylum” (the Ark) being reached two ways: from the Pool of Siloam or from the Virgin’s Fountain. Was this way, Hakeldama, the third? The cipher had claimed—from its earliest form—that there were three.