by Daniel Levin
“We’ll try,” Jonathan said. “But the water level is rising with the evening tide.” He looked at the arched ceiling, “We won’t be able to breathe in here much longer.”
“Seems like we are walking deeper into the Tiber,” Emili said. Debris from the river around them beat hollow thumps against the outside of the tunnel wall.
She touched the stones and marveled aloud, “Two thousand years and this tunnel is still holding against the river current.”
“If this was an ancient sewer,” Jonathan said, “there must be an outlet to the Tiber somewhere along this passage.” The tunnel’s water level rose to their chests. Emili looked at Jonathan nervously.
“There!” Jonathan called out, swimming to a square of white light flooding through a barnacled steel grid above them. Jonathan could only fit his arm through the square iron bars, but he could feel the outside air and the spray of the river against the surrounding rocks.
Jonathan rubbed Emili’s plastic restraints against the metal grates until they snapped.
With her arms free she lifted her head through the bars to look out.
“Which shore?” Jonathan asked. “Rome or Trastevere?”
“Neither. We’re in the middle of the river,” Emili said. “Look.”
Jonathan moved beneath the grate and saw the underside of an ancient bridge bathed in floodlight against the dark sky.
“The Ponte Rotto,” she said behind him, referring to the abandoned scenic ruin in the middle of the Tiber. The thousand-square-foot patch of overgrown river silt supported the ruins known as Ponte Rotto, Broken Bridge.
“The Ponte Rotto’s base floods easily with the tide,” Jonathan said. “We have to work quickly before the island is submerged. Any minute and the current will be too strong for us to climb out.”
“Is there a lock?” Emili said.
Jonathan searched the grate, and lifted himself to see between the weeds lining the grate. “No, but I can see a latch.”
Jonathan pressed himself against the grate, grunting as his arm scraped on the slimy plants for an object to expand his reach. He found a wet piece of driftwood and threaded the iron bars to push up the bolt of the latch.
“It’s heavy,” Jonathan said. “I almost have it.” Jonathan used the stick to push the bolt upward. The metal groaned as the bolt gave way. “Got it,” he said.
“Orvieti first,” Jonathan said to Emili. “Let’s go, Signore!”
But Orvieti did not move from the far side of the tunnel. His flashlight’s beam pointed into the darkness, illuminating various tunnels branching off from the single passage where they stood.
“I can’t leave,” he said.
Jonathan knew time was of the essence. The tide was rising, and the island above them would not be above water for much longer.
“Emili,” Jonathan said, motioning to the open grate. “You go. I’ll work on him.”
“Jon, I can’t just—”
“Go. The tide is rising every second. When you get out climb to the top of the ruin and get help.”
Jonathan knitted his fingers at the water’s surface and Emili used them to step up through the hatch.
“Signore, the latch is open, your turn. Let’s go!” Jonathan said.
“I will never have this opportunity again,” Orvieti said. “Perhaps no one will. I know which corridor leads to the menorah.” Orvieti shone his flashlight down the corridor farthest to the left. “That corridor bends back toward the Roman shore, beneath the Ghetto. You said the last known location of the first Arch of Titus was where descendants of the slaves from Jerusalem lived.”
“That was written in the eighth century by an anonymous monk!” Jonathan said, above the rushing current. “You can come back!” The water level rose so rapidly in the corridor it was visible. He knew that even after they climbed out onto the small island, the tide would be dangerously high.
“This is my only chance,” Orvieti said.
“This corridor is almost flooded,” Jonathan said. “You will not . . .” He paused, looking at Orvieti with a stronger bearing, “. . . survive. You will not survive, Signore,” he said plainly.
“It is the only way for me to survive,” Orvieti answered. “This is all I have. Now go.”
Orvieti turned away from him. He pushed through the corridor into the darkness.
96
Mosè Orvieti floated through the ancient sewer tunnel, his feet touching the tunnel’s bottom only intermittently. His green oxygen tank bobbed beside him and the flashlight in his right hand strobed in and out of the water’s surface. He was not certain how far the current had carried him. The water level had lowered, and the ceiling was completely dry. He was no longer beneath the Tiber.
The sound of rushing water grew louder, and Orvieti realized he was nearing the tunnel’s outlet, not just from the noise but from a sudden, foul stench that filled the tunnel. It was almost as sour and rank as the smell of death he recalled all too clearly from more than a half-century before. For a moment he was certain the tunnel intruded upon some recent graves, until he remembered that buried Roman streets often accumulated tons of human waste and fermenting algae.
At the tunnel’s outlet the water streamed down a sharp rock slope into darkness. Next to the water fall was a series of outcroppings he could use to lower himself down.
He pushed himself out of the opening, barely able to catch his breath because of the stench. He eyed his oxygen tank. He knew there was only a few minutes’ worth of air in the small canister. I must wait until I need it. Slowly, he began to climb down the rock, the strap jangling around his shoulder. Surprised by his own agility, he carefully moved down the incline of the rock face, one foot beneath the other. But his legs shook under the strain of his weight. The slope steepened and he slid down the moss between the footholds.
Catching his breath, he shone his flashlight down the rock slope and saw the ground’s soft gray silt twenty feet below.
But why was the floor moving?
Beneath him, the floor seemed to be alive, writhing in some kind of rhythmic motion.
He looked at the floor more closely. He saw splashing in the water, a terrain of leathery gray ribbons arcing and slipping back into the blackness of the water, like the humps of some mythical sea beast.
“Eels,” Orvieti said aloud. Thousands of them. He knew that they were the most durable of the Tiber’s inhabitants, feeding off the natural minerals and algae. He remembered as a boy how the last of the Tiber’s fishermen made their livelihood from eels, as the pollution had become so bad only this durable water snake could survive. He knew eels flourished beneath Rome, but he never imagined a grotto like this: an endless carpet of eels—enormous, ancient-looking things. The Tiber’s native eels, Orvieti knew, were not dangerous except for their particularly keen sense of smell. Any cooked flesh and they would devour it. In his youth Orvieti watched Tiber’s eel fishermen smoke their bait before setting out for the day.
His left foot slipped from the rock hold. He grabbed the rock face and his oxygen tank fell from his shoulder. He watched it descend to the gray silt below. His arms bore his entire weight as his legs clawed at the cliff face. His grip gave way and he plummeted the height of the rock face, landing on what felt like a deep cushion that moved beneath him, over him, around him, even down the back of his shirt. Orvieti rocked back and forth on the bed of eels like a man tossed about on small waves. He struggled to stand up, pulling two small eels from inside his shirt and moving his legs with great difficulty toward his oxygen tank. Each movement of his legs displaced dozens of eels. In his flashlight beam the white underbellies of the eels moved like the enormous tentacles of one seething organism. The fall of a rock outcrop had crushed hundreds of them, and their white insides coated hundreds more, giving them an even greas ier feel as they slid across Orvieti. Digging through the eels, Orvieti miraculously saw a glimmer of the green metallic tank. He grabbed the mouthpiece, turned the knob a few rotations, and, panting into the plas
tic mask’s sweet, cold air, pulled several long breaths from the tank.
Orvieti struggled through the water. He knew anyone else would not have continued, some of the smaller eels crawling up his pant leg, sliding past his calf and up his thigh. He had survived worse. The very air of this buried Roman street emitted a steam that stung his skin. Orvieti pressed forward.
Orvieti recognized the giant marble columns, rising up into the darkness. The Portico di Ottavia. Orvieti remembered Josephus’s description of the procession. “And Vespasian and Titus proceeded through the Octavian walks.” The base of the Portico di Octavia stood at the lowest archaeological strata beneath the Jewish Ghetto. As a child Orvieti had played among the capitals of these columns, which poked through the cobbled streets sixty feet above where he now stood. As a child, he imagined that massive pillars reached down into the center of the earth. Orvieti used the base of each column to step over the river of eels, as though using stones to cross a stream. He stepped gingerly, hoping that his frail legs would not give way. The long, dark cavern stretched beyond the columns with no end in sight. Giant stalagmites of moss and silt had grown from hundreds of years of hardening algae.
Stopping for a moment, Orvieti breathed in a snatch of air not from his oxygen tank, and he coughed violently. He dropped his flashlight, which was immediately carried away on a bed of writhing eels, its beam of light sinking and reappearing. Retrieving it was like plunging his hand into a vat of live squid.
He reached higher ground, which was not yet flooded. He pulled more small eels from inside his shirt and, unfazed, reached into his waistband to remove a large eel that had crawled up his leg nearly to his stomach. The eel fell to the ground, writhing helplessly on the dry dirt. Orvieti assisted it back into the water.
He moved between the ancient brick buildings, and his flashlight’s beam illuminated narrow streets and the pink eyes of amphibious creatures that defied classification. He turned a corner. There, at the dead end of an alleyway, stood an arch. The arch looked embedded in rock, as though in the midst of being swallowed by the wall of earth behind it.
“My God.” Orvieti drew close. “The Arch of Titus.”
He approached slowly, almost reverently. Half buried inside the stone embankment at its back end, the arch resembled an ancient cave tomb burrowing into a hillside behind it. Orvieti knew the arch had been abandoned only a decade after its construction to shore up the Tiber’s banks, which was precisely why the slaves from Jerusalem had seized their opportunity.
Orvieti waded as far beneath the arch as he could, standing in the rising water between the arch’s two pilasters.
The travertine along the arch’s exterior displayed rough carvings of ritual objects sacred to the Jewish slaves: ram’s horns, palm fronds, and small seven-branched emblems. Orvieti stepped back outside the arch and saw the most prominent inscription of all carved above the central architrave. In his flashlight’s beam, he was able to read the single line in ancient Hebraic script above him. He read it aloud, as if by hearing it he could believe what he read: “ ‘Eytz chaim hee l’machaziki’im ba.’ It is a tree of life for those who grasp it.’ ”
The water’s current picked up and Orvieti grabbed on to the arch’s corner to prevent being washed downstream. He was now treading four feet above the ground, his fingers clutching the flutes of a column along the arch face.
Orvieti knew he didn’t have much time. At high tide, the Tiber entirely submerged this lowest underworld of imperial Rome.
There must be an opening, Orvieti thought. A door.
With his mangled, closed fist, Orvieti banged on the arch’s columns, listening for something hollow.
“Please,” he whispered, searching for any seams in the stone. “Open the gate.” But the water kept rising inexorably and his tears around the oxygen tank’s plastic mouthpiece tasted salty. “After all you have taken from me. Please.”
It was the first word of prayer he had uttered in sixty years. Not since he prayed while pressing his entire body against a wooden door in the Ghetto, his arms splayed like a transom across the threshold, the Gestapo banging with the butt of their rifles. Orvieti remembered his children cowering in the corner and his wife smoothing back their hair to keep them quiet. Orvieti’s strong hands gripped the door’s knob—when a sudden gunshot blasted through the wood, and his right hand. Two fingers fell to the floor. That was the last thing he remembered, his fingers lying on the floor at his feet.
The water rose higher. He climbed up the volutes of the columns and then traced the travertine curve of the arch to stay under the monument.
“A tree of life for those who grasp it,” he repeated like a mantra.
The water pushed him up to the arch’s vaulted ceiling, the current pressing him against the carved foliage along the architrave. “A tree of life,” Orvieti said, and then stopped.
It all suddenly seemed absurd, a child’s tale. The slaves from Jerusalem were defeated men, Orvieti. No different from you. Frustrated and resigned to his own fate, Orvieti put his hands down, his head sinking beneath the surface of the water.
And that is when he realized it: for those who grasp it. Orvieti shot out of the water, his hands moving wildly across the arch’s ceiling, searching for a marble tree carved into the stone.
He saw a carving of a marble branch and pulled it from the ceiling, summoning every ounce of withered muscle in his body. He pulled harder, his whole body shaking, reaching the peak of exertion for an old man who had withstood so much. It was just after that moment—that fraction of a second before he released an explosive exhale of failure—that he heard a sound.
The sudden, sharp sound of stone scraping against stone. A large stone block on the arch’s ceiling began to move and plunged into the water next to him, leaving a black square opening in the arch’s ceiling.
For a moment, Orvieti remained motionless, stunned by his success and panting from exertion. The water’s surface was only inches from the opening, and Orvieti climbed up into the arch’s darkness.
He collapsed on the dry stone inside, taking deep pulls from his oxygen tank. The attic was a large space, at least twenty feet high. After he caught his breath, he shined his flashlight. The dusty floor was completely dry. The water did not rise above the opening he had crawled through, even though the tide kept rising.
Orvieti realized the architectural genius. Builders from Jerusalem had secretly hollowed out this attic in accordance with an ancient architectural principle, that water will not displace air from beneath a closed container. The attic was carved from a single mass of stone to ensure it would remain dry for thousands of years.
Orvieti’s oxygen tank hiccupped, signaling its last stretch of remaining oxygen. He stood up and walked within the attic: Twenty ornate stone pillars lined the walls, and the ceiling of the attic was dotted with ten bands of copper used for embroidered curtains. He recognized the room’s biblical design at once.
The courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem.
He walked past the pillars inside the attic and saw a carved rectangular doorway and a pile of wood pulp where presumably a doorway once stood. Above the transom, two lines were inscribed. One in Latin, the other in Greek.
No foreigner to pass here.
Orvieti stepped back, stunned. The inscription from the outer courtyard of the Temple, precisely as Josephus described.
Suddenly, a harsh beam of light flooded the attic.
Orvieti turned around. A man stood behind him, equipped with a wet suit, oxygen tank, and diving mask.
The young man’s eyes were aglow with wonder as he scanned the arch’s walls with an oversized lantern flashlight.
“Bloody jackpot,” Chandler Manning said.
97
Jonathan pulled himself up through the grate and slammed it shut as he limped onto the Ponte Rotto’s small overgrown island. The tide had already risen above the patch of grass around the ruin, and Jonathan grabbed on to the ancient bridge’s plaster to anchor himself
from getting swept downstream. He made a round of the entire island, which was only slightly larger than the bridge’s lone remaining arch.
“Emili!” Jonathan yelled.
On either side of him, the crushing river-bend current that had washed away the bridge’s other arches pounded the riverbanks. Jonathan scaled up the lone arch’s broken travertine, using the weeds and roots between the ancient stones to haul himself upward.
As Jonathan neared the top of the bridge, he heard a hacking cough. He reached the top of the ruin and found Emili on her knees, shuddering as she coughed up river water. She gripped the overgrown roots that strapped the stone, as though afraid her hacking would shake her off the arch. Jonathan hoisted himself up and ran toward her, ducking against the unrelenting wind.
“Are you okay?” Jonathan said soothingly, kneeling next to her, pulling her hair from her face.
She nodded as she slowly closed her eyes.
From the top of the Ponte Rotto where Jonathan and Emili stood, the double-lane highway of the modern Ponte Palatino was separated by only forty feet of turbulent water. Cars and trucks careened past in both directions.
“I’ll get help,” Jonathan said, rubbing his neck. He pulled to the edge of the Ponte Rotto.
“Hello!” he called out, trying to get a pedestrian’s attention. The wind picked up considerably and Jonathan could not even hear his own yell. He looked down to survey the rising water on the ruin’s island when he noticed something that chilled him far more than the freezing gusts of wind.
Someone had reopened the sewer grate over the tunnel they had just crawled through.
Jonathan turned around and Sharif stood behind him. He had gripped Emili by the arm and held her over the edge of the ruin, dangling her thirty feel above the raging river current. His bloodied face held its gaze at Jonathan.
“Like Josephus,” Sharif said, “it’s important not only to plan a way into the emperor’s court, but also a way out.”