“Oh,” said Peggy. “Gee, the very thing we’re looking for. What’s so special about this one?”
“It’s octagonal,” said Wanounou, crouching down, suddenly interested. He swept off a thin layer of dirt. The full dimensions were revealed. The paving stone was about three feet across. It looked as though there had once been a design carved into it, but the pattern had long since worn away. “Part of the church floor. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher this would be just about where the Rock of Golgotha stands.”
“So it’s an octagonal paving stone,” said Peggy. “What’s so important about that?”
Holliday knelt down beside Wanounou and started sweeping away dirt with his hands, revealing more of the stone flooring.
“Because all of the other stones are square, fanning out from this one. Whatever this was, it was the center of something.”
Wanounou stood up and brushed off his hands. “I’m going back to the truck. We need some tools.”
“I’ll go with you,” Peggy said quickly.
Holliday almost said something but then thought better of it. Instead he tried to make his expression as blank as possible.
“Don’t be long,” he said.
“We won’t,” answered Wanounou. The couple headed off back across the inner ward of the ruins. Holliday watched them go, “accidentally” bumping into each other now and again as they followed the path back to the Land Cruiser. As they walked their heads were bent toward each other like old friends.
They disappeared over the rise of the inner defensive wall, and Holliday went back to sweeping away the dirt on the section of old floor. The area was butted against two sides of a jutting section of the foundation wall, indicating that it had once been a subsidiary side chapel, perhaps even the Altar of the Stabat Mater, a feature of almost every Templar church. From his long-ago life as an altar boy Holliday could still remember the Latin hymn with its rhythmic trochaic tetrameter:
Stabat mater dolorosa
iuxta Crucem lacrimosa,
dum pendebat Filius.
Cuius animam gementem,
contristatam et dolentem
pertransivit gladius.
At the Cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful Mother weeping,
close to Jesus to the last.
Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
all His bitter anguish bearing,
now at length the sword has passed.
Pertransivit gladius. Yet another sword. The Altar of the Stabat Mater in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was a carved stone niche containing a tearful statue of the Virgin Mary with an area in front for the lighting of candles called “mensas.” There almost certainly would have been a version of the Stabat Mater at Pelerin, in which case the octagonal stone would have stood directly in front of it.
The brilliant sun was baking the rocks around him as Holliday worked on. A flock of Yellow-legged Gulls whirled and careened above him, calling loudly to each other as they rode the roller-coaster currents of the air. A hundred yards away he could hear the dull, hammering roar of the sea battering against the low cliffs at the end of the promontory.
By the time Peggy and Wanounou returned, Holliday had roughly cleared off a twelve-by-twelve area, revealing an intricate pattern of interlocking squares fanning out from the central octagon. Whoever had laid the floor had known something about geometry.
Peggy and the professor had brought a selection of tools from the rear compartment of the Land Cruiser including a small pick, a geologist’s hammer, a spade, a toolbox full of dentist’s tools and paint brushes, three trowels, and two flashlights. In addition to the tools he’d also brought a cooler full of Neviot bottled water, an assortment of sandwiches, and a thermos full of iced sweet tea.
“You’ve been working hard,” said Wanounou.
“Hard enough,” agreed Holliday.
Wanounou handed Peggy a waxed paper-wrapped sandwich, tossed one to Holliday, and chose one for himself. Holliday sat himself down on a foundation stone and unwrapped the sandwich. He peeked between the slices of bread and laughed out loud.
“Where do you find a ham and cheese sandwich in Israel?”
“I have my sources.” The professor winked. They ate quickly, then the professor handed out bottles of the cold spring water.
“What’s next?” Peggy asked, taking a slug of water.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Holliday. He stood up, holding his own bottle of water, and crossed the freshly swept area to the octagonal stone. He crouched down, then trickled water from the bottle onto the hot stone, darkening it. Wanounou came and looked over one shoulder, and Peggy looked over the other.
“I’ll be damned,” murmured the Israeli archaeologist.
On the wet stone a faint faded pattern had appeared: etched in the octagon stone were two overlapping squares turned at right angles to each other, making an eight-pointed star. In the center of the star, quite distinct, were two letters: PG.
“What is it?”
“A ‘Lakshmi Star,’ ” explained Holliday. “It’s supposed to represent the eight Hindu types of wealth. Alexander the Great imported the symbol from India, and the Freemasons picked it up.”
“It’s an Arabic symbol, as well,” added Wanounou. “The mark they use at the end of each surat, or verse, in the Koran. There was a big controversy a few years back because the asterisk on most Western typewriters is a six-pointed star, which the Muslims identify with the Star of David, so they had to change all the keyboards to eight-pointed ones.”
“That’s silly,” scoffed Peggy.
Wanounou shrugged. “We’re just as silly here—Israeli math textbooks don’t use a plus sign because it’s a Christian symbol, so they cut off the bottom bar, and you guys don’t put a Star of David on top of the Christmas tree even though Christ was born a Jew.”
“The whole world is silly,” sighed Holliday. “That’s why we have wars.”
“What about the ‘PG’?” asked Peggy. “Parental Guidance, maybe?”
“I have no idea.” Wanounou shrugged.
“I do,” said Holliday. The water was evaporating under the hot sun, and the design was fading. He poured on more water, and it reappeared.
“So give, why don’t you?” Peggy said.
“Pertransivit gladius,” said Holliday. “ ‘The sword is passed.’ ”
Wanounou knelt down beside the stone with a two-inch paintbrush and a trowel. He worked his way carefully around the eight sides of the central stone, first scraping then brushing out the accumulated accretions of dirt. Whether by accident or design or simply the passage of almost a thousand years, there was no sign of grout or mortar used to bond the central stone to its neighbors. Holliday poured water along the newly cleaned joint between the stones. The water drained away.
“Interesting,” he said quietly.
“Hand me the crowbar,” said Wanounou.
Peggy put it into his hand. The archaeologist worked the chisel end of the tempered steel bar into the very narrow crack between the stones and heaved. The stone lifted an inch. Wanounou pushed the bar in a little farther and heaved again. The stone came up another few inches, and Holliday slipped an old chunk of the foundation into the space, jamming it open.
“The Musgrave Ritual,” said Peggy, watching.
“Pardon?” Wanounou said.
“It’s a Sherlock Holmes story,” explained Holliday. “A man deciphers an old family code, and he and his girlfriend find a stone like this and lever it open. The girlfriend figures out the man is going to cheat her and traps him under the stone.”
“Never trust an Englishman,” said the archaeologist. He looked at Peggy. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”
She smiled. “Not unless you tried to cheat me.”
“Let’s get on with it,” said Holliday. He and Wanounou went to the far side of the stone. “On three,” said Holliday, and counted. They heaved the stone up and back, then eased it down carefully, only dropping it the
last few inches. They stood back, hands on knees, puffing from their exertions. Peggy peered into the hole the octagonal stone had covered.
“What do you see?” Holliday said.
“A staircase,” said Peggy. “A spiral staircase made of stone.”
20
“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” muttered Peggy as they descended. The staircase was impossibly narrow, the stone treads dangerously smooth. The only light was the narrow puddle of illumination from Wanounou’s flashlight. The air was close, heavy with the sharp scent of mold, mildew, and dissolving limestone. As they went downward step by step their shoulders brushed against the smooth rock walls.
The deeper they got the narrower the staircase seemed to get; Peggy could almost feel the enormous weight of the stone pressing in all around her. She was breathing quickly, trying to fill her lungs and failing. It felt as though she was suffocating.
“This was a really, really bad idea,” she said.
“You can always go back,” said Holliday from behind her, grinning in the near pitch dark. Wanounou led the way with the flashlight, crowbar in his other hand, while Holliday brought up the rear, carrying the geologist’s hammer and the second flashlight. Peggy was sandwiched between them, which made things even more claustrophobic.
“Go back? How am I supposed to do that? There’s no way to turn around, and anyway, you’re blocking the way. Besides, if I was up top I’d be worrying about you guys too much.”
“So nice to feel wanted,” laughed Wanounou.
“How far have we gone?” Peggy asked, her voice urgent.
“ A hundred and fifty-one steps,” said Holliday. “I’ve been counting.” He did a quick calculation. “About ten inches between the steps . . . I’d say about a hundred and twenty-five feet.”
“Thirty-eight meters, if it makes you feel any better,” said Wanounou, looking back over his shoulder and grinning.
“Shut up, both of you,” she snarled in the dark. “Or I’ll scream, I really will.”
“She gets aggressive when she’s scared,” commented Holliday to Wanounou.
“I picked up on that,” answered the professor.
“Shut. Up!” Peggy barked.
“Relax,” soothed Holliday. “It can’t be much farther.”
“Why do you say that?” Peggy argued. “For all you know this is the stairway to Hell. It could go on forever.” She was almost panting now, her throat constricted, the dank cobbled walls pressing in, entombing her. In another second she really was going to scream.
“I can see the bottom,” called Wanounou. Suddenly he disappeared, and Peggy could hear the damp gravel crunch of his footsteps. A few seconds later she reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into a narrow, barrel-vaulted tunnel. It was barely wider than the stairs. The floor was covered in a thick layer of rotted, broken limestone that felt like small, damp bones beneath her feet. She shuddered. In some ways it was worse than the stairway.
Holliday stepped out behind her. Wanounou shone the flashlight ahead, illuminating the way. Silently they made their way along the tunnel, the floor gently sloping downward.
“We’re going deeper,” commented Holliday.
“Thanks for mentioning it,” said Peggy acidly.
“I wonder what this place was. Some Middle Ages version of a priest hole?” Holliday asked.
“What’s a priest hole?” Peggy asked. “Or should I ask?”
“During Elizabethan times Catholic families and churches had priest holes, hiding places and tunnels they could escape to if pursuivants came after them—priest hunters,” explained Wanounou. “Sort of like the Nazis and the Jews.”
“You history types have far too much information crammed into your heads,” said Peggy. “Sometimes it’s scary.”
The beam of the flashlight suddenly widened as they came into a large chamber hewn out of the bare rock. The ceiling overhead was at least twenty feet high, dripping with frozen limestone “straws,” like delicate icicles. The walls were rough stone. Unlike the tunnel, the floor was set with large, quarried paving stones. There was a litter of what appeared to be broken pieces of old flowerpots that had been swept back against the walls. At the far end of the chamber was an immense doorway, the door constructed of studded iron, heavily encrusted with rust and dripping lime. An iron bar was fitted across it, held in iron brackets. Wanounou bent down and picked up a shard from the floor, examining it under the flashlight beam.
“Terra-cotta,” he said. “From the curve I’d say a five-liter container. Wine or olive oil. Even water perhaps, although five liters is a little small; the terra-cotta kept it cool.” He ran the flashlight beam around the room. “There’s nothing else here.”
“It’s chilly enough already,” said Peggy, her eyes traveling nervously around the cavernous room. She was right; it was cool, ten or fifteen degrees lower than it had been on the surface.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Holliday.
“What doesn’t?” Wanounou said, picking up another chunk of pottery.
“That staircase we came down was never used to transport jugs of wine or oil or anything else for that matter; the steps are far too narrow.”
“So?” Peggy said.
“So whatever was stored here wasn’t removed up the stairs and into the chapel,” said Wanounou, nodding his agreement. “Which means it had to have been brought in from somewhere else.”
“And that in turn means there has to be another entrance,” completed Holliday.
“Does that mean we have to go through that big door over there?” Peggy asked.
“Afraid so,” said Holliday.
“I thought you might say that,” she sighed.
They approached the door. It was enormous, at least five feet across and close to fifteen feet high. There was no sign of hinges.
“Pins in the bottom and the top,” said Holliday. “A pivot door.”
“Let’s get the bar off,” said Wanounou.
He hammered at the brackets with the curved end of the crowbar, knocking off most of the rust welding the iron bar to its supports. The rest he dug out with the chisel end. When he was done all three of them lifted the iron bar away from the door and laid it on the paving-stone floor. Their hands and clothes were stained with streaks of rust.
Wanounou hauled on the immense latch, but the door didn’t budge. He fitted the chisel end of the crowbar into the narrow crack between the door and wall, then he and Holliday heaved. For a moment nothing happened, but then there was a shrieking sound and the entire door moved a few inches toward them, grinding over the stone floor.
“Anybody got any WD-40?” Peggy cracked.
Holliday and the professor rested for a second, then repeated the process. By the third time they’d opened the door a full eighteen inches—enough to squeeze by.
“Nobody’s been through that door in about a thousand years,” said Holliday. “Who goes first?”
“You do,” said Wanounou with a melodramatic sweeping gesture of his arm. “This whole thing was your idea after all.”
“Just as long as there’s no snakes,” said Peggy. “Are there any snakes in Israel?”
“Sure,” said Wanounou. “Cleopatra and the asp, remember?”
“Any underground?”
“Just the blind worm snake.”
“What are they like?”
“A blind snake that looks like a worm.”
“Very funny.”
“They’re about ten inches long, black, and highly polished. And they’re not poisonous.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s a species of albino scorpion.”
“Blind snakes and albino scorpions . . . Great.”
“I’m going through,” said Holliday. “Anybody coming along?”
Switching on the other flashlight, he turned sideways and squeezed through the opening, disappearing into the darkness beyond. Peggy went next, with Wanounou following her.
The passage
way beyond the door was entirely different from the one that had led from the staircase to the storage chamber. Here the walls were raw native rock rather than dressed and quarried stone. The floor was rough, unworked limestone, and the roof, instead of being a plain barrel vault, was a soaring crevasse, its peak lost somewhere in the gloom. They were in fact now walking along an enormous crack in the earth created by some cataclysmic earthquake millennia before. When they spoke their voices echoed from the ragged stone.
“ ‘With dead Saladin’s echoing voice it calls us into battle once again,’ ” said Holliday, quoting from the message from the sword and swinging the flashlight around, lighting up the passage. Shadows jumped and flared in the moving beam like flitting bats.
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