‘This is the second Temple, built over Solomon’s Temple. The Romans burnt it to the ground when they destroyed Jerusalem in the year seventy – about thirty years before the inscription outside. The people who built this would have been Jews who fled from the city. A great many wound up in Egypt and Cyrenaica. And if I remember correctly, they came south.’
‘What’s the cross about, then?’ asked Donaldson.
‘I think that’s your answer,’ Max said, and turned his torch to a nearby panel on the same wall. This mosaic showed a very different scene: a man bent beneath a Roman cross, stumbling as he carried it, with bystanders, some jeering, some running to help.
‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ the doctor exclaimed. His Calvinist upbringing in Aberdeen had given him an allergy to icons. His father would have called the mosaic a ‘work of the de’il’, and his mother would have sat sucking her thumbs and muttering ‘idol worship’ beneath her breath. ‘Why would Jews put a picture of the good Lord on the wall of their synagogue?’
‘Ah!’ said Max, trying to keep any hint of smugness out of his voice. ‘But that’s not Jesus Christ in the mosaic.’
‘Who else could it be?’
‘Haven’t you read your Bible? “They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus.” There were Jews from Cyrenaica in Jerusalem at Pentecost, and some of the first Christians were converts from Libya, also from Cyrenaica. Simon and his sons were among them.’
‘How do you know this is Simon?’
Max pointed to an inscription at the base of the picture.
‘Because it says so. That’s Jesus standing behind him.’
4
Simon of Cyrene
As Max finished speaking, there was a sound behind them. It was Teddy Clark.
‘Sir, the woman who came with us…’
Gerald turned, fearing A’isha had betrayed them after all.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s back, sir. With a friend. They’ve brought lamps with them. I’ve told them to go in, but they won’t budge, and I don’t know what to do with them.’
They stepped outside. A’isha and a second woman stood some yards away, shivering like ghosts. Each carried a basket woven from palm fronds, and in the baskets were terracotta lamps filled with olive oil.
As Gerald approached them, his torch beam caught their eyes and they flinched away. Lowering it, he greeted A’isha.
‘These are for you,’ she said. ‘They will help you see in that place.’
‘Will you not come inside? There are beautiful things in there.’
‘Is there treasure? The Old Ones used to say there is treasure, gold and jewels that belonged to the king and queen who are buried there.’
‘I’ve seen nothing like that. If you come inside…’
The women thrust their baskets at him, but refused to be inveigled inside the structure.
They took the lamps inside and lit them one by one. They burnt steadily, revealing yet more mosaics on the floor and ceiling. Between the picture of the Temple and the portrait of St Simon stood a two-sided wooden door carved with finely chiselled images. Each register bore an elongated cross, and around it were fish swimming in deep waves, angels vanquishing demons, lions beneath palm trees, and lilies swaying in a breeze that had passed by long centuries ago.
Gerald pushed hard on the right-hand side, and the door opened to a shrill creaking and groaning of ancient hinges. He went inside, and the others followed, bringing some lamps with them, then returning for more. As the light grew in volume, they saw a world of long-forgotten shadows come to life, shadow by shadow, light by light, ghost by ghost. All around them, phantoms whispered, as if the dead of centuries were coming back to life.
On three sides, banks of seats, like the benches in a Roman amphitheatre, sloped back to mosaic-covered walls. Above, a dome of gold and glass twinkled as they let their torch beams play across it. Two angels held the dome, their pure white robes and golden wings occupying all but a tiny part of its glistening surface, vast and rimmed with flames.
‘Whose appearance was as lightning, and their garments glistening and white…’ said Max.
At the far end was a wooden desk, the bimah, where the Torah is read, and behind it the Ark, where the Torah scrolls are kept, and it seemed as though the congregation had just got up and left, and gone outside, back to the bright sun and the palm trees and the blue sky. Gerald fancied he could detect a faint smell as of incense, of myrrh, perhaps, or sandalwood or amber or opopanax of Solomon.
A synagogue, then. But above the Ark, where there should have been set the Tables of the Law, stood instead a golden cross whose beaten arms coruscated in the flickering light of the lamps.
‘What does all this mean, Max?’ Gerald asked, all sense of military hierarchy lost in this place beyond war. ‘It’s not a synagogue, it’s not a church. I don’t understand.’
Max was silent for a while, looking all round him, scarcely knowing where to start or where to stop.
‘I find no contradictions here,’ he said. ‘The first Christians were all Jews. This place was built by Jews who believed in the Laws of Moses, but recognised Jesus as the last of the prophets, a miracle-worker sent by God, an archangel who rules over the angels. They regarded the family of Jesus as a sacred lineage. Don’t forget that the church in Jerusalem was headed by James, the brother of Jesus. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, one of their leaders must have led a band of Ebionites out west, along with the other Jews who headed this way. I wouldn’t think it at all unlikely that St Simon of Cyrene was one of them, maybe even their leader. If that’s the case, this could be the most important archaeological find of the century, maybe of all time. It makes King Tut look pretty tame, don’t you think? And we’ve only scratched the surface. Look there.’
He pointed towards the central area, an open rectangle flanked by pillars. Shadows had dimmed it, but as they looked closely they could see at its heart an opening in the ground, an opening that led onto steps.
‘Whatever this place is about,’ said Max, ‘that’s where we’ll find it. Down those steps. Would any of you gentlemen like to go down with me?’
Max led the way, breaking through a net of fine cobwebs as he set his foot firmly on the first step. Things scuttled away from the light. The torch beam picked out about a dozen steps leading down into some sort of basement beneath the synagogue. Gerald followed, holding his breath, scared out of his wits, fearing what they might find, what secrets they had stumbled so inadvertently into.
The steps ended at another wooden door, each side of which was carved the embossed and gilded figure of an angel bearing a trumpet, and wearing on its head a crown. The crowns and robes of the two angels were studded with precious stones – rubies lay like cherries on the rims of the crowns; there were chrysoprase, turquoise, and sapphires on the horns of the trumpets; jasper and sapphires, emeralds and deep-blue gems of lapis lazuli lay along the hems of the robes.
Max laid his hand on an angel’s shoulder and pushed. The door gave without murmur, sliding inwards. He shone his torch inside, revealing a silent open space that might have been as large as the building beneath which it stretched.
‘Fetch as many lamps as you can,’ he shouted.
While the others hurried to bring light, Max stepped inside, followed moments later by Gerald. The air felt stale, and both men found themselves yawning as they breathed in hard. Gerald slipped his Fairbairn Sykes dagger from its sheath and wedged it hard beneath the door, holding it in position. Max did the same with the other half, to let as much air inside as possible.
The first lights were carried in by Donaldson, the storm lanterns from the cars, flickering and sputtering from lack of oxygen. He laid them down and went back for more. Clark brought several of the palm oil lamps, and the light began to grow.
They had entered a crypt, a chamber of stone tombs and ossuaries set in ni
ches cut in stone around the walls. Sarcophagi of differing sizes had been set on plinths. One wall had been honeycombed with semicircular cells, each filled by a skull. On the foreheads of the skulls were written the names of the dead. Another wall had been painted with an inscription in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Before the third wall, the one facing the door, stood a wooden structure very like the Ark in the room above. It consisted of a tall cupboard-like box some five feet tall and possessed of two doors. On either side of it stood the figures of two angels. These were cut from white marble and gilded, and each one held aloft a golden cross.
As if in a trance, Max made his way through the tombs, reading whatever inscriptions he could. He took a notebook from his pocket and began to note down details of what he found. No one spoke. Believer and unbeliever alike, they sensed a numinous presence here. The dead had slept in this place for close on two thousand years. Father and mother, husband and wife, son and daughter. Entire families interred in single tombs, or laid side by side in individual ossuaries, their bones unyielding to time or the end of time.
Several large sarcophagi stood together near the Ark. Max read the inscriptions and wrote them down, then stood without moving, one hand resting on the tallest. Gerald noticed that his face was ashen, and that he rested on the sarcophagus in order to stop his hand trembling. When he finally broke his silence, it was as though he had journeyed from a far country with news of war or a king’s death, or as if he stood in their presence as a bride come to her husband in a moment of peace.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and his voice was shaking. He had always been considered the calm one among them, the least easily flustered, the most ready to counsel patience. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began again, ‘we find ourselves in a place of ghosts. The phantoms here have names, and the names throw long shadows. The bones in these ossuaries are uncommon bones. This one, for example’ – he indicated a large box to his right – ‘contains the bones of Simon of Cyrene. Next to it are ossuaries holding the remains of his two sons, Alexander and Rufus. Alexander’s box is clear: it says “Alexandros Simonos”, Alexander, the son of Simon, on top, then “Alexandroi”, belonging to Alexander, on the side. There are Hebrew inscriptions on each of the ossuaries. I’ll make copies of those later. But this isn’t all.’
He took them several feet further, closer to the Ark.
‘There are five large ossuaries here. One is a double burial, probably a husband and wife. The man’s name is Joseph, his wife is called Maryam. Mary. The Nazarene: from Nazareth. There are three other names: James, Jude, and Mary. You may remember that Jesus had brothers and a sister of those names. And that James was the head of the church in Jerusalem. There are longer Hebrew or Aramaic inscriptions on these boxes. I’ll copy them as well.’
As his voice fell away, a silence settled around them by degrees, unlike any ordinary silence. It was not merely an absence of sound, or a quietude carried in from the desert; it was like nothing they had ever known. In the flickering of the lamps and the waving of the hesitant shadows, they saw each others’ faces and were abashed. All that was military in them, all that had hardened them and taught them killing without remorse, fell suddenly away. They were held in the silence by a very different force, as though some compulsion had come to them across a great distance. They could do nothing but this, nothing but remain in that great stillness until one of them found words.
It was as though angels with wings as wide as the desert had dropped down into this narrow, airless space and folded their pinions behind their shoulders, silencing them in readiness for a new tumult and a fresh ordering of things, for a fresh ordering of things was coming.
Gerald was the first to speak after that.
‘I don’t…believe you. I don’t see how…’
‘They came here after the sack of Jerusalem. After the burning of the Temple. They must have carried their bones all the way, taken them from the family tombs outside the city, and brought them here to their new habitation. Alexander and Rufus may not have been very old, in their fifties or sixties, perhaps. They must have brought their father’s bones here into exile, and when they reached this place, they must have had new ossuaries made to inter them in. Who knows what other bones were carried here on mules or camels? How many of the second and third generations died and were interred here?’
‘What about that?’ Bill Donaldson asked, pointing to the great wooden Ark, guessing it had been put there for some purpose that would encompass all other purposes. In contrast to the gilded angels on either side, the doors bore nothing but a simple inscription in Hebrew. The letters had been incised neatly into the wood, then dressed with gold leaf. Though centuries had passed, there was still a flame in them, as though some divine fire had burnt in their creation.
The Ark had been built, as far as Max could tell, from cedar wood. As he ran the light across it, it became clear that, apart from the letters, it had been carved with fine ornamentation in the form of plants and flowers, by the hand of a great craftsman. A craftsman who had worked on the Temple in his youth, perhaps. It occurred to him that much of the work here might have been done by men like that: masons, mosaic makers, sculptors who had worked on the upkeep of Herod’s great edifice, and whose fathers and grandfathers had, perhaps, built it.
There was no lock, but a metal clasp held the doors squarely together, and iron handles had been fixed to both sides. Bit by bit, he worked the clasp open. It had not rusted, but over the centuries it had grown awkward and stiff. Donaldson, the most practical among them, extinguished one of the palm oil lamps and poured the liquid onto the clasp. As the oil made its way between the hasp and post, they began to give. Suddenly, the clasp burst open, and the doors let out a creaking sound, as though something long suppressed had at last been released.
Max took a handle in each hand and pulled them towards himself. There was an initial reluctance, then the hinges groaned. The doors opened, and from the Ark came forth a deep perfume, and when Max looked inside the first thing he saw was a mass of dried rose petals that had been scattered everywhere across the contents.
It was as they had expected, and not as they had thought. In some deep part of him, each of the four soldiers knew there could be no turning back from this moment, that they had passed a point of no return.
The box on the floor of the Ark was white, and better carved at all points than any of the others. It bore an inscription on the front, the letters of which had been incised with care and precision, first in Greek, then in Hebrew or its sister tongue of Aramaic, none of them could guess.
Across the top of the box, which was some three feet long, someone had laid a wooden plank, rather like a shelf, and on this rested several objects, none of any great size, save for two long rods that stretched diagonally to the top of the Ark.
‘What on earth are those?’ asked Donaldson, curious now past measure, the cold scientist in him gone for good.
Max reached inside and, using both hands, gently lifted the rods out, one at a time. The first to be dislodged was a wooden shaft about four and a half feet in length, with what appeared to be a thick wooden handle at one end. The other was a metal spike with a barbed head, about the same length.
Max examined the two objects for a minute or so, then took the metal rod and pushed it down past the handle into the wooden shaft. It fitted perfectly, making a lance or javelin almost seven feet long.
‘It’s a pilum,’ he said. ‘A Roman lance. This lower half is probably made of cornel wood. There would have been nails to hold it together, here, and here.’ He pointed to two holes through which nails might at one time have been driven.
‘It’s a fierce-looking thing,’ the doctor said. ‘You could do some damage with that.’
‘It was used in battle by legionaries called pilani.’
‘“One of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, and immediately there came out blood and water.”’ Gerald spoke the words like someone in a vast cathedral, intoning verses for Easter, without force, know
ing them lost in the vastness. ‘St John’s Gospel,’ he said. ‘He’s the only one who mentioned the soldier.’
‘Longinus,’ said Max. ‘That’s supposed to have been his name. It’s the stuff of legend. Like the lance. The Spear of Destiny.’
‘You’re having us on,’ said Donaldson. ‘You’re not going to tell me—’
‘Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. But I think you should see the rest of what’s in here.’
One at a time, he started to take the other objects from the Ark, and laid them gently on the floor. They seemed fragile enough things, some of them, and heavy, not with substance, but with age and significance.
There were five items in all: the lance; an ochre-coloured pottery goblet shaped like a ‘v’, without decoration of any kind; a bowl into which someone had pressed what looked like a rounded cap of brambles; a finely carved ivory box whose lid came off easily, revealing inside three rough-cast metal spikes, each about seven inches long; and a large wooden rectangle that carried three inscriptions that had been painted hurriedly in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, each on one line:
‘Ιησους ‘ο Ναζωραιος ‘ο Βασιλευς των ‘Ιουδαιων
IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM.
היהודים מלך הנצרת ישוע
While Gerald held an oil lamp steady over his shoulder, Max deciphered the first two lines.
‘They both say the same thing,’ he said. ‘I expect you can all guess. “Jesus the Nazerene, King of the Jews”. This is the titulus, the wooden plaque that was nailed to the top of the cross.’
In the shadows, Clark’s fingers flickered across his chest. Gerald, a run-of-the-mill Anglican, felt a fluttering at his heart. Even the two unbelievers, Chippendale and Donaldson, sensed the enormity of this object and the inscription it bore.
Max placed the titulus on the floor, and straightened.
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