The leaves of the plane trees had started to take on their late summer colours, a mixture of various shades of greens and browns, the weather was fine and there was the promise of an Indian summer in the air. Best of all O’Connelly was in his Paris home, his left thigh was still sore and the muscles stiff, however the wound had healed and a little therapy would soon see him back to normal.
The conflict in Israel had run its course with a large part of southern Lebanon in ruins and Gaza more isolated than ever, their peoples once again the victims of politics that few understood. Israel for the first time since its independence doubted its capacity to fight a war, a new kind of war, a guerilla war, the kind dreaded by all governments.
O’Connelly’s intensive contact with the world of archaeology in eastern Mediterranean and the interlude in Cambodia during the previous months had provided him with a considerable quantity of solid information for his book. He had now fixed the theme and structure of his novel, the characters were real as were the settings with its heroes and villains. He had made progress in analysing the mass of documents provided by Assad’s research and de Lussac’s ramblings.
He felt satisfaction and pleasure at the idea of the task that lay before him over the coming winter months, entering the imaginary world of his book, transforming his experience and research into a bestseller.
He typed a heading into his laptop ‘The Legacy of Solomon’.
Whether Solomon had existed or not was of little importance, what did exist was his legacy, a legacy that had created three thousand years of Jewish history, which gave birth to the world’s three great monotheist religions, and the endless conflicts that would continue to wrack the Middle East for an indeterminable time.
The story had no end, the characters inside and outside of the pages would of course experience their individual destinies; the story of the Temple would be fought out by archaeologists and religionists for centuries to come, and almost certainly without any conclusive evidence to favour one theory or another.
Would Islam rediscover harmony when the wells of Arabia had run dry? Would Judaism find peace when the Palestinian conflict was resolved? Would Christianity ever recover faith in a world of virtual pleasure and material wealth.
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On a Bridge
The Legacy of Solomon Page 84