Authors: Michael Byrnes
Amit had grown somewhat accustomed to this response, yet he couldn’t help but curse under his breath. He made a futile attempt at swatting away the tiny desert flies swarming about his face.
“Keep going to the bottom?” the student called down.
Going to the bottom.
Just like Amit’s career if something meaningful wasn’t soon found. With excavations at Qumran approaching the two-year mark, the team’s findings thus far were unremarkable: broken clay shards from Hasmonean oil lamps and amphorae, clichéd Roman and Herodian coins, a first-century grave site with male skeletal remains that replicated earlier discoveries found nearby.
“Go to the bottom,” he instructed. “Then take a break before you move to the next column. And stay hydrated. You won’t be much good to me if you get heatstroke.”
The kid snatched the water bottle from his utility belt and held it up in a mock toast.
“Mazel tov,” he grumbled. “Now get moving.”
The burly, goateed Israeli pulled off his aviator sunglasses and used a handkerchief to blot the sweat from his brow. Even in September, the Judean Desert’s dry heat was unrelenting and could easily drive a man mad. But Amit wasn’t going to let Qumran beat him. After all, patience and resolve were paramount for any archaeologist worth his chisel and brush.
The project’s benefactors, on the other hand, followed a much different clock. Their purse strings were drawing tighter by the month.
As he watched the student holster the water bottle, then lower the GPR unit two meters for the next scan, he felt a sudden compulsion to swap places with him. Maybe the rookie was missing something, misinterpreting the radargrams. But Amit’s forty-two-year-old oversize frame didn’t take well to rock climbing—particularly the harness, which crushed his manhood in unspeakable ways. No doubt those of slight stature were best suited to archaeology. So Amit approached things the pragmatic way: delegate, delegate, delegate.
Glaring at the cliff—the wily seductress who’d stolen away his want or need for anything else—he grumbled, “Come on. Give it up.
Something.
” This project had single-handedly accounted for his most recent marital casualty—Amit’s second wife, Sarah. At least this time there weren’t kids being played like pawns.
A second later, he heard someone screaming from a distance. “Professor! Professor!”
He turned around and spotted a lithe form moving through the gulch with athletic agility—the most recent addition to his team, Ariel. When she reached him, she planted herself close.
“Everything all right?”
Ariel used an index finger to push back her glasses, which had slid down her sweaty nose, and reported between heaving breaths, “In the tunnel . . . we . . . the radar is picking up something . . . behind a wall . . .”
“Okay, let’s slow it down,” he said soothingly. New interns were prone to overreacting at the slightest blip on the radar, and no one was greener than nineteen-year-old Ariel. “What exactly did you see?” He fought to
keep his frustrated tone on an even keel.
“The hyperbolic deflections . . . they were
deep.
”
Reading a radargram was more art than science. One had to be careful with interpretation. “How deep?”
“Deep.”
Amit squared his shoulders and his barrel chest puffed out against his drenched T-shirt. The creases on his overly tanned cheeks deepened as he considered this.
Don’t get too excited,
he told himself.
It’s probably nothing.
Though radar was quite effective in penetrating dry sandstone, subterranean scans were temperamental due to excessive moisture that choked the UHF/UVF radio waves. A deep deflection suggested a considerable hollow in the earth.
She sucked in more air and went on. “And this wall—it’s not stone . . . well, not exactly. We began to clear away the clay—”
“You
what
?”
“I know, I know.” She raised her palms up as if to tame a lion. “We were going to come get you, but we needed to be sure about— Anyway, we found something.
Bricks.
”
A rush of cold ran up his spine. “Show me. Now.”
These days, when Amit pushed his body to anything beyond a light trot, he felt like a rhinoceros on a treadmill. But as he trailed close behind Ariel, there was a fluidity in his stride that he hadn’t felt since he was dodging hostile gunfire in Gaza over twenty years earlier. As
seren,
or company commander, he could easily have pursued a military career with the Israel Defense Forces, but by then he’d had enough of Israel’s gummy politics concerning the occupied Palestinian territories. So Amit set his sights on a much different pursuit at Tel Aviv University that swapped a Ph.D. in biblical archaeology for his three-olive-branched epaulets.
A hundred yards from the tent, Ariel led him through a ravine, into a cool wash of shade. Ahead, the crevasse narrowed and dipped over the cliff where winter flash floods would rage down to the sapphire-blue Dead Sea. Just over the rise, she stopped at the foot of a tall ladder propped at an angle against the vertical rock.
Catching his breath, Amit glanced at the cave opening—a good four meters up.
His mind rewound four weeks, when the GPR registered this subsurface anomaly buried behind what amounted to almost two meters of rubble, clay, and silt. It had taken ten days to clear it all out; every ounce of soil was thoroughly screen-sifted for the slightest commingled artifacts. Nothing found. What lay beyond, however, wasn’t a cave per se, but a tunnel that rose sharply into the cliff ’s belly.
Ariel went up the ladder first—an effortless ascent. At the top, she pulled herself into the darkened opening.
Drawing breath, Amit clutched the sides of the ladder with his meaty paws. His heartbeat quickened. Keeping his eyes on the opening, he started cautiously upward, the aluminum rungs groaning. Feeling suddenly vulnerable—it happened any time his feet left earth—he fought the urge to look down.
Keep moving. Eyes on the prize.
At the top, he clawed the opening’s stone rim and heaved himself up and in.
“Show me.”
“It’s far in . . . at the end, actually,” she said, waving for him to follow. Snatching a flashlight off the floor, she flicked it on, then made her way up the tight passage in short steps.
Amit trailed close behind her, bending slightly at the waist to avoid the low ceiling while twisting his torso to prevent jamming his broad shoulders in the narrow channel. Within seconds, what little sunlight penetrated the tunnel had dissipated. The subterranean air chilled his damp neck and the redolence of minerals stirred up into his nose—what he liked to call “Bible smell.”
A few meters up the grade, the glow from work lights pierced the darkness. Amit could hear echoing voices and the dry sound of gravel being scooped into buckets. He detected a
swish swish swish
—a brush dusting stone. “Stop what you’re doing!” His scream rippled along the tunnel.
The outburst made Ariel flinch and hit her head on the ceiling. She stopped, cupped her hand over the tender spot, then checked it under the light. Only dirt.
“It’ll only be a bruise,” Amit said, noting the lack of blood on her hand.
Shaking her head, Ariel proceeded upward. The sounds of work had stopped, but the mumbling had just begun, mixed with some giggles.
The tunnel reached its high point and flattened out, yielding to a wide hollow. Amit straightened with half a meter to spare overhead. Immediately his eyes found the cleared section in the chamber’s rear, a square meter, he guessed, crisply lit by two pole lights. Three more eager students stood in silence around the spot, buckets and tools at their feet, looking like they’d just been called to the principal’s office.
Huffing, he made his way closer. He fumed, “I can’t tell you again how
critical
it is to—” But the words were lost as his eyes took in the remarkable sight set before him. Moving forward and dropping to his knees, he pressed his face close to a neat patchwork of angular bricks the students had mindfully exposed. His heart seemed to skip a beat. Early on, Amit had given Mother Nature full credit for this chamber, since its interior surfaces displayed no telltale scarring from tools. Now that hypothesis had to be completely discounted. “Oh my,” he gasped.
A radargram was a far cry from a Polaroid. But as Amit studied the wild undulations in the GPR’s frequency patterns, he concurred with young Ariel. These deflections were definitely
deep.
He rolled the scanner away from the bricks and patted his fingers against his lips in rapid motion.
“What do you think, Professor?” Ariel finally said.
Mind racing, Amit stared at the brickwork a few seconds before answering. “This wall isn’t very dense. Probably less than half a meter.” For scale, he propped a ruler and a chisel against the bricks, then proceeded to snap some digitals with his trusty Nikon. After twice reviewing the images on the camera’s display, he was pleased. He turned to Ariel and said, “I need a detailed diagram of this space, with laser measurements all around.”
“I can do it,” she confidently replied.
“I know you can.” The kid not only had a knack for academia, but she was an excellent artist. Extremely useful for field study and precisely why she’d been handpicked to join his team. “Take some video too. Use plenty of light.”
Beaming, Ariel nodded in fast motion.
Then he addressed the others. “The rest of you start tagging the bricks. Then we’ll see what they were looking to hide.”
“They,” the students immediately understood, were the Essenes— the reclusive Jewish sect that had inhabited these hills for two centuries beginning in the second century b.c.e., until their mass genocide by the Romans in 68 c.e. Their primary settlement was set along the shore of the Dead Sea, a cluster of crude clay brick dwellings that included sleeping quarters, a refectory, and ritual bathing pits called
mikvah
s
.
But the site’s dominant building had been a long hall furnished with drafting tables—a scriptorium where multiple copies of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, as well as a plethora of apocryphal texts, had been fastidiously transcribed. The Essenes had been the scribes, librarians, and custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“Think we’ll find scrolls, Professor?”
Irritated by the ask-it-and-kiss-your-fortunes-good-bye query, Amit turned to the nineteen-year-old Galilean named Eli, who was all nose and ears beneath a tight knit of black curls topped off by a brightly embroidered
kippah.
A spasm rippled Amit’s lower left eyelid as he agitatedly replied, “Anything’s possible.”
An hour later, when Amit nudged free the brick pin-tagged “C027,” he saw a black space open up behind the wall’s final layer. Grinning ear to ear, he carefully handed the block to the Galilean kid, who used it to start a new column in the ordered matrix of bricks laid neatly on the chamber floor.
Amit held a tape measure along the top of the recess. The radargram had been right on the shekels. “Half a meter.”
“Exciting stuff,” Eli said, rubbing his hands together and crouching to peek through the hole.
“You getting all this?”
“Every brick,” he assured Amit as he grabbed his clipboard and wrote “C027” on the inventory sheet.
Grabbing a flashlight, Amit shone the beam through the gap, moving it side to side, up and down. The light clung to two meters of tight walls and ceiling—another passage?—before being swallowed by a much larger void. A second chamber? His knees popped as he stood. “Let’s get the rest of this cleared away,” he instructed the interns.
After another two hours, under Amit’s close supervision, the ancient wall
had been completely dismantled.
He reclaimed his kneeling spot.
“Let’s have a look.” Crouching, he shone the flashlight into the rocky gullet while trying not to inhale the stagnant air spilling out of the breach. Just beyond the opening, he studied the angular passage and ran his fingers over its scooped chisel hashes. Definitely quarried. A tap on his shoulder made him turn. It was Ariel, holding out a silver-cased Zippo lighter.
“To check for oxygen,” she explained.
“Right,” Amit said, taking it from her. She’d obviously noticed that he’d left his fancy digital oxygen sensor back at the tent. So the crude method would have to suffice. Flicking the top open with a small
ting,
he lit it up. The tang of butane filled his nostrils as he extended the Zippo into the passage. The robust flame held steady. All clear. “Here goes.”
Crawling through the short passage, flashlight in his left hand, Zippo in his right, Amit hesitated when he quickly reached the end. A large void opened up in front of him.
Craning his neck, he swung the light in wide arcs through the black soup. The light melted deep into the space—a sizable angular chamber hewn from the mountain’s innards.
Confusion came fast. The space seemed to be empty. But there was lots of Bible smell here.
Working his way inside, Amit stood and rolled his neck. Though the Zippo’s quivering taper suggested questionable air quality, he wasn’t about to vacate the chamber. He hadn’t felt this exhilarated in years. Pulling in shallow breaths, he paced the level floor and examined the symmetrical walls and ceiling—a ten-meter cube, he guesstimated, every surface blank. Why would the Essenes brick up an empty cubicle?
“Speak to me,” he muttered.
On cue, his Doc Martens scuffed across an uneven surface in the center of the floor—a variation so slight he could easily have dismissed it. Then the ground seemed to shift slightly beneath his weight. He dipped the flashlight onto the spot and eased onto his knees. Flicking the Zippo shut, he slid it into his shirt pocket. He trailed his fingers through a dust layer blanketing the floor and detected a ridge. Pressing his face close to the floor, he gently blew away the dust to reveal a tight seam that cut a hard angle. He repeated the process until he’d uncovered a sizable rectangle cut into the floor.
A stone slab?
He tried working his meaty fingers into the seam. Nothing. Snapping to his feet, he paced to the passage opening, crouched down, and called to Ariel. “Bring in the tools . . . a pry bar too. And let’s get some lights in here. Quickly!”