'That's really irritating,' Angela said, her features clouded with annoyance. 'I should have done more research. Not only was it a waste of time, but we nearly got killed in the process.'
'What about these other cisterns?' Bronson asked, tactfully changing the subject.
'Oh, yes. Right, mostly they're of very varied design and construction, presumably because they were built by several different groups of people over the centuries. Some of them are just chambers roughly cut out of the rock, while others were constructed with more care and attention. A couple of them – the ones normally known as cisterns one and five – might possibly have had some kind of religious function connected with the Second Temple altar, because of their location on the Mount. Cistern five also contains a doorway blocked with earth, so there could well be a further chamber or chambers beyond what's known to exist now.'
'How big are these cisterns? Do they just hold a few gallons of water, or are they really big?'
'Some of them are huge. Cistern eight can hold several hundred thousand gallons, and number eleven has the potential to store nearly a million gallons. Most of the others are smaller, but they were all designed as proper cisterns, with reasonably high capacities. Don't forget, in antiquity water conservation was absolutely essential, and these cisterns were intended to hold every drop of rainwater that fell.'
'But from what you've said, they can't be accurately dated, so we have no idea which of them were already in existence when the Sicarii were looking for a hiding place for their relics?'
'Exactly.'
'Let me have another look at the translation we did, please,' Bronson asked.
Angela opened her handbag and pulled out half a dozen folded sheets of paper. Bronson riffled through them.
'I thought so,' he said. 'The text specifically states "the cistern", and that's followed by two words we haven't cracked, then "place of", another blank and then "end of days". Our interpretation of that was "the cistern at the place of the end of days". If there was more than one cistern in the place where the Sicarii hid the relic, wouldn't it make sense for them to have written "the cistern at the northern edge of the Mount" or something like that? I think what they wrote implies that there was only a single cistern in the place they chose, and that it would be a cistern everybody would be aware of.'
'That's why I thought Hezekiah's Tunnel was the right location. It was certainly in existence at the time, and it was the biggest and most famous of all the cisterns near Jerusalem. But this information destroys that theory.'
'Then there's only really one conclusion we can draw,' Bronson said.
'Which is what?'
'That we've been looking in completely the wrong place. Wherever the Sicarii hid the relics, it probably wasn't in Jerusalem.' He yawned – it had been a very long day. 'We need to look at the whole inscription again.'
65
'I was so sure we were right,' Angela said. 'It all seemed to fit so well, especially as Hezekiah's Tunnel is the most obvious of all the cisterns.'
It was early morning in the holiest of cities, a salmonpink sky presaging yet another blisteringly hot day. They'd been woken by the electronically amplified cries of the muezzins summoning the faithful to worship, a discordant and unforgettable dawn chorus borne on the still air from the mosques of Jerusalem.
They were again sitting in Angela's room, drinking bad instant coffee made worse by powdered creamer. Bronson had slept like a log, but Angela's face was pale and she had dark shadows under her eyes. He guessed she'd stayed awake for much of the night puzzling over the meaning of the inscription and the location of the lost scroll.
Bronson picked up the sheets of paper on which they'd written out the translation of the inscription and glanced through the disjointed text, hoping for inspiration.
'This phrase about the "end of days" would fit very neatly with the Well of Souls, the cave on the Temple Mount where Muslims believe that the dead will gather to wait for judgement when the world ends,' he said, then paused for a few seconds. 'No – hang on a minute. The Sicarii weren't Muslims. In fact, Islam as a religion didn't even exist until about half a millennium after the fall of Masada, so our premise about the location must be wrong.'
Angela shook her head. 'It's not that simple, Chris. I wasn't suggesting the hiding place had anything to do with the Well of Souls. My interpretation of the "end of days" expression was that it referred to the Jewish beliefs about the Third Temple – they think the end of the world will come shortly after it's built. Yosef Ben Halevi talked to us about this, if you remember. Like the Muslims, the Jews also think that the "place of the end of days" – the place where the world will end – is most likely to be the Temple Mount.'
Bronson looked crestfallen. 'Damn,' he muttered, 'I thought I'd spotted the fatal flaw in your argument. So if Armageddon is definitely going to take place here in Jerusalem, the Sicarii must have hidden the Silver Scroll somewhere here. All we can be certain of is that they didn't stick it in Hezekiah's Tunnel.'
For a few seconds Angela just stared at him, an inscrutable expression on her face.
'What?' Bronson demanded.
'Did I ever tell you you were a genius?' Angela asked, her eyes shining.
'Nothing like often enough,' Bronson said modestly. 'What did I do this time?'
'You've just made the obvious connection that I missed. I was so sure about the Temple Mount that I completely forgot about Armageddon – and that's somewhere very different.'
'But I thought Armageddon was an event, not a place?'
'When most people talk about it they assume it means the end of the world. But in fact it is an actual place. It's called Har Megiddo, the hill of Megiddo, and it's about fifty miles north of Jerusalem. That's where, according to the Bible, the "battle of the end of days" will take place, when the forces of good and evil confront each other for the last time.'
'The "place of the end of days" would fit, then?'
'It would match the expression very well. I don't know too much about the site, so I'll need to do some more research.'
'But how do you get "Armageddon" from "Har Megiddo"?' Bronson asked.
'Well, it's not exactly a mistranslation from the Bible,' Angela said, 'not like the camel passing through the eye of a needle.'
'That's a mistranslation?' Bronson asked. 'I didn't know that.'
'Yes. Why on earth would a camel want to go through the eye of a needle? It's yet another biblical expression that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, but which has been trotted out in pulpits by preachers for hundreds of years, none of whom stopped to wonder what the expression was supposed to mean. Of course it's a mistranslation.'
'So what should it be?' Bronson asked.
'Most of the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, with a few chapters of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic, but the New Testament was in Koine Greek. The first translation was started by a man named John Wycliffe and finally completed by John Purvey in 1388. For the King James Bible, a group of over fifty scholars worked on not only the original Hebrew and Greek versions of the two books, but also looked at all the extant translations that had been made.
'It was translation by committee, and not surprisingly mistakes were made. There are two very similar words in Greek: camilos, meaning "rope", and camelos, which translates as "camel". Whoever was doing that bit of the New Testament misread the "i" in the Greek as an "e", and the Church has been stuck with his mistake ever since. Amazing, isn't it?'
Bronson shook his head. 'Now I think about it, I suppose it is. So what about Armageddon?'