A tunnel leading downward was not hard to find. In one corner on the inside of the temple there was a crater in the rubble, as if someone had dug in search of treasure, and at the bottom were rough boards t h e
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weighted down with rocks. “Here it is then!” Ned quietly exulted. We threw the boards aside and found a set of sandstone stairs leading downward. Using dry brush to make crude torches, we lit one with steel and flint and descended. Yet we were soon disappointed. After thirty steps the staircase ended abruptly at what appeared to be a well, its sides of smooth sandstone. I took a rock and dropped it. Long seconds passed, and then there was a splash. I could hear water running below.
“An old well,” I said. “The Bedouin closed it up so their goats and children wouldn’t fall in.”
Disappointed, we went back outside to explore the perimeter but found nothing of interest. Out in front, old pillars holding nothing up lined an abandoned causeway. More heaps of broken masonry marked ancient buildings, long collapsed. All looked picked over, pottery fragments everywhere. I’ll tell you what history is: broken shards and forgotten bones; a million inhabitants thinking their moment is the most important, all turned to dust. From the cliffs around, caves were mute mouths. Weary, we sat.
“Looks like your theory didn’t work, guv’nor,” Ned said, dispirited.
“Not yet, Ned. Not yet.”
“Where’s the ghosts, then?” He peered about.
“Keeping their own counsel, I hope. Do you believe in them?’
“Aye, I’ve seen ’em. Lost shipmates stalk the deck on the darkest watches. Other wraiths, from wrecks unknown, call from passing swells. It gives a sailor a chill, it does. There was a baby that died in a rooming house I rented in Portsmouth, and we used to hear the cries when . . .”
“This is Satan’s talk,” Mohammad interrupted. “It’s wrong to dwell on the dead.”
“Yes, let’s think of our purpose, lads. We need a way down. If there’s one thing that goes with treasure hunting, it’s grubbing in the earth.”
“We should get miner’s wages, we should,” Ned agreed.
“In the morning, Silano is going to enter a temple where that lightning beam struck and either find something or not. I’ve bet not. But we need to find it ourselves and be well on our way before then.” 2 1 8
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“And what of the woman?” Ned asked. “Are you givin’ her up, guv’nor?”
“She’s supposed to steal away and meet us.”
“Ah, you gambled on her, too? Now, women are bad bets.” I shrugged. “Life is nothing but gambles.”
“I like the sound of the river,” Mohammad remarked, to change the subject. He viewed gambling as Satan’s device too, I knew. “You seldom hear it in the desert.”
We listened. Indeed, there was a stream running down a channel next to the causeway, chuckling as it splashed.
“It’s that storm. This place is parched like a bone most days, I figure,” Ned said.
“I wonder where the water goes,” Mohammad added. “We’re in a bowl.”
I stood. Where indeed? The desert drinks its fill. Suddenly excited, I clambered down the temple’s broken stairs to the causeway and crossed it to the temporary stream, sparkling now in the starlight. It ran west toward the mountains and . . . there! Disappeared.
An old pillar lay like a chopped tree trunk across the river course, and under it the river abruptly ended. On one side a babbling brook, on the other dry sand and cobbles. I slid into the cool water, feeling it rush against my calves, and peered under the column. There was a horizontal crack in the earth like a sleepy giant’s eyelid, and into this the water poured. I could hear the echo. Not a giant’s eye, but its mouth. Drinks its fill.
“I think I’ve found our hole!” I shouted up to the others.
Ned jumped down beside me. “Slip into that crack, guv’nor, and you might be flushed to hell.”
Indeed. Yet what if by some miracle I’d guessed right, and this was a clue to where the Templars had really hidden their Jerusalem secret?
It felt right. I backed out from under the pillar and looked about.
This was the only pillar that had fallen into the stream course. What were the chances it would have rolled precisely to where a cavern led downward? A cavern, moreover, that made its presence known only after a big thunderstorm?
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I followed the column’s trunklike length up the slope opposite from the temple. It had sheered off its base as if in an earthquake, its lower remnant jutting like a broken tooth. Intriguingly, the foundation platform seemed freer of debris than the surrounding landscape.
Someone—centuries ago, now?—had cleared this: perhaps after setting aside their coat of medieval chain mail and a white tunic with a red cross.
“Ned, help me dig. Mohammad, get more brush for torches.” He groaned. “Again, guv’nor?”
“Treasure, remember?”
Soon we’d revealed a platform of worn marble under the column base. For just a moment I could visualize what this city must have been like in its heyday, the columns forming a shady arcade on either side of the central causeway, crammed with colorful shops and tav-erns, clean water gushing down to blue fountains, and tasseled camels from Arabia, humps laden with trade goods, swaying in stately march.
There would be banners, trumpets, and gardens of fruit trees . . .
There! A pattern on the marble. Carved triangles jutted from the pillar’s square base. There were actually two layers of paving, I realized, one an inch higher and overlapping the other. It made this pattern: 2 2 0
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“Look for a symbol on this stonework,” I told my companions.
“Like a Masonic sign of compass and square.” We hunted. “Clean as a virgin’s breast,” Ned declared.
Well, the Templars were warrior-monks, not stonemasons. “No cross? No sword? No sefiroth?”
“Effendi, it’s just a broken pillar.”
“No, there’s something here. Some way down to flower and faith, like the poem said. It’s a locked door, and the key is . . . it’s a square with a square. Four corners and four corners? That’s eight. A sacred number? It’s in the Fibonacci sequence.” The other two looked at me, blank.
“But two triangles too, three and three. Six. That isn’t. Together they make fourteen, and that isn’t either. Damn! Am I entirely off course?” I felt I was trying too hard. I needed Monge, or Astiza.
“If you could overlap the triangles, effendi, it would make the Jewish star.”
Of course. Was it as simple as that? “Ned, help pull this column base. Let’s see if the triangles on this floor slide over each other.”
“What?” Once more he looked at if I were a lunatic.
“Pull! Like you did on the altar beneath Jerusalem!” Looking as if he was confirming his own damnation, the sailor joined me. By myself I don’t think I would have budged the frozen stonework, but Ned’s muscles bulged until they cracked. Mohammad helped too. Grudgingly, the base of the fallen pillar indeed began to move, the marble beginning to overlap. As the triangles crossed, they increasingly began to form the pattern of the Star of David.
“Pull, Ned, pull!”
“You’re going to bring another lightning bolt, guv’nor.” But we didn’t. The more the triangles overlapped, the smoother they slid. When they formed the star there was a click and the pillar base suddenly swung free, rotating out of the way on a single pin at its corner. The whole assembly had become weightless. As the base did so the six-sided star began to sink into the earth.