Angela shook her head.
‘You’re mad,’ she said. ‘Quite, quite mad.’
‘Very possibly,’ Bronson said agreeably, ‘but sometimes a touch of insanity — or at least the willingness to take a chance — is exactly what’s needed.’
‘In my opinion, breaking into the chambers underneath the Temple Mount would amount to quite a bit more than taking a chance,’ Angela replied. ‘On the other hand, I don’t have any problem whatsoever in taking one of the Kotel tunnel tours so we can at least see what we’re up against.’
Bronson nodded. He knew Angela as well as any man knows the woman with whom he has spent the better part of his life, and he had been quite certain that, once she had decided they were on the trail of something of major historic importance, she wouldn’t be prepared to let a minor inconvenience like a locked and barred gate, or even wandering platoons of armed soldiers, deflect her from her course. They had spent time in Jerusalem before, on an equally perilous quest, and had come through that unscathed, and Bronson was confident that they could do the same this time. Or at least, they would have a damned good try.
‘That also sounds like a plan,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Let’s go right now. We don’t really have any time to lose.’
‘But we can’t just turn up,’ Angela reminded him. ‘We’ll have to pre-book a tunnel tour.’
At the back of the desk in the hotel room was a small wooden box containing a number of printed leaflets advertising various attractions, including Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall Tunnels. She picked up one of the tunnel tour leaflets and dialled the number.
‘Good,’ she said, replacing the phone in the cradle. ‘There’s an English-language tour in just over an hour, and there’s enough space on it for the two of us to join in. Let’s go.’
It wasn’t that far from the hotel to the Kotel Plaza, and they made it with over half an hour to spare.
‘The Wailing Wall,’ Angela said, as they stopped as if by common accord and stared in awe across the open space to the vertical wall that dominated the area.
They looked at the mass of people gathered at the foot of the wall, some obviously praying, their heads moving back and forth somewhat in the manner of chickens feeding, while others busily forced scraps of what looked like cloth or paper into the spaces between the massive old stones.
‘Remind me why it’s called that?’ Bronson asked.
‘The root cause of the name goes back nearly two millennia,’ Angela explained. ‘In AD 70 the Romans destroyed what was known as the Second Temple and virtually the entire Jewish population was forced to leave the city.’
‘Hang on. I know quite a lot about the mediaeval history of this area, but not too much about the earlier stuff. Why was it called the Second Temple?’
Angela shook her head. ‘It was a lot more than a name,’ she replied, and glanced at her watch. She pointed at a nearby café with three or four vacant tables outside. ‘We’ve got a few minutes before the tour starts. Buy me a coffee to sustain me, and I’ll give you the potted history.’
They sat down at one of the tables. Bronson ordered two coffees and then looked expectantly at Angela.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘according to the history of early Judaism, the Ark of the Covenant was moved from one sanctuary to another over the years, until King David captured Jerusalem, and moved the Ark permanently to the city. The idea was to fuse three separate things — the Judaic monarchy, the Ark and the holy city itself — into a single entity that the various tribes of Israel could regard as the centre, something that would be a unifying force. King David chose what was then known as Mount Moriah, now the Temple Mount — the place where legend stated that Abraham had erected the altar on which he intended to sacrifice his son Isaac — as the location for the temple that would house it. David never lived to see the temple finished, but it was completed during the reign of his son Solomon, and finished — if my memory serves me correctly — in 957 BC.’
‘So that was the First Temple,’ Bronson said.
‘Exactly. It acted as a sanctuary, the final resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, and as a place of worship for the entire people. Oddly enough, the building wasn’t that big, but it had a huge courtyard in which thousands of people could stand. The temple contained five altars and three rooms, and the most important of those was the Holy of Holies where the Ark was kept, a room that only the high priest could enter and only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
‘The First Temple stood for a little under half a millennium, but in about 600 BC the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar sacked the place and removed all of the temple treasures, very possibly including the Ark of the Covenant, though of course the ultimate fate of that relic has never been established. According to the Bible, it was supposed to be made of acacia wood that was then covered in gold leaf, so there’s a possibility that it may simply have rotted away over the centuries. There have been all sorts of claims about where it ended up, but the truth is that nobody knows for sure. Anyway, Nebuchadnezzar came back about fifteen years later and completely destroyed the building. He also captured much of the Jewish population and hauled them off to Babylonia as slaves. Less than a hundred years later, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and the descendants of those Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, where they rebuilt the temple. This was the Second Temple, erected on the spot where the First Temple had stood, but a significantly smaller structure than the original.’
She paused for a moment as the unsmiling waiter delivered two small cups of coffee and a surprisingly large bill.
‘Interestingly,’ she went on, taking a cautious sip, ‘the Second Temple also lasted for about half a millennium. It had been desecrated but it was still standing when Herod the Great, the King of Judaea, came to power in 37 BC, and he ordered the temple to be rebuilt, a process that began in 20 BC and took almost half a century.’
‘So Herod wasn’t entirely bad news,’ Bronson suggested.
‘Nobody is entirely bad news,’ Angela commented drily. ‘It was claimed that even Mussolini made the trains run on time, though of course he didn’t. But you’re right: Herod wasn’t all bad. It was a major rebuilding programme. They started off by doubling the size of the Temple Mount, then raised and enlarged the Temple, facing it with stone, and built a number of additional chambers and facilities, and the new building again became the centre of Jewish religious life in the city. What happened next, really, was the fault of the Jews, because in AD 66 they rebelled against Roman rule, which was at least understandable as it was a rebellion against an occupying power. The Jewish Revolt was put down by the Romans with massive bloodshed and ended in AD 73 when the fortress of Masada finally fell, the defenders committing mass suicide rather than submit to Roman rule. As a part of the campaign, in AD 70, the Romans completely destroyed the temple, which is where I started the story.
‘And then the Romans deported most of the surviving Jews. They were forbidden to return to Jerusalem until the early Byzantine period, about three hundred years later, and even then they were only allowed to visit the city on the anniversary of the destruction of the temple. The only bit of the building that was left — and in fact it wasn’t actually a part of the temple at all, merely one of the supporting walls — is what we’re looking at now, the Western Wall. The Jews who visited realized that the temple had gone for ever, and so they began praying at the closest point to the original structure, and they howled and lamented their loss, hence the Wailing Wall.’