“Sorry, Carrie. I just...”
“I know. But you’ve got to believe, Dan. There’s truth in that scroll.” She pointed at the tav rock looming before them. “Look. We’re not imagining that. It’s there.”
Dan wanted to say, Yes, but if you want to perpetrate a hoax, you salt the lies with neutral truths, and the most easily verifiable neutral truths are simple geological formations. But he held his tongue. This was Carrie’s show.
“What are we waiting for?” she said
Dan shrugged and got back in behind the wheel. The incline ahead was extra steep so he shifted into super low.
“Can you believe it?” Carrie said, bubbling with excitement as they started the final climb. “We’re traveling the same route as Saint James and the members of the Jerusalem Church when they carried Mary’s body here.”
“No, Carrie,” he said softly. “I can’t believe it. I want to believe it. I’d give almost anything to have it be true. But I can’t believe it.”
She smiled that smile. “You will, Danny, me boy-o. Before the day is out, you will.”
‡
The closer they got to the rock, the less and less it resembled a tav...and the more formidable it looked. Fifty feet high at the very least, with sheer walls that would have challenged an experienced rock climber even if they went straight up; but the outward bulge and the sharp overhang at the crest made ascent all but impossible.
As they rounded the outcropping, Dan realized they’d entered the mouth of a canyon. The deep passage narrowed and curved off to the left about a quarter of a mile north. He stopped the Explorer in the middle of the dry wadi running along the eastern wall. Cooler here. The canyon floor had been resting in the shadow of its western wall for a while. To his left he spotted a cluster of stunted trees.
“Aren’t those fig trees?” Carrie said.
“Not sure. Could be. Whatever they are, they don’t look too healthy.”
“They look old. Old fig trees... didn’t the scroll writer said he was subsisting on locusts, honey, and wild figs?”
“Yeah, but those trees don’t look wild. Looks like somebody planted them there.”
“Exactly!” Carrie said, grinning.
Dan had to admit—to himself only—that she had a point. It looked as if someone had moved a bunch of wild fig trees to this spot and started a makeshift grove...out here...in the middle of nowhere.
But that only meant the forger of the scroll had to have been here in order to describe it; it didn’t mean St. James had been here, or that the Virgin Mary was hidden away atop the tav rock.
But a big question still remained: Who had planted those fig trees?
He turned to Carrie but her seat was empty. She was walking across the wadi toward the tav rock. Dan turned off the motor and ran around to catch up to her.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Looking for a way up.” She was studying the cliff face as she walked. “The scroll says there’s a path.”
Dan scanned the steep wall looming before them.
“Good luck.”
“Well, this isn’t nearly as smooth as the far side. There could be a way up. There must be. We simply have to find it.”
Dan saw countless jagged cracks and mini-ledges protruding randomly from the surface, but nothing that even vaguely resembled a path. This looked hopeless, but the scroll had been accurate on so many other points already, there just might be a path to the top.
He veered off to the left.
“Giving up so soon?” Carrie said.
“If there is a path,” he said, “you won’t spot it from straight on. It’ll only be visible from a sharp angle. You didn’t spot one as we rounded the front of the cliff, so let’s see what things look like from the back end.”
She nodded, smiling. “Smart. I knew I loved you for some reason.”
Dan figured he’d done enough nay-saying. The only way to get this over with was to find a path to the top—if one existed—and convince Carrie once and for all that there was no cave up there and that the Virgin Mary was not lying on a bier inside waiting to be discovered. Then maybe they could get their lives back to normal—that is, as normal as life could be for a priest and a nun who were lovers.
He reached the northern end of the outcropping and wound his way through the brush clustered around its base. When he was within arms reach of the base itself, he looked south along the cliff wall.
“I’ll be damned...”
Carrie hurried to his side. “What? Did you find it? Is it there?”
He guided her in front of him and pointed ahead. Starting a dozen feet behind them and running up the face of the cliff at a thirty-degree angle was a narrow, broken, jagged ledge. It averaged only two feet or so in width.
Carrie whirled and hugged him. “That’s it! You found it! See? All you need is a little faith!” She grabbed his hand and began dragging him from the brush. “Let’s go!”
He followed her at a walk as she ran back to where the ledge slanted into the floor of the canyon floor. By the time he reached it she was already on her way, scrabbling upward along the narrow shelf like a lithe, graceful cat.
“Slow down, Carrie.”
“Speed up, slowpoke!” she laughed.
She’s going to kill herself, he thought as he began his own upward course along the ledge. He glanced down at the jagged rubble on the hard floor of the wadi below and quickly pulled his gaze away. Maybe we’re both going to get killed.
He wasn’t good with heights—not phobic about them, but not the least bit fond of them. He concentrated on staying on the ledge. Shale, sand, and gravel littered the narrow, uneven surface before him, tilting toward the cliff wall for half a dozen feet or so, then a crack or a narrow gap, or a step up or down, then it continued upward, now sloping away from the wall. These away sections were the worse. Dan’s sneakers tended to slip on the sand and he had visions of himself sliding off into—
“Dan!”
A high-pitched squeal of terror from up ahead. He looked up and saw Carrie down on one knee, her right leg dangling over the edge, her fingers clawing at the cliff wall for purchase. She’d climbed back into the sunlight and it looked as if her sharp-edged shadow was trying to push her off.
Dear God!
“Carrie! Hang on!”
He hurried toward her as quickly as he dared but she was back on the ledge and on her feet again by the time he reached her.
“What happened?”
Pale, panting, she leaned against the cliff wall, hugging it. “I slipped, but I’m okay.”
Suddenly he was angry. His heart was pounding, his hands were trembling...
“You almost killed yourself, dammit!”
“Sorry,” she said softly. “That wasn’t my intention, I assure you.”
“Just slow down, will you? I don’t want to lose you.”
That smile. “That’s nice to hear.”
“Here. Let me slide past you and I’ll lead the way.”
“Not a chance. I’ll take my time from here on up.” She held up two fingers. “Promise.”
Carrie kept her word, taking it slow, watching her footing, with Dan close behind. They reached the sunlit summit without another mishap. He glanced around—no one else here, and no place to hide.
“Oh, Lord,” Carrie said, wandering across the top of the tav toward the far edge. “Look at this!”
Dan caught up to her and put an arm around her shoulders, as much from a need to touch her as to stop her from getting too close to the edge. The sun cooked their backs while the desert wind dried the sweat from the climb, and before them stretched the eastern expanse of the Midbar Yehuda, all hills and mounds and shadowed crags, looking like a rumpled yellow-brown blanket after a night of passion, sloping down to where a sliver of the Dead Sea was visible, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.