We rubbed our hands in front of the blazing fire to warm ourselves in the cold night desert air. Sparks flew up and the smell of olive wood was heady.
‘You like, Mr David?’ said Hassan with boyish glee, his long dark locks unfurled from their usual bunch and flowing, prophet-like, all around him. I smiled.
‘Is very beautiful, yes?’ He was relaxed, and this meant that we were about to hear something we had been dying to hear since we first laid eyes on a set of amateur, yet astonishing, photographs in Oxfordshire, England, the year before.
Tired from our journey, yet alive with the heady exoticism of our surroundings, we waited. In the distance tiny dots of light from Hassan’s rural community could be seen beneath the dark blue sky; the pyramidal shadow of Mount Tabor lay before us.
Hassan sat back and drew on a cigarette he had just rolled, listening to the midnight baying of his camels, a last link to the past of the Bedu.
‘God has blessed you, Hassan,’ I said, breaking a brief silence. Zaid, the farmhand, stoked the fire. Hassan smiled quietly at us, nodding his head respectfully. The flames crackled and roared, stretching high into the air, lighting up Hassan’s features, exposing the shadow of dark stubble on his angular face. He pulled up a chair next to us and sat down, and after a long rapturous drag on his joint he coughed slightly and began his story.
It was September 2005. Torrential storms had swept the area for the past week. The two shepherds had been scouring the hillsides looking for stranded animals in the flash floods. They were about to call it a day when they noticed a vapour rising from the ground where the floods had begun to subside. As they went over to investigate, it appeared to be emerging from a crack in the ground that had been washed clean of topsoil.
Puzzled, the two men began to move aside some rocks that obscured the opening. On two of the rocks they could make out some markings. One of them had a cross – ‘X’ literally marked the spot. The other seemed to bear the image of a Jewish candlestick, a menorah. The shepherds worked away at the rocks, scrabbling furiously at the craggy earth, struggling against the humidity after the storm.
The mud was cloying and made hard work for them. It was possibly a false trail. On the verge of giving up, and when they least expected it, they suddenly saw that they had made an opening – a vast hole where the rocky plug had been: a cave.
Each of them held their breath, hardly daring look inside, for fear that in the darkness there might be more threatening things. Evoking the name of Allah, they cast their fears aside and peered into the darkness.
One of them dug out his cigarette lighter, and as their eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness they began to make out forms. They picked their way down a sloping tunnel that opened out into a large cave. The flickering flame cast ominous shadows that danced on the walls. Moving in closer, they became aware of rectangular niches carved into the rock face, and they saw that these niches contained objects. Carefully, they removed from one of the niches a little metal book, sealed on all sides by metal rings and stained by long years of lime-scale build-up and other detritus. Other niches were similarly furnished with little lead artefacts. They gathered a few of the objects to take with them, hoping that God would not curse them for disturbing what appeared to be a tomb.