8

An hour? In your dreams, Mr. Hall, she thought, as she watched him set out across the parking lots for the base of the mountain. The soldiers made some funny comments as they watched him go. What a silly, silly man, she mused. Well, maybe not silly, but certainly impulsive. It must be an American trait. She had caught his surprise when she told him that it was a forty-degree slope, so he must know enough about mountaineering to appreciate the challenge, and yet, almost like a teenaged boy showing off, he had plunged ahead. But showing off for whom, Yehudit? Certainly not you. You’ve been about as cold a fish as could come out of the sea. Nothing new there. Since Dov had died, she had gone cold inside and out.

She thought back to her childhood days in an Ahuza neighborhood on Mount Carmel above Haifa as an only child. Her father’s parents, both wealthy medical doctors, had made aliyah from Europe before World War II, and her father taught European history at the exclusive Reali School. Judith had grown up as something of a solitary person, shy in adolescence from being too tall, eternally awkward, nearsighted, and uncommonly bright in school, characteristics that guaranteed a certain degree of ostracism by her more boisterous classmates.

Her mother had died of breast cancer when Judith was twelve, devastating both Judith and her father, who proceeded to cocoon himself from human relationships until he died seven years later. Judith had later realized that her father had been simply marking time for those seven years until he could join his wife, but at the time, his self-imposed isolation left her alone at a terribly vulnerable phase of her life.

With both parents effectively gone, she had thrown herself into academic achievement, excelling in high school and scoring a thirty-four out of thirty-five on the matriculation exams. Upon completion of her army service, she had gone first to Hebrew University, and then to Cambridge University in England to study with a Scrolls scholar. Like many Israelis, she had met her future husband, Dov Ressner, in the army. It turned out that Dov was something of a clone to Judith in terms of personality. He was a physics and mathematics major, extremely shy, nearsighted as she was, devoted to his academic career, and entirely inexperienced in the field of human relations, especially if they involved young ladies. It had taken a while, first because Judith had money and Dov did not, which caused a certain amount of awkwardness while she figured out how to get around his stubborn pride. Dov had lost his mother and father in an automobile accident, and the growing recognition that he and Judith had shared similar childhood experiences, combined with their mutual passion for academic achievement, blossomed into a marvelous year of catching up across the full spectrum of postponed adolescent love.

Sitting now in the dusty restaurant of the Masada tourist center, her eyes open but unseeing behind her glasses, she could still conjure up the images of the first awkward, tentative, and ultimately wonderful time they had made love, in the back of his cousin’s ancient Volkswagen van just like a couple of American hippies. That they were going to be married was almost a given, with the only obstacle being the requirement for him to study abroad in France for two years. Upon return from Europe, he completed his graduate studies at the Weizmann Institute and later took a job at the government research facilities down at Dimona. They got married as soon as she finished her own graduate degree in ancient languages.

Their time together, even once married, had been all too short. Because his work involved shift hours that often went through the night, he lived in a bunkroom at the site during the week. She had plunged directly back into graduate work, aiming now at a full Ph.D. in archaeology. Deferring as ever to the singular goals of academic achievement, they had put off having children until she completed her Ph.D., which ended up taking four years because of all the summer site work. Their marriage worked, although she had begun to appreciate, toward the end of her graduate program, that the enforced separation might have been shielding both of them from some of the more normal stresses and strains of marriage. Then Dov had begun to change, not so much in his personality but in his attitude about the work at Dimona. It was no secret between most of the married couples connected with Dimona what the site was really all about, although Dov never once told her anything that could be considered a violation of security. He became increasingly frustrated the year before he died, and Judith sensed that he was having trouble sustaining his passion for the pure science in the face of the product it was serving. It was a topic he avoided, however, and because it caused him to be more rather than less affectionate in his love for her, she had decided not to rock that particular boat, even after he became secretly, and then not so secretly, involved with the LaBaG faction.

Then the terrible night five years ago, when his laboratory supervisor, gray-faced and tongue-tied, along with the cadaverous Colonel Skuratov, had appeared at the apartment, hats in hand, a military driver standing nervously down in the lobby, to announce that Dov Ressner was dead. A sudden catastrophe at Dimona, mumbled words about an accident, a matter of urgent security according to Skuratov, and, worst of all, the news that he had been already interred. Judith had been raised in a mildly religious family, casual in the sense that they respected the tenets of the Jewish faith but were not overly zealous in observing every aspect of it. Besides, quick burials were a fact of life in the Middle East. Still, it had accentuated her sense of loss and grief never to see him again, even in death, or to be able to go to the place where he was buried. The scientist had told her as gently as he could that in all probability no humans could ever go near that place. Just like the stone-cold empty place in her heart, which no man would ever get near again.

“I say, miss, are you quite all right?” Judith looked up, her eyes blinking as she came back to the tourist center. The tourists had begun to arrive, and an elderly British gentleman was standing next to her table, looking at her with concern. Without knowing it, she had removed her glasses, and there were tears in her eyes.

“Yes, thank you,” she said hastily, blinking her eyes rapidly. “I was—I was far away, that’s all. Yes, I’m quite all right.”

He nodded, apologized for intruding, and sat back down at his table. She wiped her eyes, put the glasses back on, and scanned the sunlit side of the mountain, finally spotting the dogged American chugging his way up the Serpent Path, something that even dear Dov, outdoors enthusiast that he was, would probably never have tried. She stood up, shook the sorrowful cobwebs out of her mind, and decided to be nice to the dummy on the hill. He was harmless.

*   *   *

The climb took closer to two hours than one. It had been technically simple but extremely demanding because of the punishing heat and the nature of the trail itself. David had seen no serpents, remembering halfway up that the Serpent Path was called that because of the way it snaked back and forth across the face of the ancient scree. The trail itself was no more than a footpath, all loose dirt, shale, stone rubble, and sand. It was not so much treacherous as fatiguing, since every step demanded he first find a secure foothold before the other foot could be planted. The view out across the Dead Sea and into distant Jordan was stupendous the higher up he went, and his appreciation for the fortress’s natural defenses improved as he climbed closer to the casemate walls guarding the rim. He could not imagine anyone trying to come up this slope in the face of archers, or even a crowd of women with a good supply of big rocks. Every time he looked up at the walls above he had to plant the stick behind him to overcome the sensation that he would topple over backward and go tumbling down the slope in a cloud of sand and dust, pursued no doubt by a sand-slide of scorpions.

He had not bothered with the rucksack, choosing to stick the plastic bottle of water in a pocket. After twenty minutes on the slope, he had shucked his shirt, tying it around his waist, and built up a pretty good sweat by the time the cable car rumbled overhead with its first load of tourists. He had heard and then watched the initial squadron of tour buses come down the coast road from the cities. He wondered if Judith would take the first run up the mountain or watch from her vantage point in the air-conditioned restaurant until she saw him getting close to the top. He was breathing strenuously because of the heat but felt fine otherwise except for a stinging in his calf muscles.

Judith Ressner, he thought. A strange woman. His first impression of her remained intact: physically very attractive, with that exotic sabra face and those mile-long legs. Smart, but distant. No, more like preoccupied. Or maybe just plain sad. Ellerstein had said that she had not recovered from the loss of her husband, the physicist. As a “nuke” himself, he wondered briefly if her husband had worked directly in the not so secret Israeli nuclear weapons program. Right now, though, he needed to focus on the mission here, and not get involved with The Ressner. She was actually doing him a favor, because he needed that distance. He especially did not need to aggravate the woman. So keep your trap shut, he reminded himself. Maybe she’ll stay down at the tourist center.

As it turned out, however, she was waiting for him as he climbed wearily through the stone gates at the top of the Serpent Path. He was pretty well soaked with sweat and puffing when he climbed up the last one hundred feet, which were much steeper than the rest of the path due to the erosion over twenty centuries. He walked unsteadily up the rounded stone steps that led inside the casemate walls, stopped briefly in the cool shadows of the guards’ chamber to regain his wind, and then emerged into the bright sunlight of the fortress enclosure. Judith was sitting on a low stone wall, facing the guards’ chamber and reading a book. She had her mirrored sunglasses on again but now had changed from jeans to abbreviated khaki shorts, and David took a moment to admire the scenery. She looked up at last.

“Welcome to Metsadá, Mr. Hall. Did you enjoy your climb?”

“I don’t know if I’d say I enjoyed it, but I certainly have a better appreciation of the defensive strength of this place.”

“Well, that’s why it wasn’t the side the Romans attacked, of course. I brought you some water in case you might have run out.”

David’s single bottle of water had run out a third of the way up the mountain, and he reached for the cool plastic bottle gratefully. Their fingertips touched for an instant.

“Thank you very much,” he said, drinking half the bottle in one gulp. “The climb would be a whole lot easier without that sun.”

“The Bedouin call it the Hammer of Allah; now you know why. During the siege, all of the traffic up and down that path was at night.”

A trio of very blond and pretty girls came by, one of them giving his sweaty torso a frankly sexual appraisal. He decided to put his shirt back on. Judith turned and shot them a pointed look, and they strolled away, giggling in what sounded like a Scandinavian language. He sat down a few feet away from her in deference to his aromatic condition and looked around. The top of the mountain looked to be about three football fields long and about one and a half wide, in the rough shape of a large, broad spear point, just as all the books described. The sharp end of the spear pointed north, up the Dead Sea, and, like a spear point, the offset spine of the mountaintop was ridged slightly higher than the surrounding edges. Sitting near the eastern gate, he looked up a gently rising stone slope to a collection of ruined buildings that appeared to be about eighty yards away near the western rim. To his right, the ground also sloped upward toward a much larger collection of ruins situated behind the remains of a smooth fifteen-foot wall.

All around the rim were the remains of casemate walls, which consisted of two parallel fortification walls spaced about eight feet apart and which originally had been covered by a ceiling to allow defenders to get anywhere around the rim without being exposed to enemy fire. The walls were much reduced now, and the ceilings were, for the most part, long gone. The open ground space between the ruined clusters of masonry was hard-packed sandy dirt or bare stone, reminding him of the flinty surface of the Acropolis in Athens. The rubble of buildings and fortifications gleamed bone white in the glare of the late morning sun. The eastern gate he had come through was just north of the middle of the plateau, and the cable-car landing platform was close by. Small knots of tourists were scattered here and there across the plateau. One group had a guide who was giving his tour in French. His voice carried crisply across the stones.

“The main palace-villa complex is on the north end,” Judith said. “I assume you know something about the layout, and that there are several periods of history represented by the various buildings.”

“Yes, I’ve studied it a bit. As I understand it, the mountain was probably first fortified during the Hasmonean period, say 167 to about 37 B.C. Then came the Herodian period, from 37 to 4 B.C., which is when the bulk of all this was built up as a summer palace and potential refuge for the king. Then Judaea became a Roman province, and there was a Roman garrison up here until a band of Zealots took the place away from them around the beginning of the Jewish revolt, in either A.D. 66 or 67. The Romans took it back in 73 or 74, left a garrison here for about fifty years after that, and then later there was a Byzantine monastery up here until the late 400s or so, after which it fell into complete ruin. In brief.”

“In brief, that’s pretty good,” she said. She seemed somewhat friendlier since he had made his climb up the Serpent Path. Perhaps her earlier frostiness was some kind of initiation. Be careful, he told himself—don’t show off. She’ll become suspicious if you can name every building up here, which he could.

“If you would like, and if you’re ready to walk again, I can give you a tour of the major ruins. Unless, of course, you would rather go off on your own.”

“No, I’d appreciate a tour. I know that the complex up there is the storeroom for the northern palace, and that one is the so-called western palace, and that the siege ramp should be right behind those buildings up there, but beyond that—”

“Very well. If you are ready, then…”

“Just raring to go, Miss Ressner,” he said, “but let me check with hobble central.” In fact, he could barely make his legs function for the first twenty feet, a fact of which she seemed to be aware based on the slow pace of their walk. Big mistake, he thought, that sitting down for even a few minutes. He was in good physical shape, but a twelve-hundred-foot climb up a forty-degree slope under the fierce Judaean sun was still a major expenditure of muscle power. He would definitely not volunteer for any walk down the damn hill.

He shifted mental gears and began to focus on his real reason for being here. He took note of the slope of the slate-hard ground as they walked up toward the northern end of the fortress, upon which stood the curtain wall, and behind that, the remains of Herod’s elaborate northern palace complex. If Adrian’s theory was correct, what he was looking for would lie behind them, in the vicinity of that eastern gate, because that was the point toward which any surface rainwater would run down whenever it chanced to rain on the mountain.

The view beyond the reduced casemate walls was stupendous. They could see for at least twenty miles in every direction except west, where the bare Judaean hills were silhouetted against glare-drenched metallic sky. They entered the northern palace ruins through a narrow gate cut through reconstructed man-high stone walls. She explained that the maze of large rooms immediately in front of them had been storerooms for the palace-villa complex, containing enough grain, oil, and wine for several years’ survival on the mountain. The rooms immediately beyond the storeroom complex were the public rooms of the palace—an audience chamber, offices for officials, and a living area for palace functionaries. David knew from his studies that the northern palace complex occupied nearly one hundred thousand square feet.

Beyond the ruins of the main storehouse buildings they came out onto a courtyard area that provided the most spectacular view from the mountain. Standing in the courtyard was like standing in the bows of a very large ship. On either side of this northern point of the mountain, the cliffs dropped away over a thousand vertical feet to the desert floor. At the very point of the bow was a low stone wall, over which could be seen the remains of the ornately terraced palaces below, accessible by stone stairways cut into the living rock on the left-hand side. Here King Herod had carved two notches into the descending spine of the mountain and erected what looked like a cascade of gardens, baths, open terraces, and porticoes that dropped down a few hundred feet from the summit plateau. The view from the terraces would have been magnificent and utterly private, offering cool breezes to ward off the oppressive desert heat rising from the bare, baking rocks far below.

“Can we go down there?” David asked after a few minutes of staring at the view.

“Not today,” she replied, looking around as if to see if some of the other people standing at the wall were eavesdropping. “I must make arrangements to get through these gates. The villa terraces are kept locked away from the general public—the steps down are not safe, and there are some rare frescoes and mosaics down there we wish to preserve. Tomorrow perhaps.”

“The main cisterns are down there to the left, under the terraces, aren’t they? I seem to remember reading about how Herod’s engineers made the water flow uphill.”

She smiled behind the mirrored sunglasses. “An illusion. Not exactly uphill, either. We will go down the siege ramp, and I will show you how they diverted water from Wadi Metsadá into the cisterns.”

“One of the historians said they had three years’ supply of water up here; the cisterns must be enormous.”

“That they are. The largest of the three main cisterns can hold one hundred forty thousand cubic meters of water. They are just great big holes in the rock now, of course. Like cavities in a tooth. There are more, smaller cisterns along the rim. Mostly on the south and eastern side. One big one. Again, all empty holes in the rock.”

“Yes, of course. It looks like there’s been a good deal of reconstruction done up here,” he said, changing the subject. The cisterns were vital to his objective, but he must not attract her attention to them with too many questions. Especially since he already knew all the facts she was quietly describing. Be impressed, he said to himself. Drop some oohs and ahhs.

They spent the next two hours walking through the remains of the western palace, which the archaeologists thought might have predated the more luxurious northern palace. The palaces had been reconstructed only up to the point of piling the wall rocks back up to the height of five or six feet, enough to show the overall scope. Of roofs, audience rooms, and Roman-style baths there were only outlines. In the intense white sunlight, the stones gleamed with age, and David felt like he was walking through the bones of some enormous ossified museum. Judith pointed out the outlines of the Byzantine-era church and the small monastery and noted that the time sequences had a lot to do with the scale of the ruins. They walked back over to the parallel lines of the casemate walls, which on the western rim were barely two to three feet high. They looked down into the deep ravine four hundred feet below the western rim, where they could see the sloping ramp of sand and stone the Romans had used to finally defeat the fortress’s natural defenses. The ramp had eroded over the intervening span of nearly two thousand years, but the core was still there, pointed precisely up from the other side of the ravine at a forty-five-degree angle, like some enormous stake still stuck in the heart of the Jews’ final bastion.

“Amazing, it’s still here, after all these years.”

“Large things endure in the Judaean desert,” she observed. “The ruins up here were jumbled, but everything described by Josephus in the first century was basically still here when Yadin came digging.”

“What do you mean jumbled? By the battle?”

“Not exactly. By time and occupation. Herod used the mountain until 4 B.C. His son Antipater used it into the Roman provincial days. Then it fell into disuse, with only a small Roman garrison stationed up here, perhaps a demicohort. They occupied only a part of the buildings, and probably took materials from other parts to furnish the place as they wanted it. When the Kanna’im took it from them in A.D. 66, they did the same thing: rearranged buildings, closed off various parts of the palaces to make the mountain more defensible, and strengthened the casemate walls. Once the siege began, the Romans used artillery, you know, ballistae?”

“Yes, I’ve studied their weaponry. Mobile catapults throwing big round rocks, two-, three-hundred-pounders, against defensive masonry. Pretty damned effective.”

“It wasn’t effective here until they built the siege ramp and brought a siege tower up within range of the top. Then it must have been devastating. Yadin found several dozen ballistae stones embedded throughout the ruins. Once the Romans could get the catapults and a battering ram within range, it was the beginning of the end.”

“Not quite the end, though, right? The Zealots tore down the big wooden beams from the palace structure and built a bulwark of sand and wooden beams on the outside of the walls, which cushioned the impact of the ram.”

“Very good. You have done your research. Then, in the final attack, the Romans came up the ramp with Greek fire and set the wooden beams afire.”

“Yeah, but the wind changed halfway through the attack, and the fire blew back onto the siege tower, setting it afire, driving the Romans off.”

“And—?“

“And then when nightfall came, the wind changed again, this time driving the fire back into the walls, consuming the beams. That’s when the defenders knew.”

“Yes. Without the casemate walls, the Tenth Legion would swarm over the rim at dawn and overwhelm them by sheer numbers. There were nine hundred and sixty defenders, according to Josephus, but probably more than half of that number were women and children. We estimate the Romans had between three and five thousand. Look there, and you can see the main Roman camp.”

David could see clearly the outlines of the Roman headquarters camp, a precise military square drawn on the plateau across the western ravine, almost within a long arrow shot of where he stood. He knew there were other camps surrounding the mountain, and that the Romans had connected all the camps with a circumvallation to seal their objective area. Oblivious to the small knots of tourists climbing through the rocks and ruins, they both stood in silence on the ruined casemate wall, looking down into the deep ravine, thinking their own thoughts about that final night and what these amazing people had done. Finally Judith glanced at her watch.

“It’s going on two o’clock,” she said. “We should go down to the tourist center now and have a meal before it closes. I need to talk to the security people before they go home, about tomorrow.”

“Great idea.” David realized suddenly he was very hungry. He had been sufficiently absorbed by the fortress and its sanguinary history to have been paying no attention to the time. “Join me in a stroll back down the Serpent Path?” he quipped.

“No way, Mr. Hall,” she said, but there was a much friendlier note in the “mister” term.

The ride down in the cable car gave them another stunning view of the eastern wall of the mountain, where David could see the dusty, tortuous footpath he had climbed that morning. It was now partly in shadow as the sun dipped toward the Mediterranean beyond the Judaean hills. The ramp, he thought. The ramp will have to be my route. Tomorrow I have to get her to let me hike back down to the center from behind the fortress. Go down the siege ramp and walk back around the southwestern corner of the mountain to the visitors center. I have to know how long that takes.

The cable car groaned and clanked as it settled into its lattice structure above the visitors center. The parking lot was about half full of tour buses and cars, and there were people still waiting to go up.

They went back to the hostel briefly to clean up and made it into the restaurant by two thirty. The food was a mixture of Arabic and Israeli fare. David had what Judith had, willing to eat a whole goat by that point, and then finding out that he was doing so. Judith reminded him to stock up on some fruit, bread, and more water when the waiter announced that the place was closing for cleanup. By that time the tourists had thinned considerably, and the security guards in the center were getting a head count over the radio from their counterparts up on the mountain.

“How do they make sure everyone’s off the mountain?” David asked.

“There is a guard in the cable car. He tells the tourists that the last cable car leaves at five; anyone not down by then has to walk down the Serpent Path with the guards.”

“That ought to do it. So the guards actually walk down after the last cable car?’

“Yes, they do. It’s a fitness requirement, and there might be someone stranded on the path who is too tired to continue. As you can see, the path is in shadow by late afternoon, so the observation point can’t see it. Down is actually harder than going up, I’m told.”

David nodded absently and then looked around to find that observation point. After a few minutes, he realized that it must be on top of the cable-car landing. Casually, he looked. There was a tiny room up there, more like a pillbox, with slotted windows that had a panoramic view of the mountain. He wanted to ask if it was manned at night, but that would have been pushing it. He thought he saw a spotting scope sticking out of one of the slots. He still could not figure out where the security people were based. There must be an army camp nearby. Perhaps up the road at Ein Gedi; he had seen army vehicles there, but in Israel there were army vehicles everywhere. He made a show of looking at his watch.

“I think I’m going to call it a day,” he said, stretching. “My legs are informing me that there’s a wheelchair in my future if I don’t lie down pretty soon, and I have some notes I want to get down on paper. Eight o’clock tomorrow okay with you?”

“That will be fine. There is usually someone here by then so you can get a coffee.”

“Great. Well. Good evening, then. Thanks for the tour.”

“Yes, Mr. Hall. Good evening.”

He walked back through the tourist center lobby to the hallway leading to the hostel rooms before remembering to get some water and snack food. When he had acquired his supplies, he saw that she was still sitting in the restaurant, pensively now, looking out the big picture windows.