FORTY

Hart eased himself up and over the stone. Elwand slid the slack through his hands. To Hart’s eyes, there appeared to be an awful lot of slack.

Elwand braced his legs against the rock face and nodded to Hart.

‘Are you sure?’ said Hart.

Elwand nodded. ‘Big advantage for you. If you fall, I don’t fit through hole. I stick. You hang.’

‘But the rope could slide out through your hands.’

‘Might do. Might not. This up to God.’

‘Great.’ Hart levered himself steadily backwards until he was ready to take up the abseiling position. He could feel his sphincter tightening and his throat clenching. He wanted to mewl like a baby. ‘Can you feel me? The weight of me?’

‘I have your weight. Now you start. I cannot keep hold too long.’

Hart began to abseil. At first he could hear the rope sliding through Elwand’s gloves. Later all he could hear was his own attenuated breathing echoing back from the circle of the rocks surrounding him and the slap of his desert boots against the sides of the chimney.

Each jump bought him maybe five feet. At first, he didn’t dare look down. Didn’t dare give himself any perspective on his situation. He took on the role of the ostrich – or of a baby playing hide-and-seek under the covers of a bed. He knew what was happening, but didn’t dare acknowledge it. If the rope broke, or if Elwand’s hands slipped, he’d better hope he died outright. Because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

Five minutes into his endless swinging, he stopped for a rest. He knew he daren’t take too long, because Elwand was carrying the full weight of his body. For the first time Hart really looked around himself. The light was better now, and he could make out much of the detail of the rock surrounding him. There were fissures, yes, but they were interspersed on the way down with long flat slabs which only a man equipped with pitons and a hammer could hope to conquer. The truth was that once you were down there, in Solomon’s Prison, you were down there for good, unless someone chose to pull you back up again. Hart had never seen anything like the place. It was terrible.

He recommenced the abseiling motion, and very soon he could see the ground approaching. The base of the extinct volcano measured perhaps fifty yards across. In other words the whole thing was in the form of an inverted cone – wider at the top than at the bottom. Thirty feet from the ground a broad lip shot out – an overhang really – that would have made it doubly impossible for prisoners to escape. The prison, although entirely natural and not man-made, was supremely fit for purpose. A genius could not have designed it better. An evil genius.

The equation was a simple one. You drop a man down here and you begin to destroy him psychologically. Inevitably, during his first day, when he knows he is at the height of his strength, he strives to get out. Finds he can’t. Then, as each day passes, he becomes weaker and there is less chance that he will be able to summon the strength of will or of body to climb. It was the most perfect torture imaginable. It worked on every level. The surroundings were so extreme that there was no room for hope. As Hart felt his feet strike hard ground, he wondered how long any prisoner would have been able to withstand the horror or the loneliness. The uncertainty of wondering whether he would be fed or given drink. The uncertainty of everything.

He untied the rope from around his waist and gave it three firm yanks. The rope snaked back towards the surface. Hart switched on the torch. He soon decided, though, that he ought to conserve the batteries in case of emergency, and trust to his eyes in the burgeoning daylight. The sky seemed awfully bright up above him, but it was still very dark indeed down where he was. The contrast sent a chill directly into his soul.

He began by making a tour round the periphery of his temporary prison, hoping against hope that there might be some artificial shelter under the lee of the overhang. But there was none. The only thing breaking the flatness of the base area was a large rock positioned a little off-centre, with a mass of smaller rocks around it. It didn’t take Hart long to work out that the rock matched nothing else that he could see, either geologically or topographically. The only possible reason, then, for its presence, was that it had been toppled down from the lip of the volcano for some obscure purpose. Maybe to frighten the inmates?

He looked up again. Was that Elwand’s arm he could see briefly against the skyline? As he peered upwards, trying to discern exactly what he had seen, the truth about the single rock came home to him.

It had been sent down against the rains. The motive behind it had to be purely diabolical. Water would naturally stream into the vent during a great storm, and there would be little or no drainage to let it out again – a fact attested to by the paucity of vegetation. So the place would slowly fill up like an old-fashioned wide-mouthed milk bottle under a steadily dripping tap. When the water got too high, the only way for anyone to survive would be to clamber onto the rock. Send too many prisoners down here, and it would be man against man. An interested observer, high up on the lip and anchored by a rope, say, could entertain himself for hours watching his enemies fighting it out amongst themselves for who would be king of the rock castle when the waters finally overtopped a man’s head. Later, when the waters did finally subside, the losers in the struggle would be left as mute witnesses, slowly rotting and poisoning the victors’ air. Hart shook his head. The place was demoniacal.

He found his first bones fifteen minutes into his search, tight up against the side of the chimney, under the overhang. After that he found nothing but bones. One entire corner was rich with them. They lay scattered amongst the rocks and lichen like the remains of a great battle people had long ago forgotten the name of.

At first he avoided them with his feet as a mark of respect, but, later that day, when he had turned nothing up – no possible hiding place for the Copper Scroll – he found himself kicking them aside in a desperate attempt to unlock the key of the place and discover what his ancestor, Johannes von Hartelius, had been thinking of in using it.

Elwand had been true to his word and had sent him down a basket of food and water some twenty or so minutes after his initial climb. Hart had been briefly tempted to tie himself back onto the rope and shout up to Elwand to haul him up beyond the lip to where he could begin over-arming himself towards normality again. But he didn’t. Was it shame, in that he had started all this – drawn all these people into what only he wanted to do – and that he dared not be the one who capitulated to fear? He hardly knew any more.

He spent the next thirty minutes picturing a nightmare scenario in which Elwand concealed the rope, and then hurried back down the slope to his car. The scenario continued with Elwand driving to the next checkpoint, where he would be stopped and found to have infringed some esoteric Iranian law. He would be taken to the local town and locked up. And Hart would have to eke out the water and food Elwand had sent down to him for as long as it took for Elwand to talk himself free.

How long would he last down here? A week? Hardly. He’d heard somewhere, possibly during the Hostile Environment and Emergency First Aid Training – or HEFAT as it was known – that he’d been obliged to undergo as a photojournalist, about the 3-3-3 survival rule of thumb. Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Now, down here, he didn’t believe a word of it. He suspected he’d be delusional and gabbling way before the last part occurred. He decided to go easy on the water nonetheless. This wasn’t the rainy season. If things went badly wrong he couldn’t count on nature to protect him.

Fool. Bloody fool. What was he doing dwelling on this when he should be looking for the scroll?

Hart divided the prison area into four segments. The bone segment. The vegetation segment. The rocky segment. And the cleared segment. He decided to inspect each segment as diligently as he could, and then take a break. He worked out that if he spent around two hours on each, he might reasonably use the time before Elwand came back to the best of his ability, and miss nothing.

He was wrong. Each segment took him considerably less than two hours. It soon became clear to him that there was nowhere – simply nowhere – that anything resembling the Copper Scroll could be hidden.

The few piles of rocks he encountered were easily undone. The ground was bone-hard and unyielding. You’d have needed a pickaxe to make a mark in it, and what would have been the point? A worse place to hide anything could scarcely be imagined.

Hart stretched out on the central rock, making the most of the thin rays of sunshine that descended into the chasm. He might as well admit it. Von Hartelius had intended his secret writing to be discovered by his captors. He’d wanted to send them on a wretched wild goose chase into Persia. He’d probably never even seen Solomon’s Prison – only heard of it – and in his desperation for somewhere apparently logical to have hidden the scroll, he’d chosen that. What a bloody fool he’d been ever to have thought that a thousand-year-old message from the dead would automatically tell the truth. People lied in the past just as they did in the present.

Hart ate most of the contents of the basket of food Elwand had sent him, drank thirty per cent of his remaining water, and went to sleep.