Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

Perhaps four fifths along the wall a partition emerged to bisect the crowd. It wasn’t much, no different from the panels of fencing her father might have put up in their back garden. But on the left side of it, as you faced the giant stones, the crowd was much thicker. She walked closer, to work out what this division could mean.

Ah . Men on the left side, women on the right. There was another sign, addressed to the women. You are entering an area of sanctity. Women should be in appropriate modest dress . But it was the men whom she looked at. Even now, there were a good number of them, many draped in large black-and-white shawls, facing the Wall. Some let the shawls cover their heads, like boxers in hooded robes, readying for a fight. Others wore them over their shoulders. All seemed to be rocking back and forth on their heels or swaying from side to side, their eyes closed. Maggie tried to get nearer.

‘Are you Jewish?’ A matronly woman with a European accent. She was nodding and smiling.

‘No, I’m not. But I am here to join these good people’s prayers to the Lord,’ she said, the voice of Sister Olivia from school in her head. The woman gestured towards the ladies’ side of the partition and wandered off.

Maggie wondered how long she would be able to stay here before somebody moved her on. She had to find out where to go. She saw a policeman, armed, and asked for the Western Wall tunnels. He pointed at a small archway, apparently newly built into the long, but much lower, wall that ran perpendicular to the Kotel itself.

Outside was a group of maybe thirty men and women, kitted out with water bottles and video cameras. Perfect .

She loitered at the back, then followed them through the archway, her eyes down and fidgeting with her phone.

‘All right, people. If we can all listen up. Thank you,’ said the tour guide: American, late twenties, with a whiskery beard and bright, shining eyes. He clapped his hands three times and waited for silence. ‘Great. Thanks. My name is Josh and I’m going to be your guide through this tour of the Western Wall tunnels-and this journey into the ancient heritage of the Jewish people. If you just follow me through here, we can begin.’

He led them into an underground cellar, a chamber whose shape was described by a vaulted arch. The stones were colder and greyer than the ones Maggie had grown used to in Jerusalem and there was a drone of fans, struggling to dispel the smell of dry, lightless must.

‘OK, do we have everybody?’ His voice was bouncing off the walls. ‘All right. We’re in a room the British explorer Charles Warren called the Donkey Stable. That may be because that was what this room was once used for-or perhaps it just looks that way.’

There was polite laughter from all those who were not framing up a shot on their camera phones. Maggie started scoping the walls, desperate to see if there was any kind of opening, a place where Shimon Guttman might have stashed his precious discovery.

‘This gives us an opportunity to say a little about where we are. We are now very close to the area known as the Temple Mount. As you know, this is a very special place indeed. Our tradition holds that on this spot stood the Foundation Stone, from which the world was literally created five thousand seven hundred years ago. We also know it as Mount Moriah, where Abraham was asked by Ha’shem , by the Almighty, to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It’s also where Jacob laid his head to rest, and had the dream of angels moving up and down between heaven and earth. And where he predicted that the House of God would be built.

‘Sure enough, the Temple was constructed here many years later. And what you were looking at before, the Kotel, that was the western retaining wall of the temple. Which temple? Well, there were two. The First Temple was built by King Solomon nearly three thousand years ago and the Second was built by Ezra about five hundred years after that. When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the only part that was left standing was the Western Wall.’

Maggie was keeping her place at the back, her eye scanning every crack between the white-grey stones. You’ll find what I left for you there, in the path of ancient warrens , Guttman had said. Could that refer to something in this room?

‘…most people don’t realize is that the giant wall we just saw outside, with everyone praying, is not the entire Western Wall. It continued on, northward, for four times as long again. Trouble was, over the years, people built against it, and eventually over it. Building layer on layer of houses and foundations and support structures. Until we couldn’t see much of the wall at all.

‘But the good news is, we’ve been able to dig out a tunnel along the entire length of the wall. Now we can see all those layers of history-and see the beauty of the wall itself, a treasure that was hidden from the Jewish people for at least two millennia.’

While the men in shorts and women with sweaters tied around their waists ooh-ed and aah-ed, Maggie was trying to guide her eye like the beam of a flashlight. Was Abraham’s tiny tablet hidden somewhere in here? She examined the ground, wondering if there was a trapdoor, a staircase perhaps, that might lead to a vault. But where?

‘OK. We’re going to follow that little light you can see there-and head down the Secret Passage.’

A teenage boy made a ghost sound. His sister sang the theme tune from The Twilight Zone .

The group walked in single file down a long corridor, beneath a low vaulted ceiling. There was no daylight now, just the orange glow of electric lights embedded at intervals along the ground. Maggie shivered, a product of shock and fatigue as much as the cold.

The guide was speaking again, his voice raised to be heard above the footsteps. The echo meant that, from her position at the back, Maggie had to strain to hear him.

‘Legend has it that this was an underground walkway used by King David so that he could travel, unseen, from his palace, which would have been west of here, to the Temple Mount…’

Maggie looked above her and at the walls. Guttman surely wouldn’t have left anything here. How would he have managed to hide it? Behind one of these stones? She began to worry. If he had loosened one of these ancient stones, and hidden the tablet behind, how on earth was she to find it? Where would she start?

The guide was answering a question. ‘That’s what I find so beautiful about being here, touching the very stones and breathing the very air that our ancestors would have touched and breathed. As we delve deeper, we can begin to reach the very roots of Jewish existence.’ His eyes were shining, two dancing beams of light. ‘We can touch our souls here.’ He left a pause while he smiled wide enough to show all his teeth. ‘OK, let’s move on.’

Maggie was feeling twitchy. The light was too weak for a proper search and, if she was to stick with this group, there was too little time in each stop along the tour. She thought of Uri, cursing his father and his elaborate schemes. Leading them here was all very well, but not if they had no chance to find the tablet.

She suddenly became self-conscious. She glanced up to see a man gazing at her, then looking away. Had she been muttering? She was so tired it wouldn’t have surprised her if, in her desperation, she had started thinking out loud. She could feel her cheeks grow hot.

The guide shepherded the group around a glass panel in the ground, which revealed they were in fact walking on a bridge, with a well-like hole directly below. ‘This is only thirteen hundred years old,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Because this is not the original bridge, but one that was added later by the Muslims.’