P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“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.”