P. Deutermann - The Last Man

He watched as the silent gray figures filed past him thirty yards away and converged on the truck. There was some milling about, the further flare of cigarette lighters, and then they started climbing into the back of the truck. He could hear murmurs of conversation, and then the truck engine started up. David withdrew around the corner of the boulder to avoid any headlamps that might sweep the hillside. He listened as the truck drove back out of the parking lot and on down the coast road.

When the noise of the truck had died away, he made his way back along the ridge of rocks, staying in the shadows and stopping to listen every twenty feet or so. When he was satisfied that there was no one about, he walked down the sandy slope to the fire exit door and let himself back in. Once back in his room he got undressed, set his watch for seven, and then lay back on the bed. Tomorrow he would play boy archaeologist with the widow Ressner. Tomorrow night he would go up there on that mountain and find what he had come here for.

The following morning dawned bright and sunny, with a slight dust haze in the air carried in by a brisk breeze from the northwest across the tops of the Judaean hills. David met Judith in the restaurant as planned for coffee, where she surprised him with the suggestion that they walk up the southern ravine to the Roman siege ramp. “The cable car won’t start up for another two hours; we might as well see some things in that time,” she said.

This was the reverse of David’s plan, but it served his purposes even better, allowing him to gauge the time required to go up Wadi Masada. They set out twenty minutes later, passing the ridgeline where David had kept vigil the night before. The sheer walls of the mountain rose about six hundred feet on the right, or north, side of the ravine, which was about a hundred yards wide at its mouth. As they climbed, the ravine narrowed down to about thirty yards in width. On their left rose the sheer rock walls of the southern plateau, which was actually higher than the rock of Masada. The wind kicked up dust devils along the ravine floor, and the going was much more difficult than David had anticipated due to the soft sand, hundreds of small rocks, and leg-deep fissures carved in the old stone by centuries of flash floods. The occasional scream of a hawk punctuated his grunts and quiet curses as he forced his way up the gradually more demanding slope. He was very grateful she had reminded him to bring his stick. She led the way, dressed in jeans, army boots, and a sleeveless sweatshirt. She wore a floppy sun hat and her mirrored glasses and had a plastic water bottle sticking out of her fanny pack that bobbed incongruously as she climbed ahead. He realized that she was puffing a little more than he was, but she put her head down and pressed on, and so did he. After forty-five minutes of climbing in the wadi along the southern edge of the Masada escarpment, they reached a ridge from which the ground fell away in a steep hillside into a second ravine, this one pointing north along the western edge of the mountain until it ran smack into the right side of the Roman siege ramp about a quarter mile away. Judith paused to take a water break and to point out some of the engineering features of the fortress.

“This is the western branch of Wadi Metsadá, the ravine used to fill Herod’s cisterns. You can see that it runs down from the hills on our left and along the western wall of the fortress.”

“Yeah, but the cisterns are on the north face.”

“North west, actually. Before the Romans built the ramp this wadi ran all the way along the west side of the mountain and down to the Dead Sea around the northern tip. Herod’s engineers dammed it up just beyond where the Romans eventually put the ramp. They then dug channels into the stone palisade that forms Metsadá’s west face. In the winter, storms occasionally sweep in off the Mediterranean and turn this wadi into a torrent. You may have seen the pictures in Yadin’s report. The water would back up at the dam and overflow sideways into the channels, run down along the channels, around the corner, and into the cisterns on the north face.”

“Ingenious — but of course the Romans destroyed the impoundments.”

“The very first thing they did. In a desert siege, of course, water is the key, but the fortress had been collecting water for decades. Even after it fell, people lived up there on what remained in those cisterns for nearly fifty years. There were other cisterns, too, of course, up along the rim, but they were small compared to the palace cisterns.”

“How did they get the water up to the top from the palace cisterns?”

“I will show you, but basically, water slaves carried it up in buckets. Shall we go?”

They started down the side of the Wadi Masada, slip-sliding in the loose sand and dirt until they reached the bottom, and then traversed the ravine from side to side as they made their way north down the slope to the base of the Roman siege ramp. Although they were in the shadow of the mountain, it was getting hotter by the minute, and it seemed to David that the dry desert wind was sucking the moisture right out of him. The ramp, a huge pile of sand, dirt, and stones, rose four hundred feet from the bottom of the gorge, bridging the wadi between the western plateau on the left and the western rim of the fortress. Having been built across the ravine, it made its own dam, and there were signs of some violent erosion over the centuries.

David knew that the main Roman camp was up on that plateau above them to the left, and Judith indicated that they would first have to climb up the left side of the ravine to get to the beginning of the ramp. David could see that the sides of the ramp itself were much too steep to climb without axes. The ravine at that point was about two hundred feet deep, so it took them another thirty minutes to get up to the base of the ramp. David was winded when they climbed over the top and stood at the base of the siege ramp itself. Judith was red-faced and completely out of breath. He realized they had been slowing down for the last thirty minutes. It was the heat, he told himself. At night he should be able to do better than this.

“For someone not in shape, you’re doing all right,” he said.

She could only nod and smile weakly and mop her forehead with a handkerchief. He looked at his watch. To the base of the ramp had taken an hour and a half, including the rest stop at the top of the cross ravine. He would have to allow two hours in the dark. The going would be slower, but he should be able to make better time without her. He looked up to the fortress walls, hundreds of feet above them, and then at the ramp.

“How in the hell did they build this thing? The defenders could hit anyone exposing themselves out here just by throwing rocks.”

“We have no firsthand facts,” she replied, between inhalations. “Historians surmise that initially they took some casualties. Then they probably went back to the remains of Jerusalem and gathered up a few thousand women, since all the men had been killed. The Jews on the mountain probably could not bring themselves to kill Jewish women who were being used as slaves. They built it by carrying baskets of earth and sand and throwing them into the wadi. Eventually they filled it in and then piled more on until the ramp reached the summit and the engineers could bring up the siege tower.”

“Good Lord.”

“Yes, even then it was a very bad thing to lose a war. Beyond the hard labor, since there was no water here, each woman was forced to carry an amphora-sized jar of drinking water from Jerusalem to the Roman camp. By night they would have been used by the legion. You can begin to understand how the defenders might choose death over what they saw befalling their countrywomen. The Roman camp is over there. Do you wish to see the ruins?”