P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“No, I think not. I saw the outlines yesterday from up there, and it looks like only wall foundations. My focus is on what’s up there. Besides, I’m just dying to climb some more.”

She gave him a look that said she was just plain dying, but then hefted her stick, and they set out up the ramp. Damn, he thought, maybe she’s human. He stumbled in the loose sand. This is in human, he thought then. Just hard slogging, up another forty-degree slope of hard-packed sand and rocks. They paused halfway up to catch their breath, and David wondered aloud about the siege tower.

“On this slope, how could they pull something like that up close enough to the walls? Those towers were fifty, sixty feet high.”

“The slope was probably not this steep; there is evidence that the ramp started closer to the Roman camp than the edge of the wadi. They would have taken the siege tower up the ramp in pieces: the base on wheels, the tower sections one at a time. The soldiers would have pulled it up the ramp using ropes. They would have used a testudo to protect the soldiers — do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” David nodded. “The tortoise back: Several dozen soldiers put their shields over their heads and advance in close formation. From above they present an impermeable shield wall. Still…”

“Yes. Those men? Now they were in shape, and implacable.”

David nodded soberly. Implacable indeed. He could only imagine the growing despair on the mountain as that siege ramp took shape and then the antlike columns of soldiers began pulling a siege tower into position to begin the bombardment that would batter down the casemate walls.

By silent agreement they set out again to walk up the final few hundred feet to the top of the ramp, where they encountered a steel and concrete stairway that took them up to the western gate. David looked around for indications that the gate was locked at night but did not see any signs of chains or other securing devices as they went through the gate, climbed the casemate ramp, and encountered the first group of tourists.

They spent the rest of the morning walking through the casemate wall that surrounded the entire rim of the fortress, where she pointed out the locus of individual archaeological finds including some coin hoards, weapons, the skeleton of a man apocryphally believed to have been Eleazar ben Jair himself, and a small stash of scroll fragments similar physically to those found in the caves of Qumran, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.

“Were any of them legible?” he asked.

“One they were able to recognize right away, because the text was visible on the outside of the scroll. It was the Vision of the Dry Bones, from Ezekiel.”

“Now there’s a lovely metaphor, especially here.”

“Indeed.”

In the early afternoon they met with a security guard who admitted them to the narrow stone stairway leading down to the terrace palace ruins. Two terrace palaces had been built below the northern prow of the mountain, descending two hundred feet down from the main plateau in two stepped levels. The view out over the Dead Sea was breathtaking as they maneuvered carefully down the worn and very steep steps. Judith explained that the first terrace, confusingly called the middle terrace, had had a circular pavilion surrounded by a colonnade, and the lower terrace a rectangular, nearly square hall called a triclinium in the center surrounded by porticoes on all sides and a bathing area. Sheer stone and mortared brick walls dropped away from the marble balustrades on either side.

Down below the left, or western, side of the middle terrace Judith showed him the water channel that had once routed storm water from the wadi to the very large cisterns cut into the northwest face. The channel was about three feet wide and two feet deep, cut along the face of the cliff, aiming back along the western palisade to a point now buried by the Roman siege ramp. Fifty feet back along the channel was a large, irregularly shaped hole in the cliff, with several smaller holes behind that one, all in a line across the cliff face.

“May I?” he asked, pointing to the hole.

“With great care, please,” she answered, reminding him that there was no railing on the outside edge of the water channel. It looked to be about four hundred feet straight down from the channel to the bottom of the gorge. He stepped off the stone stairway and walked back along the water channel, whose bottom was polished smooth. He tried not to look over the side. A sudden updraft tugged at his shirt. He did not have a big problem with heights, per se, but this was pretty exposed.

He reached the first hole, knelt down, and peered into it. He was at the top of an enormous spherical cavern, perhaps eighty to one hundred feet across and the same dimension in depth. Beams of sunlight coming through the hole projected his silhouette on the smooth lower walls. Descending from the hole was a set of steps that had been cut out of the rock, spiraling down the side to the very bottom of the cistern. There was no railing there, either. The walls of the cistern were water polished, and there were two large pillars of rock that had been left in the center to support the ceiling. He wanted to walk down those steps, but it was pretty clear that the cistern was completely empty. It was just a big dry hole in the rock. As worn as the steps were, it would have been very easy to fall to the bottom of the huge stone cavity. Judith came up behind him to join him at the entrance.

“The steps leading back up to the top palaces are called the water steps. Slaves would have to come down here continuously to collect water in jars and then carry them back up to the main level, where they would fill smaller cisterns, which in turn piped water throughout the palace for the baths, hypocausts, and fountains. There are other cisterns farther back along the channel.”

He looked beyond the entrance and saw the second hole, smaller than this one. “Same thing — dry hole?”

“Yes. Once the Romans breached the dam and raised the ramp, no more water ever came into these cisterns.”

“Yet, if they were full when the siege began, and these things are, say, sixty feet to eighty in diameter, then each one would have held nearly three-quarters of a million gallons of water.”

She looked at him. “Did you just compute that?”

He smiled, trying to cover his sudden error. “I’m an engineer, remember?” he asked. “Volume of a sphere; pretty simple calculation.” Pay attention, dammit, he thought. She doesn’t need to discover she’s telling you things you already know. Especially about the cisterns.

He looked over the edge of the water channel again. Some birds sailed through the wadi a few hundred vertiginous feet below them. He gave a small shudder. Judith turned to walk back to the relative safety of the water-slave steps. They went up and then turned left and down the terrace steps to the lowest level, where she showed him some of the remaining fresco fragments and speculated about what the buildings looked like. He remembered the drawings in the Yadin reports and said so.

“Very speculative, but at this distance in time, as good as any,” she replied. “Truly, there is much we do not know.”

A warm breeze swept across the ruined terrace, bearing just a sulfurous hint of the Dead Sea far below them. They stood and looked out over the panoramic view, which from this elevation covered nearly thirty miles in every direction except due west, where the Judaean hills blocked out the metallic sky. Those hills looked to be about as dead as the sea over which they kept silent watch. From the lowest terrace, the main Roman camp, approximately a quarter mile distant, was at about eye level.

“Do you suppose the Zealots came down here?”