P. Deutermann - The Last Man

Whoa, he thought.

I wonder.

He squatted down and dug at the depression, pulling away sand until he had a hole slightly more than two feet deep, which immediately filled up with water. He was about to give it up when his fingertips felt something hard — and smooth. The sun had long since gone over to the western side of the mountain, so he couldn’t see much in the dimming light of the cistern. Definitely should have brought a flashlight. Whatever it was, it was smooth, almost like polished stone. Maybe even metal.

He stood up again and looked around. He was standing in the lowest point of the chamber, toward the back of the cave. He had to get down to the visitors center, reestablish contact with Judith, tell her all about his stimulating hours on the mountain, eat the one substantial meal of the day, take another nap, and then get back up here again tonight. This cave had to be the way in. The big question remained: Into what? He stepped up the slope of sand and out into the light of day. Once outside he sat down in the dry sand, squirming around to see if that might disguise the fact that he had soaked the back of his pants. There was, he realized, no disguising the aroma. Pray for an empty cable car down, and time to get to his room before he ran into Judith.

At 9:00 P.M. David lay in bed, fully clothed, recalling the hasty descent from the mountain earlier in the afternoon. He had hoped to shuck the eau de bat-crap without running into anyone, and, for the most part, he had succeeded, although some of the American tourists had commented about the smell in the cable car. He had planted himself at one end of the gondola and kept his mouth shut, not wanting them to know he was an American. He was painfully amused by their immediate assumption that he could not understand what they were saying, but did not delay in getting to his room and changing the offending trousers, which he washed out in a deep sink in the bathroom.

Judith had been waiting for him in the restaurant and was pleasantly conversational about his day on the mountain. She did manage to steer the conversation around to the subject of when they would go back.

“I’d like to go up one last time in the morning,” he had replied. “Stay until about noon, maybe one o’clock, and then we can hit the road, if that’s okay. I’ll hike up the wadi to the ramp, maybe before sunrise.”

She agreed, although she cautioned him that it was not permitted for anyone to leave the hostel before full daylight. He promised to observe the rules. After their meal, they walked again down to the shores of the Dead Sea and talked mostly about the history of ancient Israel and how many parallels remained with contemporary times. Their walk was cutting into his naptime, but, refreshed by his rest in the cistern cave, he was content to walk with Judith and listen to her talk. She seemed to need to talk now, he realized, and after her personal revelations during their last walk, she was much more at ease. He had learned the value of being a good listener from Adrian, who’d always been surprising him with the range of things she knew something about. Besides, he liked being with Judith. She was so damned serious about everything that he was itching to poke a little fun at her, get her to lighten up a little, but he had sensed that if he did, she’d get offended and go back into her prickly shell.

They had walked up and down the grainy multicolored sands, stepping around salt-encrusted pools reeking of sulfur and halogen compounds. About a half mile south of the fortress, out of sight of the hostelry, there were some windowless concrete buildings, two squat steel tanks, and one tall tank, all surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. Clouds of steam were rising from vent pipes on one of the buildings. Judith explained that there were many mining operations along the Dead Sea, some of which used the heat from geothermal vents to concentrate minerals before the final extraction process. There was almost no vegetation growing along the seashore itself, and only sparse, stunted trees and thorn bushes populated the edge of the coast road. The sea itself was purplish in color, only grudgingly reflecting the hues of a glorious sunset shaping up over the Judaean hills. David was surprised to observe seabirds soaring here and there and wondered what they ate in this lifeless part of the world. Judith prattled on about the difficulties of getting things done in an academic bureaucracy while he mentally rehearsed tonight’s expedition back to the fortress.

He would have his backpack and the flashlight this time. He needed something to dig with, to clear the sand away from the bottom of the cistern cave, but he thought he knew how to solve that problem once he got up there. He also had to take his diving harness and the wire rope in case there were no steps down into that big cavity. A good bit of weight to hump up that damned ravine, but tonight he needed real equipment, and a camera, in case there was something in there. In case, hell. There had to be.

Now, what about La Ressner? She was the closest professional archaeologist. He had just about decided to include her in the project, assuming he found something other than a big empty hole. Adrian had been totally convinced that the whole point of the Masada legend was that they’d been protecting something incredibly valuable, some religious artifacts being more likely than a heap of gold. He promised himself he would tell Judith if he did find something and then let her call in the pros. She, hell, all of them, would be furious with him for going up there on his own, for doing precisely what he had promised not to do — intrusive exploration, sneaking around at night, and, worst of all, digging, the cardinal sin of archaeology: an amateur putting spade to ground. Even worse than worst, finding something important. That said, he suspected that if the find was big enough, all would be forgiven in the excitement of the discovery, as long as he let the professionals exploit the discovery. If he had been wrong all along, and the cavity on the screen was just an empty cave, well, he would fold his tents and steal away into the desert night, or rather, back to Tel Aviv, do some diving at Caesarea Maritima, and then slink home to Washington.

A sudden assault by biting sand flies forced them to retreat to the hostel. The German kids had been organizing a picnic fire outside the building near the edge of the parking lot, and now David could hear soft singing coming through his single window. The night outside was still moonless, although tonight he would have to be more careful coming back down, as moonrise was around two. There had been no sign of the army patrol trucks when he had come up to his room. He peered out the window to see if the yellow rectangle of light coming down from Judith’s room upstairs was still visible, and it was.

Ten minutes later he decided to make his creep. He rose from the bed, slipped the backpack on, and headed out the door and down the hallway toward the fire door. Besides the gear in the backpack, he carried a bottle of water and his walking stick. He paused to listen for sounds of someone in the bathrooms, then quietly walked to the fire door, opened it, and wedged another piece of wet paper into the bolt hole. He crept down the outside stairs to the ground and stopped. He listened again for sounds of anyone coming around this side of the building, but all he could hear was the sound of the kids’ party out front. With his eyes not yet night adapted, it was much darker out here than he had expected. He walked around to the back of the hostel building but this time went straight up the hill behind it, trying to keep out of the field of view of that observation post. He did not stop until he was over the first sand ridge and able to hunker down below the line of sight from the building.