Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (2 page)

"Turn off that damnable light," growled
Father Benoit somewhere to Tim's left. "You're a target. And don't
shoot me in the dark."

Tim switched off his headlamp and swept the
ground with his foot to identify an object he had just kicked.
After hitting it a second time, he bent over to touch the wooden
stock of an assault rifle. "The guy's not shooting anyone now," he
reported to Benoit, as he turned his light back on to examine a
Chinese AK-47. "There's blood on the butt and trigger guard."

Benoit answered in a raspy growl caused by
dust particles suspended in the thick, motionless air. "Did… did
you see… him?"

"For an instant. He wore a white Bedouin
kafia. He must be hiding in the cave somewhere. Thank God we didn't
kill him."

"
Non, non, mon
reverend
," the Dominican priest exclaimed, reverting to his
native French under pressure. "No Bedouin would box himself inside
a cave. These people live in open spaces. Before he settled down,
he made an escape route through a ventilation port. Better if we
had killed him."

"You, want… him dead?" Tim said, coughing
dust deep in the throat and gagging for air.

"Let's get out of here."

"What?" Tim wheezed, thinking how they had
fully discussed the potential perils, including something like
this. "I'm not leaving until I've looked around."

"Listen to me, Timothy," the priest said.
"That Bedouin is already outside signaling his kinsmen with a
mirror. In minutes, his comrades will be headed here."

"We agreed on six hours. What's the worst
that could happen?"

"You don’t want to know. Bedouin practice
only one form of vengeance, an eye for an eye. To them, the notion
of fair compensation doesn't exist."

"I don't give a damn. I expected six hours.
Tell me how much time I've got."

"Less than thirty minutes. And don't expect
the rappelling lines to be in place. The first thing that guard
will do is cut them."

"We'll signal the Israelis for help."
"Choose
your poison. If we stay, Bedouins will dismember us organ by organ,
starting with our testicles, then leave our carcasses for vultures
to pick clean. Or we expose ourselves outside and let the Israeli
police throw us in prison for looting. Let me remind you,
mon ami
, Jews treat terrorists who
brutalize their wives and children with more compassion than they
do traffickers in their sacred artifacts."

"We're wasting time," Tim's voice cracked
with emotion. "Go without me."

"Thirty minutes. Not one second more.
Bedouins move over the desert like gazelles. And we've still got to
find a way off this mountain."

As soon as their eyes adjusted to sunlight
from the opening in the tarp, the clerics made a preliminary tour
of the twenty-by-thirty-meter chamber. Headroom was insufficient
for Tim, but comfortable for the shorter Benoit. Dust particles
coating Tim's glasses, forced him to unhitch them from his ears and
wipe the lenses with a special cloth he had brought for that
purpose. Near the spot where he believed the Bedouin guard to have
been sitting, they found more blood. Broken pottery shards were
everywhere, making it difficult to move about without damaging them
underfoot. Many of these clay pieces were painted with Aramaic
lettering and crude images. As the clergymen moved away from the
cave entrance, they became more dependent upon their headlamps for
illumination.

Tim's first discovery was a quartzite
ossuary, turned on its side without signs of human remains. A
terracotta jar, 32x12 cm, its gray-red hue similar to those used
for storing scrolls in previous Qumran caves, lay overturned as
well. Benoit peered inside, but discovered nothing.

"Too late," the priest said, shaking his head
in frustration. "Too late."

"What’s that suppose to mean?" Tim
replied.

"Thieves have beaten us to what’s here."

"If they took everything, why post a
guard?"

"These shards will fetch thousands on the
international market, if the Israelis don't catch you first."

They next examined the walls for signs of
previous inhabitants. Had this cave served primarily as a
depository for scrolls like those found in the early 1950s? Or was
it used for human habitation? And if people had actually dwelt
here, who? Social misfits from Jerusalem or nearby Jericho?
Religious zealots and ascetics? Early Christian dissidents or Jews
fleeing Roman oppression?

The high-pitched buzz of a drone aircraft
flying overhead alerted them to the danger of tapping the sun's
light through the open tarp. A nod from Benoit confirmed that their
futures outside the cave were now little better than remaining too
long inside. Once they shut the curtain, they became entirely
dependent on their headlamps.

"Twenty-six minutes," the Dominican
announced, leading Tim from the cave's outer chamber into an
excavated crawl space with scarcely room to slither through single
file on their stomachs, dragging tethered backpacks behind. When
the tunnel forked in ten meters, they agreed to increase their
chances of discovery by splitting up.

"Rendezvous here in twenty minutes sharp,"
Benoit said. "If I'm not back by then, don't wait for me. And, I
can assure you,
mon ami
, I have no
intention of waiting for you. If you're late, you're on your
own."

Tim crawled forward until the tunnel opened
into a tiny cavern where he could kneel but not stand. No shards
lay on the floor and no carvings adorned its hand-chiseled walls.
For a moment, he entertained the prospect of crawling back
empty-handed. But on the right wall, his headlamp captured yet
another tunnel entrance, this one barely large enough to squeeze
through on his stomach. It proved to be dustier than the first, but
shorter, debouching into a small grotto with sufficient room to
lift his head over his elbows. His fingers made immediate contact
with a familiar substance—animal skins used in ancient scrolls. He
adjusted his headlamp to examine a small piece of decomposed
parchment and noticed that the ground was strewn with hundreds
similar to it. This was exactly what he and Father Benoit had hoped
to discover! Or was it? Yes, there were plenty of words written in
the ancient form of the Aramaic script, but no complete scrolls.
Just fragments, hundreds, no perhaps thousands, several layers
thick! To his left, he discovered a small terracotta jar on its
side and another upright but uncovered and empty. Had the looters
already stolen scrolls found inside? In their quest for jewelry and
statuary easily sold to collectors, had they left these fragments
for later retrieval? Or had they simply abandoned them because they
seemed unreadable?

Tim called to Father Benoit, knowing there
was little chance his voice would carry through the surrounding
walls. To confer with him, it was necessary to inch back through
the two tunnels with a few fragments tucked in a utility pocket. At
the original fork, the priest’s trail curved left through another
dusty conduit.

He caught up with Benoit in a small grotto on
his knees, complaining about arthritis in his hip, but studiously
examining human skeletal remains from a limestone ossuary. Under
normal rules of excavation, a discovery would have been carefully
photographed and documented, then removed to an accredited
laboratory for X-ray and chemical analysis. Yet at the moment,
conditions were anything but normal, giving the priest license to
violate nearly every conventional rule of modern archeology. He had
simply jimmied the seal on the ossuary lid with a utility knife. No
names were inscribed on the limestone exterior, so the identity of
the deceased would probably remain unknown. Though suffering from a
hacking cough, Benoit insisted on voicing his excitement over the
remains of an early Christian, or perhaps an Essene. Tim reminded
him that with no identification on the ossuary, this would likely
remain mere speculation.

Benoit tapped his watch to mark the time. He
seemed encouraged by the fragments Tim showed him, but refused a
request for an additional half-hour to collect more.

"I'm going back to get what I can," Tim
announced.

"Twelve minutes, no matter what."

Back in the original chamber, Tim fumbled
nervously with his backpack, now racing against the clock.
Unfortunately, the plastic Ziploc bags so essential for collecting
parchment fragments were tucked near the bottom of his pack. In the
tight confinement, it was necessary to empty all his equipment on
top of ancient documents, risking damage to them. To make matters
worse, a rubber band holding together a wad of the transparent bags
popped, scattering many over the ground. At least a full minute was
lost gathering them.

A temptation to interrupt the collection and
read some of the text tormented him. It was possible he had
stumbled onto a great discovery, but how would he know until at
least some of these fragments had been deciphered? He was sure they
were of historic value, for why else would ancient people go to the
trouble of storing them in this remote, nearly inaccessible place.
Almost everything taken from previous Dead Sea caves had proven to
be of historical significance, shedding light on the lives of
recluses at the dawning of the modern age. Why not the documents in
his hands? "Collect, collect," he urged himself, driving his
fingers relentlessly into compliance. "Don’t read. Don't even
glance at the words. Just get this stuff up!"

It was necessary to remind himself that he
was handling precious treasures, not mere scraps of paper. His plan
was to place small clusters of parchment in separate Ziplocs,
squeeze out the surrounding air to prevent deterioration, then seal
the tops. But in fact, he was stuffing bunches of fragments into
the containers with abandonment, almost as if they were carrot or
celery sticks packaged for a Sunday picnic. Simultaneously, he
found himself cursing Father Benoit for setting an arbitrary time
limit and wondering if he had surrendered to the priest's judgment
too easily. But even if he had, he lacked confidence in his own
ability to escape through the mountains without the priest's
experience in the desert.

His breathing seemed to echo the metronomic
clicks of the second hand on his wristwatch. If only there was more
time, these fragments might be displayed beside the revered Dead
Sea scrolls in Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book. Written words in his
fingers collapsed time, binding him with a distant generation. In
that moment, he imagined that, through these ancient documents, he
was actually conversing with his forefathers over the expanse of
millennia. Yet this sensation morphed quickly into a darker vision
in which the delicate thread linking the past and present
shattered. When he dared glance at his watch, he was tardy by seven
minutes. Had the Dominican father already made his way to the cave
entrance without him?

Tim started to squeeze backwards through the
tunnel, but as his head turned, he noticed in the beam of his lamp
a tab of parchment stuffed between cracks in the inner wall. This
new discovery caused him to hesitate. More time would be lost
retrieving it, but then he was already overdue. To snatch it, he
was forced to reverse directions and crawl forward. When he
inserted his fingers into the crevice, he experienced a familiar
sensation of dried animal skin, but this was different from
fragments on the ground. The parchment felt as if rolled into a
scroll, the holy grail of Dead Sea discovery!

In the course of millennia, the organic
composition of the material had evidently expanded like mortar
between bricks, making extraction nearly impossible without
damaging the very thing he wanted to preserve. A prayer for
dexterous fingers slipped from his lips as he attempted to pry the
document free. When the scroll refused to budge, he decided to
manipulate it to a new location where the groove appeared larger.
At that moment, he heard Father Benoit thundering behind him, his
words garbled by the echo in the confining conduits.

"Give me another minute," he yelled back in
the loudest voice he could muster, having little faith the
Dominican would understand.

The scroll seemed determined not to move.
Each new degree of pressure Tim applied threatened either to
collapse the precious document or damage whatever was written
inside. He nevertheless applied additional force, pushing hard with
his index finger and thumb. A responsible archeologist would leave
the document in place and return with proper tools and adequate
time for careful removal. For an instant, Tim considered choosing
this path and abandoning this treasure for another scholar to
retrieve. Still, a deeper, more determined voice commanded him to
ignore his scruples and persevere.

He pressured the parchment still harder,
nudging it first in one direction then another until finally it
eased higher. Slowly, the precious scroll moved upward some fifteen
centimeters to an expanse in the crevice. In that position,
extraction was possible, though it required another full
minute.

Smaller than he had originally thought, the
scroll was darker than the other fragments. A quick scan told him
it was not in Hebrew or the lingua-franca of the time, Aramaic, but
in the Greek language of the educated aristocracy. Finding it too
large for one of his Ziploc bags, he improvised by wrapping it in
the cloth he had brought to clean his glasses. Far from a high-tech
solution, but it would have to do.

Crawling backward to the rendezvous junction,
Tim wondered why, after being told about these fragments, Father
Benoit had not wanted to assist in their collection. He asked
himself if perhaps the priest had discovered artifacts still more
valuable, perhaps something from the unopened ossuary? Or another
scroll?

It was sixteen minutes past the deadline when
Tim arrived at the rendezvous juncture, not surprised to find
himself alone. He scrambled still faster on his knees, dragging his
backpack behind him on a tethered line. The umbilical cord had a
tendency to tangle, forcing him to stop frequently to free it.