The Rock (18 page)

Helena and her entourage, with Judas in tow, hurried to the place indicated by God, and Judas was set to work. The Romans had spared no effort in filling the site with city waste and earth and rubble brought from elsewhere; all this Judas had to uncover. He found the cross at a great depth in a stone cave that had been concealed when the Romans raised the level of the ground and covered it with flagstones in preparation for the construction of a temple to the Goddess of Love. And yet the holy tomb that Judas revealed was remarkably well preserved. Right on top of the Rock of Golgotha, which Helena could finally see, and to which the cross had been fixed throughout the ordeal of Jesus, there stood a statue of Venus, naked, brazenly displaying her charms.”

Only now was the empress convinced of Judas’s good faith. She showered him with honors, had him baptized, and made him the first bishop of Jerusalem—but not before changing his name from Judas to Cyriacus.

S
ophronius concluded his tour by showing Umar a piece of the actual cross, mounted in a casket of pure gold and precious stones. I found out later that it was not the actual relic, which had been carried to Constantinople for safekeeping in the months preceding Umar’s entry into the city. On Easter Friday, Sophronius said, the casket would be opened in a ceremony to which the Caliph was invited.

At this ceremony, which Umar did not attend but which many years later I observed, the Patriarch’s chair is placed on the Rock of Calvary. He takes his seat. A table is placed before him with a cloth on it. The deacons stand round the table like sentinels. The casket containing the fake holy wood is then put before him. He opens it, and takes the piece of the cross out, placing it on the table. As long as the holy wood is on the table, the bishop sits with his hands resting on either end of it, holding it down. The deacons round him watch like hawks as now all the faithful, catechumens and communicants alike, come up to the table, one by one, with their hands behind their backs, to kiss the wood and move on. They keep their hands behind their backs, I was told by a monk, because on one occasion one of them bit off a piece of the holy wood and stole it away. That is why the deacons are anxious and wary as they stand guard, and why the worshippers stoop down and touch the holy wood with their foreheads, then with their eyes, and finally with their mouths, but no longer reach out their hands to touch it.

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f the Patriarch’s strategy was to feast the Caliph’s eyes on the sumptuous buildings of the Holy City to gain a foothold inside the mind of his adversary, Sophronius realized the strategy had not worked after Umar refused to pray inside the Church of the Resurrection. Umar occupied another world, different even from that of his own followers. Had he been Abu Ubayda, the commander-in-chief, or that brave son of Walid who wreaked havoc on the Byzantine army and had a weakness for silk and red turbans with arrows stuck in them after the fashion of great warriors, it might have been a different story. “Heaven is as close to me as my sandal-straps, and so is Hell,” I heard Umar say. The Caliph lived every hour of every day as though that were the literal truth.

Umar, impatient now, repeated the request that he had first made on the Mount of Olives, saying, “I would have you take us to the Sanctuary of David. Do you know where it is?”

“It must be somewhere amidst the ruins of the Temple,” replied Sophronius. “But why do you want to go there? The place has been abandoned for years.”

“I wish to pray there.”

“There is so much more that I can show you,” said Sophronius. “The New Church of the Virgin Mary, for instance, which is a truly splendid building, and the Church of Zion.”

“I don’t want to see any more buildings,” Umar answered. “I want to be taken to the place where David sought God’s forgiveness.”

Gaining access to the site of the Temple was not as straightforward as Umar had imagined. Sophronius insisted that the hour was too late to go right away.

“If you must,” said Sophronius, resigned, “I will take you there tomorrow, at the crowing of the cock.”

U
mar and Ka’b were given comfortable quarters for the night in an annex of the church. To decline the duty of hospitality might give offense, even to a Christian. Moreover, the Patriarch’s invitation conferred upon the Caliph a measure of protection that the desert Arab immediately understood; and, conversely, Umar thought, the Christian was putting himself under an obligation to the Muslim that might come in handy later on.

The Patriarch was careful to show Umar his own quarters, which were part of a grouping of monastic cells organized around a courtyard north of the Rotunda. The room was tiny and bare, much less comfortable than those of his guests less than twenty paces away. Even my father was struck by its austere furnishings, which so contrasted with the Patriarch’s silk and gold-tasselled attire.

Just before daybreak, when the only sounds on the streets are those of roosters and padlocks, sliding bars and rattling door boards, the party set out. Sophronius was in the lead. For some unknown reason, a dozen local peasants had been rounded up. There was a new spring to the Patriarch’s step as he picked his way across cobbled streets less elegant than the ones they had taken the previous day. It was as though the old man, having slept on the dilemma that Umar represented for Christendom’s holy places, had woken up with a new resolve.

The party worked their way south and east of the Church of the Resurrection arriving before a gate on the southern wall of the
esplanade. Believers today call the entrance through which Umar first entered the noble sanctuary the Gate of the Prophet, because it looks as if it had been an important entrance to the Temple Mount in its time. But the entrance gate was blocked with piles of refuse. Now it became clear why Sophronius had brought the peasants along; they set to work clearing a path to the giant doors. As soon as these had been forced open, more rubbish came bursting out, raining down upon the heads of the workers and spilling onto the road that pointed in the holy direction of the Ka’ba.

The interior was a warehouse of filth, which had settled in huge piles on the floor. In some places it reached the ceiling. Umar and Ka’b found themselves standing outside what had once been an elegant sequence of paired square spaces—the pair closest to the wall being surmounted by two domes that gave the appearance of floating away from the walls, supported as they were by adjoining pairs of arched brackets.

Umar fell to the ground in horror, like a man suddenly paralyzed at the knees. Then he soberly and calmly prostrated himself before the rubbish-filled doorway, in a posture of deep and humbling submission, becoming as one with the earth. Slowly, he rose to his feet and stood upright. Raising his hands level with his ears, palms toward the cheeks, he said, “God is most Great!” Then he crossed his hands over his chest, the right palm over the left as prescribed by the Prophet, and inclined toward the Lord, his hands on his knees, said three times, “Glory to the Great One”; then he drew himself up slowly, saying, “God hears him who praises Him.” Drawing himself upright for the second time, the Caliph said, “To You be the praise, our Lord,” and then prostrated himself yet another time, resting his body on his forehead, knees, and the palms of his hands, his nose lightly brushing the earth.

Umar prayed and prayed. He prayed like a man washing himself over and over again in a running stream of clear water. Each time, he would repeat the same sequence of movements. He prayed not to an audience, as he had done at the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool. He prayed as though his very soul were on fire and in need of
quenching in the cool waters of God’s praise. Solomon had done the same upon finding that the doors of the Temple were barred to him. The son of David had then repeated his father’s prayers, imploring God to grant forgiveness. Solomon had prayed as much on his father’s behalf as his own. Umar now prayed on behalf of all of them.

Rubbish was piled high on the steps leading up to the Temple Mount. So dense and packed was the dirt that not a single ray of the early morning sun could make its way through, not even after the doors had been opened. Once again, the peasants brought along by Sophronius were set to work. Only two men could work in the densely packed gateway at a time. After much delay, they managed to clear out the beginnings of a tunnel. Still, no light came through.

“It is impossible to proceed,” Sophronius said, “except by crawling on one’s hands and knees.”

“So be it,” Umar replied.

Whereupon the Patriarch, in spite of his age, went down on his hands and knees, oblivious of the consequences to his finely tailored garments. Before following Sophronius into the tunnel, Umar tightened his loosely wrapped outer mantle around his body, and tucked the extra material into his belt. My father took up the rear. Everyone else stayed behind on Umar’s instructions until they had fully dug out the entrance and carted all the rubbish away.

What was it like, tunnelling through the refuse of centuries? Ka’b remembers bumping into massive pillars a man’s length in diameter. Sophronius had dug out a space around them, pushing the rubbish to one corner so that Umar could see his way forward. The pillars rested on the bedrock of the mountain and had once held up a gigantic portico, which Ka’b said King Solomon had built; Sophronius gave the Romans all the credit. A part of that portico, on the southern boundary of the sanctuary, was still standing when the armies of Islam arrived.

Rare are the moments when the play and chatter of life in this world, the pageantry and the boasting, the competitive grasping after wealth and children, are all suspended—and suspended by
dint of sheer necessity, not because of thoughts of the grim doom that awaits all God’s creatures. Such was the bond between the three men inside the tunnel that held the forces of competition, prejudice, and hatred in abeyance for however short a while.

After considerable exertion, they worked their way up a flight of steps, emerging into what looked like a gigantic court. They looked around in all directions and pondered the scene for a long time.

Ka’b was the first to break the silence: “By Him in whose hands is my soul, this must be it! This is David’s Sanctuary.”

Then he removed his sandals, a custom of both the followers of Muhammad and Moses, signifying that they make no claim to the hallowed ground upon which they are about to walk. The ground was thick with filth under Ka’b’s feet; still, he felt a holiness seep through the bare flesh of his soles. Umar did the same, but Sophronius would not follow their example. Instead, the old Patriarch turned east and genuflected, as though to ward off some evil wind that was turning his way.

Y
oung Muslims cannot imagine what the noble sanctuary looked like then—just as they cannot imagine a butterfly wrapped inside the wrinkled carcass of its chrysalis.

Time, and the vindictiveness of men, had taken its toll. One-fifth of the city was a warehouse of ruins—the very fifth that had sustained its former splendor. The destruction of the Temple Mount had begun in the time of Titus, the capital of whose kingdom lay in the land of the Franks. When Titus came to the Holy House in the first year of his reign, he fell upon the Jews, massacred thousands, and enslaved the rest. He gave their city over to plunder. He put the Temple and all its sacred scrolls to the torch.