'I'm worried now about Robin,' said Bob Smith. 'I told him to wait for us outside the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and he was missing when we came out.'
'Missing? In that mob?' Jim Foster stared, aghast.
Then, with unspeakable relief, he saw his wife, with Jill beside her, coming through St Stephen's Gate. He ran across to her.
'Thank heaven you've come,' he said. 'We've got to get Miss Dean to hospital. She's in the ambulance already. I'll explain everything on the way. There's been a series of mishaps all round. Babcock ill, Robin missing, it's been a disastrous day.'
Kate seized his arm. 'But you?' she said. 'Are you all right?'
'Yes, yes ... Of course I'm all right.'
He dragged her towards the ambulance. He did not even look at Jill. Bob hesitated, wondering what he ought to do. Then he turned, and saw Jill standing beside him.
'Where have you been?' he asked.
'I don't know,' she said wearily. 'In a sort of garden. I was looking for you but I couldn't find you. Kate was with me. She was worried about her husband. He can't stand crowds.'
'Nor can any of us,' he said, tut we'll have to face them again. Young Robin is lost, and I must go and find him. There's nobody else left.'
'I'll come with you.'
'Are you sure? You look absolutely done in.'
The Fosters were climbing into the ambulance. The siren wailed, and the spectators moved away. Jill thought of that endless winding street they called the Via Dolorosa, the chanting pilgrims, the chattering vendors, the repetition of a scene she never wanted to see again, the clatter, the noise.
'I can face it,' she sighed. 'It won't seem so long if we're together.'
Robin was enjoying himself. Being on his own always gave him a sense of freedom, of power. And he had become very bored trailing along in the path of the pilgrims, with people going down on their knees every other moment. It wasn't even as if they were walking the right way. The city had been pulled down and rebuilt so many times that it was altogether different from what it had been two thousand years ago. The only way to reconstruct it would be to pull it down again, and then dig and dig and reveal all the foundations. He might well become an archaeologist when he grew up, if he didn't become a scientist like his father. The two professions were rather similar, he decided. He certainly would not become a clergyman like Mr Babcock. Not in this day and age.
He wondered how long they would stay inside the church. Hours, probably. It was full to the brim with priests and pilgrims wanting to pray, and they would all bump into each other. This made him laugh, and laughing made him want to go to the toilet--his grandmother hated the word toilet, but everyone used it at school--and so, as there wasn't a real one handy, he went and relieved himself against the wall of the church. Nobody saw. Then he sat down on a step, opened his two maps and spread them across his knees. The thing was, Jesus had either been held in the Antonia Fortress or in the Citadel. Probably both. But which one had he been held in last, before he had to carry his Cross with the two other prisoners, and set out for Golgotha? The description in the Gospels did not make it clear. He was brought before Pilate, but Pilate could just as well have been in the one place as in the other. Pilate delivered Jesus to the high priests to be crucified, but where were the high priests waiting for him? That was the point. It could have been at Herod's Palace, where the Citadel stood now, and in that case Jesus and the two thieves would all have left the city by the Genath Gate. He looked from one map to the other : the Genath Gate was now called Jaffa Gate, or in Hebrew Yafo--it depended which language you spoke.
Robin looked at the church door. They would be ages yet. He decided to walk to the Jaffa Gate and see how it was for himself. It wasn't very far, and with the help of the modern map he wouldn't lose the way. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the gate, and here he paused to take stock of his surroundings. People were passing in and out, and there were cars drawn up outside, as there had been by St Stephen's Gate at the opposite end of the walled city. The trouble was, of course, that instead of the bare hillside and gardens, which was how it would have been two thousand years ago, there was now a main road, and the modern city spreading itself everywhere. He consulted his old map once again. There used to be a fortress tower called Psephinus, standing proud and mighty by the north-west corner of the city, and this was the tower that the Emperor Titus rode to inspect, when he camped with his Roman legions before capturing and sacking Jerusalem in A.D. 70. There was something built on the present site called the College des Freres. Wait a moment, though. Was it the College des Freres or a hotel called the Knight's Palace? Either way it was still inside the walls of the city, and somehow that was not right, even with the walls having been rebuilt.
'I'll imagine,' he told himself, 'that I'm Jesus, and I've just come out of the Genath Gate, and all this is bare hillside and sloping gardens, and they don't crucify a person in a garden, but a decent distance away, especially before the Feast of the Passover, otherwise the people would make a disturbance, and there had been enough riots already. So Jesus and the two other condemned prisoners were made to walk a fair way, that's why they made Simon the farm-labourer--and Cyrene means farm-labourer in Aramaic, the Headmaster told me so--carry the cross. He was just coming in from work in the fields. Jesus couldn't manage it, being weak from all that scourging. And they took him and the others out to some rough scrubby ground overlooked by the Psephinus tower, where the soldiers would have had a guard posted, so that if there should have been an attempt at rescue the attempt would fail.'
Pleased with his deduction, Robin turned to the right out of the Jaffa Gate and walked along the main road until he judged that he was the right distance from the long-vanished tower of Psephinus. He found that he had reached a junction, with main roads going in all directions and traffic roaring by, and the great building across the other side of the central square was the town hall, according to his modern map.
'So this is it,' he thought. 'This is scrubby ground, with fields where the town hall stands, and the farm-labourer is sweating, and so are Jesus and the others. And the sun is overhead in a blazing sky, as it is now, and when the crosses are set up the men nailed on them won't see the fields behind them, they'll be looking at the city.'
He shut his eyes a moment, and turned, and looked back at the city and the walls, and they were a golden colour, very fine and splendid. For Jesus, who had spent most of his life wandering about the hills and lakes and villages, it would have seemed the finest and most splendid city in the world. But after staring at it for three hours, in pain, it would not seem so splendid--in fact, it would be a relief to die.
A horn blared, and he stepped out of the way of the incoming traffic. If he didn't watch out he would die too, and there wouldn't be much sense in that.
He decided to walk back to the city through the New Gate, which was just along to the right. Some men were repairing a place in the road, and they looked up as Robin approached. They shouted, pointing to the traffic, and although Robin got the message, and skipped to safety beside them, he couldn't understand what they were saying. It could be Yiddish, or possibly Hebrew, but he wished it could have been Aramaic. He waited until the man with the drill ceased his ear-splitting probe, and then he called to them.
'Does anyone speak English?' he asked.
The man with the drill smiled and shook his head, then called out to one of his companions, who was bending over a piece of piping. The man looked up. He was young, like the rest, and had very white teeth and black curly hair.
'I speak English, yes,' he said.
Robin peered down into the pit beneath. 'Can you tell me, then,' he asked, 'if you have found anything interesting down there?'
The young man laughed, and picked up a small animal by its tail. It looked like a dead rat.
'Tourist souvenir?' he suggested.
'No skulls? No bones?' Robin asked hopefully.
'No,' smiled the labourer. 'For that we have to drill very de
ep, below the rock. Here, you can catch?' He threw a small piece of rock up to Robin from the pit in which he stood. 'Keep it,' he said. 'The rock of Jerusalem. It will bring you luck.'
'Thank you very much,' said Robin.
He wondered whether he should tell them that they were standing within a hundred yards or so, perhaps, of a place where three men had been crucified two thousand years ago, and then he decided they would not believe him; or, if they did, it would not impress them very much. For Jesus was not important to them, not like Abraham or David, and, anyway, so many men had been tortured and killed around Jerusalem since then that the young man might very well say, with justice, so what? It would be more tactful to wish them a happy holiday instead. It was the 14th day of Nisan, and at sundown all work would cease. He put the small piece of rock in his pocket.
'I hope you have a very pleasant Pesach,' he said.
The young man stared. 'You Jewish?'
'No,' answered Robin, uncertain whether the question related to his nationality or to his religion. If the latter, he would have to reply that his father was an atheist, and his mother went to church once a year on Christmas Day. 'No, I come from Little Bletford in England, but I do know that today is the 14th day of Nisan and that you have a public holiday tomorrow.'
This, in fact, was the reason for so much traffic, he supposed, and the reason why the city itself had been so crowded. He hoped the young man was suitably impressed by his knowledge.
'It's your Feast of Unleavened Bread,' he told him.
The young man smiled again, showing his row of white teeth, and, laughing, he called something over his shoulder to his companion with the drill, who shouted in reply, before applying his drill to the surface of the road again. The ear-splitting sound began once more, and the young man cupped his hands to his mouth and called up to Robin, 'It is also the Festival of our Freedom,' he shouted. 'You are young, like us. Enjoy it too.'
Robin waved his hand and began walking towards the New Gate, his hand clenched tightly round the piece of rock in his pocket. The Festival of our Freedom ... It sounded better than the Passover. More modern, more up to date. More suitable for, as his grandmother would say, this day and age. And whether it meant freedom from bondage, as it did in the Old Testament, or freedom from the rule of the Roman Empire, which the Jews hoped for at the time of the crucifixion, or freedom from hunger and poverty and homelessness, which the young men digging in the road had won for themselves today, it was all one and the same thing. Everyone, everywhere, wanted freedom from something, and Robin decided that it would be a good idea if Pesach and Easter could be combined throughout the world, and then all of us, he thought, could join in celebrating the Festival of our Freedom.
The bus took the road north from the Mount of Olives before sundown. There had been no further drama. Bob and Jill Smith, having searched the precincts of the Holy Sepulchre in vain, had turned their steps in the direction of the New Gate and had come across Robin, perfectly composed, entering the city behind a group of singing pilgrims from the coast. The bus had been late departing because of Miss Dean. The ambulance had taken her to hospital, where she had been detained for a number of hours suffering from shock, but luckily with no external or internal injuries. She had been given an injection and a sedative, and then the doctor had pronounced her fit to travel, with strict injunctions that she should be put straight to bed directly they were back in Haifa. Kate Foster had become nurse in charge of the patient.
'It is so kind of you,' Miss Dean had murmured, 'so very kind.'
It was decided by all not to mention her unfortunate accident. Nor did Miss Dean allude to it herself. She sat silently, with a rug over her knees, between the Fosters. Lady Althea was silent too. Her blue chiffon scarf masked the lower part of her face, giving her the appearance of a Moslem woman who had not relinquished the veil. If anything, it added to her dignity and grace. She too had a rug over her knees, and the Colonel held her hand beneath it.
The young Smiths held hands more openly, Jill sporting a new bangle, an inexpensive one that Bob had bought for her as they passed near one of the suks on their return earlier in the day after finding Robin.
Babcock sat beside Robin. Like Miss Dean, he also wore a change of clothing--a pair of trousers borrowed from Jim Foster which were a shade too large for him. No one passed any remarks, and for this he was unspeakably thankful. No one looked back at the city of Jerusalem as the bus skirted Mount Scopus--that is to say, no one but Robin. The ninth hour of the 14th day of Nisan had come and gone, and the thieves, or the insurrectionists, whichever they were, had been taken down from their crosses. Jesus too, his body perhaps in a grave deep in the rock below where the young labourers had been drilling. Now the young men could go home, and wash, and meet their families, and look forward to the public holiday. Robin turned to the Rev. Babcock at his side.
'It's rather a shame,' he said, 'that we couldn't have stayed two more days.'
Babcock, who wished for nothing more than to be safely back on board ship so that he could shut himself in his cabin and try to forget his shame in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, marvelled at the resilience of the young. The boy had been dragging round the city all day, and had nearly lost himself into the bargain.
'Why, Robin?' he asked.
'Well, you never know,' Robin replied. 'Of course it's not very probable in this day and age, but we might have seen the Resurrection.'
The Breakthrough
MY PART IN the affair started on September 18th, when my chief sent for me and told me he was transferring me to Saxmere on the east coast. He was sorry about it, he said, but I was the only one with the necessary technical qualifications for the particular work they had on hand. No, he couldn't give me any details; they were an odd lot down there, and shut themselves up behind barbed wire at the slightest provocation. The place had been a radar experimental station a few years back, but this was finished, and any experiments that were going on now were of an entirely different nature, something to do with vibrations and the pitch of sound.
'I'll be perfectly frank with you,' said my chief, removing his horn-rimmed spectacles and waving them in the air apologetically. 'The fact is that James MacLean is a very old friend of mine. We were at Cambridge together and I saw a lot of him then and afterwards, but our paths diverged, and he tied himself up in experimental work of rather a dubious nature. Lost the government a lot of money, and didn't do his own reputation much good either. I gather that's forgotten, and he's been reinstated down at Saxmere with his own hand-picked team of experts and a government grant. They're stuck for an electronics engineer-- which is where you come in. MacLean has sent me an S.O.S. for someone I can vouch for personally in other words, he wants a chap who won't talk. You'd do me a personal favour if you went.'
Put like this, there was little I could do but accept. It was a damned nuisance, all the same. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to leave Associated Electronics Ltd., and its unique facilities for research, and drift off to the east coast to work for someone who had blotted his copybook once and might do so again.
'When do you want me to go?' I asked.
The chief looked more apologetic than ever.
'As soon as you can make it. The day after tomorrow? I'm really very sorry, Saunders. With any luck you'll be back by Christmas. I've told MacLean I'm lending you to him for this particular project only. No question of a long-term transfer. You're too valuable here.'
This was the sop. The pat on the back. A.E.L. would forget about me for the next three months. I had another question, though.
'What sort of a chap is he?'
'MacLean?' My chief paused before replacing his horn-rims, always a signal of dismissal. 'He's what I'd call an enthusiast, the kind that don't let go. A fanatic in his way. Oh, he won't bore you. I remember at Cambridge he spent most of his time bird-watching. He had some peculiar theory then about migration, but he didn't inflict it on us. He nearly chucked physics for neurology, but
thought better of it-- the girl he later married persuaded him. Then came the tragedy. She died after they'd only been married a year.'
My chief replaced his spectacles. He had no more to say or, if he had, it was beside the point. As I was leaving the room he called after me, 'You can keep that last piece of information to yourself. About his wife, I mean. His staff down there may not know anything about it.'
It was not until I had actually packed up at A.E.L. and left my comfortable digs, and the train was drawing out of Liverpool Street station, that the full force of my situation hit me. Here I was, lumbered with a job I didn't want in an outfit I knew nothing about, and all as a personal favour to my chief, who obviously had some private reason for obliging his one-time colleague. As I stared moodily out of the carriage window, feeling more bloody-minded every minute, I kept seeing the expression on my successor's face when I told him I was going to Saxmere.
'That dump'?' he said. 'Why, it's a joke--they haven't done any serious research there for years. The Ministry have given it over to the crackpots, hoping they'll blow themselves to pieces.'
A few discreet off-hand enquiries in other quarters had brought the same answer. A friend of mine with a sense of humour advised me over the telephone to take golf-clubs and plenty of paperbacks. 'There's no sort of organisation,' he said. 'MacLean works with a handful of chaps who think he's the Messiah. If you don't fall into line he ignores you, and you'll find yourself doing sweet f.a.'
'Fine. That suits me. I need a holiday,' I lied, hanging up with feelings of intense irritation against the world in general.
It was typical, I suppose, of my approach to the whole business that I hadn't checked thoroughly on timetables, and therefore an added annoyance to find that I had to get out at Ipswich, wait forty minutes, and board a slow train to Thirlwall, which was the station for Saxmere. It was raining when I finally descended upon the empty windswept platform, and the porter who took my ticket told me that the taxi which usually waited for this particular train had been snapped up five minutes before.