“We’re not lost, are we?” Dan said.
“I don’t think so. I’m sure he came this way.”
How could she be certain? Sure, she’d put a lot of research into this trip, but there hadn’t been much to go on to begin with. All they knew was that the fictional author of the scroll—”fictional” was an adjective Dan used privately when referring to the author; never within Carrie’s hearing—had turned west from his southward trek and left the shore of what he called the Sea of Lot to journey into the wilderness.
But where had he turned?
“I don’t know, Carrie …”
“This has to be the way. “She seemed utterly convinced. Didn’t she have even a shade of a doubt? “Look: He mentioned being driven out of Qumran—that’s at the northern end of the sea. He says he headed south toward Masada and Zohar but he never mentions getting there. He doesn’t even mention passing En Gedi which was a major Oasis even then. So he must have turned into the wilderness somewhere between Qumran and En Gedi.”
“No argument there. But that stretch is more than thirty miles long. There were hundreds of places we could have turned off the road. Why did you pick that particular spot back there?”
Carrie looked at him and her clear blue eyes clouded momentarily. For the first time since their arrival she seemed unsure of herself.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It just seemed like the right place to turn. I’ve read the translation so many times I feel as if I know him. I could almost see him wandering south, alone, depressed, suddenly feeling it was no use trying to find other people to take him in, that he was unfit for human company, and turning and heading into the hills.”
Dan was struck by the thought that she might be describing her own feelings as a fourteen-year old entering the Convent of the Blessed Virgin.
That moment back on the highway had been kind of spooky. They’d been cruising south on Route 90 along the Dead Sea shore when Carrie had suddenly clutched his arm and pointed to a rubble-strewn path, little more than a goat trail, breaking through the roadside brush and winding up into the hills.
“There! Follow that!”
So Dan had followed.
“Which way does it seem we should go now?” he said and knew right away from her expression that it hadn’t come out the way he’d meant it.
Her eyes flashed. “Look, Dan. I know you think I’ve gone off the deep end on this, but it’s important to me. And if—”
“What’s important to me is you, Carrie. That’s all. Just you. And I’m worried about you getting hurt. You’ve pumped your expectations so high …”
Her eyes softened as she challenged the sun with that smile. “You don’t have to worry about me, Dan, because she is up here. And we’re going to find her.”
“Carrie …”
“And now that I think about it, it seems we should take the south fork.” She swung back into her seat and closed her door. “Come on, Driver Dan. Let’s go! Time’s a-wastin’!”
Dan sighed. Nothing to do but humor her. And it wasn’t so bad, really. At least they were together.
Almost four o’clock. Dan was thinking about calling it a day and heading back to the highway while there was still plenty of light left. Wouldn’t be easy finding his way back down in the light. No way in the dark. He was just about to suggest it when Carrie suddenly lurched forward in her seat.
“Oh, my God!” she cried, her eyes darting between the windshield and the sheet of paper in her lap. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, could that be it?”
Dan skidded to a halt and craned his neck over the steering wheel for a look. As before, the trailing dust cloud caught up to them and he could see nothing while they were engulfed. But as it cleared …
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
No, he thought. It’s got to be a mistake. The sun is directly ahead, it’s glancing off the dirt on the windshield. A trick of the light. Got to be.
Hoping, praying that his eyes were suffering from too much glare, Dan opened the door and stepped out for a better look. He shielded his eyes against the sun peeking over the flat ledge atop a huge outcropping of stone ahead of them, and blinked into the light. He still couldn’t tell if it—
And then the sun dipped below the ledge, silhouetting the outcropping in brilliant light. Suddenly Dan could see that the ledge ran rightward to merge with the wall of the mountain of which the outcropping was a part, and leftward to a rocky lip that overhung a sheer precipice bellying gently outward about halfway down its fall.
Damned if it didn’t look just like a … tav.
“Do you see it, Dan?”
He glanced right. Carrie was out of the cab, holding the yellow sheet of paper at arms length before her and jumping up and down like a pre-schooler who’d just spotted Barney.
He hesitated, unsure of what to say. As much as he wanted to avoid reinforcing her fantasies, he could not deny the resemblance of the cliff face to the Hebrew letter he’d drawn for her.
“Well, I see something that might remotely—”
“Remotely, shlemotely! That cliff looks exactly like what you drew here, which is exactly the way it was described in the scroll!”
“The forged scroll, Carrie. Don’t forget that the source of all these factoids is a confirmed hoax.”
“How could I possibly forget when you keep reminding me every ten minutes?”
He hated to sound like a broken record, but he felt he had to keep the facts before her. The scroll and everything in it was bogus. And truthfully, right now he needed a little reminder himself. Because finding the tav rock had shaken him up more than he wished to admit.
“Sorry, Carrie. I just …”
“I know. But you’ve got to believe, Dan. There’s truth in that scroll.” She pointed at the tav rock looming before them. “Look. We’re not imagining that. It’s there.”
Dan wanted to say, Yes, but if you want to perpetrate a hoax, you salt the lies with neutral truths, and the most easily verifiable neutral truths are simple geological formations. But he held his tongue. This was Carrie’s show.
“What are we waiting for?” she said
Dan shrugged and got back in behind the wheel. The incline ahead was extra steep so he shifted into super low.
“Can you believe it?” Carrie said, bubbling with excitement as they started the final climb. “We’re traveling the same route as Saint James and the members of the Jerusalem Church when they carried Mary’s body here.”
“No, Carrie,” he said softly. “I can’t believe it. I want to believe it. I’d give almost anything to have it be true. But I can’t believe it.”
She smiled that smile. “You will, Danny, me boy-o. Before the day is out, you will.”
The closer they got to the rock, the less and less it resembled a tav … and the more formidable it looked. Fifty feet high at the very least, with sheer walls that would have challenged an experienced rock climber even if they went straight up; but the outward bulge and the sharp overhang at the crest made ascent all but impossible.
As they rounded the outcropping, Dan realized they’d entered the mouth of a canyon. The deep passage narrowed and curved off to the left about a quarter of a mile north. He stopped the Explorer in the middle of the dry wadi running along the eastern wall. Cooler here. The canyon floor had been resting in the shadow of its western wall for a while. To his left he spotted a cluster of stunted trees.
“Aren’t those fig trees?” Carrie said.
“Not sure. Could be. Whatever they are, they don’t look too healthy.”
“They look old. Old fig trees … didn’t the scroll writer said he was subsisting on locusts, honey, and wild figs?”
“Yeah, but those trees don’t look wild. Looks like somebody planted them there.”
“Exactly!” Carrie said, grinning.
Dan h
ad to admit—to himself only—that she had a point. It looked as if someone had moved a bunch of wild fig trees to this spot and started a makeshift grove … out here … in the middle of nowhere.
But that only meant the forger of the scroll had to have been here in order to describe it; it didn’t mean St. James had been here, or that the Virgin Mary was hidden away atop the tav rock.
But a big question still remained: Who had planted those fig trees?
He turned to Carrie but her seat was empty. She was walking across the wadi toward the tav rock. Dan turned off the motor and ran around to catch up to her.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Looking for a way up.” She was studying the cliff face as she walked. “The scroll says there’s a path.”
Dan scanned the steep wall looming before them.
“Good luck.”
“Well, this isn’t nearly as smooth as the far side. There could be a way up. There must be. We simply have to find it.”
Dan saw countless jagged cracks and mini-ledges protruding randomly from the surface, but nothing that even vaguely resembled a path. This looked hopeless, but the scroll had been accurate on so many other points already, there just might be a path to the top.
He veered off to the left.
“Giving up so soon?” Carrie said.
“If there is a path,” he said, “you won’t spot it from straight on. It’ll only be visible from a sharp angle. You didn’t spot one as we rounded the front of the cliff, so let’s see what things look like from the back end.”
She nodded, smiling. “Smart. I knew I loved you for some reason.”
Dan figured he’d done enough nay-saying. The only way to get this over with was to find a path to the top—if one existed—and convince Carrie once and for all that there was no cave up there and that the Virgin Mary was not lying on a bier inside waiting to be discovered. Then maybe they could get their lives back to normal—that is, as normal as life could be for a priest and a nun who were lovers.
He reached the northern end of the outcropping and wound his way through the brush clustered around its base. When he was within arms reach of the base itself, he looked south along the cliff wall.
“I’ll be damned …”
Carrie hurried to his side. “What? Did you find it? Is it there?”
He guided her in front of him and pointed ahead. Starting a dozen feet behind them and running up the face of the cliff at a thirty-degree angle was a narrow, broken, jagged ledge. It averaged only two feet or so in width.
Carrie whirled and hugged him. “That’s it! You found it! See? All you need is a little faith!” She grabbed his hand and began dragging him from the brush. “Let’s go!”
He followed her at a walk as she ran back to where the ledge slanted into the floor of the canyon floor. By the time he reached it she was already on her way, scrabbling upward along the narrow shelf like a lithe, graceful cat.
“Slow down, Carrie.”
“Speed up, slowpoke!” she laughed.
She’s going to kill herself, he thought as he began his own upward course along the ledge. He glanced down at the jagged rubble on the hard floor of the wadi below and quickly pulled his gaze away. Maybe we’re both going to get killed.
He wasn’t good with heights—not phobic about them, but not the least bit fond of them. He concentrated on staying on the ledge. Shale, sand, and gravel littered the narrow, uneven surface before him, tilting toward the cliff wall for half a dozen feet or so, then a crack or a narrow gap, or a step up or down, then it continued upward, now sloping away from the wall. These away sections were the worse. Dan’s sneakers tended to slip on the sand and he had visions of himself sliding off into—
“Dan!”
A high-pitched squeal of terror from up ahead. He looked up and saw Carrie down on one knee, her right leg dangling over the edge, her fingers clawing at the cliff wall for purchase. She’d climbed back into the sunlight and it looked as if her sharp-edged shadow was trying to push her off.
Dear God!
“Carrie! Hang on!”
He hurried toward her as quickly as he dared but she was back on the ledge and on her feet again by the time he reached her.
“What happened?”
Pale, panting, she leaned against the cliff wall, hugging it. “I slipped, but I’m okay.”
Suddenly he was angry. His heart was pounding, his hands were trembling …
“You almost killed yourself, dammit!”
“Sorry,” she said softly. “That wasn’t my intention, I assure you.”
“Just slow down, will you? I don’t want to lose you.”
That smile. “That’s nice to hear.”
“Here. Let me slide past you and I’ll lead the way.”
“Not a chance. I’ll take my time from here on up.” She held up two fingers. “Promise.”
Carrie kept her word, taking it slow, watching her footing, with Dan close behind. They reached the sunlit summit without another mishap. He glanced around—no one else here, and no place to hide.
“Oh, Lord,” Carrie said, wandering across the top of the tav toward the far edge. “Look at this!”
Dan caught up to her and put an arm around her shoulders, as much from a need to touch her as to stop her from getting too close to the edge. The sun cooked their backs while the desert wind dried the sweat from the climb, and before them stretched the eastern expanse of the Midbar Yehuda, all hills and mounds and shadowed crags, looking like a rumpled yellow-brown blanket after a night of passion, sloping down to where a sliver of the Dead Sea was visible, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.
Breathtaking, Dan thought. This almost makes the whole wild goose chase worthwhile.
Together they turned from the vista and scanned the mini-plateau atop the tav. It ran two hundred feet from the front lip to the rear wall, and was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet wide. And against that rear wall, to the left of center, lay a pile of rocks.
Carrie grabbed his upper arm. He felt her fingers sink into his biceps as she pointed to the rocks.
“Oh, God, Dan! There it is!”
“Just some rocks, Carrie. Doesn’t mean—”
“She’s there, Dan. We’ve found her! We’ve found her!”
She broke from him and dashed across the plateau. Dan hurried after her.
Here it comes, he thought. Here’s where the roof falls in on Carrie’s quest.
By the time he reached the pile, Carrie was on it, scrambling to the top. The jumble stood about eight feet high and she was already at work pulling at the uppermost rocks to dislodge them.
“Easy, Carrie.” Dan climbed to her side and joined her atop the pile. “The last thing we need is for you to slip and sprain an ankle. I have no idea how I’d get you back down.”
“Help me,” Carrie said, breathless with excitement. “She’s just a few feet away. We’re almost there! I can feel it!”
Dan joined her in dislodging the uppermost rocks and letting them roll to the base. The first were on the small side, cantaloupe sized and easy to move. But they quickly graduated to watermelons.
Carrie groaned as she strained against one of the larger stones. “I can’t budge this. Give me a hand, will you?”
Dan got a grip on the edge of the rock and put his back into it and together they got it overbalanced to the point where it tumbled down the pile.
Dan saw even bigger stones below.
“We’re going to need help,” he said, panting and straightening up. The sun was still actively baking the top of the tav rock and he was drenched. “A lever of some sort. We’ll never move those lower rocks by ourselves. Maybe I can find a tree limb or something we can use to—”
“We’ve got to get in!” Tears of frustration welled in her eyes as she looked up at him. “We can’t stop n
ow. Not when we’re this close. We can’t let a bunch of lousy rocks keep us out when we’re so close!”
With the last word she kicked at one of the larger stones directly below her—and cried out in alarm as it gave way beneath her. Dan grabbed her outflung hand and almost lost his own footing as the entire pile shuddered and settled under them with a rumble and a gush of dust.
“You all right?” Dan said, pulling her closer.
She coughed. “I think so. What happened?”
“I’m not sure.” The dust was settling, layering their skin, mixing with their sweat. Even with mud on her face Carrie was beautiful. Over her shoulder, down by Carrie’s feet, Dan saw a dark crescent in the mountain wall. “Oh, Jesus.”
Carrie turned and gasped. “The cave!”
Maybe, Dan thought. Maybe not. The only sure thing about it is it’s a hole in the wall.
But he knew it was the upper rim of a cave mouth. Had to be. Everything else in this elaborate scam had followed true to the forged scroll. Why not the cave too?
But what sort of ugly surprise waited within?
Before he could stop her, Carrie had dropped prone and pushed her face into the opening.
“We left the flashlights in the car,” she was saying. “And I can’t see a thing.”
Quickly he pulled her back. “Are you nuts?”
“What’s the matter?”
“You don’t know what’s in there.”
“What could be in there?”
“How about snakes or scorpions? Or how about bats? It’s a cave, you know.”
“I know that, but—”
“But nothing.” He pulled her to her feet. “You keep your nose out of there while I go get the flashlights.”
“All right,” she said reluctantly as she allowed him to guide her down to the bottom of the pile. “Can’t see anything anyway.”
“Precisely. So you just wait here while I go back to the Explorer.”
“Okay, but hurry.” She squeezed his hand. “Don’t hurry so much you fall, but hurry.”