A Skeleton in God's Closet Read online

  Jon buried his face in the pillow and whispered, “I miss you, Andrea! You’ll never—ever—know how much!”

  SIX

  Achmed Sa’ad’s seventeen-year-old son, Ibrahim, now assisted Jon at the stonework he was excavating, and progress was rapid. Another course of fitted rock was uncovered, but this row had an oblong stone bridging a pronounced recess below it. Next, they uncovered three smaller courses on each side, flanking the indentation, which Jon measured at about two feet square. It was time to summon the master.

  “Aha!” Jennings chortled with glee, rubbing his hands together. “Just as I thought! Have you gone inside yet?”

  “What do you mean ‘inside’?”

  Both knew that the two questions were idle chitchat designed to conceal their excitement. Jon knew the oblong stone looked for all the world like a lintel, and Jennings could plainly see that the threshold—if it were that—had not been penetrated.

  Jon broke the silence. “It does look like a small doorway, doesn’t it, Austin? But to what? Another sepulcher, like the one above?”

  “Or even a treasure trove?!” Jennings winked. “It could be a natural cliffside cavern that was converted into some sort of storage chamber simply by walling in the front. And I find any of those possibilities . . . just fabulous,” Jennings murmured.

  Jon wiped his forehead in a surge of elation. Then he noticed that even young Ibrahim was standing tall, drenched in the pride of accomplishment. Jon threw an arm across his shoulders and said, “Kwais! Kwais! Shukran, shukran!” (“Good, good, my friend! Thank you, thank you!”)

  But Ibrahim replied in very acceptable English, “And I am thanking you, Sayyed Weber, for letting me work with you.”

  “Wait a moment and don’t touch anything,” Jennings advised. He returned minutes later with a camera, a small prybar, two flashlights, and a black-and- white-banded meter stick that he placed against the now fully exposed stonework. After taking a series of photographs, he handed Jon the prybar and said, “Now wedge out those four stones beneath the lintel.”

  The stones proved to be only a foot thick, and Jon pried them apart without much difficulty. Beyond question, it was a passageway. When he had hauled the last stone aside, he looked up to Jennings and said, “You first, Austin; it’s your dig.”

  “No. It’s your discovery, Jonathan. But first, we’d best make sure the air inside is good. Ibrahim, run to the supply shed and fetch us a candle, some tape, and some matches. There’s a good lad . . .”

  They managed only small talk while Ibrahim was gone, both refusing to ventilate their excitement. When he returned, Jennings taped the candle onto the end of the meter stick, lit it, and poked it through the dark threshold as far as he could reach. “If the flame goes out, it’s not safe to go inside until we give the cavern a complete airing.”

  They waited two minutes. “Flame’s still burning,” Jennings said. “I doubt that this place was hermetically sealed.” Then he stood up and said, “But I also made my first mistake in over thirty years in the field.” He winked at Jon to show that he was not really a pompous ass. “I should’ve used our air pump. If a goodly collection of methane had been inside there, I do believe I would quite have exploded your find—if not myself as well!”

  “I’ve always said you were a blasted good archaeologist, Austin.”

  “Do spare me the bad humor! Now grab a torch and climb inside.”

  “After what you just said, I much prefer our American term: flashlight. ”

  “But do come out immediately if the air smells bad, or if you feel dizzy.”

  Jon hunkered down on all fours, crawled through the opening, and turned on his flashlight. He saw little but smelled much. The odor was overpowering, an unholy mixture of dank, musty dungeon, mixed with rotting cistern, essence of primordial swamp, and bat guano. He coughed, retched, and backed out of the cavern.

  Sitting ruefully in front of his find, Jon said, “The place smells as if the whole Chinese army hung its socks here after Mao’s Thousand-Mile March!”

  “I dare say, Jonathan. It’s likely worse than a Turkish toilet! Let’s give it more time to air out.”

  Fifteen minutes had passed when Jon said, “I can’t wait. I’ve got to go back inside.”

  He crawled through the passageway again. “The air seems more tolerable,” he reported. “Or maybe my nose just died.” While his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he combed the interior with his flashlight. “It’s not hewn, Austin,” he called back. “It’s a natural cavern. At this point I see nothing artificial. It’s just high enough to stand—if you’re a hunchback or a dwarf!”

  When Jennings heard nothing for several minutes, he called, “What else do you see?”

  “Many wonderful things!”

  “What?!”

  “Only spoofing! That’s what Carter said the first time he saw all the gold in King Tut’s tomb. No, all I see is an empty cavern.”

  “Well, I’m coming in, now that my stalking horse seems to be surviving. See why I let you go in first?”

  Chuckling, Jon pointed his flashlight toward the passageway to illuminate Jennings’s path. As the taller of the two, Jennings found it easier to explore the cavern on his knees than to go about stoop-shouldered as did Jon. Sniffing the air, he said, “Not that bad, Jonathan, not that bad. I’ve smelled worse.”

  “Sure, now that I’ve aired it out for you.”

  Slowly, Jennings circled the cavern with his flash-light, muttering such unintelligibles as “Hmmmm,” “Umm-hmmmm,” “Well, now,” “Hmmmpf,” and “My, my!” He spent an inordinate amount of time examining the walls of the cavern, gently tapping them with his mallet and listening closely. He did the same between rocky outcroppings on the floor. Finally he halted his search and said, “It’s closing time, Jonathan. Ah, let’s keep this confidential for the moment. I’ll have a word with Ibrahim about that also. . . . But I’m canceling my lecture for this evening, because you and I have much to discuss.”

  Jon found two letters waiting for him at the hotel, one from his parents in Hannibal, the other embossed with the triple crown and papal keys of Vatican City. Kevin Sullivan’s letter concluded:

  Yesterday, I completed my UV scan of the entire Vaticanus. No other eradications appear in the entire Codex. I did detect some points at which the scribe had corrected himself, but these had been known for years.

  Next Monday I fly to London, where I’ll examine the Sinaiticus, thanks to your kindness in clearing the way at the British Museum. I await final approval from the Holy Father for your testing proposal.

  Carry on, Jon! I only wish I were getting my fingernails dirty too! All the best!

  Kevin

  And I only wish I knew how to get a proper handle on that Markan ending, Jon mused. That new line could be a sputtering bombshell!

  After dinner, Jennings came up to his room with a bottle of sherry and two glasses. “I know,” he apologized, “it’s supposed to be sherry before dinner, among civilized English, and port after. But we exist here under dire privations!”

  “Not to worry, dear Austin,” responded Jon, in a contrived Oxonian accent. “Frightfully glad you were able to fetch any sort of spirituous beverage!”

  “Good effort, Jonathan. With a little tutelage, you might even learn to communicate in a civil manner. But to the point at hand. Did you find anything strange about what we uncovered today?”

  “Not really. Except for the walled-in opening, every inch of that cavern looked like a natural grotto to me. There are hundreds like it all over Israel and Jordan, aren’t there?”

  “To be sure. But you’re losing the forest for the trees. Once again, which piece doesn’t fit the puzzle? What is the master anomaly?”

  “The threshold, the stonework, of course.”

  “Exactly. But why, pray tell, would anyone wall in an empty cavern?”

  “Masonry practice? No, I’ll get serious. Clearly something of value had at one time been inside that cavern, but it must
have fallen prey to robbers centuries ago.”

  Jennings wrinkled his brow, then began the ritual of lighting his pipe. Meticulously, he poured an aromatic blend into the bowl, tamped the tobacco exactly to his specifications, lit it with a great sweep of his hand, and then sucked the mixture into life, filling the room with bluish clouds of smoke. Only then did he respond, “That’s a quite proper hypothesis, Jonathan. But you’ve overlooked the anomaly inside the anomaly.”

  Jon pondered for a time, then shrugged his shoulders and said, “I . . . just don’t see it.”

  “Why, then, would treasure thieves or grave robbers have bothered to replace those four stones so carefully at the threshold?”

  “Of course! They replaced them to disguise the theft.”

  “That’s your American mind at work, Jonathan. Near Eastern grave robbers aren’t so sophisticated. I can’t think of a single cavern or tomb in Palestine that was robbed and then occluded again.”

  Jon stroked his cheek in thought, then quaffed the remaining sherry in his glass and poured another for Jennings and himself. “Well, then, we have a quite fascinating mystery on our hands. Can you solve it?”

  “I have some thoughts on the matter. But I’d like to hear yours first.”

  Jon paused some moments, then said, “I can think of three alternatives. One, some grave robber long ago was sophisticated; two, something remains hidden inside the cavern that we missed; or three, we’ll never know.”

  “Quite right. I incline to the second, and let me tell you why. To ward off grave robbery, the ancients sometimes made secret burials and then camouflaged their tombs. Several such have been discovered in the so-called Tombs of the Sanhedrin in north Jerusalem. That’s why I tapped the walls of the cavern: I was searching for hidden loculi. But I heard nothing hollow, nothing suspicious.”

  “And that, of course, was why the Egyptian pharaohs abandoned pyramids for their hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings. We must have over-looked something, Austin. That was just a ‘once-over’ this afternoon. . . . But why are you keeping our find confidential?”

  “Can you imagine fifty-five curious people squeezing into that cavern?”

  “Oh, obviously.”

  Jennings held his glass high. “To the morrow!” he toasted.

  The clink of their glasses was answered by the haunting yowl of a jackal.

  The next morning, they brought thin probing rods, hammers, and metal detectors along with them to the cavern. A careful sweep of the sides, ceiling, and floor of the grotto set up no howl in the electronic detectors, even with sensitive settings. Then they began a systematic tapping of the walls of the cavern, inserting probing rods wherever there seemed to be a suspicious echo, crease, or recess. Every surface, however, appeared to be solid virgin bedrock.

  Returning after lunch, Jennings sighed, “Well, it’s the floor . . . or nothing.” They were now illuminating the grotto with a Coleman gas pressure lantern set into a niche on the far wall. Jon squatted down and studied the base of the cavern for some moments. Then he said, “Austin, do you see what I see?”

  “Rock, dirt, debris, guano . . .”

  “No, look at those rocky outcroppings. They show up everywhere except in this center area here.” He traced a large rectangle with his flashlight. Emitting a low whistle, he asked, “So! Do we finally have a ‘diggable’ area here?”

  “Good show, Jonathan! Let’s find out.”

  Both set to work with hand picks, loosening the composite of dirt and guano, and handing buckets of the material out to Ibrahim. By closing time, they had dug eleven inches into the floor, uncovering an area that clearly was not part of bedrock.

  “Well, we have our work cut out for us again tomorrow, Austin,” said Jon, wiping his brow.

  Jon sat across from Shannon at dinner that night. Their conversation drifted to an inevitable topic for that quarter of the world—Israel versus the Arabs.

  “Will there ever be real peace?” he wondered.

  “The Israel-PLO accords are a great first step,” she replied, as she peeled a Jaffa orange. “But the extremists keep the pot boiling. And you can’t believe the wild variety of pressure groups on both sides.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, among the Palestinians it’s Hamas that makes the PLO or Fatah look tame. Hamas are the ‘true believers,’ mind you, the Muslim fundamentalists who reject any talks with Israel because they oppose the very existence of a Jewish state.”

  “What about the Israeli factions?” asked Jon. “They have extremists too. There’s that wonderful Jewish adage, ‘two Jews, three opinions.’”

  “They run from the Gush Emunim—who want to plant the Star of David flag in Damascus, if possible—to some of the orthodox groups who oppose the State of Israel.”

  “Who what? Jews opposing Israel?”

  “True. Take the Neturei Karta. They’re rigor-ously orthodox Jews who think the State of Israel is a violation of God’s will.”

  “Oh, that group!” he now recalled. “Aren’t they the ones who think it was God who willed Jewish exile from Israel in the first place? And the exile will end only when the Messiah comes?”

  “That’s the group. Some of them even claim the Nazi Holocaust happened as divine punishment for Zionist thinking even before the State of Israel was founded in 1948.”

  “Beyond belief!”

  Shannon smiled and nodded. “Nobody pays them that much attention, but they’re part of the crazyquilt that’s Israel today.”

  Jon squirmed a bit in his chair. He had moved into a frustration zone. Shannon was an engaging, obviously attractive, and delightfully lively woman, with a first-class intellect to boot. With such a woman one could fall in love. With such a woman, one could also fall into hopeless frustration—she was too young for him . . . and too spoken for. He had to get back on track with their conversation.

  “So, Shannon,” he finally managed. “Back to my original question: Will there ever be peace around here?”

  A wistful smirk crossed her face. Then she nodded and said, “Of course.”

  “When, then?”

  “When Messiah comes.”

  Three blasts of a horn pierced the quiet of evening.

  “Oh, oh, have to go,” she said. “Gideon gets impatient if I don’t hop to.”

  The next morning, Jon and Jennings gently ham-mered probing rods into their shallow pit inside the cavern. Both encountered something solid at a distance of twelve and thirteen inches respectively.

  Their digging was now impassioned. Neither said anything as they excavated on their knees with small half-spades, handing bucket after bucket of spoil out to Ibrahim. The lantern kept hissing its brightness into a grotto that had not seen light for ages.

  “I’ve bottomed onto something,” said Jon.

  “Then switch to your trowel. Be careful not to scrape our target, whatever it may be.”

  Several minutes passed when Jennings said, “I’ve reached it too.”

  An hour more of the most meticulous excavation laid bare a two-meter angular slab of grayish lime-stone, less than a meter wide, peaked at the center line, with sides sloping at a four-to-one ratio and horned at the corners.

  “Good heavens!” Jennings whispered in exclamation. “You know what we have here?”

  “Yes, beyond any debate. It’s the lid of a sarcophagus!”

  At lunch they could barely disguise the mood roaring through them. Again Jennings had urged silence until their discovery was complete. One exception, how-ever, was Dick Cromwell, whom he now assigned to the cliffside cavern with all his camera equipment. The rest of the afternoon saw a lightning storm of electronic flashes in the grotto as Cromwell recorded their progress at every stage in liberating the sides of the stone coffin.

  That task went rapidly, since there was far less bulk to remove. At 2 PM, they sent a message that the bus should leave without them, and they would drive back in the dig’s Land Rover instead. Some phases of excavation did not brook inter
ruption of any kind.

  By late afternoon, the sides of the sarcophagus were fully exposed. They stood two and a half feet high and were of the same limestone as the lid. Attractive rosettes had been cut into both of the long sides of the sarcophagus, and small seven-branch candlesticks into the two ends, the menorah symbol.

  But it was not the art that transfixed the three as they knelt before the stone coffin at the most awesome moment of their professional lives. It was the inscription. Jon had uncovered the first lettering in midafternoon, but left it enshrined in dirt caking until the sides had been fully cleared. Then he had taken a camel’s-hair brush and gently dusted off the inscription. It had two-inch lettering, it was in two languages, and it would evoke the first flourish from the trumpets of destiny:

  “That’s Greek on top and Hebrew at the bottom, isn’t it?” Cromwell wondered.

  “Well . . . Aramaic, the later cousin to Hebrew,” Jon explained.

  “But what does it say?”

  Jon pointed out each syllable with his index finger as he said, “Here . . . lies . . . Joseph of Arimathea . . . son of Asher . . . Councilor—or Member of the Council— . . . His memory be blessed . . . Peace.”

  “What Council would that be?” asked Cromwell.

  “The Jewish Sanhedrin, of course. That’s the very term used in the Gospels.”

  Silence ruled the cavern.

  “Awesome!” Cromwell finally exclaimed. “Just awesome!”

  Jennings said nothing at all. He merely wiped tears from the corner of his eye.

  SEVEN

  Jonathan . . . Richard . . . I needn’t tell you the implications here.” Jennings had finally found his tongue while driving back to Ramallah in the Land Rover. “The sarcophagus may be empty. Or it may not be. If not, then this could be one of the first biblical personalities ever discovered. We have inscriptions relating to people in the Bible—like the Pontius Pilate stone at Caesarea—but we don’t have their remains.”