we’d meet for beer and discuss our photographic exploits, each trying to outdo the other.
One afternoon, knowing full well I could challenge Arno with the adventure, I climbed a wall in the Arab quarter. I’d seen some Israeli soldiers sitting on the edge of a roof. They were watching the crowds below, and I figured if I climbed the wall and stuck my head above the far side of the roof they were on, I could get a great shot of them silhouetted against the Dome of the Rock.
I figured out all the angles and scampered up for the shot. It’s only now, in retrospect, that I realize how foolish I was. Sneaking up on two soldiers armed with machine guns isn’t a smart thing to do. But I went, anyway, and snapped the photo without the pair ever realizing I was there. I still think about it. What if a chunk of rock had broken off under my feet? What if I had startled them? Sometimes, I guess, you think that because you’re a tourist, you’re bulletproof and not really part of what’s going on.
One evening, poring over maps with Arno and Berhitte, we came up with our craziest escapade. We decided to tunnel under Jerusalem. That’s not as daft as it sounds — a tunnel really does exist. There aren’t many references to it, but we managed to find it. We were going to go through Hezekial’s Tunnel.
Okay, I thought, here we go. It was a sort of metaphor for the whole trip. A tunnel, all Freudian analysis aside, is a dark place through which one emerges into the light. The real Hezekial’s Tunnel begins at a pool of water, and it was there, at that pool, that Jesus is said to have washed the eyes of a blind man and made him see again. That’s the metaphor exactly: to come through the tunnel into the light, to see clearly, to understand.
In King Hezekial’s time the water supply of Jerusalem was outside the city walls. No river runs through Jerusalem and never has. Instead, the first settlements were built around a little artesian well, a pool of water that has bubbled faithfully up from the ground throughout the long years of the city’s existence.
Now, when King Hezekial got word that an Assyrian army was advancing on his city, he wisely ordained that a tunnel should be built to bring water to a reservoir inside the walls. Work on the tunnel commenced. One party dug in from the pool, while another dug out from inside the city walls. And almost thirty centuries ago water flowed through the tunnel for the first time, the Assyrians were thwarted, and Jerusalem, the city of peace, survived to live another day.
The tunnel is still there, carrying a stream of water through its dark shaft. Outside St. Stephen’s Gate an unmarked path winds down into a valley. Arno, Birhitte, and I descended it wordlessly, and at the bottom of the path, still within sight of the city walls, we saw an unremarkable concrete building. Inside it was the ancient spring.
There, too, a group of young Palestinian boys appeared from nowhere and began pulling at our sleeves. “You go? You go?” They held flashlights so that we knew we had reached the place. Hezekial’s Tunnel starts at the bottom of a decrepit set of concrete stairs, and the boys’ faces quickly reflected disappointment when we declared forcefully that we would go through it without guides.
Berhitte, though, took one look at the pitch-black entrance and chickened out. She couldn’t do it, she said. Too claustrophobic. Big Arno glanced at her sheepishly. I’d like to think he was feeling a little doubtful himself. “Berhitte,” he said, “I can’t leave you here by yourself. It’s not safe.” He was probably right. I’d already seen one young woman being followed ominously by a man with less than honourable intentions. The tunnel’s entrance wasn’t a safe place for a lone woman. Arno shrugged and said to me, “I can’t leave her alone.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”
“You are sure?”
For a moment I, too, was unsure. I hadn’t really planned on going solo, but there I was and there it was.
Berhitte and Arno said they’d meet me at the other end, and I ventured forward into the water, switching on my flashlight. The boys were still calling, their voices echoing in the darkness. Within a few steps the water was around my knees, gurgling and splashing as it has for three thousand years. The stone resembled unpolished marble, and the thin lance of my flashlight swept over rock that was a gentle pink like the hue of a seashell’s interior.
I could see how the tunnel was carved out by hand chisels. The marks were still visible in the rock, and again I wondered how anyone could possibly have managed the feat. The water was crystal-clear, and the only sound was my own breathing and the slosh of my two pale legs, diffracted and determinedly striding beneath the surface. Literally, I was tunnelling through history, plunging deep below the meaning-heavy city above.
At first the ceiling was a full metre over my head, and I could extend both arms and touch the walls on either side. Farther into the tunnel the walls began to squeeze in and the roof descended. Then, of course, the water was forced higher, and I had to crouch with only my head and shoulders and desperately precious flashlight free of the flowing stream.
Somewhere above Christ had been crucified. Somewhere above Muhammad had ascended to heaven on a silvery steed. The tunnel stretched on, seemingly winding and bending toward the very roots of the world.
In time I came to the point where the two parties of diggers had met all those years ago. There was once an inscription here in archaic Hebrew. It had read simply: BEHOLD … THE EXCAVATION.
I continued on, a heartbeat from panic, knowing there were hundreds of tonnes of rock overhead. Hurrying, I tipped my flashlight occasionally to see if something was in the water. I didn’t know what I expected to see lurking in the depths — perhaps something unknown and terrifying, something scuttling along the bottom in the murk.
There were also rumbles several times as if the earth was still settling around me. I hustled a bit more, jittery at the thought of being trapped in a cave-in. The thundering, I rationalized later, must have been the noise of trucks passing overhead — either that or more jets breaking the sound barrier.
Finally, the tunnel started to weave back and forth, and it seemed that the ceiling was growing higher. I turned another bend and heard a voice calling. It was indistinct, but I had little choice but to forge toward it. Then I realized my name was being shouted. It was Berhitte. She was quite worried. I’d been underground for maybe forty-five minutes. Her voice became louder until all at once I emerged at the Pool of Siloah and into the light.
A gang of boys was there, as well, but they were older than those at the entrance. They offered to take my picture as I arrived, but I didn’t trust them with my camera. These boys had a menacing air, laughed at my soaked T-shirt, and probably wondered why anyone would want to clamber through a three-thousand-year-old tunnel.
I shook them off, and Arno slapped my back and grinned. Together we three trudged back up to re-enter Jerusalem by the Dung Gate, which was given its unpleasant name because ancient villagers had once tossed their refuse there.
Today the Dung Gate leads into one of the most famous of all the sites of Jerusalem. In my wet clothes I was alarmingly out of place among the long white beards and black robes rocking gently in prayer. Directly in front was the legendary Wailing Wall.
A few hundred metres away, in the Arab quarter, one is greeted with “Salam aleikum,” but at the Wailing Wall only Hebrew is heard, and for Israelis the salutation is that most Jewish of words — shalom.
Salam, shalom — they are brother words from an ancient Semitic root. The name of the city, Jerusalem, literally means
