The Last Man Read online

  He rubbed his eyes and stared at the pillbox. He concluded that there was nobody in that thing. He was sure of it. Well, pretty sure. Last thing he needed was a guy in the box with an infrared scope nailing his ass when he left the cover of the ridge and started up the gully. He decided to wait some more, shifting his position slightly to get out of the clammy night breeze coming off the Dead Sea.

  A shiver went up his back when he thought about where he was and the fantastic history of this area, going back well before the time of Christ. The Bible’s description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Pillar of Salt, the petrifaction of Lot’s disobedient wife. He stared up at the darkened rock of Masada itself and considered again the bloody story of the Jews’ heroic self-immolation on that last night. He tried to picture it: high on the mountain, the wooden walls around the western rim ablaze in the night, illuminating the scorched top half of the huge siege tower perched at the top of the ramp as it catapulted huge stones across the flaming sky; the nine hundred sixty Jews, huddled inside the wrecked palace walls, knowing that it was over, as they took their last desperate counsel. They would have been listening to the massed cheering shouts of the bloodthirsty legions as they worked themselves up into a frenzy for the coming assault, waves of hard-bitten male voices hurling Roman war cries up the mountain slopes.

  The final decision to commit mass suicide was chronicled in Josephus’s history of the revolt, which in itself was an astonishing piece of writing. Josephus, a scion of the priestly Levite class, had been one of the Jewish leaders of the revolt in Galilee, but when the city he was charged to defend fell to Roman assault, he surrendered to Vespasian and saved his own life by prophesying Vespasian’s ascent to Caesar’s throne. When Nero was killed in Rome some weeks later, Vespasian’s legions proclaimed him the new emperor, and prophet Josephus had won himself a permanent new lease on life. Since there were other claimants and the prospect of a civil war, Vespasian turned over the Judaean campaign sideshow to his son Titus so that he could begin the politico-military campaign that would lead him back to Rome months later as Emperor Vespasian.

  Titus allowed Josephus to join his campaign staff as an adviser, and Josephus apparently became a willing ally of the Romans, not so much to subdue his own people but to convince the Jews to end the revolt before things went too far. He was present for and participated in the siege that culminated in the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple, and the core of the Jewish nation. He tried in vain to talk his countrymen into surrendering the city, but to no avail, and was reviled in Jewish history as a turncoat. In his later years, Josephus, now Flavius Josephus, having taken the family name of his royal sponsors, lived in Rome as a ward of the Flavian aristocracy and wrote several histories, including the one titled The Jewish Wars. Even though he had not been present at Masada, he had told the story as if he had been, writing in vivid detail about the final attack and describing the exhortations of Eleazar ben Jair, the leader of the Zealots on Masada, that death was far better than the dishonor of surrender and slavery. David knew that Josephus’s account of what the Jewish defenders thought and did up on the mountain was mostly made up, and yet his descriptions of the siege and the final Roman assault had been verified by the Yadin expedition two thousand years later. Now David was here to prove, if Adrian had been right, that even the illustrious Yadin had missed the truth.

  He looked at his watch. Eleven ten. He was getting cold just sitting here and had seen no signs of life in the box. The entire tourist center was in shadow, with only the sounds of the onshore wind and the occasional cry of a night bird from the salt marshes stirring the darkness. He was about to get up when he heard the sound of a vehicle coming up from the south. He scrambled around the large boulder and crouched down beneath its overhang as an army vehicle pulled off the coast road, slotted headlamps dimmed, and drove up into the parking lots in front of the tourist center. It pulled all the way to the edge of the lot nearest the mouth of the wadi leading up behind the mountain and stopped, its engines and lights subsiding.

  David waited, but nothing happened. He glanced back up at the box to see if someone would be climbing down, but there was still no movement. There was the flare of a cigarette lighter in the left front window of the truck, but no other signs of life. Twenty minutes later, as David was trying to decide how to get back down the sand slope to the fire door in the hostel, he heard another sound, this one coming from the mouth of the wadi. He crouched lower, aware that he was exposed to anyone coming down that darkened ravine. He stared hard at that darkness, then froze as a single file of soldiers emerged from the shadows, their footfalls tramping small puffs of dust. He couldn’t make out many details of their uniforms or faces in the dim starlight, but the unmistakable shape of submachine guns slung from shoulders confirmed who and what they were.

  Shit, he thought. An army patrol. So this place was not unattended after all. Now the question was, where did they patrol? Did they go up on the mountain, or just into the hills around it? What were they looking for? Arab terrorists setting up some atrocity at the tourist center, or Bedouin thieves bent on making off with ancient artifacts from the mountain? When did the patrols go out? He looked at his watch again but decided not to illuminate the dial. Had to be closing in on midnight, though. Was there a relief patrol in the truck? Or had they already been inserted somewhere else?

  He watched as the silent gray figures filed past him thirty yards away and converged on the truck. There was some milling about, the further flare of cigarette lighters, and then they started climbing into the back of the truck. He could hear murmurs of conversation, and then the truck engine started up. David withdrew around the corner of the boulder to avoid any headlamps that might sweep the hillside. He listened as the truck drove back out of the parking lot and on down the coast road.

  When the noise of the truck had died away, he made his way back along the ridge of rocks, staying in the shadows and stopping to listen every twenty feet or so. When he was satisfied that there was no one about, he walked down the sandy slope to the fire exit door and let himself back in. Once back in his room he got undressed, set his watch for seven, and then lay back on the bed. Tomorrow he would play boy archaeologist with the widow Ressner. Tomorrow night he would go up there on that mountain and find what he had come here for.

  10

  The following morning dawned bright and sunny, with a slight dust haze in the air carried in by a brisk breeze from the northwest across the tops of the Judaean hills. David met Judith in the restaurant as planned for coffee, where she surprised him with the suggestion that they walk up the southern ravine to the Roman siege ramp. “The cable car won’t start up for another two hours; we might as well see some things in that time,” she said.

  This was the reverse of David’s plan, but it served his purposes even better, allowing him to gauge the time required to go up Wadi Masada. They set out twenty minutes later, passing the ridgeline where David had kept vigil the night before. The sheer walls of the mountain rose about six hundred feet on the right, or north, side of the ravine, which was about a hundred yards wide at its mouth. As they climbed, the ravine narrowed down to about thirty yards in width. On their left rose the sheer rock walls of the southern plateau, which was actually higher than the rock of Masada. The wind kicked up dust devils along the ravine floor, and the going was much more difficult than David had anticipated due to the soft sand, hundreds of small rocks, and leg-deep fissures carved in the old stone by centuries of flash floods. The occasional scream of a hawk punctuated his grunts and quiet curses as he forced his way up the gradually more demanding slope. He was very grateful she had reminded him to bring his stick. She led the way, dressed in jeans, army boots, and a sleeveless sweatshirt. She wore a floppy sun hat and her mirrored glasses and had a plastic water bottle sticking out of her fanny pack that bobbed incongruously as she climbed ahead. He realized that she was puffing a little more than he was, but she put her head down and pressed on, and so did
he. After forty-five minutes of climbing in the wadi along the southern edge of the Masada escarpment, they reached a ridge from which the ground fell away in a steep hillside into a second ravine, this one pointing north along the western edge of the mountain until it ran smack into the right side of the Roman siege ramp about a quarter mile away. Judith paused to take a water break and to point out some of the engineering features of the fortress.

  “This is the western branch of Wadi Metsadá, the ravine used to fill Herod’s cisterns. You can see that it runs down from the hills on our left and along the western wall of the fortress.”

  “Yeah, but the cisterns are on the north face.”

  “Northwest, actually. Before the Romans built the ramp this wadi ran all the way along the west side of the mountain and down to the Dead Sea around the northern tip. Herod’s engineers dammed it up just beyond where the Romans eventually put the ramp. They then dug channels into the stone palisade that forms Metsadá’s west face. In the winter, storms occasionally sweep in off the Mediterranean and turn this wadi into a torrent. You may have seen the pictures in Yadin’s report. The water would back up at the dam and overflow sideways into the channels, run down along the channels, around the corner, and into the cisterns on the north face.”

  “Ingenious—but of course the Romans destroyed the impoundments.”

  “The very first thing they did. In a desert siege, of course, water is the key, but the fortress had been collecting water for decades. Even after it fell, people lived up there on what remained in those cisterns for nearly fifty years. There were other cisterns, too, of course, up along the rim, but they were small compared to the palace cisterns.”

  “How did they get the water up to the top from the palace cisterns?”

  “I will show you, but basically, water slaves carried it up in buckets. Shall we go?”

  They started down the side of the Wadi Masada, slip-sliding in the loose sand and dirt until they reached the bottom, and then traversed the ravine from side to side as they made their way north down the slope to the base of the Roman siege ramp. Although they were in the shadow of the mountain, it was getting hotter by the minute, and it seemed to David that the dry desert wind was sucking the moisture right out of him. The ramp, a huge pile of sand, dirt, and stones, rose four hundred feet from the bottom of the gorge, bridging the wadi between the western plateau on the left and the western rim of the fortress. Having been built across the ravine, it made its own dam, and there were signs of some violent erosion over the centuries.

  David knew that the main Roman camp was up on that plateau above them to the left, and Judith indicated that they would first have to climb up the left side of the ravine to get to the beginning of the ramp. David could see that the sides of the ramp itself were much too steep to climb without axes. The ravine at that point was about two hundred feet deep, so it took them another thirty minutes to get up to the base of the ramp. David was winded when they climbed over the top and stood at the base of the siege ramp itself. Judith was red-faced and completely out of breath. He realized they had been slowing down for the last thirty minutes. It was the heat, he told himself. At night he should be able to do better than this.

  “For someone not in shape, you’re doing all right,” he said.

  She could only nod and smile weakly and mop her forehead with a handkerchief. He looked at his watch. To the base of the ramp had taken an hour and a half, including the rest stop at the top of the cross ravine. He would have to allow two hours in the dark. The going would be slower, but he should be able to make better time without her. He looked up to the fortress walls, hundreds of feet above them, and then at the ramp.

  “How in the hell did they build this thing? The defenders could hit anyone exposing themselves out here just by throwing rocks.”

  “We have no firsthand facts,” she replied, between inhalations. “Historians surmise that initially they took some casualties. Then they probably went back to the remains of Jerusalem and gathered up a few thousand women, since all the men had been killed. The Jews on the mountain probably could not bring themselves to kill Jewish women who were being used as slaves. They built it by carrying baskets of earth and sand and throwing them into the wadi. Eventually they filled it in and then piled more on until the ramp reached the summit and the engineers could bring up the siege tower.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Yes, even then it was a very bad thing to lose a war. Beyond the hard labor, since there was no water here, each woman was forced to carry an amphora-sized jar of drinking water from Jerusalem to the Roman camp. By night they would have been used by the legion. You can begin to understand how the defenders might choose death over what they saw befalling their countrywomen. The Roman camp is over there. Do you wish to see the ruins?”

  “No, I think not. I saw the outlines yesterday from up there, and it looks like only wall foundations. My focus is on what’s up there. Besides, I’m just dying to climb some more.”

  She gave him a look that said she was just plain dying, but then hefted her stick, and they set out up the ramp. Damn, he thought, maybe she’s human. He stumbled in the loose sand. This is inhuman, he thought then. Just hard slogging, up another forty-degree slope of hard-packed sand and rocks. They paused halfway up to catch their breath, and David wondered aloud about the siege tower.

  “On this slope, how could they pull something like that up close enough to the walls? Those towers were fifty, sixty feet high.”

  “The slope was probably not this steep; there is evidence that the ramp started closer to the Roman camp than the edge of the wadi. They would have taken the siege tower up the ramp in pieces: the base on wheels, the tower sections one at a time. The soldiers would have pulled it up the ramp using ropes. They would have used a testudo to protect the soldiers—do you know what that is?”

  “Yes,” David nodded. “The tortoise back: Several dozen soldiers put their shields over their heads and advance in close formation. From above they present an impermeable shield wall. Still…”

  “Yes. Those men? Now they were in shape, and implacable.”

  David nodded soberly. Implacable indeed. He could only imagine the growing despair on the mountain as that siege ramp took shape and then the antlike columns of soldiers began pulling a siege tower into position to begin the bombardment that would batter down the casemate walls.

  By silent agreement they set out again to walk up the final few hundred feet to the top of the ramp, where they encountered a steel and concrete stairway that took them up to the western gate. David looked around for indications that the gate was locked at night but did not see any signs of chains or other securing devices as they went through the gate, climbed the casemate ramp, and encountered the first group of tourists.

  They spent the rest of the morning walking through the casemate wall that surrounded the entire rim of the fortress, where she pointed out the locus of individual archaeological finds including some coin hoards, weapons, the skeleton of a man apocryphally believed to have been Eleazar ben Jair himself, and a small stash of scroll fragments similar physically to those found in the caves of Qumran, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.

  “Were any of them legible?” he asked.

  “One they were able to recognize right away, because the text was visible on the outside of the scroll. It was the Vision of the Dry Bones, from Ezekiel.”

  “Now there’s a lovely metaphor, especially here.”

  “Indeed.”

  In the early afternoon they met with a security guard who admitted them to the narrow stone stairway leading down to the terrace palace ruins. Two terrace palaces had been built below the northern prow of the mountain, descending two hundred feet down from the main plateau in two stepped levels. The view out over the Dead Sea was breathtaking as they maneuvered carefully down the worn and very steep steps. Judith explained that the first terrace, confusingly called the middle terrace, had had a circular pavilion surrounded by a colonnade, and the l
ower terrace a rectangular, nearly square hall called a triclinium in the center surrounded by porticoes on all sides and a bathing area. Sheer stone and mortared brick walls dropped away from the marble balustrades on either side.

  Down below the left, or western, side of the middle terrace Judith showed him the water channel that had once routed storm water from the wadi to the very large cisterns cut into the northwest face. The channel was about three feet wide and two feet deep, cut along the face of the cliff, aiming back along the western palisade to a point now buried by the Roman siege ramp. Fifty feet back along the channel was a large, irregularly shaped hole in the cliff, with several smaller holes behind that one, all in a line across the cliff face.

  “May I?” he asked, pointing to the hole.

  “With great care, please,” she answered, reminding him that there was no railing on the outside edge of the water channel. It looked to be about four hundred feet straight down from the channel to the bottom of the gorge. He stepped off the stone stairway and walked back along the water channel, whose bottom was polished smooth. He tried not to look over the side. A sudden updraft tugged at his shirt. He did not have a big problem with heights, per se, but this was pretty exposed.

  He reached the first hole, knelt down, and peered into it. He was at the top of an enormous spherical cavern, perhaps eighty to one hundred feet across and the same dimension in depth. Beams of sunlight coming through the hole projected his silhouette on the smooth lower walls. Descending from the hole was a set of steps that had been cut out of the rock, spiraling down the side to the very bottom of the cistern. There was no railing there, either. The walls of the cistern were water polished, and there were two large pillars of rock that had been left in the center to support the ceiling. He wanted to walk down those steps, but it was pretty clear that the cistern was completely empty. It was just a big dry hole in the rock. As worn as the steps were, it would have been very easy to fall to the bottom of the huge stone cavity. Judith came up behind him to join him at the entrance.