Temple of the Grail(91)

He walked over to a lamp similar to ours lying discarded on the floor.

‘Short of wick and oil,’ he concluded. He looked troubled and then nodded his head slowly. ‘Sometimes there is a simple explanation . . .’ He lifted his lamp up to chest level to the wall opposite the door. Something glistened in our eyes, as though rays of the sun were escaping through a gap in the stone, but I knew that this was impossible, we were too deep in the earth for that.

‘Oh, Jacob! A terrible magic! Glittering like the eyes of Lucifer!’

‘No, Eisik, it is only a mineral within the rock that reflects the flame of the lamp. Jerome’s lamp must have caught their sparkle and he, perhaps curious, or dazzled, wandered in. It is a trap for the unwary.’

‘The body then?’ Eisik said. ‘Holy land of our fathers, we cannot leave it here.’

‘We shall touch nothing,’ my master replied in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Nothing can be done for him now, and if we move him where shall we take him? After all, it is impossible to take him back up. No, we shall simply close the door.’ He made the sign of the cross over the poor monk, saying a paternoster, and did just that.

After a solemn silence, my master showed Eisik the diagram. The old Jew peered myopically at it for a moment. ‘Holy Fathers!’ he exclaimed suddenly, ‘the star of David! The symbol of the heavenly union   of man and God. The upper and lower triangles meet in the centre.’

My master had drawn, by calculating the directions given by the doors, the remaining unknown portion of the tunnels and the whole thing was indeed shaped in a star, the star of David.

Following my master’s calculations, we emerged from the chamber, descending once more, entering another, only to leave through the door facing east, above which I could just make out the mark of the last letter, ‘Laodicea’. After making an abrupt turn to the right, we were, as my master had earlier foretold, headed in a southerly direction.

‘Ohh . . .’ Eisik was muttering to himself, ‘I am an old man, my feet hurt, and my bones ache with the damp! Must I take with me to eternity the sight of dead monks and ghosts? Why must I follow you, Andre, in your hungers and raptures, in your thirst after a knowledge that has little to do with a righteousness that we can scarcely formulate because we are covetous! May the God of our fathers forgive me. I should have stayed safely in my bed, with the Torah, and the sounds of animals to lull me to sleep.’

‘Firstly, Eisik, you are not so old, and secondly, you came here because, like me, you are a curious man.’

‘May God forgive me.’ Eisik bowed his head.

We entered a passage whose walls and floors were lined with bones and skulls piled up, one over another in a gruesome collection.

‘This must be the ossuary,’ my master said, fascinated, picking up a skull and inspecting it before setting it down casually and continuing on.

Just then, as if prompted by the toothy grins of those long dead, Eisik’s lamp went out, having run out of taper, and we were forced to proceed with only two lamps.

‘Soon the catacombs,’ my master commented almost to himself and in a reassuring way to me said, ‘Do you know that the first Christians worshipped below the ground in catacombs to hide from the Romans? They buried the bones of their dead there too, and so the divine services were held over graves. Now you see why there are the relics of the bones of saints in our altars.’

‘I see,’ I said, wishing to talk of anything but dead bones.

‘The Christian prays over the forces of death and destruction,’ Eisik commented, ‘which is a fitting thing since that is their foremost occupation.’

My master gave Eisik a black look. ‘Bones cannot hurt you, Christian.’

‘As I believe in the rebuilding of Zion so too do I believe,’ Eisik repudiated, looking around him with a grim expression, ‘that deep in the earth lie spirits whose existence is tortured by demons . . .’

‘Eisik!’ my master admonished.

‘Listen, if you will, to this old Jew whose race is prepared for every effort of evil! We are told there are powerful forces in the nether regions. Here forces of ancient ethers, frustrated in their efforts to find the light, smoulder, calcified and crystallised. The sages tell us of ground where the bodies of the dead, Andre, are rejected, and one hears strange rumblings coming from the bowels of the earth when one disturbs the soil, because in doing so one releases elemental creatures, whose natures have been trapped for thousands of years. Evil is their function, and I feel it in my bones, as I am sure they felt it in theirs.’ Eisik pointed to the heaped skeletons.