RUE MONTBELLIARD ROSE STEEPLY from Square St Medoc in the general direction of the famous Parisian Lycée Henry IV, not far from the Sorbonne and a stone’s throw from the little known Irish Cultural Centre. It was market day and a smell of rotten fruit and vegetables hung in the air as O’Connelly navigated his way around the heaps of garbage, which the municipal cleaning gangs were busily sweeping into piles hurrying to return the street to the lunch time strollers and tourists. He had taken the Metro to Les Goblins and had decided to make the rest of the distance on foot, firstly because the early autumn weather was fine and warm and secondly as he was not sure at which end of the street number 45 was situated. He vaguely knew street numbers in Paris started at the end nearest the River Seine, but the problem was rue Montbelliard ran more or less parallel to the river.
Finally number 45 was tucked in between one of those tiny Parisian art cinemas and a small bookshop, the building was fairly recent. In the recessed entrance he found a plaque with a column of names and their respective intercom buttons. He spotted ‘de Lussac’ and pressed the button.
O’Connelly waited a moment for a reply, then announced himself to a disembodied voice that instructed him to take the lift to the third floor, there was a click as the entrance door lock was released and he entered into the dimly lit lobby.
O’Connelly, a journalist turned successful writer, had been going through an unproductive period, it was two years since his last book appeared. He had bathed in the lime light of literary success when his second book made it into the top ten best sellers eight years previously. His problem was not that he was short of ideas, but none inspired him enough to sit down and write.
Now a dread about eating into his comfortable capital had started to gnaw at him, something which did not prevent him from spending his money fairly liberally. The royalties from his books had slowed; it was not surprising considering his last book had appeared two years back, though he had recently received a handsome down payment for the film rights to two of his novels.
There had been fewer demands for interviews and he was slowly discovering that success was as ephemeral as the praise for a new book. Books were a business and without a new novel ready for the presses he would fade from the public view. His only alternative was to come up with something new for his publisher, and quickly, or face the grim prospect of being a has been and eventually forced to turn to hack writing political or financial exposés or even worse returning to journalism with its deadlines and stress.
Though O’Connelly had been born in London, his family was Irish, which did not prevent him from growing up more English than Irish. He had studied languages and journalism in London, then spent three years in California at the UCLA International Institute before joining The New York Times and was dispatched to Paris as a correspondent. It was in Paris he discovered the good life, mixing with prominent personalities, wining and dining on his generous expense account, attending film festivals and reporting on political summits and the usual French scandals.
His visit that morning went back to his contacts with the Irish Cultural Centre, where he had been invited from time to time for literary evenings, art exhibitions and theatrical presentations. In a manner of speaking it was by chance he had discovered the Centre, normally he avoided all things Irish, and small countries in general with their introspective vision of the outside world and the kind of parochial snobbery born of associating with a narrow home made elite.
His first visit to the Cultural Centre had been at the prompting of a friend, Gilles Bruno, who had persuaded O’Connelly to join him for a reading given by a Donegal housewife who had become the darling of Dublin critics with her autobiographical story of a handicapped girl in a small Irish town. Gilles was with Le Figaro, an arts critic, and had an inexplicable passion for all things Irish, as did curiously a good many French people, O’Connelly put it down to some kind of empathy with another enemy of Perfidious Albion. However, Gilles had another motivation, as a bachelor he had discovered it was a good spot to pick up newly arrived Irish girls, girls who had been won grants to study in France, full of enthusiasm and naivety.
Gilles had pursuaded O’Connelly to drop by at the Centre, where a cocktail was planned. It was just to fill in an hour or so before dinner, he explained, though in reality he wanted to check out the new arrivals, that is the girls. The occasion was the inauguration of an exhibition for an obscure abstract Irish painter.
O’Connelly quickly scanned the lifeless paintings and observed the pretended interest of the visitors before turning his attention to the meagre cocktail. Up to that point it had been a dull half hour with Gilles disappearing and chatting to the different persons he recognised amongst the crowd.
‘Patrick,’ he said beckoning O’Connelly. ‘Let me introduce you to Laura de la Salle.’
O’Connelly found himself presented to an attractive young woman.
‘Laura is the Centre’s cultural director,’ he said, then maliciously added: ‘She’s a fan of yours.’
To O’Connelly’s surprise she blushed unable to find a suitable réplique to Gilles’ remark.
‘Tell me about the Centre,’ said O’Connelly, offering her a life line.
She was seduced by O’Connelly’s easy going style, his indifference to his image as a successful international writer, talking about her interests and not his own. He invited her to join them for dinner, it was impossible her obligations to the painter came first. Finally a place was found for the two intruders at the after cocktail dinner given by the Centre in a nearby restaurant.
O’Connelly discovered Laura’s mother was Irish, a converted Catholic, her grandmother’s family had belonged to the tiny and ever diminishing community of Irish Jews, her father was a prominent French art specialist and critic who had lectured at Trinity College in Dublin where he had met Laura’s mother. She had lived in Ireland on and off graduating in French and English literature in Dublin before studying European history at the Sorbonne.
She persuaded O’Connelly to give a series of readings at the Centre and they agreed to meet the next day for lunch to go over the schedule. He agreed more for Laura than any culture aspect and the next day they found themselves in more relaxed and comfortable surroundings. Neither was a literary snob avoiding so-called intellectual circles, preferring the relaxed company of close friends than the weary pretentious dinners with tormented thinkers. As they got to know each other she discovered the absence of a plan in his career and disconcerted set out to fill his creative void and his relative indifference to the dilemma, offering him encouragement, but to little avail. O’Connelly seemed indifferent to the fact he had run into a blank wall, he needed something new, he was in a rut, his success had left him satisfied, he needed to be shaken him from his routine tranquillity.
O’Connelly’s problem was that he procrastinated in everything that was not directly related to his personal needs. His life was comfortable, extremely comfortable by most standards, with the sixth floor penthouse he owned in Paris on quai des Celestines facing Saint Louis en Île, for which he had struggled to keep up the payments until the success of his first book. The apartment was not big, but it was surrounded by a planted terrace that had an impregnable view over the Seine with Notre Dame to the right and the Jardin des Plants to the left. After his second successful book the money poured in and his first real investment, with an eye on the future, was the apartment on Telegraph Hill overlooking the Bay and Alcatraz. More extravagantly he bought a 15 metre motor cruiser that he kept in the Sausalito Marina, where he liked to spend weekends with his friends when the weather was fine.
Isaac de Lussac had discovered the Irish Cultural Centre in the course of his archaeological research work, whilst looking for bibliographical data on an Irish Jesuit priest who had lived in Paris before leaving for Jerusalem in the 19th century. De Lussac had met Laura and told her of his archaeological investigations in Jerusalem, and his difficulties in finding a publisher for the monumental work he had spent ten years i
n writing. One of the problems was that it was written in French – all 2,800 pages – and the market for such a work as it stood was small if not non-existent. His chances would have been better if it was in English, but the cost of translation was prohibitive, and up to that point he had had little time for such worldly considerations.
Laura recounted the story to O’Connelly who laughed – archaeology was not his thing and the Holy Land even less. His successes had been politico-financial thrillers based on his journalistic experiences in the corridors of European politics. Laura, fascinated by de Lussac’s work, finally persuaded O’Connelly to meet and talk with the archaeologist.
Laura, though a Catholic, treasured her, if not unique, extremely unusual Irish Jewish heritage. At the beginning of the third millennium there remained just a handful of Jews in Ireland, around one thousand including her grandparents.
Her great-great-grandparents had arrived in Dublin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, after fleeing Russia and the pogroms, where they had bought a fine town house in the centre of the city and set up a textile import business. Life in Dublin was peaceful and anti-Semitism was nonexistent given the almost insignificant number of Jews in the country, then part of Great Britain. The ‘troubles’ were still decades away and the Irish independentists a small minority, the country being firmly in the hands of the rich Anglo-Irish gentry.
Since that time the Jews of Ireland had become assimilated through intermarriage, like her mother, or had immigrated either to England or the USA in order to find a suitable Jewish partner in marriage, some chose Israel – where there were more Irish Jews than in Ireland.
Laura’s grand-father, Joseph Briscoe, had been a prominent lawyer and Irish parliamentarian, as a young man he had known Chaim Herzog – who was to become the President of Israel – who had been born in Belfast, where his father was a well-known rabbi.
Though the apartment building where de Lussac lived was modern and in a fashionable district it did not radiate wealth; the lift was correct as the French would say. O’Connelly stepped out into a dark corridor on the second floor and fumbled for the light switch, a door opened and a head appeared. O’Connelly greeted the bespectacled de Lussac, a man of about sixty, recognising his head clean shaven and his smile that displayed solid, but slightly irregular teeth.
‘Come in, I’m sorry we couldn’t met elsewhere – my mother you know, she suffers from Alzheimer – it’s very kind of you to come.’
‘Don’t mention it, it’s no problem,’ O’Connelly replied stepping inside the apartment, which at a glance seemed to be composed of three rooms, through an open door he saw the bowed form of an elderly woman watching an old fashioned television set.
‘If you don’t mind we can talk in my office,’ said de Lussac pointing the way. It was a small room that evidently served both as an office and a bedroom. It was Spartan, a single bed to one side and a long built in table to the other, on which stood an ancient desk top computer and a printer. In another corner was a built-in wardrobe and on the floor before it, a huge, though neatly arranged pile of documents and a small bookcase.
‘Sit down, here take this chair,’ de Lussac said unfolding a collapsible chair.
O’Connelly sat down, not entirely at ease.
‘So did Laura tell you about me?’ de Lussac said with a very kindly and apparently sincere smile, the smile that doctors and men of God use to assure their patients and parishioners.
‘Yes, well not completely, I know that you’ve worked in Israel, on the site of Temple I believe?’
‘Yes, I’m an archaeologist. Some years back I was working on a site near the Dead Sea when Isaac Rabin was assassinated by a fanatic. Up until that time I had not realised or perhaps considered the importance of religion in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m a Jew myself, an atheist, and always looked on Israel as the home of the Jews, not in a religious sense but as a nation.’
O’Connelly observed him; he spoke rapidly and with conviction. He had not dressed up for their meeting, his clothes though not threadbare had seen a good deal of wear, his spectacles superannuated.
‘In my research work I came across a 19th century report by a certain Captain Wilson, the chief engineer of the Palestine Survey Fund in the Holy Land, concerning investigations on the underground of the Haram esh-Sharif.’
O’Connelly looked puzzled.
‘Commonly known as the Esplanade of the Mosques.’
‘I see.’
‘In my work as an archaeologist in the Near and Middle East, I have observed how water has played a role in ancient civilisations, in Babylon; the Euphrates, in Egypt; the Nile. That of course doesn’t mean that every city was built on a great river. Jerusalem at its origin was a small village where springs and wells provided water. However, as it grew, its need of water also grew, especially for religious needs.’
O’Connelly listened with interest to the lesson in ancient civilisations.
‘But even though the ancients were great hydraulic engineers they had no pumps and no mechanical power, so there were just two possibilities, the first was to sink wells – that is if ground water existed – and the second was to transport the water from a not too distant source. Now Jerusalem, which is to say the Old City, is situated 700 metres above sea level, and water obviously can’t flow uphill.’ He smiled obviously enjoying his explanation, though O’Connelly could not yet see where it was leading to.
‘The nearest springs, with sufficient water to supply the city, were the Etam Springs, twenty kilometres to the south of Jerusalem, 800 metres above sea level. So they built an aqueduct to supply what is today the Temple Mount with spring water.’
O’Connelly nodded as de Lussac pulled a map to show the path of the aqueduct.
‘That water served the needs of the first Temple of the Jews.’
‘Quite an exploit for a temple.’
‘Yes, you see the needs were enormous because the rituals in the Temple required the sacrifice of animals.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Sacrifice was practised by the Jews: bulls, rams, sheep.... For Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, tens of thousands of animals were sacrificed. Basically there were two types of sacrifice, a complete sacrifice when the animal was totally burnt on the altar, then a sacrifice when the animal was butchered by the priests, part was kept by them and the rest returned as food to those who had offered it.’
‘That’s why they are called feast days!’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Now, the essential point is this whole process generated a huge quantity of waste blood and viscera, as the animals were slaughtered, skinned and emptied of their innards, before being quartered and butchered. Remember Yom Kippur was the greatest religious feast of Judea and the animals led to the Temple had to be fed and watered as they waited their turn. The floor of the Temple would have been awash in urine and defecation, not to speak of the blood and viscera, unless there had been an enormous quantity of water to wash away the detritus.’
‘I see,’ said O’Connelly becoming more interested, ‘so all this water came from the aqueduct?’
‘Yes and no, in fact the water was stored in huge cisterns cut into the rock, supplied not only by the aqueduct, but also by rain water collected during the winter months.’
‘So these cisterns were underground, underneath the Esplanade of Mosques.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And they supplied the Temple?’
‘Yes, by gravity, yes since water cannot not rise by itself, as I said there were no pumps, no electricity or other power, only animal power or human muscle.’
‘So this explains the title of your work.’
‘Yes.’
‘Le Temple dans la vallée,’ he said smiling, ‘The Temple in the Valley.’
‘Well I think I’ve got the idea, the Temple could not have been on top of the mountain, on what is today the Muslim Haram, for the simple reason water cannot flow uphill.’
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‘Of course. You see the water was essential for the sacrificial rituals in the Temple.’
‘Sacrificial rituals!’
‘Yes, but not only the sacrificial rituals, it was also for purification, which is at the very heart of the Jewish religion. This purification was codified by the High Priests and extremely complex, from the washing of hands to the complete immersion in a special bath each time a priest entered into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the Temple.’
‘Apart from the archaeological aspect what signification does this have?’
‘It should go a long way resolving the conflict between the Jews and Muslims, since this archaeological work removes one of the sources of conflict where the two different religions claim the same holy site.’
‘So how can I help you?’
‘Well I need to publish this work. I’ve spent ten years research proving that the Temple could not have been on the Haram, a total of two thousand eight hundred pages.’
‘Two thousand eight hundred pages!’ O’Connelly exclaimed, he had never heard of a book two thousand eight hundred pages long, not even the Bible.
‘Yes,’ he replied in that doctor-patient manner. ‘You see I’m an archaeologist, I know very little about books and publishers. There’s another thing…my book is in French and the people I want to target are basically English speaking; Israeli and American Jews, Middle Eastern Arabs, and the negotiators who are mostly Anglo-Saxon. It costs money to translate a book.’
‘Look, I’m not a translator, my publishers are more interested in contemporary fiction and it’s not my agent’s thing either.’
De Lussac seemed unperturbed and pressed on: ‘Look this is an introductory section that describes the essential details, three hundred and fifty pages.’
He handed O’Connelly a printed manuscript bound together in a plastic spine. ‘Why don’t you read this, perhaps it will change your mind.’
O’Connelly left, not very convinced, but he promised he would read the introduction and come back to him very shortly.
4
The Underground Cisterns