“You, with your mighty position with the sheikh, are always looking at me like dirt, Nahavi. I always figured you were a thief like me.”
“You are the professional thief, Behzad, which is why we are doing business tomorrow. But remember, we do this my way. It must look like a robbery by strangers. I will not jeopardize my position with the sheikh.”
“Yes, Nahavi, I will take care to protect your precious innocence in all this. As long as the money comes from the black market for what I take from the Murphys.”
“The money will come, Behzad. Half for you, half for me, and just to be fair, if you do your part right, two full shares of death for the Murphys.”
MURPHY WIPED HIS
sleeve across his forehead, squinted through the glare toward a distant line of dusty hills, and breathed in a deep lungful of hot desert air. It felt good to be home.
In fact, he had never before set foot in this particular region of Samaria, but as his sneakers crunched over the dry ground and a ragged herd of goats scuttled past him, leaving the clatter of bells and a sharp, musky scent on the air, he knew this was where he was meant to be. The first Christians might have walked here. Perhaps one of the apostles had rested awhile in the shade of that large boulder perched on the escarpment. For all Murphy knew, he might literally be following in the footsteps of Jesus.
He grinned at his own flight of fancy. Maybe that was a
stretch. But there was no doubting that this was the stage where some of the key events of the Bible had unfolded. And he was convinced that this seemingly dead and empty landscape could tell a miraculous story, if you knew how to read it.
That, unfortunately, was the tricky part. The official cover for the Murphys’ visit to Samaria was to shoot some test footage for an upcoming television special. So, while Laura continued her methodical searching of the landscape, Murphy kept raising and lowering his digital camera, pretending to be doing the main work.
Through his camera monitor Murphy watched as Laura paced slowly back and forth, scanning the low ridge to the south, checking it against a handful of maps stuffed into the pocket of her cargo pants, suddenly turning one hundred eighty degrees as if she’d suddenly remembered something—then turning back, frustrated, as if the memory had eluded her. Murphy knew better than to crowd Laura when she was in the zone.
The other members of their party, provided by the sheikh, were Saif Nahavi and a driver named Behzad. Both men remained down below with the Land Cruiser, watching for intruders but seeming to be paying no attention to either Murphy. They had told Nahavi nothing about what they were seeking other than the general vicinity to which they wished to be driven. Going beyond Levi’s warning to him, Murphy did not tell even the sheikh about the Serpent’s tail.
They were otherwise alone in their little corner of the desert, a natural semicircular amphitheater formed by the curving horns of the ridge. The goat bells had faded in the distance,
and the only sound was the whisper of sand being gently blown up from the desert.
After her map study the previous night, then early that morning, Laura had been fairly dizzy with excitement and strong Arabic coffee. She was convinced that she had nailed it. After staring at the countless hills and gulleys, not allowing herself to be distracted, Laura had stabbed a finger at the map spread on the kitchen table. “That’s it! I’m sure of it. Just north of the old riverbed, before you reach the wadi. There!” And Murphy had hoped she was right. After all, she was a natural.
Now, he could tell, that sense of certainty had disappeared, evaporating like the dew under a fierce desert sun. Laura had her head down, shoulders sagging like a defeated athlete as she picked her way through the boulders and little outcrops of rock toward him.
And then, in an instant, she was gone.
MURPHY STOOD OPENMOUTHED
for a moment, like a member of the audience at a magic act who could not figure out where the girl in the suddenly empty box had vanished to. Then he broke into a run.
Laura had been about fifty yards away, he figured, when she’d disappeared. Heart hammering, he felt the soft ground sucking at his feet as he pounded through the sand toward the plume of dust marking his last sight of her. It was like one of those dreams where you are running from a monster but your legs don’t seem to work. He suddenly had an image of Dakkuri, dark eyes gleaming with malice, and whispered a silent prayer.
He stumbled, righted himself, and finally crested the shallow rise that had divided them. There, where Laura must have been, was a gaping hole some four feet wide, sand pouring into
it like water down a dram. He threw himself down, leaning as far into the hole as he dared. He remembered rescuing a classmate who had fallen through the ice one winter, hoping the ice would take his weight as he inched closer. Did desert sand behave the same way?
He thought he heard something, a muffled cry that might have been Laura, and leaned farther over. Suddenly, the solid ground beneath him gave way and he was plunging like a kid down a park slide. He landed with a thump, and rolled onto his side, choking on a mouthful of sand. As he spat it out, the dust began to clear and the world came into focus again.
On three sides were rough-hewn walls of dark, uncut stone. The fourth was buried in the tidal wave of sand that had sucked him down with it. And there, seemingly oblivious of the chaos around her, was Laura. Murphy scrambled to his feet and reached out for her.
“Laura, are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Her cargo pants were shredded at the knees, a dark stain seeping through, and sand seemed to be falling off every inch of her. But as she shook a big swirl of sand from her hair, Murphy could see that she was smiling.
“You see—I was right! It was right under our feet the whole time. No wonder we couldn’t see it.”
Murphy wrapped her in a bear hug and laughed with relief. “I never doubted you for a second, sweetheart.” He stood back to make sure she really was still in one piece, then followed her gaze to the far wall.
Their eyes were adjusting to the mix of light from the holes they’d fallen through from above with the shadowy, mostly stale-aired gloom of the underground sand cave in which they
had landed. They saw that the sand actually started to give way fifty yards ahead to some stone. The stone formed steps, and the steps led to the entrance of what appeared to be the kind of natural stone cave they were used to seeing when hiking through North Carolina.
They stumbled through the sand to the steps, where they could move more swiftly to the entrance of the cave. Both Murphys took their flashlights from their pants now and swept the cave entrance in twin arcs.
“What are we looking for?” Laura asked.
“Probably an amphora.”
Laura drew up her mental image of the ancient clay jars that were bulbous in shape with two handles that stuck out like ears from their narrow necks. Amphoras were used to store grains, dried fish, water, wine, and valuables. She spotted a piece of one that was lying in the sand and handed it to Murphy.
“Yes, this certainly looks like the ‘vessels’ the Bible speaks of, what we call
amphoras
, the kind the Babylonians took when they sacked Jerusalem. If I’m right, the tail of the Serpent is in one of these.” Murphy turned the clay jar upside down. Something horrible and snakelike crawled out of it and slithered away. “But not this one.”
Laura shuddered and jumped aside as the slimy thing skittered past her. She lost her balance, went stumbling backward against the cavern wall, and fell through a narrow vertical fissure.
Murphy heard her scream and whirled around with his flashlight, searching the darkness for her. But Laura was gone.
“Laura? Laura, where are you?” he called out, staggered by a surge of anxiety. “Laura?”
“Over here, Murph,” Laura finally replied after what seemed like an eternity had passed. “Over here. I think I found it!”
Murphy was relieved to hear her voice but still couldn’t see her. Tense moments passed before he saw the beam from her flashlight through the narrow fissure. He dashed toward it and slipped between the gap in the cavern’s walls that had swallowed Laura.
Murphy found himself in another cavern, considerably smaller than the first. “Laura, you have got to stop trying to disappear on me.”
Laura was standing there, sweeping the beam of her flashlight across what she had discovered. “Look, Murph!” Laura exclaimed in amazement. “Isn’t that incredible?”
Murphy trained his flashlight beam alongside Laura’s, and both of their mouths dropped open.
“Murph, do you see what I see?”
“After all this, it’s almost too good to be true.”
The neck of a large stone jar was sticking out of a mound of dirt and sand as if it were just waiting for them to open it.
They approached it together, like hunters stalking a buck they feared would bolt before they could get it in their sights. Silently, they knelt down and scooped the dirt and sand away from the jar. It was about eighteen inches high and the neck was just wide enough to get a hand through.
Murphy was bursting with anticipation, and he raced to pick it up. Trying not to think of scorpions, vipers, or other stinging creatures, he reached inside. Laura, being the more cautious of the couple, trained her flashlight beam on the floor of the cave between where she stood and the amphora, to make sure there was nothing crawling before she moved another step
toward her husband. The path looked safe and she was about to join her gleefully shouting spouse when, just to be sure, she shined her flashlight against the far wall of the cave.
There was nothing crawling there either, but what she saw instead made her heart sink. “Um … Murph … we have a problem.”
THE REST OF
the cave was filled with amphoras. Hundreds upon hundreds of amphoras. Amphoras of all shapes and sizes.
Murphy put down the one he had been cradling, the one that only seconds before had seemed like the certain hiding place for the Serpent’s tail.
The floor was flat and free of water, which was why the amphoras had likely been stored there many centuries before. Stored and forgotten. “Great,” Murphy groaned. “This must be where amphoras came to die. I wasn’t planning on spending the next six months down here.”
“And I was doing so well.”
“Yes, you were, sweetheart. You got us this close.”
“Any idea how we know which one is hiding the Serpent’s tail?”
“Hmm … I wonder if that sneaky high priest Dakkuri pulled a clever trick here. What if he instructed his minions not only to bury this piece of the Serpent but to go one step further and kind of bury it in plain sight?”
“Yeah, kind of like looking for the needle in a stack of other needles instead of a haystack.”
“Maybe not as bad, Laura. You know this stuff better than I do from your research—how did they use these amphoras?”
Laura began sorting through her vast knowledge of ancient artifacts. “They usually sealed them with plugs made out of cork, clay, or wood, if they were sealed at all,” Laura explained. “But something this important, we should be looking for one that was sealed with wax.”
“If we find one full of pennies, we’ll definitely know it’s a fake.”
Laura took one side of the cavern, Murphy the other, and they began examining amphoras by the dozen. Most were empty. Some held animal bones, others primitive household tools and personal items. Every one of these amphoras, let alone their contents, was an ancient artifact that under different circumstances would have had Murphy, or any archaeologist, doing cartwheels.
They searched amphora after amphora and were at their wits’ end, when an idea struck Murphy. “Hold it,” he said in that tone he used when he couldn’t believe how blind he had been to something. “If you wanted to hide a piece of the Serpent, which is presumably long and thin and hard, you wouldn’t put it in one of these fat ones so it could rattle around, calling attention to itself every time it moved. You’d wrap it in something soft and slip it into one of these, right?”
He picked up a tall, narrow amphora that resembled a flower vase. “Find one like this that’s sealed with wax and we’ve got it.”
Most of the amphoras in the cavern were of the potbellied and bulbous variety. Murphy’s moment of insight had eliminated every one of them. He and Laura quickly picked out the potential candidates, and just as quickly eliminated those not sealed with wax.
“How about this one?” Laura soon asked, showing Murphy one whose mouth was sealed so tightly, smoothly, and totally that the plug had to be made of wax.
Murphy began digging at it with a knife, first placing all of the wax he removed in a plastic bag for future study. The plug soon popped out with a dull
thwack
. His eyes were wide with anticipation as he reached inside and removed something wrapped in a coarsely woven cloth.
What he found when he unrolled it was a perfectly preserved piece of cast bronze about twelve inches long and two inches in diameter. It was tapered snakelike at one end and broken off at the other. Murphy had no doubt he was holding the tail of the Brazen Serpent in his hands.
“
MURPHY, WE’VE FOUND
it. Let me hold it.” Laura marveled at the weight of the bronze snake’s tail in her palm. “Imagine, Murphy, Moses made this!”
“Amazing. We are blessed today. Now let’s try to get out of here so we can live to tell about it tomorrow.”
They retraced their steps but realized they would not be able to climb back out of the holes they had fallen into to get to the underground cave. There were two passageways leading back in the opposite direction from where the cave entrance was. Murphy chose the one that was least sandy. After several hundred yards, the sand was turning into dirt and the ground was even a little damp, indicating that water would be nearby. A few yards farther, and there were roots of trees and shrubs showing through some of the soil, and Murphy was able to hoist himself up on a combination of rock and roots and poke
his head aboveground. “Honey, I think we can squeeze through here.”