The Rock Read Free

girl fell down from its highest point and cracked open her skull.
    Surface and texture gave no sign that the Rock had been levelled to create a usable surface, or cut into and chipped away at by builders, pilgrims, men who wished it ill. The natural slopes and furrows, I recall, were well preserved. Traces of yellow earth could be found tucked away inside cracks and crevices; they must have sat there undisturbed for centuries, resistant even to the regular washing down to which the Rock has been subjected from the time of the conquest. The ring of stone hidden beneath the polishedmarble floor is naturally flat, until the point at which the outer walls supporting the new building begin. Here, the stone’s profile takes a sharp dip, sloping downward. The mountain, key to the Rock’s secrets, has begun its descent.
    Before the Christians and the Romans, before even King Solomon and his miracle of engineering, when the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, the Rock and the mountain were one. Or so my father used to say. Zion would then have looked no different from the other mountains upon which this city is built; it was not distinguished from its neighbors by size or height. In fact, Zion is not a mountain at all; it is more of a hill, a bump in the landscape. Neighboring Golgotha is higher.
    Today, the mountain and its summit look separate, and people say that the Rock is suspended by an invisible force between Heaven and Earth. But that is an illusion created by the fact that the Rock is attached to the mountain in only one place. Below the Rock, underneath its highest point, is a low-ceilinged cave. The cave is small, less than five paces square, and barely a man’s height. Eleven crudely carved steps lead to the cave from the summit. Why eleven? I remember asking my father. Because, he said, eleven is the first act of transgression over ten, the number of God’s Commandments.
    The cave is pierced by two holes. The first bores through solid stone for the length of a man and is round and smooth, just large enough for a child on a rope to slither through and drop down on the floor below. Not even my father knew who cut this hole or why.
    The smaller second hole pierces the floor of the cave below. For as long as I can remember, it has been covered with a large, round slab that has a hoop set into it, which I was never able to shift. Ka’b said that on the slab’s underside there is another hoop protruding downward with a chain attached onto which Solomon used to hang the keys of his Temple. The slab conceals an underground cavern that drops like a giant waterskin into the belly of the mountain. People call it the Well of Souls. They say that, if you listen very carefully at certain times of the year, you will hear muffled mumblings emanating from deep within the mountain.

    We shall show them Our signs
in the horizons and in themselves
. (photo credit 1.4)

    T hose who know what a great seducer the desert is understand how the faith of its sons gets tested daily simply by their being condemned to live in it. Amid sands and dunes that shift and undulate like loose women, rocks stand out, omnipotent and steadfast, commanders of presence, demarcators of boundaries, bearers of witness—visible presences in place of invisible ones, the known in place of the unknown and the unknowable. And when such signs of God’s work cannot be found because the terrain is too flat, too muddy, too monotonous, and unresistant, they have to be made up. A building then takes the place of a mountain.
    In the Holy Land, such signs did not have to be invented as they were in Babylon and Egypt with their sacred assemblages of brick and stone aping the kind of permanence that nature itself had eschewed. They were already there. But they had to be identified and their relation to God interpreted correctly. Sinai, Horeb, Zaphon, Carmel, Hermon, Tabor, all pointed to the attributes ofHim who created them—the