Dan looked back the way they’d come.  Rolling hills, dry, sandy brown, almost yellow, falling away to the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth—the world’s navel, someone had called it.  The hazy air had been unbearably thick down there, chokingly laden with moisture from the evaporating sea; leaden air, too heavy to escape the fifty-mile trench in which it was trapped.  Maybe it wasn’t cooler up here, but it was drier.  He could breathe.

Above, the sky was a flawless turquoise.  The land ahead was as dry and yellow-brown and barren as behind, but steeper here, angling up sharply toward a phalanx of cliffs.  Looked like a dead end up there.

He plucked a rag from the floor by the front seat and began wiping the dust from the windshield.

“When’s the next rain?” he said.

“November, most likely.”

Dan had to smile.  Carrie had done her homework.  She’d spent months preparing for this trip, studying the scroll translation and correlating its scant geographical details with present day topographical maps of the area.  He bet she knew more about the region than most Israelis, but that probably wasn’t saying much.  They hadn’t seen another soul since turning off the highway.  They were completely alone up here.  The realization gave Dan a twinge of uneasiness.  They hadn’t thought to rent a phone—not that there’d be a cell out here anyway—and if they broke down, they’d have to start walking.  And if they got lost...

“We’re not lost, are we?” Dan said.

“I don’t think so.  I’m sure he came this way.”

How could she be certain?  Sure, she’d put a lot of research into this trip, but there hadn’t been much to go on to begin with.  All they knew was that the fictional author of the scroll—”fictional” was an adjective Dan used privately when referring to the author; never within Carrie’s hearing—had turned west from his southward trek and left the shore of what he called the Sea of Lot to journey into the wilderness.

But where had he turned?

“I don’t know, Carrie...”

“This has to be the way.  “She seemed utterly convinced.  Didn’t she have even a shade of a doubt?  “Look: He mentioned being driven out of Qumran—that’s at the northern end of the sea.  He says he headed south toward Masada and Zohar but he never mentions getting there.  He doesn’t even mention passing En Gedi which was a major Oasis even then.  So he must have turned into the wilderness somewhere between Qumran and En Gedi.”

“No argument there.  But that stretch is more than thirty miles long.  There were hundreds of places we could have turned off the road.  Why did you pick that particular spot  back there?”

Carrie looked at him and her clear blue eyes clouded momentarily.  For the first time since their arrival she seemed unsure of herself.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly.  “It just seemed like the right place to turn.  I’ve read the translation so many times I feel as if I know him.  I could almost see him wandering south, alone, depressed, suddenly feeling it was no use trying to find other people to take him in, that he was unfit for human company, and turning and heading into the hills.”

Dan was struck by the thought that she might be describing her own feelings as a fourteen-year old entering the Convent of the Blessed Virgin.

That moment back on the highway had been kind of spooky.  They’d been cruising south on Route 90 along the Dead Sea shore when Carrie had suddenly clutched his arm and pointed to a rubble-strewn path, little more than a goat trail, breaking through the roadside brush and winding up into the hills.

“There!  Follow that!”

So Dan had followed.

“Which way does it seem we should go now?” he said and knew right away from her expression that it hadn’t come out the way he’d meant it.

Her eyes flashed.  “Look, Dan.  I know you think I’ve gone off the deep end on this, but it’s important to me.  And if—”

“What’s important to me is you, Carrie.  That’s all.  Just you.  And I’m worried about you getting hurt.  You’ve pumped your expectations so high...”

Her eyes softened as she challenged the sun with that smile.  “You don’t have to worry about me, Dan, because she is up here.  And we’re going to find her.”

“Carrie...”

“And now that I think about it, it seems we should take the south fork.”  She swung back into her seat and closed her door.  “Come on, Driver Dan.  Let’s go!  Time’s a-wastin’!”

Dan sighed.  Nothing to do but humor her.  And it wasn’t so bad, really.  At least they were together.

‡

Almost four o’clock.  Dan was thinking about calling it a day and heading back to the highway while there was still plenty of light left.  Wouldn’t be easy finding his way back down in the light.  No way in the dark.  He was just about to suggest it when Carrie suddenly lurched forward in her seat.

“Oh, my God!” she cried, her eyes darting between the windshield and the sheet of paper in her lap.  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, could that be it?”

Dan skidded to a halt and craned his neck over the steering wheel for a look.  As before, the trailing dust cloud caught up to them and he could see nothing while they were engulfed.  But as it cleared...

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

No, he thought.  It’s got to be a mistake.  The sun is directly ahead, it’s glancing off the dirt on the windshield.  A trick of the light.  Got to be.

Hoping, praying that his eyes were suffering from too much glare, Dan opened the door and stepped out for a better look.  He shielded his eyes against the sun peeking over the flat ledge atop a huge outcropping of stone ahead of them, and blinked into the light.  He still couldn’t tell if it—

And then the sun dipped below the ledge, silhouetting the outcropping in brilliant light.  Suddenly Dan could see that the ledge ran rightward to merge with the wall of the mountain of which the outcropping was a part, and leftward to a rocky lip that overhung a sheer precipice bellying gently outward about halfway down its fall.

Damned if it didn’t look just like a...tav.

“Do you see it, Dan?”

He glanced right.  Carrie was out of the cab, holding the yellow sheet of paper at arms length before her and jumping up and down like a pre-schooler who’d just spotted Barney.

He hesitated, unsure of what to say.  As much as he wanted to avoid reinforcing her fantasies, he could not deny the resemblance of the cliff face to the Hebrew letter he’d drawn for her.

“Well, I see something that might remotely—”

“Remotely, shlemotely!  That cliff looks exactly like what you drew here, which is exactly the way it was described in the scroll!”

“The forged scroll, Carrie.  Don’t forget that the source of all these factoids is a confirmed hoax.”

“How could I possibly forget when you keep reminding me every ten minutes?”

He hated to sound like a broken record, but he felt he had to keep the facts before her.  The scroll and everything in it was bogus.  And truthfully, right now he needed a little reminder himself.  Because finding the tav rock had shaken him up more than he wished to admit.

“Sorry, Carrie.  I just...”

“I know.  But you’ve got to believe, Dan.  There’s truth in that scroll.”  She pointed at the tav rock looming before them.  “Look.  We’re not imagining that.  It’s there.”

Dan wanted to say, Yes, but if you want to perpetrate a hoax, you salt the lies with neutral truths, and the most easily verifiable neutral truths are simple geological formations.  But he held his tongue.  This was Carrie’s show.

“What are we waiting for?” she said

Dan shrugged and got back in behind the wheel.  The incline ahead was extra steep so he shifted into super low.

“Can you believe it?” Carrie said, bubbling with excitement as they started the final climb.  “We’re traveling the same route as Saint James and the members of the Jerusalem Church when they carried Mary’s body here.”