We walked in the dark to a restaurant near the Jaffa Gate. He didn't say why Del wasn't coming with us. It was misty and cold, we were a long time finding the place.Vosdanik walked in, a small dark man wearing an undersized fedora. He removed the hat and coat, offered us cigarettes, remarked that stuffed pigeon was the specialty here. There was a note of serious business in his manner, a modulated note, softest when he greeted people passing near our table. We drank arak and asked him questions.He spoke seven languages. His father had walked across the Syrian desert as a boy, a forced march, the Turks, 1916. His brother's business was rubble in Beirut. He told us his life story as a matter of course. He seemed to think we expected it.Before he was a guide he'd worked as interpreter for a team of archaeologists at a site near the Sea of Galilee. Crews had been excavating for decades. Twenty levels were eventually uncovered, almost four thousand years of settlement. A vast cataloguing of fragments."They made temples that will face the east. In Egypt at that time they call the east God's land. Ta-netjer. The west is death, the setting sun. You will bury the dead on the west bank. The west is the city of the dead. The east is cockcrow, the rising sun.This is where you will live, on the east bank. Put the house in the east, put the tomb in the west. Between there will be the river.”He went at the pigeon seriously, rice spilling off his fork. His remarks were well spaced, pauses for effect, for mouthfuls of food, gestures of greeting and good will as people entered.He was the guide as storyteller. Even incidents from his own life he recounted with a degree of awe, as if he were pointing out the workmanship in a polychrome tile. There was a bump on the bridge of his nose. All his clothes looked shrunken.At the excavation he first heard of a group, a cult, apparently nameless. An archaeologist spoke of it, a Frenchman named Texier. In the beginning Vosdanik thought the references were to an ancient cult whose members had lived in this region. It was a land of cults and sects and desert monks and stylites. Every settled group produced a scatter of rival cells. From these a man or men broke off, working toward a purer vision."Wherever you will find empty land, there are men who try to get closer to God. They will be poor, they will take little food, they will go away from women. They will be Christian monks, they will be Sufis who dress with wool shirts, who repeat the holy words from the Koran, who dance and spin. Visions are real. God is involved with living men. When Mohammed was, there still were men who went away from him. Closer to God, always in their mind to remember God. Dhikr allab. There were Sufis in Palestine, Greek monks in the Sinai. Always some men go away.”This man Texier, himself half starved and a little distant, offered clarification, sitting in the evenings under a swaying bulb beneath the excavation roof. A note pad and briar pipe. He was working backward through curves of time, arc after arc of fragments set on the ground around his chair. At intervals he spoke softly in the general direction of Vosdanik, shadowed on a wall ten yards away, beyond the shards, a man unaccustomed to listening.The cult was not ancient as far as Texier knew. The cult was living. The members had last been seen, a handful of men, in a cliffside village some miles north of Damascus-a Christian settlement where the people at times still spoke Aramaic (or Western Aramaic or Syriac), which happened to be the language of Jesus.Wait, wait, go slow, we said.He ate twice as fast as we did, spoke a thousand words to every one of ours. It was his job, telling stories, supplying names and dates, sorting through the layered calamities of his city, the alleys and crypts where profound things had taken place.It was not one of Vosdanik's seven languages, Aramaic, but he had heard it in the Christmas liturgy. The cult lived in two caves above the village. They were elusive men, rarely seen, except for one of them who occasionally came down into the streets and talked to the children. The language of the streets and schools was Arabic. But this man made efforts to speak Aramaic, amusing the children. Good reason why the others stayed above the town. They were keeping a watch, waiting for someone or something."They follow you like a crooked shadow," he said.After they'd left, the body of a man was found in one of the caves, a villager, his chest full of slashes and puncture wounds, blood everywhere. The cultists were thought at first to be Druze, blondish, some of them blue-eyed-a Muslim sect living in the mountains in the southern part of the country. A murder based on religious differences, it seemed. But arising out of nothing. There'd been no trouble, no provocation. And why were the initials of the victim cut into the blade of the crude iron tool used to kill him?Vosdanik paused, his sad face hanging in the smoke."You will want to hurt your enemy, it is in history to destroy his name. The Egyptians made pottery that the names of their enemies were engraved with sharp reeds. They will smash the bowls, great harm to the enemies. The same harm that if you cut his throat.”None of this was easy for us to follow. Vosdanik was involved in the textures of place, in histories, rituals, dialects, eye and skin color, bearing and stance, endless sets of identifying traits. We leaned forward, straining to hear, to understand.He ordered more arak. I poured a scant measure of water, watching the arak cloud, a sedimentary stir. His narrative worked back to the dig, the overshadowing background, whispers of Islam, occult rabbinical doctrine, the vast embroidered mist of precepts and dreams. Shining icons, strands of hair from the Prophet's beard. He believed it all.Slow, we told him. Go slow, give us a chance to get it straight.He was taken back by the intensity of Volterra's questioning. It was clear he had few answers. He hadn't thought about these things and there was no reason he should have. The cult was just another mystery in the landscape. They were unremarkable to him, these men, considering where he lived, what he knew about the dark places, assassins in cloaks, the dead who walked. He told us of two other cult murders, one we knew about, the Wadi Rum, although the version he'd heard was different in some ways.He went after the last traces of food with a thoroughness almost cleansed of pleasure and zest. To an Arab at the next table he said something that sounded like "German shepherd." A boy came with arak."With sweet words you make them naked," Vosdanik said to us."Who?”"The Arabs. You will be soft with them you get what you want.”He offered us cigarettes. A man with half his face covered by a scarf came out of the toilet, wearing black and carrying a stick. Smoke collected near the ceiling."Where are they now?" Frank said."I hear nothing.”"Do you think there is one group, two?”"I hear three murders, I see one pair of blue eyes.”"Were the initials on the knife in Aramaic?”"This I don't know.”"Is there an Aramaic alphabet, or what?”Shrugging. "No one can write it anymore. It is only sounds. It traveled in history with the Jews. It was used by itself, it was mixed with other languages. Dog-Aramaic. It was carried by religion and now it fades because of religion, because of Islam, Arabic. It is religion that carries a language. The river of language is God.”And this."The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.”He lit another cigarette, leaving one in the pack."Food for tomorrow," he said. A shy smile.Tomorrow he would show us an Aramaic inscription on the wall of the Syrian church if we were interested. He would take us to Bethlehem, to Jericho. The columns in el-Aqsa are Crusader columns, he said. Mohammed flew to heaven from the Dome of the Rock.