Jennings returned early the following morning and spared Thorn any conversation about his exploits the night before. His only gesture of acknowledgment came as he urinated with the bathroom door open; he was urinating into his hands and washing his genitals with the urine. Catching Thorn's expression as he watched him perform this strange and repulsive ritual, he said,

"Taught me this in the RAF. It's as good as penicillin."

Thorn closed the door and waited impatiently for Jennings to dress. He was disgusted to be in the company of this man. But he feared being alone even more.

"Let's go," Jennings said, grabbing his camera bag. "I got us on a tour to the digs when I came in this morning."

They traveled on a mini-bus with ten others through the old city of Jerusalem. There they stopped at the Wailing Wall where the tourists disembarked and greedily took pictures. The commercialism even here was grotesque: vendors moving through the crowds of wailing Jews, shouting over them as they hawked everything from hot dogs to plastic replicas of Christ up on the cross. Jennings bought two such crucifixes, hanging one about his neck, giving the other one to Thorn.

"Put it on, old boy. Might need it."

But Thorn refused, irritated by Jennings behaving as though he were on a joyride.

The trip into the desert was less amusing. The tour guide recounted the recent history of warfare between the Arabs and Jews, pointing out the Golan Heights were most of the major battles had raged. They rumbled through the village of Daa-Lot where a group of Jewish schoolchildren had been massacred by Arab terrorists, and then the tour guide told how another group of terrorists had been captured and killed, their bodies trampled to pulp by schoolchildren in return.

"Now we know what all the wailing's about," muttered Jennings.

Thorn refused to respond and they rode the rest of the way in silence.

When they finally reached the archaeological digs, the tourists were hot and tired, complaining as the tour guide pointed into the roped-off area and explained the work being done. Beneath their feet were King Solomon's quarries, an intricate system of ditches and canals that possibly stretched to Jerusalem, some sixty miles away. Somewhere within the system were the ruins of an ancient city, believed by many to be the site where the Bible itself was created. Text had already been recovered, carefully preserved in pottery and cloth, that reflected stories closely following those in the Old Testament. The dig was an ambitious project, for no one knew exactly where the city lay; it was being uncovered, not with earthmovers but inch by inch, with pick and brush.