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Show crazy; on other digs I had worked, when we got to a rainy season we stopped. You can't sift mud. But here it seemed that the two thousand years of waiting had reversed its lesson of patience: we were less than six feet from the Temple wall, but we were in a hell of a hurry. In one corner of the pit, stacks of black rubber buckets leaned against the dirt walls, waiting to be filled and sent up. I picked up the sledge hammer and brought it down hard on a large rock and when I was standing over a pile of rubble I began filling buckets. I filled ten and moved them over beneath the pulley, but no one else had returned to work, so I went back and filled ten more. I was working hard. I was busting up Jerusalem, breaking it down into little pieces, and when ten more buckets were full, and hauled through the mud, I again picked up the hammer. "Be more careful, you will destroy something of value." It was Chaim, of course: supervising. I looked up. He was not standing next to Talma, who had also returned, but was on the other side of the pit from her, keeping a safe cold distance. "Send up the buckets you've already filled," Chaim ordered, and without questioning his authority I left the hammer and went over to the twenty already-filled buckets beneath the pulley. I did not look up. I hooked the handle of the first bucket, made the rope taut, and stepped back out of the shadow cast by the earthen wall. Soon enough, next month or the month after, it would be the shadow of the Temple itself. Then slowly, hand over hand, I strained at the rope as the bucket rose above me; when I felt |
