In the fall of 1891 I met Doktor Stumper at his Villa in Jerusalem's German Colony. Unaccustomed to being interrupted, he lectured me over the course of ninety minute tea on why his trips in search of the Grail reached no findings in English.
For the 150 minutes thereafter, he recited by memory the story of Christ's last supper in all four Gospels, then in the six gospels of the Apocrypha - reciting them all in Greek, Hebrew, German, Latin, Turkish and Arabic.
His wife and five children sat in rapt attention, and therefore I had a distinct feeling that indicating any sign of boredom would result in the possibility of scandal, and more significantly, not getting the job.
After concluding the Gospel of Bardesanes in Arabic, he announced in German a conclusion from readings of the Gospel of Pseudo Matthew that the Holy Grail was placed upon the Temple Mount by the Knights Templar, who hid the Grail by digging a tunnel down from the crusaders' church upon the Temple Mount, the Templum Domini, all the way to the ruins of King Solomon's temple.
Herr Doktor then announced that in order to find the Holy Grail, the Temple Mount would have to be blown up with dynamite.
Doktor Stumper explained his conclusion that the ruins of the Solomonic temple were 250 meters beneath the "Dome of the Rock", the al-Aqsa Mosque. Beneath the Dome lies the Bir al-Arwah, the 'Well of Souls,' where the spirits of the dead await their final judgement. It is this place of which the 11th century Persian poet Nasir Khusraw wrote:
"They say that on the night of his Ascension into heaven, the Prophet, prayed first at the Dome of the Rock, laying his hand upon the Rock. As he went out, the Rock, to do him honour, rose up, but he laid his hand on it to keep it in its place and firmly fixed it there. But by reason of this rising up, it is even to this present day partly detached from the ground beneath."
It was Doktor Stumper's view that the dynamite must be placed in the Well of Souls and exploded from there. Since we could not risk damaging the ruins of Solomon's temple, we would have to blast down merely to the ruins of King Herod. And since Doktor Stumper concluded that the blast would collapse the Knights Templar tunnel we would then dig a tunnel of our own, past potential ruins of the Maccabian and Nehamian eras, to finally arrive at the Solomonic Temple, in which the Grail had been placed..
As an engineer with expertise in the transport of weapons, Doktor Stumper wanted my professional opinion on how much TNT was necessary to blast a roughly 185 meter meter hole in the mountain that would lodge us directly at the ruins of Herodian era.
I told him this plan was extraordinarily unlikely to work. I had been to Jerusalem six times, and four of those times, I had walked upon the Temple Mount once even permitted to see the Well of Souls for myself. The Well is six meters on every side, and for a blast to create such a hole as the one the Doktor proposed, we would require 10000 killograms of nitroglycerine explosives, which could not possibly fit within the well. There are, furthermore, no safe means of transporting such volatile cargo either by land or sea; nor would customs inspectors ever look kindly on allowing into their borders explosives of that magnitude. Finally, as Jerusalem's Old City is nearly impossible to travel in any manner but by foot, the Old City would require construction of an entirely new system of roads and ramps, which would further result in the extreme provocation of the Jerusalemite population and perhaps even every monotheistic believer in the world.
Doktor Stumper listened to my objections stonefacedly and silent. Upon my concluded remarks he referred to all my objections as mere trivialities. 1. He would hire the necessary engineers to expand the Well of Souls to whatever dimensions I stipulated, along with workers and technicians for every foreseen requirement. 2. For this project, he had the full backing of Kaiser's treasury and diplomatic corps. Whatever money and connections required were at the fullest measure of my disposal. All necessary Ottoman and Palestinian authorities could be cajoled, bribed, and threatened into compliance, as could authorities in any countries traversed en route to destination. 3. Herr Doktor Stumper had a cousin by marriage, one Herr Daimler, at work on just such a transit vehicle, called a 'truck', which provides precisely the safe transit of weapons we require. 4. When the world beholds the properties of the Holy Grail, all objections shall be irrelevant.
I told him the project was still unlikely to work for a hundred variables, but I would venture all the designs for smoothly ramped roads through the Old City he required. At this moment, Herr Doktor told me my services would not be necessary for some years, but he shall keep me on retainer. The German Reich would deposit one-hundred-fifty thousand gold marks every year in a bank of my choosing until my expertise was required, at which point I would have to drop every other project to work exclusively for him in Palestine. The gold marks would arrive for me in New York every year on exactly January 1st, and every year I must send him at this address a new schematic for just such a road based on whatever new technology had developed in the intervening year.
It was the last I was to hear from the Doktor for seventeen years.
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On Easter Sunday 1908, I received a telegram ordering my immediate presence in Jerusalem. An ocean liner had been booked arriving in Normandy, along with passage through transcontinental passage along the Mediterranean railroads. I would arrive sometime in June with all necessary accommodations provided. I had one night to say goodbye to my family, from whom I would be parted either for one year, or twenty in the unlikely event I was sent to prison, and forever if the operation killed me. Something clearly had shaken Doktor Stumper's confidence.
Upon my Jerusalem arrival I was taken with immediate haste to Herr Doktor's residence rather than my own. I was lead to a drawing room with walls decorated floor to ceiling: framed medieval maps of Jerusalem, medieval and Byzantine paintings of Christ at the Last Supper, at the Garden of Gesthamene, and every station of the cross, along with speculative drawings of the Temple Mount in every historical period. Doktor Stumper was no longer dressed in a bourgeois suit but in the dress of an Arabic knight - white qaffia and galabea. I was soon to discover that months after our last meeting, he'd left his family for a Syrian girl one third his age with whom he now had four more children, the two older sons were staring at my schematics with their father, speaking to each other in ancient Greek.
"Gruss gott." He switched to his accented but correct in every particular English.
"I regret we have much work. You must be taken immediately to the weapons depot. I have elected to use your Road Plan C to construct roads leading us directly to Jewish Quarter's southern Mughrabi Gate, where we shall use Ramp Plan E to construct elevated roads leading us from Mughrabi Gate to the Temple Mount, and then we shall depart via an eastern ramp leading us to St. Stephen's Gate at the edge of the Muslim Quarter. It is regrettable that Muslims will find encroachment upon their quarter objectionable, but we have handsomely compensated the Ottoman Consul in Nablus and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to depopulate the old city and imprison any potential subversives."
"Has the Jewish population been consulted at all about what would be done to their quarter?"
"An immaterial obstacle. The Jewish Quarter is barely occupied. We shall give them access to their two great temples and they quite obviously may rebuild their quarter as they see appropriate. Though I highly suspect the current increase in their Palestinian presence to be a temporary affair."
"Please forgive me for asking but how will the Islamic population respond to your demolition of their third most sacred relic?"
"I shall explain more fully later, but will very briefly tell you that if I am correct about the properties of the Grail, opposition from the Islamic community will soon be absolutely irrelevant."
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Schliemann needed his own fortune to discover Troy, but the second Reich provided all the money we needed. When I arrived, I learned with alacrity that various plans of mine had been discussed and adopted long before my presence was requested.
It was elected that the dynamite was to be transmitted via nineteen six-masted wooden schooners departing from Hamburg - each of the schooners measured over 100 meters in length; the movement of trains is far too volatile for dynamite, combustion on frigates much too incendiary, and transmission via trucks far too public. If a wooden sailboat exploded from the nitroglycerine, the ship would burn so quickly that any identifiable remnants would sink in ninety seconds. The explosion would have to be seen by the naked eye register at all. Transmitted in the schooner's lower decks along with the explosive cargo would be forty-three elite German soldiers on each boat - 817 in total. A further 6,000 soldiers had gradually traveled to Palestine by train and frigate over the last eight years, many having been trained to pose themselves covertly as Austro-Hungarian Jews - all of them trained in a second language: some Yiddish, some modern Hebrew, some Hungarian or Czech. all of whom trained to chant Jewish prayers, and each trained to adopt a specific rural accent of townspeople in the Austro-Hungarian hinterland so no one could identify their town of origin. They were instructed to blend in, marry if necessary, have children if necessary, then abandon their families after the operation's completion. These undercover Germans comprised nearly 10% of Palestine's entire Jewish population.
The weapons would arrive not in Jaffa but in a soon to be incorporated town called Tel Aviv, where few people lived and transfer of goods likely to go unnoticed. The explosives would load onto two hundred Daimler Paukbauerei Zweibrucken trucks that would transit the explosives to Jerusalem by convoy at extremely slow speeds while many soldiers would travel across Palestine by train in plain clothes. Other soldiers would stand guard with loaded ammunition at every 100 meters between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and once every kilometer there would be an expertly trained sniper.
The construction workers were entirely Turkish, Greek, Persian, and Afghan, imported from the smallest towns in their countries so the likelihood any worker spoke Arabic would be next to none. Their sleeping quarters were not near in Jerusalem but in tents in the Judean desert, where they were shuttled every day by truck convoy. The entire population of the Old City itself was compelled to temporarily leave their homes and resettle on the excuse that Jerusalem plumbing was so old that deadly gasses had formed. Further residents near the old city were required to leave in the neighborhoods of Yemin Moshe, Mamilla, Nahalat Shiv'a, Musara. The entirety of the area near the Old City was to be sealed off with the severest penalties imposed for intrusion. Christians would be relocated to Bethlehem, Jews to Jericho, and Muslims to Ramallah. Most of the Old City would remain untouched and in a year's time, residents would return to their homes; almost all finding them exactly as they'd been left. Those who'd lost their homes would receive handsome compensation. By the time suspicion truly fermented, the operation would be complete.
The Mughrabi Gate, also referred to as the Dung Gate, would be expanded from the size built by the glorious architects of Suleiman the Magnificent, who never had to countenance transit larger than a caravan. A road of pure Jerusalem limestone would raise the trucks from the Dung Gate to the Temple Mount, and a second limestone ramp for the trucks to descend from the Temple Mount to St. Stephen's Gate in the East, just over the end of the Muslim quarter. Regrettably, the Western Wall, so holy to the Jews, would be sealed off by the road to near-completion.
The 817 weapons experts who traveled in the schooners with the dynamite would sit roughly 4 to each of the two-hundred trucks. One to drive, one to sit passenger side and watch for any counter-operations, and two to preserve the condition of the cargo. Thirteen hundred forty-two soldiers would post themselves within easy running distance of the road every fifty meters between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem carrying knife and pistol. With desert conditions allowing for easy visibility, a further sixty-nine sharpshooters were placed every kilometre between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem at a distance from the road greater than a kilometre, each sniper outfitted with Lee-Metford rifle. Three thousand thirty-three plain clothes soldiers placed themselves around Jerusalem streets and public spaces, looking for potential subversives who might have gotten wind of the operation and looked to stop it - every soldier had instructions to shoot immediately upon suspicion. A further 467 soldiers would stand armed guard around the gates of the Old City. 203 would guard inside the Temple Mount. 78 would guard inside the Mosque. 6 would guard in the Dome's cave itself. Once in place, the eight hundred soldiers would load the explosives onto the cave of the Dome of the Rock. The six soldiers in the cave with the explosives would stand guard up unto the explosion and receive the honor of blowing up along with the Temple Mount.
Whispers among the Stumper household held that the Kaiser himself telegraphed every day for information on the project's progress.
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To my astonishment and Doktor Stumper's prediction, the plan went off as if in a dream, and by September, we were entirely prepared. Two hundred trucks formed a convoy of explosives going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a perfect formation, at exactly 17 kilometers per hour with exactly 19.6 meters distance between each truck. Two soldiers would be riding in the front of the car, one to drive and one for security. Five more would ride in back for the sake of security.
Herr Doktor and I arrived at our temporary perch atop the Dung Gate where we would watch two hundred trucks enter the Old City from the south. Herr Doktor was in atypically good disposition, and for the first time, spoke unguardedly of his aims: "Mein Freund, you will soon drink from the juices of your heroic contributions to our quest. He who drinks from the Grail will truly receive eternal life and blessings from Christ himself. All Germany and its peoples will gain eternity and favor from its blessings, and the German soldier can fight a war of conquest invincibly against the very Ottomans who paved our roads. Please understand, mein weisser bruder, the Kaiserreich in no way means to conquer the world, we merely wish to may compare our empire unashamedly to our Saxon and Frankish brothers to the West. We mean to share in this conquest with all of Germanic bloodlines. We shall offer drink from the Grail to all truly peoples of the world: Britain, Scandinavia, the United States, and die Niederlande. All from pure Germanic and Northern European bloodlines will drink of the cup and live forever, and all peoples under us will be bred as they should, to live at our service.
"Excuse me Herr Doktor, but I might inquire, as my parents were German Jews, would I qualify for this great service?"
"Herr Miller..." The Doktor hesitated before giving any answer and seemed genuinely flummoxed.
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The first
"What is your name?"
"Miller"
"Ah. One of those German Jews who now lives on farms in the West..."
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