Soon, another city whizzes past, and Sol says over his shoulder, "That is Netanya where they cut the diamonds. In Israel is the best diamond cutters in the world."
He checks his Rolex. "On the way back, we will have time to stop, and I will get you the good price from my Arab friend at the diamond factory."
Then, almost immediately, he says, "Ah, here is the outskirts of Caesarea. See the Roman aqueduct for bringing the water to the city. It is built before the time of Jesus."
He jolts to a stop, and the Mediterranean looms an intense blue beyond the balanced, fitted stones of ancient Roman arches, over which -hopefully-there will be no dispute.
Sol pauses only a few seconds before he whirls back onto the blacktop, makes a ninety-degree turn onto a road through an avocado grove, and emerges at a bone white parking lot.
"Put on the hats. We don't want to make a sunstroke. Here you buy cold water for a dollar a bottle." He starts his lecture while we scramble from the van. "A camel travels twenty miles in a day. But the camel needs food and drink, and the Phoenicians realize ships is cheaper and faster, so they build ships and Caesarea becomes the biggest port on the Mediterranean."
He proffers our tickets to the Arab attendant as he talks. "In the time of Jesus, when Rome puts King Herod on the throne, he builds a great city here. But he is not stupid. He knows where his bread is buttered, so he names the city after Augustus Caesar. For six hundred years, Caesarea is the residence of the governors. Here is Pontius Pilate, the governor when Jesus is brought to be judged." He stops before a slab of rock.
'Pontius Pilate' is carved in the stone, and Rory, an Irish Catholic, studies it with awe.
Then Sol says, "It is not the real stone of course. The real stone they don't want to end up with the graffiti, so they make the cast of it and put the original in the museum in Jerusalem."
I watch Rory's enthusiasm evaporate since Pontius Pilate plaques could well be cast for Disneyland.
But I don't say anything as Sol leads us to a row of broken columns, torsos, and a huge marble foot.
"See how there is no heads." He puts a hand companionably on the shoulder of a headless figure. "In the Middle East, it is the custom to behead the captives. Then to knock the heads off the statues. To lose the head is to lose the brain and the power. So the victors don't want to take no chances, not even with marble statues."
The stone torsos also lack hands and penises, the symbolic power to act and reproduce, but he doesn't point that out as he wanders off to talk to the Arab attendant. I think that it's no wonder beheading and displaying severed heads on pikes have remained favorites for executioners the world over, and as I stand before the maimed marble statues whose extremities must have been difficult to crack off, I see that the mind-set of the conqueror has always been the same.
