When they arrived at Kiryat HaYovel, the streets seemed dull and drab, as if the street lights themselves were somehow dilapidated and incapable of dispelling the darkness. It took Yigal two passes of the building before he realized that was their destination. There wasn't any lighted sign or even a bare light bulb in the entrance corridor. At least the stair case lights worked when they pressed the button. Otherwise he would have gone back to the jeep to fetch his flash light.
Two floors down Sarah knocked on the door of an apartment that Yigal couldn't help but laugh when he saw it. The frame, door and even the handle had been painted in bright yellows, reds and greens in some sort of paisley pattern.
"Who lives here, a hippie?"
Sarah didn't get a chance to answer as the door opened. The creature that stood there stopped him cold. He wasn't certain if it was a male or a female. What was certain was, with the exception of the face every exposed part of the person's body was covered in intricate colored tattoos. To add to the total bizarreness, every piece of flesh that wasn't flat, had some kind of piercing. Eyebrows, ears, lips, nose. Later he realized the was a piercing through the fellows tongue. Yigal hesitated when he saw an outstretched hand. 'What the heck! When in Africa ..." and he responded in kind.
It turned out that YYY was a student of Sarah's. She evidently taught at one of the colleges that had sprouted up in Israeli cities in the past few years. YYY was a student of computer graphics at the Bazel School of Art who supplemented his knowledge with Sarah's course in digital photography.
"So what do you have for us?" Sarah asked.
"Remember I told you about that software that permits viewers on the Internet to navigate in three-dimensional space? To do that you need 360 degree photographs. You don't have exactly 360, but with software I managed to fudge it, giving you 270 degrees. Come in her and see what I'm talking about.
They had remained standing in what was supposedly a living room. Yigal was more than relieved that he didn't have to sit down here. The next room, what appeared to be the only bedroom in this bachelor apartment was in stark contrast to the filth and disarray of the rest of the house. Upon entering the second room Yigal could see floor to ceiling shelves against every wall, including the only wall with a window. Neatly stacked on some shelves were endless books on various computer subjects with stacks of glossy magazines as book ends. On other shelves was a dizzying array of computers and wires running in every direction through well put together plastic conduits. On a large table that took up the entire space in the center of the room was a large wood table surrounded by ergonomic office chairs.
"Sit down here, if you don't mind?" offered YYY pointing to two of the chairs opposite the largest LCD screen Yigal had ever seen. Even in the sports bar he occasionally visited when in Tel Aiv they didn't have a screen that large!
"Here's a mouse." YYY said, handing over a small black ball with no visible cord connecting it to anything.
With the touch of the keyboard in front of him the screen suddenly came alive. The sheer size of the screen, coupled with the brilliant three dimension representation of the scene made Yigal feel as if he had somehow been magically teleported to the edge of the cistern fifty kilometers away. It was unbelievable realistic.
"Use the mouse!" YYY encouraged.
Yigal placed the black ball on the table, having discovered that one side was flat. By gently moving it side to side, his perspective changed. It was as if they had walked back and forth along the side of the cistern.
"This in absolutely unbelievable!" he exclaimed.
"Try moving it forward." YYY coached.
Yighal did as he was bid. The perspective moved forward and slightly down, as if they were hanging in the air above the artifacts and debris below.
"Here you try it." Yigal offered to Sarah.
Far less hesitant Sarah moved the mouse quickly in various directions creating the effect of drawing closer to the bottom of the cistern, and even slowly moving around one particular pile of rocks that had a large apparently unbroken urn sticking out covered in layers of dust.
"This is absolutely amazing!" Yigal said out loud, an attempt at placating his host and to make up for his initial shirking from contact with his host. "How do you do this?"
The explanation he received was totally incomprehensible to him, but he could see Sarah listening with rapt attention.
"So what do you say?" YY asked the two of them. "Can I go public with this site?"
"What do you mean public?" Yigal questioned.
"You know, like make it available on the web. Kind of like an example of what three dimensional representation using VRML can really be!"
Yigal sat quietly. He felt like he had been ambushed but he wasn't certain. Did Sarah know this was going to happen when she brought him here?
"Listen, I can't ..."
YYY was quick to interrupt.
"Listen dude. I'm not going to argue or anything. Sarah told me there might be problems with permissions. I just thought it might be great to share something this hot with the rest of the world." Yigal didn't respond.
"Well at least I can use the site in-house, like off-line, as a term project for one of my courses?"
"That shouldn't be a problem."
"Yigal," Sarah turned to him. It was the first time she participated in the discussion between the two men. "What if YYY made this public without identifying where it was. Some sort of anonymous archeology discovery somewhere in Israel?"
Yigal didn't want to say yes but ... for some reason he had this inner need to find favour in Sarah's eyes.
"Okay. But there is one condition."
"Yes!" YY shouted, raising one of his multi coloured tattooed arms into the arm with a clenched fist! "What is the condition?"
"I was never here and we never had this conversation. Can we all agree to that?"
Both YYY and Sarah smiled as they nodded their heads in agreement.
"I can always say that I shared the photos with YYY in order to get his help in recreating the site, all without your knowledge. That way if anything happens you're not directly responsible."
"Listen you two. I'll always remain 'responsible'. Its just a question of how culpabale I'll be." With that even he had to smile at the subterfuge the three had just cooked up."
"Did the two of you rehearse this before I came here?" he asked, partly in jest but with an underlying tone of disbelief, no mater how they answered.
"Good luck YYY!" Yigal said as he rose from the chair. This time he offered his hand first, and firmly and warmly shook the tattooed fist that was proffered him.
"We got to get going. I have to get up early."
"Me too, don't forget!."
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