Source

by James A. Michener

  The monolith was her idea. She said, “If we erect on the highest part of the rock a tall stone, the storm and the wind and the wild boar will see it and will know that we wish them well.” Ur asked how they would know any such thing, but his son assured him, “They will know.” And so all the men of the cave went with Ur’s son to a part of the wadi where stones grew, and there, with flint cutters and wedges and heavy stones dropped as hammers, they broke away a monolith much taller than a man and rounded on one end. They shoved and hauled it onto the highest point of the rock, where after two months of sweating and building of earthen ramps, they upended it into a socket that the boy had hacked into the solid rock. Securing it with stones wedged under the corners they left it standing upright, a thing without a name, but a thing from which they nevertheless took much consolation. It was their spokesman to the storm.

  On the third night after its institution as guardian of the well, a wild boar—the symbol of implacable hatred—came rampaging out of the wadi and tore up a good two thirds of the remaining wheat fields. When dawn broke and the cave people saw the devastation, and realized how much food they had lost—crested larks were already feasting on the fallen grain—they became panicky and tried to push over the monolith, but Ur’s wife and son prevented this, reasoning, “If they have come at us even though they can see our sign, what might they have done otherwise?” Ur and his son-in-law followed a simpler reasoning. The wild boar had ravaged their fields. They would kill him. So they gathered their spears and set upon the chase that would long be recounted in that wadi.

  In the dawn they went down to the swamps, where his trail lay, and among the waters and the flying birds they probed until they found his ugly foot marks leading deeper into the areas where the biting bugs hid. For a day they splashed their way through green water up to their knees, and at night they slept among the dreadful bugs. They could hear the great boar and knew that he was beginning to feel panic, and in the morning they were after him. He led them on a long chase away from the swamp and through the glades of lovely forests thick with oak and pine. He hurried up hills and toward caves, breathing harder as the persistent hunters clung to his muddy trail. The huge beast gathered strength and ran far down the valleys until the men could see before them the bright Whispering Sea which Ur had known of old but which his new son had not encountered. They followed the boar to the southern end of the sea, where hot waters bubbled from the ground, and there in a thicket of pistachio and thorn they finally cornered him.

  “Remember what I said,” Ur called as they prepared to move in from opposite sides. His heart pounded with unprecedented speed, and when he was alone he whispered, “I must not die now. Not till the boar is killed. The young man doesn’t know how …”

  With a scream the young hunter flew into the air, for the wily boar had lured him into range of his flashing tusks.

  “Fall away!” Ur shouted, rushing into the thicket, but the young man could not control his fall, for there was nothing to grasp, and he fell onto the tusks again and was slashed to death. Before old Ur could penetrate the tangle the triumphant beast was galloping to the north, leaving the young hunter destroyed behind him.

  It was then that the immensity of life, the awesome, aching mystery of man in conflict with the things about him, overwhelmed the old man. He looked at his dead son and visualized the man’s wife and little boy. “I was the one ready for death!” Ur cried. “Why was he chosen?”

  From the north came echoes of the distant beast crashing about in victory. “Why should a thing so evil have triumphed?” Ur protested, rending his garment in anguish.

  He thought of the futile monolith his family had raised to ward off just such contradictions and he wondered what extra thing he might have done to save this bravest of hunters. What had he left undone? Standing in grief over a man he had loved more than his own wife, more than well or cave, he began to formulate words which expressed his spiritual bewilderment:

  Why is the young hunter dead, why do I live?

  Why has the mad boar triumphed, why does he growl?

  Where is the path home, why is it hidden?

  Why does the sun hide its face, why does it mock?

  And as he felt the tragedy of these recent days he again entertained those mysterious thoughts which had begun that day when he saw his broken reflection in the well: was it the boar which had willed this dreadful day or was it a force far greater than either the boar or the lightning or the storm—some entity outside them all? Deep in the thicket he stood over the body of his son and wondered.

  And the anguish that Ur knew that night—the mystery of death, the triumph of evil, the terrible loneliness of being alone, the discovery that self of itself is insufficient—is the anxiety that torments the world to this day.

  LEVEL

  XIV

  Of Death and Life

  Clay figurine of the Canaanite goddess of fertility, Astarte or Ashtart. Known to the Hebrews as Ashtoreth (plural Ashtaroth), to the Babylonians as Ishtar and to the Greeks as Aphrodite, this goddess appears repeatedly throughout the Old Testament as a permanent temptation to the Hebrews. Struck from a two-part mold in the seaport of Akka, 2204 B.C.E. Fired at 750° centigrade. Purposely buried beside the wall of Makor sometime after dark on an autumn evening in 2202 B.C.E.

  High in the heavens over the desert a vulture wheeled, its glinting eye fastened to an object almost invisible in a clump of brush that grew where the drifting sand met fertile earth. Its wings fiat against the rising currents, the powerful bird drifted aimlessly in huge circles, but kept its sharp eye focused on the tiny object below, which seemed to be hesitating between death and life. The vulture showed no impatience, nor did it change its elevation. If the decision were to be death, the rapacious bird could drop quickly enough, and in the meantime its steady, waiting flight continued.

  Then a change occurred. It appeared that death had come, and quickly the hovering bird ceased its drifting and inclined its wings into a steep dive. From the warm rising current which had sustained it, the vulture entered into the cold outer layers, descending in a great arching curve, its sharp eye fixed on the object that had just died. Speed and determination were necessary, for before long other birds would spot the lifeless target and would come swooping in to claim it, but on this day the solitary vulture was to be the angel of death and it sped down on silent wings.

  On the ground a small donkey lay trapped with its hind leg pinched into the fork of a desert shrub, and its efforts to extricate itself had brought exhaustion. Vainly it had cried and twisted and pulled and now it could do no more. Death was very close, for from the desert came a torrid wind that intensified the little creature’s thirst, and in its last extremity the donkey ceased struggling; it was this surrender that the soaring vulture had interpreted as death, and now through dimmed eyes the little beast could see the final bird approaching. Both were prepared for death.

  At that moment, pushing his way through the bushes that marked the edge of the desert, appeared a nomad wearing sandals whose thongs came upward about his ankles; across his right shoulder was fastened a cloak of yellow marked with red crescent moons. He wore a beard and carried a crooked stave which he used to knock aside the impeding brush, and from time to time he stopped to listen for a donkey that had disappeared from his caravan. He heard no sound but his eye did mark the descending flight of the vulture, and by a calculation which he had learned from his father, who had also been a nomad, he deduced from the actions of the scavenger where his donkey might be. He was afraid, from the appearance of the vulture, that the little creature was already dead, but nevertheless he hurried on, and in a moment his shepherd’s crook pushed aside the last brush—and at its base he saw his donkey very close to death, but now restored to life.

  The vulture, robbed of this promised meal, uttered a croaking cry of anger, then sought an ascending current, on which it rose in great circles to a height from which it was almost invisible to the herdsman in the brush at the ed
ge of the desert, and then remembering past good fortune, it drifted effortlessly to the west, over green lands from which it had often feasted in earlier days, until it came to the mound of Makor, in whose town another contest between death and life was about to occur, involving more important characters than a stray donkey, and more complicated forces than a hungry bird and a nomad dressed in a yellow cloak with crescent moons.

  It was in the early summer of 2202 B.C.E., and in the more than seven thousand years that had elapsed from that day on which the Family of Ur had erected its monolith on the rock a sequence of changes had transformed the area. One unrecorded civilization after another had flourished briefly—successful ones had lasted a thousand years; the unsuccessful, only two or three hundred—but each had left behind an accumulation of rubble as its buildings were demolished and its inhabitants led away to slavery. Ruins had grown upon ruins until some twenty feet of debris obscured the original rock, obliterating even its memory, except that from its secure footing in the high place the ancient monolith still pushed its head through rubble to protrude a few feet into sunlight. It was the holiest object in this part of the land and was believed to have been placed in its exalted position by the gods themselves.

  The rest had vanished. The roof of the cave was collapsed and the mouth, which had seen so much traffic in its numberless millennia, was filled in, so that not even goats could creep into the cool retreat that had served them for so many years. At the well, which still explained the concentration of life in the area, earth had built up until ropes thirty feet long were required to reach water, and the rocks that formed the upper lip of the well were worn with deep grooves showing where the girls of Makor had guided their ropes while hauling up the water.

  The mound now housed a town of a hundred mud-brick houses located along winding streets, and contained a population of some seven hundred people who engaged in trade, kept animals, and grew agricultural produce in the fields south of town. The most conspicuous change, however, was the great wall which surrounded the settlement and which kept off all but the most determined invaders. It had been erected sometime around the year 3500 B.C.E., when a people whose tribal name was no longer remembered decided in desperation that they must protect themselves or perish. Accordingly, they had built a massive wall nine feet high and four feet thick, using no mortar but only large chunks of unworked rock piled loosely atop one another. From a distance the wall looked as if at any given point it might easily be breeched, but when the attackers moved close they found that against the inner face of the stone the defenders had jammed a second wall of beaten earth, eight feet thick, and had faced it with two additional feet of rock, so that anyone seeking to pierce the defenses had to hack his way through fourteen feet of rock, then earth, then rock, and this was difficult to do.

  In the thirteen hundred years that the wall had stood, it had been assaulted sixty-eight times—once every nineteen years on the average—by Hittites and Amorites from the north, by Sumerians and Akkadians from the Land of the Two Rivers, later known as Mesopotamia, and by Egyptians from the Nile. Even the predecessors of the Sea People, making preliminary forays on the port of Akka, had tried to capture Makor, too, but of the numerous sieges only nine had succeeded. In recent centuries the town had been totally destroyed—that is, burned to the ground and desolated—only twice, and was thus more fortunate than some of its larger neighbors like Hazor and Megiddo.

  Primarily Makor was an agricultural center whose rich fields produced a surplus which could be traded for manufactured goods. During recent centuries caravans had begun moving past Makor on their way from Akka to the inland city of Damascus, and exotic goods were becoming known: obsidian knives from Egypt, dried fish from Crete and Cyprus, stacks of lumber from Tyre and fabrics from the looms east of Damascus. The wealth of Makor was controlled mostly by the king, but this word could be misleading. The size of the town and its importance in world affairs were best illustrated by what happened in 2280 B.C.E., when the neighboring city of Hazor was in trouble and called for help. The king of Makor responded, sending to the imperiled city an army of nine men.

  It was strange, perhaps, that there should even be a king of Makor ruling over a town of only seven hundred persons, but in those days this was no mean assembly, and if one took into consideration the surrounding fields and undefended hamlets protected by the king, one had an area just large enough to constitute an economic unit. It never belonged permanently to any one national system; from one century to the next it had been subject to Egypt for a while, then to empires having their home in Mesopotamia. For the most part it enjoyed the same status as larger communities like Hazor, Akka and Damascus, a subject town floating this way and that as the tides of history swept in or receded.

  In an age of violent change, when the super-empires were trying to establish themselves, Makor was allowed to exist only because it was a minor settlement off to one side of the major thoroughfare connecting Egypt, which had long ago builts its pyramids, to Mesopotamia, which had already built its ziggurats. It was never an important military target and could be safely by-passed, as it usually was, but after the significant battles had been decided elsewhere, victorious generals usually dispatched a few troops to let Makor know what new hegemony it now belonged to.

  On the occasions when Makor had to be destroyed, its population was dealt with severely: all men who could be caught were massacred; their wives were raped and dragged off to harems, and their children led away to slavery. Later, when peace came, other groups would move in to take their places and to rebuild the town, and this accounted for the varied types one saw in Makor. There were tall, slim Canaanites with sunburned complexions, blue eyes, small noses and well-defined chins, while those who came from Africa were dark. Hittites wandering down from the north were swarthy, squat men with powerful bodies and large hooked noses, but those from the southern desert were lean and hawk-faced. They were the Horites. Even some of the Sea People had decided to live ashore—robust, thick-chested men. They were the forerunners of the Phoenicians. And all lived together in a kind of indifferent amalgam, finding for themselves about as good a life as was then available in the area.

  In this age of uncertainty, only one thing was certain: the confusion about religion had been permanently settled. It was now known that the world was governed by three benevolent gods—storm, water, sun—and each was represented by a special monolith rising from the high place in the center of town. There was, of course, a fourth stone in the solemn line facing the temple, sacred beyond all others, rounded on top by erosion and almost submerged in earth that had accumulated through the years. Because it looked something like a human penis, it was revered as the father of all gods and was known as El, but in appearance it was trivial, rising only a few feet from the soil, whereas the others were impressive monuments. It was as if the god to whom the rock-penis belonged was old and worn out; he was still revered by his subjects as a potent force, the source of all power, the god El.

  After these major gods came the multitude of others for whom no monoliths were raised at the high place but to whom prayers were said daily: gods of the trees, the rivers, the wadi, the birds, the ripening grain, and particularly gods for any feature of the landscape that stood out prominently. Thus the hill behind Makor had its god, as did the mountain that stood behind it. Baals, they were called, little baals and greater baals, and each was worshiped in a separate way, but there was one special god whom all the citizens of Makor kept close to their hearts, and this was Astarte, the tempting, rich-breasted goddess of fertility. It was she who brought the grain to ripening and the cow to calving, the wife to the birthing stool and chickens to the nest. In an agricultural society, smiling little Astarte was the most immediately significant of all the gods, for without her nothing that concerned the cycle of life could come to pass.

  By and large the baals had been generous to Makor, for even though the town had been twice destroyed, it had been revived and under Astarte its fields prospe
red, but few were the families who could say, “We have lived in Makor for many generations.” Most were newcomers, but in one rambling mud-brick house to the west of the main gate, its back tucked snugly against the wall, lived a man whose ancestors through one trick or another had managed to survive both war and occupation. When bravery was called for, the men of this resilient family voluntarily leaped with their spears to the ramparts, but when defeat became inevitable they were the first to scramble into some hiding place, covering themselves until massacre and fire were over. And with the coming of each peaceful cycle they returned to their expanding olive groves and wheat fields.

  The present scion of this resourceful clan was the farmer Urbaal, thirty-six years old, lineal descendant of that great Ur whose family had started farming at Makor and who had erected in the high place the monolith which was to become the god El. Urbaal was a husky man, stout and strong as becomes a farmer, with big teeth that flashed when he smiled. Unlike others of his age, he was not bald nor was he inclined to fatness. In war he had proved himself a good soldier and in peace a productive farmer. He was gentle with his wives, boisterous with his children and kind to his slaves; and if he had wanted to be king or high priest, he could have been either, but his love was farming and women and the growth of things. But now he had a consuming worry, and as he hurried from his house to the high place where the monoliths stood facing the temple, his forehead was wrinkled and he thought: My well-being for the whole year depends on what I do right now.

  The street which led from Urbaal’s house did not march impressively from the main gate to the temple area; to do that would have required planning. Instead, it dodged and twisted in unforeseen ways like the hit-or-miss village footpath it had once been, and as the farmer passed along its inconvenient cobbles, citizens of the town nodded pleasantly; but he did not acknowledge them. His mind was preoccupied with serious matters, and when he reached the high place he proceeded gravely to the farthest monolith, the remnant that barely pushed its head through the earth, and bowed before it, kissing it many times and mumbling, “This year, great El, let it be me.” He then moved to each of the other three and uttered similar prayers: “Baal-of-the-Storm, this year let it be me. Baal-of-the-Waters, Baal-of-the-Sun, I have asked you for little.”