Source

by James A. Michener

  Meshab the Moabite had been assigned the roof of the governor’s house, for this rose higher than the others and thus formed a prominent landmark; but as the slave walked back and forth among drying seeds to position the important sixth flag which would anchor the range, he annoyed the governor, who left his quarters to cry, “Who is on my roof?”

  A crowd collected as the official began ranting at the slave and there might have been trouble, for the Moabite was loath to take down his needed flag, but just as the governor was becoming ugly, General Amram appeared, washed and relaxed, and he could see the desirability of keeping the flag in its present position. He joined Meshab on the roof to study the range of flags, then summoned everyone including Hoopoe to a council below. “The governor is right,” he announced. “The last flag should not be on his roof.” Hoopoe started to protest, but before he could do so the general added, “But since the flag is essential, why not place it on the wall?”

  The crowd murmured its approval of this wise decision, but Hoopoe said, “From the wall the stick will be too short for the flag to be seen.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” General Amram said, “and what you must do tomorrow is go into the forest and find a young tree that will be tall enough.”

  So the naïve little engineer disappeared into the forest while General Amram returned to the house by the west wall, where he spent the afternoon with Kerith. Meshab the Moabite, working on the wall, saw the trick that the clever general was playing and was incensed. When on successive afternoons Amram devised new ways to keep the fat engineer occupied, the big slave felt a growing bitterness; but his suspicions of what transpired in Hoopoe’s house were not justified. General Amram, at ease in the engineer’s chair, was finding Kerith even more complicated than he had taken her to be on their first afternoon together. She tended her famous visitor as if he were her father, bringing him cold drinks and comforts like a slave, yet rebuffing with charming innocence his attempts to seduce her. Had he been younger he might have wrestled with her; as a man nearing fifty he was amused by the faithful wife and tried to penetrate her reasoning, discovering that she really believed that if she were kind to him he might take her husband to Jerusalem.

  “Why are you so dissatisfied with this pretty town?” he asked one afternoon, clutching at the hem of her gray robe as she went past.

  Like a dancer from the desert she twisted and her skirt flew out in rhythmic swirls, passing over his hand and leaving an enticing fragrance in the air. He laughed, then listened as she said, “I feel corrupted, living in a town like Makor, where Yahweh and Baal are both worshiped.”

  “I’ve found Makor attractive,” he said. “Not as much so as I had hoped.”

  She ignored his response and asked, “When you waken in the morning in Jerusalem, doesn’t it thrill you to be at the center of the earth? Where Yahweh dwells?”

  General Amram coughed. Kerith was being either naïve or taunting, and in either case he was growing bored. Seeing no reason to prolong evasions he said frankly, “To tell you the truth, I’m loyal to Dagon.”

  “Dagon!” Kerith cried, appalled at the idea.

  “Yes. I served with King David when he was hired by the Philistines, and I grew to like them. They’re good warriors and Dagon is a powerful god. Oh, I suppose Yahweh is satisfactory too. I know the king worships him, but I’m a fighting man and I keep to simple tastes.”

  Kerith stepped back. This man, this famous general, saying without fear that he was loyal to a god made of stone like Dagon. “I’m surprised Yahweh doesn’t …”

  “Strike me dead?” Amram laughed. “Oh, I pay homage to Yahweh, too. As a soldier you mustn’t overlook anything that may help your side. But my personal loyalty …”

  “Is to Dagon?”

  “Yes.” He rubbed his stubbled head, pulled himself out of Hoopoe’s chair, and to Kerith’s surprise caught her by the waist and embraced her with chuckling good humor. “You’re a dear wife, Kerith.” He kissed her. “And some day you’ll reach Jerusalem.” He kissed her again, holding her arms to prevent her struggling. “And Yahweh will be waiting.” He kissed her farewell and left the house, laughing to himself. She stood alone in the room, defiled, not by his kisses—which she understood—but by his blasphemy. Slowly she knelt beside her husband’s chair and prayed.

  “Yahweh, let me ascend to your city. Let me come singing to your gates, Jerusalem.”

  That night at the final dinner General Amram was astonished when Hoopoe announced, “Governor, I’m leaving my house by the west wall.”

  Kerith gave a cry of joy. “Jerusalem?”

  “No,” Hoopoe said. “Tomorrow we start digging the main shaft, and I’m going to build myself a new house along the edge.” The guests reacted noisily, and he added, “The work is so important that I’ll need to be on hand.”

  “Good idea!” Amram said. “We’ll start tonight.” And with a spurious gaiety he led the party out of the governor’s house and along the curving street, past the silent shops and to a spot near the postern gate where Hoopoe showed him the location of the shaft. Pouring a glass of red wine onto the ground, the general made a short, sardonic speech: “It has been a long time since I have visited so charming a country town and met such charming country people.” He bowed toward the governor and Kerith. “In my travels I have seen no fortifications superior to these built by the man you call Hoopoe.” The crowd began to cheer this gracious compliment, but Amram spoiled the effect by bobbing his head up and down like a hoopoe bird, and there were giggles. “I feel sure,” he concluded, “that the new water system, if it is ever completed, will be the marvel of the north.” Kerith realized that he was mocking both Hoopoe and Makor, and that sense of disillusionment set in which would lead to her final judgment of the general; she felt pity for him, that he should live in Jerusalem so close to Yahweh and King David without having discovered the inner significance of either the city, the god or the king.

  When the mock ceremony ended he smiled at Kerith condescendingly and said, “Go home now and help your little man build his little tunnel, and maybe some day you’ll both get to Jerusalem.” She was humiliated, yet in the morning she stood in the crowd that lined the town walls to cheer the general on his way back to Megiddo, and as he disappeared toward the swamp she thought how strange it was that he who appreciated Jerusalem so little should be allowed to reside in that city, while she who longed so desperately for Yahweh should be denied this boon. She resented the basic unfairness of life, and tears came to her eyes, but as she climbed down from the wall she caught Meshab staring at her with undisguised contempt, and she wondered what had occasioned this reaction.

  She went home with Hoopoe, who now became so absorbed in launching both the water system and his new house that she was increasingly left alone in the old, to which the general had brought a fragrance of Jerusalem, and staying there with her two children she was able to see with unemotional accuracy what she must do: as carefully as her husband planned his punctures of the earth, she planned how she would reach Jerusalem, that citadel of the one true god. The next three years would be tedious, and she knew it, but she suspected that General Amram’s cynical advice was accurate: “Rely on your husband’s completion of the tunnel.” This she would do and with the compassion and love she had formerly felt for him, for she could not ignore the respect General Amram had shown for Jabaal the engineer, even while laughing at Hoopoe the man.

  She therefore dedicated herself to helping him attain his ambition, trusting that if she did so she would gain access to Jerusalem. She helped him transfer his headquarters into the new house, then listened with understanding as he discussed the various difficulties he was encountering. In all outward respects she became a woman content with her life in Makor, attentive to her husband’s problems and respectful of the local gods; but never for one moment of one day did she submerge her longing for the presence of Yahweh and the reality of Jerusalem. When some months later word reached Makor that King David’s
general of the eastern forces, Amram, had been slain in an expedition against the rebellious Moabites, she felt a personal involvement and went back to the old house and stood alone in the room where the robust general had sat. She remembered him now principally as the conniving, self-opinionated man who had spoken arrogantly of Yahweh and King David, and she was amazed that so insensitive a person had progressed so far in a spiritual city like Jerusalem, and when at table Hoopoe eulogized him she remained silent. “He was the author of our good fortune,” the little builder said, “and what is more important, when he promised me fifty new slaves he sent them.” He was deeply moved by the general’s death, for he had imagined that when the water system was finished and he went to Jerusalem, Amram would adopt him as a kind of protégé, but now the first man to have championed the tunnel was dead, and Hoopoe felt abandoned.

  The excavation of the various holes that would unite to form the water system required, as Hoopoe had predicted, a full three years. The first seventeen months were spent sinking the square main shaft, whose diagonal, twenty-nine feet across, Hoopoe took pains to keep aligned with the flags. In the beginning the great hole had to pass through the accumulated rubble of the mound, and the diggers uncovered relics first of the bronze age when the Hebrews were bringing El-Shaddai to the site, then of the earlier copper age when Canaanites were erecting monoliths to Baal, and finally of the stone age when the Family of Ur was first erecting its menhir to El. In the digging Hoopoe occasionally found some article of interest which he took to his wife, so that the main room of their home became lined with small shelves on which he placed old statues and bits of metal. It was his opinion—not shared by others—that down along the sides of the hole one could detect signs of many towns that had vanished, and he was particularly impressed with one solid band of black soot that reached across the entire area some eight feet under the surface. “I think that at this point Makor must have been burned away,” he told Meshab, and he recalled the poems and legends kept alive in his family regarding the fight between Baal and El-Shaddai which had ended in a general fire, but others were sure that if a town had burned so long ago its ashes would have washed away in the rain. They proved their argument by lighting a fire, making ash, and then washing it completely away with a bowl of water. Long after the experiment Hoopoe found the answer: “Of course you can wash away a little ash. It goes from here to there. But suppose everything is ash? Both here and there? Where then does it go?” But by that time the slaves were digging into solid rock.

  It was here that Meshab the Moabite became so valuable. The rock of this area was a semi-soft limestone which when soaked with water could be worked like a hard clay. Iron-edged tools could be driven into it and huge chunks broken away, square-edged to be used in building houses later. It was Meshab who discovered the proper sequence for working the limestone: slant the floor of the hole in one direction so that water could seep into stony crevices, then excavate the portions over which the water had been standing, tilting the floor in the opposite direction. He also rigged the thick ropes that hauled out the quarried stone and built the two circular inclines that would take one set of women down to the well on one set of stairs while their sisters climbed up another flight that did not interfere with the first. Meshab became more than a foreman; in every respect he was Hoopoe’s second in command, and it was Hoopoe who finally suggested that he leave the slave camp and move into a small room at the rear of the new house so that he could be available throughout the night in case of emergency. At first Kerith did not like the idea of having a murderous slave so near at hand, but when she remembered the hovel in which he had been living she consented. The governor objected, but Hoopoe insisted that the project was too big and too important to go unguarded by the man who knew it best, so the tall Moabite took up his residence in the rear of the house. One night, as the two builders studied the gaping hole they had chopped into the earth, Hoopoe said, “Next week we start the tunnel. You go in from here. I’ll go in from the well and somewhere down there we’ll meet. At that moment, Meshab, I shall embrace you as a freed-man.” The slave said nothing, for he was wondering how he could keep his tunnel headed straight through the darkness, through the concentrations of solid rock. How could two men, starting from opposite directions, find each other in the bowels of the earth?

  When the shaft was completed Hoopoe and Meshab stood at the bottom and looked upward at the small square of sky which showed its blue impartially by yielding no hint of direction, and Meshab said, “From here no range is visible. The well might lie in any direction,” and Hoopoe replied, “Would I have brought you so far if I did not have a secret?” And he led Meshab out of the well and out of the town to a spot far in the hills where tall trees grew, and he asked the slave, “How high is that one?” and Meshab judged the tall tree to be at least thirty cubits. “It will do,” Hoopoe said confidently and he sat down to wait while Meshab returned to Makor for a gang of slaves to chop down the tree; but when the Moabite was gone Hoopoe lost his sense of assurance and humbled himself before the tree, clutching its trunk with his hands and praying, “Baal-of-this-Tree, I depend on you to help us find our way.” And for the better part of an hour he prayed, an engineer seeking guidance from the tool he was about to use.

  When the tree was felled and its branches trimmed away, the slaves began hauling it back to town, and when it was brought through the postern gate Hoopoe said, “Take it to the square shaft at once”; and there he placed it diagonally across the gaping square so that its direction duplicated the range established by the six flags; and since the range now passed directly along the tree, any tunnel that followed the line of the tree would have to intersect the well.

  “Your job is to follow the tree,” Hoopoe told the Moabite.

  “And how will I do that after the first day, when I can no longer see the tree above me?”

  Then the genius of Hoopoe manifested itself, for he disclosed the secret he had been perfecting over the last two years. He asked for a ball of strong white cord, to one end of which he fastened a heavy stone. Then, going to the point where the tree formed the southern end of the diagonal, he tied the free end of the cord about the trunk and slowly allowed the rock to fall till it just touched the bottom of the shaft. Next he went to the northern end of the diagonal and repeated the process, so that now he had at the bottom of the shaft two rocks holding taut two perpendicular strings so placed that a line between them would exactly reproduce the line of the tree and therefore the range of the six flags. And now Hoopoe’s care in orienting his diagonal so precisely bore fruit, for by this device he had insured that the two strings would be as far apart as possible and thus give maximum protection against error. If Meshab could keep these two strings in line as he dug, he must find the well.

  The Moabite, with a shout of joy—such as a hunter utters when he sees a deer, or a sea captain when he sees the harbor—cried, “It can be done!” And when he hurried down to the bottom of the shaft and saw what a clean, hard line the two taut strings provided, he said, “At night we can place two lamps at the foot of the strings, and we can see our way into the heart of the earth, no matter how dark it gets.” And he looked at the engineer, so like the hoopoe bird when he walked, and felt an inexpressible admiration for the intelligence of this man.

  And so on a bright sunny morning in Ethanim of the second year—when summer had ended and only the major rivers found enough water to stay alive and when men waited for rain so they could plow their fields and sow their winter’s wheat—Meshab the Moabite hammered the first iron wedge into the limestone barrier separating the bottom of the shaft from the well, and for twelve months thereafter he would keep his men working away at the rock, digging a tunnel that slanted downward. At the first sledge blow Hoopoe prayed, “Baal, lead us through this darkness,” and aloft at the edge of the pit Kerith prayed, “Yahweh, bring him success that he may take me up to Jerusalem.”

  Now Hoopoe moved to the well end, and there his problem was more di
fficult. Originally Makor had obtained its water from a spring which bubbled freely from the earth, but as the millennia passed two changes occurred: the earth about the lip of the spring grew upward year by year because of accumulated rubble; and during each century the chopping down of trees in the area—not many yet, but each year more and more—caused the actual water level to be drawn downward. These two agencies working in contrary directions meant that the surface of the spring sank lower and lower into the earth, so that by the time the first walls were built about the mound the spring had already become a well whose sides had to be dug constantly deeper and walled with stone.

  Since it was essential that his workmen see the range flags, Hoopoe ripped away the roof of the waterwall. He also demolished the circular wall around the well, and when the area was cleared he began sinking a narrow shaft straight down to water level. But when he approached the surface of the well he found an old cave that had been inhabited by men more than two hundred thousand years before. In the days when his forefather Ur had been worried about the cultivation of wheat, this earlier cave was already two thousand centuries old, buried and forgotten. Now Hoopoe walled it up again and continued his way down to the water level, and when he reached the desired spot he ordered his slaves to dig out a considerable hollow, providing a floor space from which his men could work and on which women seeking water in future years could rest their jars. Then across the upper opening of the shaft he placed a tree in line with the range of flags, and again he dropped two weighted lines to the well, and these showed the intended direction; but since the diameter of this temporary shaft was so much less than the diagonal of Meshab’s main shaft, the strings could not be far apart nor the accuracy of his range so precise, and the reason he had chosen to work from the well was because there the responsibility was greater. Eight and nine times a day he would lie on his stomach to check the range, satisfy himself that he must be headed right, then study the clay tablets to determine the upward pitch his slaves must follow. After that he had to trust that sooner or later his men digging on their upward slant would meet Meshab’s as they worked downward.