“You were on the exact heading!” he said with generous approval, but when they climbed down into the well and started into that tunnel he saw at once the sharp correction Meshab had made in his absence. He crawled to the facing rock, listened to the hammers in the other tunnel and realized how far off course he had been and how Meshab’s intervention had protected him from what would have been a conspicuous error. He embraced the Moabite and said, “As we broaden the tunnel we can smooth out the bump and no one will ever know,” and when they had retreated back to the well he pledged his gratitude: “When your chisel penetrates that last rock, you’re a free man.” And he scrambled out of the well and ran home to tell Kerith, pointing to one of the baked tablets and saying, “What we scratched on clay three years ago we’ve dug in solid rock.” Pushing the tablet aside he hugged Kerith and cried with sheer joy, “Jerusalem is yours.” He kissed her many times and whispered, “It was for you I dug the tunnel.” He was about to lead her to their bedroom when he thought of an important responsibility, and he banged on the wall to attract Meshab’s attention.
“Let’s take the new tools down to the men right now. That’s why I went to Accho,” and before he went to bed he saw to it that his slaves got the sharp new tools for cutting away the last of the intervening rock.
Late in the month of Ethanim, at the end of the hot season in the third year, when early rains began and plowing and sowing were possible, it became obvious that within a few days the two teams would meet, but the relative positions of the approaching tunnels could not yet be determined; almost certainly one would be higher than the other, or off to one side, but there seemed little doubt that at least part of the two openings would coincide and that subsequent corrections could be easily made. Excitement grew and even the governor got into old sandals and crawled along the little tunnel, gaining for himself a sense of the wonder that had been accomplished: each man had dug for nearly a hundred and forty feet through solid rock, relying upon the most primitive surveying equipment, and were about to meet as planned, within a tolerance of two feet in any direction.
On what would be the last day Hoopoe tried to mask his excitement, and he refused to be the man at the facing when the puncture was made. He chose an ordinary slave who had done good work and sent him crawling in with his sledge while he remained in the well cave, looking at the sweet water which would bubble quietly to the surface for the next two thousand years as women came along with their water jars. His work had made the future existence of Makor possible; and since he was deep in the earth, working with the earth, he prayed to the god who controlled that earth: “Sweet Baal, you have brought me face to face with my friend Meshab. Hidden from the eyes of others, you have brought us together, and the triumph is yours.”
“Hoopoe!” the men in the tunnel began calling. Shouts of joy echoed through the cave and reverberated across the surface of the water. “Hoopoe!” The voices became confused and men backed out of the tunnel, their eyes filled with tears.
“You must go in!” the slaves shouted, and they pushed their master into the tunnel. On his knees he crawled through those difficult first cuttings which had determined the success of the venture, past the bulge that Meshab had corrected for him, and to the longed-for spot where he saw a lamp shining through the rock. The men on the other side were waiting for him and he heard a slave saying, “When he puts his hand through, shout!” And when he reached the small opening he could see Meshab the Moabite and he said, “You are my brother. This moment you are free to leave.”
“I’ll finish the tunnel with you,” the Moabite promised; and at that glowing instant when they met in the darkness of the earth, a slim, exhausted man with a black beard was painfully climbing the ramp to enter the town, and when the guards at the gate stopped him he said that he was Gershom, seeking sanctuary, and he carried with him a small kinnor, called a lyre.
… THE TELL
Vered Bar-El had been in Chicago only a short time giving her lectures on the Candlestick of Death when a withering example of the “fifty days” drifted in with searing winds from the desert, making work at the dig almost impossible. These days were now called khamsin, from the Arabic word for fifty, but they were as enervating as they had always been. During khamsin only the Moroccans made any attempt to keep digging, and even they preferred the bottom of the trenches, where they could hide in shadows and pick at the rubble with their fingers.
In this impossible weather John Cullinane often sat on the back porch of the headquarters building, watching the amusing little hoopoe birds as they hurried about, probing into sandy holes, and he remembered Vered’s lilting voice as she once said, “The hoopoe bird ought to be the world symbol for archaeologists. We also go furiously about, poking our noses into the earth.” He missed Vered even more than he had expected, and hoped she would soon return; at his desk he sometimes blew at the skirted figurine of Astarte and convinced himself that he was going to take both the clay goddess and the living back to Chicago. In fact, he was pleased that she was having a chance to see the city which was to be her future home.
When the lingering khamsin continued to make digging impractical, he resumed work on his progress report, but even here Vered’s lovely figure haunted him, for when he wrote of ceramics he could see her darting back and forth to her washing troughs with basketfuls of fragments, and he recalled with affection the phrases that so often appeared in the prefaces to archaeological reports: “I am especially indebted to Miss Pamela Mockridge (later Mrs. Peter Hanbury)” and a few lines farther on one would discover that Mr. Peter Hanbury had been the expedition’s architect. Few presentable girls could survive two seasons of digging in the Holy Land without getting married, and Cullinane thought how saucy it would be to include in his preface: “We are all indebted to our brilliant ceramicist, Mrs. Vered Bar-El (later Mrs. John Cullinane).” He chuckled. “Let ’em figure out what happened on that dig.”
But when he submitted his provisional draft to Eliav and Tabari he ran into trouble, for they feared that in his section covering Level XII at Makor he had been too much influenced by what had happened at collateral sites elsewhere. Eliav warned, “Your guesses are too derivative.”
“What he means,” Tabari interpreted. “You’d be a lot smarter if you were a lot dumber.”
“Forget what happened at Megiddo and Gezer,” Eliav advised. “Trust your own eyes.”
“We don’t work in a vacuum,” Cullinane said defensively. “Don’t you suppose the men at Gezer and Megiddo faced the same problems our fellows did?”
Tabari evaded the question. “We want you to take a little trip with us, John,” and as the three men climbed into the jeep the Arab said, “It’s the year 3000 C.E. and we’re archaeologists coming to excavate four sites, all of which perished in some great cataclysm in 1964.”
“Let’s just use our eyes,” Eliav said, “and decide what kind of report we’d write.”
They drove to a bright new suburb of Akko, where Tabari stopped at the home of a friend to show Cullinane and Eliav a modern house, whose components he ticked off: “Age of electricity, refrigerator, stove, air-conditioning, wiring in all rooms. Accessible to a lively foreign trade, because the rug’s from Britain, the radio from Germany. Where’d you get the chair, Otto?”
“Italy.”
Eliav continued the analysis: “And if we found fragments of these books we could state that the family had attained a high culture with works in German, French, English, Hebrew, Arabic and something I don’t recognize.”
“Hungarian,” Otto explained.
“We could go on through the rest of the house,” Eliav said, “with eyeglasses as proof of medical skill, the wine bottle linked with France. So let’s agree that this is the norm for Level XLV.”
“And a very high norm it is,” Cullinane said amiably to the owner.
“We’ve worked since we got out of Hungary,” he replied.
They drove to a village not far away, where Tabari sought permission t
o enter a house, which was granted by a group of recent oriental immigrants who as yet spoke no Hebrew. “Look at the contents here,” he said. “No electricity. Practically no objects dating since 1920. Very few signs of cultural attainment. Different cooking methods, different mode of life altogether.” He gave the owners some cigarettes and thanked them for their kindness.
“But the real jolt to our archaeologists in 3000 C.E. will be when they dig up this next house,” and he led the way to an Arab village north of Makor, where he shouted to a man standing in the unpaved road, asking him if they could visit his house. The villager nodded, and standing amid chickens, Tabari pointed out, “Completely different architecture. No electricity, no stove. Clay pots such as were used two thousand years ago. No books, one picture with Arabic writing, a manner of dress centuries old. But what I want you to see especially is this mill for grinding wheat. It’s all wood, but tell me—what are those little things sticking out to grind the grain?”
Cullinane got on his hands and knees to inspect the ancient grinding system from whose upper section small points projected. “Are they what I think they are?” he asked.
“They’re not metal,” Tabari said.
“They’re flints,” Cullinane said. “Where’d they get flints in this age?”
“Where the people of Makor got them ten thousand years ago,” Tabari replied. In Arabic he checked with the owner of the mill. “That’s right. Nodules from the wadi bed.”
The three scientists returned to the jeep, where Tabari said, “Now before you tell me how you’re going to date that Arab hut when we dig it up, let’s look at item four.” He drove to a ravine up whose sides they climbed on foot until they came to the mouth of a cave, at whose entrance they called. From the dark depths came a petulant voice, and they crept in to find an old man who lived alone with his goats. Eliav whispered, “This cave’s been occupied like this for at least thirty thousand years, and the only thing that I can see that would tell us it’s the twentieth century is the plastic buttons on the old man’s shirt.”
“You’re wrong,” Cullinane said as he probed into the area where the goats slept. “Here’s a Danish beer bottle.”
“Suppose you dug that up,” Tabari continued. “You’d swear it was an inappropriate intrusion.” He gave the old man three pounds and said, “Get yourself some more beer.”
As they descended to the jeep Eliav said, “This is what we meant about your report, John. Within a few miles in modern Israel we find a 1964 house, a 1920, a 1300, and a cave dating back to who knows when? Yet side by side they exist, and it takes all four to represent our civilization. Don’t you think that in King David’s time Makor must have been equally varied?”
“I’m not sure your reasoning’s good,” Cullinane said cautiously. “Today we have so many more levels that might be held over from the past. After all, King David could have seen houses from only four or five different levels at most.”
“Granted. But the homogeneity you write about probably didn’t exist.”
“Point’s made,” Cullinane admitted. Standing in the road he tried to summarize the trip. “In Akko, the new house …”
Tabari interrupted. “On our first day you oriented yourself by pointing west to Akko. Do you always start that way?”
The Irishman considered this for a moment, then said, “In Israel, yes.”
“Why?” Tabari asked.
“I don’t know,” Cullinane replied. After a moment he offered tentatively, “As a child I’d heard a good deal about Jesus,” and he pointed back over his shoulder to Galilee. “But the Holy Land never became real for me until I read about the Crusades. For weeks I went around making believe I was in the boat that brought Richard the Lion Heart to Acre.”
“Interesting,” Tabari said. “You visualized yourself coming ashore to save the Holy Land, so you’ve always moved from west to east.”
“For me, that’s the way Israel is.”
“Most curious,” Eliav said with restrained enthusiasm. “I’ve always seen it lying north to south. I’m Abraham wandering out of the north and seeing this marvelous land for the first time. Or I’m a Jew of King Solomon’s age, stationed up here and looking south toward Jerusalem.” He hesitated, then added, “I first saw Israel from the north, and its wonderful hills invited me southward as they must have done Abraham. It never occurred to me until just now that you could visualize it any other way.”
Tabari said, “During the War of 1948 I met an Arab from across the Jordan and he told me how excited he was when his unit invaded Palestine. Coming out of the desert and seeing our explosive richness … the greenness. His company had merely to march westward to the ocean and the land was theirs.”
“How do you see it?” Cullinane asked.
“Me?” Tabari asked in surprise. He had never considered the question before. Cautiously he continued, “I see it as if it had always been here, with me standing on it. No west, no east, no south. Just the land as far back as my family can remember. I could probably live in any of the four spots we’ve been in today and be reasonably happy.”
“Even in the cave?” Cullinane asked.
“I’d get rid of the goats.”
And the three scientists, each with such a different view of the land they were excavating, returned to Makor.
• • •
Gershom was a singer of the hills, a man who had tended his father-in-law’s sheep in the upland valleys where he had killed a man and had fled, leaving his family and his wife behind. He wore the plain sheep-skin garment of a countryman and he arrived in Makor with no trade, no spare clothing, no tools and no money. He carried a small seven-stringed lyre made of fir wood trimmed with antique bronze and strung with twisted sheep’s gut, which now hung slack across the sounding board. He came seeking sanctuary from the brothers of the man he had slain and it had been his hope to reach the anonymity of Accho, but his strength had given out and his pursuers were bearing down upon him, for they rode donkeys while he had to make his way on foot.
He stumbled past the guards, gasping merely, “Sanctuary.” They pointed toward where the temple lay, then ran to inform the governor, who appeared in time to see the shepherd hurrying down the main street. As he disappeared to the left three dusty men on donkeys rode up the ramp and demanded entrance. “If you’re looking for the other one,” the governor said, “he reached the temple.”
The men were disgusted, and their sense of urgency vanished. Stiffly they dismounted, kicked their donkeys free to find their own shade, and followed the governor as he showed them the way to the temple. The building was intentionally kept small to avoid giving the priestly leadership of Jerusalem competition; it was built of a reddish uncut field stone and was quite plain, lacking even columns or imposing steps. Its two doors were of olive wood—thin strips nailed together with little art—and when the governor pushed them aside their stone hinges groaned. Inside was darkness, for the temple held no blazing windows or perpetual fires, but a few simple oil lamps did show the built-up levels, one after the other, terminating in a raised section upon which stood an altar of black basalt, well carved and decorated with the head of a bull which represented the sacrifices that were traditionally associated with such altars, though no animals had been offered in Makor for many years, that function being reserved for Jerusalem. The outstanding feature of the altar was a series of four horns which projected upward from each corner; through the centuries these had undergone such modification that except for their name, few in Makor would have known they represented horns, for they had become merely rounded corners of rock, but they had always held a special significance, and now as the murderer knelt on the topmost platform, his sheepskin falling carelessly about him and his kinnor thrown to one side, he clutched two of these horns.
“He’s taken sanctuary,” the governor said, pointing to the altar.
“We’ll wait,” the brothers said.
“We’re obligated to feed him,” the governor warned. “As lon
g as he stays by the altar.”
“We’ll wait,” the brothers repeated.
“Not here,” the governor ordered.
“We’ll go outside.”
“Not within fifty cubits. King David established the law, not me.”
The three brothers said they understood and left the temple without speaking to the man who had murdered their brother. When they were gone the governor asked the fugitive what crime had been committed, and the man with the lyre replied casually, “Angry words … over nothing.”
“For that you killed a man?”
The kneeling man dropped one hand from the altar and pointed to a scar across his neck, a long, livid welt that had not yet healed. “For that I killed a man,” he repeated.
“What will you do?” the governor asked, indicating the three watchers outside. They had retired the stipulated fifty cubits and were asking townspeople for water.
The Source: A Novel Page 36
