The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  “They don’t understand,” he muttered to himself. In the house by the shaft he was left with two children who were destined to preserve the Family of Ur for future generations, but they took no interest in the shaft where women walked up and down, year after year, bringing into the city the sweet water from the hidden well. In Hoopoe’s lifetime the defenses of Makor—all due to his building genius—were not put to the test, so the townspeople could not appreciate what a brilliant thing he had accomplished; they began to take the well and the walls for granted, and as Hoopoe grew older they remembered him only as a queer little man who ran about the town poking his head into this hole or another, finding nothing.

  “No man in Makor has a more appropriate name than Hoopoe,” they said, and the older he grew the more pathetic he became in their eyes: a chubby little man with no wife, no job, few friends. When Solomon became king and there was much building in Jerusalem, with boats shuttling back and forth between Accho and Tyre, Hoopoe developed the illusion that he would soon be called to the capital to help the resplendent king, but in the beautiful city his name was unknown, and he was not sent for.

  When he was an old man he disappeared for some time, and his unloving children suspected, or perhaps even hoped, that he was dead; but he was in the depths of the tunnel, that flawless piece of engineering which he alone had conceived, and he had brought with him a hammer and chisel and a small wooden scaffold from which he worked on the ceiling for several days. Young women passing beneath brought him a little food and speculated upon what he was doing.

  “Is the roof going to fall?” they inquired.

  “Have rats gnawed a hole downward from the fields?” they teased, not even knowing that it was he who had built the David Tunnel.

  Hoopoe said nothing but kept chipping away, holding a blanket on the scaffold lest bits of stone fall on the heads of the patient women who walked back and forth. Finally he finished, and although he could not be aware of the fact, walked for the last time through his beautiful construction. At the well the great crisscross tiers of rock protected the roof from any trespass and would remain in position—a part of the earth—for three thousand years. The deep caves of antiquity were sealed and hidden. The well itself was cold and sweet and secure, sending forth as much water as the people needed, and the clean, fair tunnel climbed at its preordained pace to the foot of the shaft, which rose with its two lovely, twisting pairs of stairways into the sunlight.

  As he climbed out of the shaft for the last time he went through the postern gate to the cemetery beside which, years ago, he had buried Meshab the Moabite when no others would touch him, and there he sat on the grave recalling their good days of friendship and shared work, perhaps the only thing an engineer remembers. It was a spring day and he was inspired to climb the mountain where Baal resided, for he would like to be with his old god once more; but it was a steep path and as he rose from the Moabite’s grave a sudden dizziness overtook him, and he sensed that death was at hand, and he sat down again.

  “Almighty Yahweh,” he prayed, “accept me at the end of my days.” And he was dead.

  Of Gershom the Psalmist, his words echoed to the end of the world. Of Hoopoe the Builder, his great square shaft was ultimately filled with rubble, and his tunnel forgotten. For the poet, regardless of the expense in human lives, had glimpsed the true face of Yahweh and had dedicated himself to the one god. But the builder had early found himself trapped between Baal, whom he knew to exist in the earth, and Yahweh, whom he was willing to accept as the unseen deity; and it is impossible for any man to vacillate between two gods: if he tries, he is slowly eroded. On the afternoon of his death Hoopoe recognized these facts and wished that he had had the clear understanding of King David and Gershom and his beloved wife Kerith. But their understanding had been denied him and he died a useless old man, trapped by his gods.

  But in the autumn of 1964, in the month of Bul—when rain clouds make their first tentative appearance over the Carmel and farmers gather wood for winter fires—a descendant of the great Family of Ur stumbled upon the long-forgotten tunnel, and shortly it was excavated, with photographs of the notable work becoming common throughout the world. Engineers hailed it as a masterpiece of construction, “one of the first great surveying feats,” and in an age that appreciated science many words were written on the timeless message which the unknown engineer of Makor had sent the world; a French philosopher claimed that “this mute genius of the Makor water system speaks to modern man more cogently than those who wrote the Psalms, for he exemplified in work that portion of the divine spirit which has always prized acts as much as words. His tunnel is a psalm in fact, the song of those who accomplish God’s work.”

  And then one day the American archaeologist John Cullinane would discover the real psalm of Tell Makor. Each part of the tunnel would by then have been investigated by experts, who would cleverly deduce how the unknown builder must have operated: they would reason that he had punched two small tunnels through the rock, joining them somewhere near the middle, then broadening them out to absorb the error, but they would not be able to guess how he had established his pitch and headings underground, for age and lichen had dimmed the ceiling so that carvings which existed there were long overlooked. But on this day Cullinane would be walking through the tunnel guided by a cheap flashlight and his wandering eye would catch a kind of shadow on the rocks above. Calling for a ladder he would examine the damp roof, then summon his assistants. With infrared photography, with talcum powder and camel’s-hair brushes, the archaeologists would lay bare a dedication whose effect upon scholarship would be pronounced for several reasons. It would provide one of the earliest samples of Hebrew writing; establish an anchor for a sure chronology; and evoke from the past the figure of a real human being wrestling with problems. The same French philosopher would title this inscription “The Psalm of the Tunnel Builder,” under which title it would serve to summarize the age:

  Jabaal of Makor built this David Tunnel. Using six flags he found the secret. Using white cords he probed the earth. Using iron from Accho he cut the rock. But without Meshab the Moabite nothing. Jabaal worked from the well and wandered. Meshab from the shaft and true. For Meshab was his brother and is now dead, slain by King David. From the heavens Yahweh directed. From the earth Baal. Praise to the gods who sustain us.

  LEVEL

  XI

  The Voice of Gomer

  Babylonian armament. Left: Iron spearhead cast in the city of Urartu (Ararat) on the northern shore of Lake Van in Asia Minor, 684 B.C.E., and traded southward to Babylonia in exchange for woven fabrics. Originally fitted to the end of a four-foot cedar stave imported from Tyre. Right: Helmet in the Assyrian style, made of hammered bronze fitted with bronze rivets, made in 653 B.C.E. in the city of Shushan (Susa), capital of Elam on the border between Babylonia and Persia and traditionally antagonistic to the former. Deposited at Makor in late summer, 605 B.C.E.

  These were the generations when Yahweh smote his Hebrews, for still he found them a stiff-necked people.

  To punish them he used the Assyrians. In 733 B.C.E. he unleashed Tiglath-pileser III from Nineveh, and of his depredations the Bible says: “In the days of Pekah king of Israel came Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria … and took Hazor, and Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and carried them captive to Assyria.” In this onslaught 185,000 people were slain and 591 towns were ravaged, but not Makor, for the defenses erected by Jabaal the Hoopoe held off the invaders through a formidable siege until an agreement of suzerainty was worked out. But in 701 B.C.E. Sennacherib came out of the north, and of him the Bible says: “Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them.” Even against this scourge Makor defended itself, protected by its David Tunnel, until at last the Assyrians appealed for negotiation, whereupon the community opened its zigzag gate voluntarily. At dawn Sennacherib entered the town; by noon he had assembled the tribute;
and at dusk there was not a single house standing. Makor, gutted and burned, its walls thrown down in many places, had ceased to exist, and its Hebrew inhabitants were led away in slavery to join those Ten Tribes of the north who would henceforth be lost to history if not to legend: fanciful writers would try to prove that these lost Jews found new existence as Britons, Etruscans, Hindus, Japanese or Eskimos.

  To castigate his Hebrews, Yahweh also used the Babylonians. In the year 612 B.C.E. this rising power humbled Nineveh, driving the Assyrians from the two rivers, and in 605 the mighty Nebuchadrezzar led his troops into one of the significant battles of history at Carchemish along the banks of the Euphrates. Of him the Bible says: “For thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north, with horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen, and companies, and much people. He shall slay with the sword thy daughters in the field: and he shall make a fort against thee, and cast a mount against thee, and lift up the buckler against thee. And he shall set engines of war against thy walls, and with his axes he shall break down thy towers.” And these things Nebuchadrezzar did.

  And invariably Yahweh used the Egyptians to accomplish his purposes, throwing them sometimes against Assyria, sometimes against Babylonia, but always against the Hebrews, so that during these dynastic struggles the armies of Egypt were much seen in the Galilee; regardless of who the enemy was, the battles were apt to be fought here. For example, in 609 B.C.E. Josiah, one of the wisest kings the Hebrews were to produce, must have suffered a temporary derangement, for he entered a pact of mutual support on the side of upstart Babylon against established Egypt and Assyria. Of the pitiful battle that resulted the Bible says: “Necho king of Egypt came up to fight against Carchemish by Euphrates: and Judah went out against him.” The confrontation between Egyptian and Hebrew took place at Megiddo, that recurring site of Armageddon, and the good king Josiah was slain. Always the Egyptians were a threat.

  During these turbulent years the stubborn Family of Ur managed to maintain Makor as a minor outpost in no way comparable to its predecessors. Even the town wall, built by Jabaal the Hoopoe in the reign of King David, existed only in fragments, while the principal street, if it could be called such, ran from the main gate to the postern past a miserable collection of buildings. Where a score of enticing shops had once flourished, offering wares from all parts of the Mediterranean, two now offered little. Citizens eked out a frugal existence, for the luxury that had characterized the days of David and Solomon was no more.

  At opposite ends of the Water Street stood two houses which summarized the new Makor. By the main gate, in a low, poorly built establishment that rambled over a considerable area and was kept to one floor because Makor could no longer afford timber, lived Jeremoth, scion of the Family of Ur and willing to serve as governor for whatever empire ruled the valleys. He was fifty-two years old, a resolute and crafty man whose ancestors, by one trick or another, had kept the town intact through the civil war that had destroyed the empire of King Solomon and through two hundred years of unremitting Phoenician, Aramaean, Assyrian and Egyptian pressures. In the mournful chaos of those years the Family of Ur had trimmed its banners to each new conqueror marching up to the battered walls. In siege, in pestilence and in terror the determined men of Ur had somehow managed to hold on to their olive trees south of the town and to some kind of governmental residence near the main gate.

  Jeremoth, black-bearded, wiry and courageous beyond most of the men in his town, was governed by one fixed idea: this continuity of occupation must be preserved. If the erupting power of Babylon made war against Egypt inevitable, there would have to be war, and Makor would again be trapped between the armies; but if guile and persuasion could preserve the little town, then he was prepared to temporize with anyone. He had five daughters, four of them married to leading merchants and farmers, and he also had a group of brothers who were just as tough as he. Like many families in Makor they had relapsed into being Canaanites who worshiped Baal on the mountain back of the town, and as a well-disciplined unit they relied on the hope there would always be some trick whereby they could keep their holdings intact, diminished though they might be.

  At the other end of the Water Street, cramped into a corner near the ruins of the postern gate, stood a small one-room house made of unbaked clay bricks. It had an earthen floor, no furniture, only one window, and the clinging smell of meanness and poverty. It was the home of Gomer the widow, a tall, gaunt woman of fifty-eight who had known a difficult life. An ugly girl, she had married late as the third wife of a miserable man who had derided her in public for being childless and who used her as a slave. After many years, and as the result of a scene she had tried to erase from her memory—Egyptian soldiers rioting inside the walls—she had become pregnant, and the wretched old man had suspected that the child was not his. In public he was afraid to challenge her lest he himself look foolish, but in the privacy of their mean home he had abused her; yet when he died it was she and not his earlier wives who tended to his burial.

  She had only this one child, a son whom she had named Rimmon, after the pomegranate, hoping that like the seeds of that fruit he might have many children to send her line forward, and Rimmon had grown into a handsome young man of twenty-two whom the young girls of the town admired and who now held the job of supervising Governor Jeremoth’s olive grove. He and his mother were staunch supporters of Yahweh, the Hebrew god, but as a man who worked in the fields for a Canaanite, Rimmon found it prudent to worship Baal as well—a fact which he did not discuss with his mother.

  Gomer was a gawky, forbidding woman. Her hair was not even a clean gray, which would have brought her respect; it was a muddy gray. Her eyes were not clear nor was her skin attractive. She had worked so hard that she walked with a stoop which made her seem older than she was, and the only thing about her that was appealing was her soft, quiet voice, hushed through half a century of obeying first her father, then her abusive husband, and finally her handsome son. She spoke quietly, as if she were still in the fields, living in the harvest booth with her father as he guarded the barley and the vines. In her long life those were the only days she remembered with affection, the happy days of harvest time when men built booths so as to be near the produce of their lands.

  Now, in the year 606 B.C.E., in the days before Ethanim, the month of feasts—when heat from the desert spread over the land, when late grapes were ripening for the wine presses, and when great Egypt and Babylonia were getting ready to tear at each other while Greece gathered strength in the west—Gomer left her mean house by the postern gate, balanced a clay jug on her head, and descended the gaping shaft that cut into the earth not far from her home. By a considerable margin she was the oldest woman lugging water, and her long spare figure in tattered sackcloth looked out of place as she patiently went down the familiar steps in the company of young wives and slave girls. But since she had no slave or daughter-in-law to help her she was forced to fetch the water for herself.

  She had descended to the well, had filled her jug and started her return journey, when she came to a section of the David Tunnel where the oil lamp that hung over the water could no longer be seen, yet where the daylight coming down the shaft brought little illumination, and in this dark passage she heard a voice saying to her, “Gomer, widow of Israel! Take your son up to Jerusalem, that he may cast his eyes upon my city.” She looked around to find who had spoken, but there was only darkness, and she thought that one of the younger women had hidden to taunt her, for often they made fun of her; but again the voice surrounded her, and this time she was certain that it could not belong to any woman. It said, “Gomer, let your son see Jerusalem.”

  Not in fear but in bewilderment she left the tunnel and climbed the shaft, ignoring the calls of younger women who were descending by the other stairs, and in a kind of trance she sought for her son, but he had already gone to the olive press, so she put her jug down, went to the main gate and cross
ed the Damascus road, entering the olive grove belonging to Governor Jeremoth. After a few moments she saw her son working at the press, that ancient system of square stone pits cut into the solid rock and connected by lead pipes so that the settled oil could fall and filter of its own weight. Fortunately, she stopped before coming upon her son, for he was kneeling by the press and she realized that he was saying his morning prayers to Baal, pleading for a good run of oil. She waited until he was finished, disturbed that he should be trafficking with Baal on this particular morning, then went to him.

  As always, when she came upon him suddenly, she was impressed anew with what she could only call his radiance: like many of the Hebrews he was blond and freckle-faced, tall and with a quick intelligence. As the son of a widow who was almost a pauper, he had worked in the fields all his life and could neither read nor write, but he had learned from his mother the cherished stories of his people, particularly the steps whereby Yahweh had revealed himself to the Hebrews. At twenty-two he was a young laborer in charge of the one operation which brought surplus money into Makor, so he prayed to Yahweh for moral guidance in the conduct of his life and to Baal for success in his daily work.

  Under the fruitful trees Gomer asked, “Rimmon, have you made any plans for going up to Jerusalem?”