A shocked hush fell over the room as Zodman and Cullinane tried to apply this challenge to America, but they were unable to do so because Schwartz was speaking: “You won’t fight back, Zodman, because your kind never does. You didn’t in Berlin or Amsterdam or Paris. And you won’t either, Cullinane. You’ll pray and you’ll issue most moving statements and you’ll regret the whole mess, but you won’t raise a finger. And Eliav as a trained seal of the government will announce, ‘The responsible nations of the world really must do something,’ but he won’t have a clue as to what.” With contempt Schwartz looked at the three men and said, “But no one will ever again have to ask, ‘Why didn’t the Jews do something?’ Because my group will be doing just that.”
He moved to Zodman and said, “So when trouble starts in Chicago and you’re positive it will go away if Jews keep the governor and the chief of police happy, nobody expects you to do anything, Zodman. All we ask is this. If in that time of trouble you see me on the street and you realize that I have come over from Israel to lead the Jewish resistance, don’t betray me. Look the other way and pass on in silence. Because I shall be there to save you.”
He nodded brusquely to the three men and left the discussion, a hard-disciplined man who cultivated an unemotional view of the contemporary world. He was a man whom Cullinane had grown to respect and actually to like, a tough-minded man who stood ready to take on the whole Christian church, the united Arabs, the diffident Jews of Florida, the vacillating Gentiles and anyone else who wanted to break into the act. It was reassuring to know that such men populated the new Israel, and Cullinane offered a benediction to Schwartz’s self-contained arrogance: “If you can harness his courage, Eliav, you’ll build a great land here.”
Zodman said, “If I ever meet him walking the streets of Chicago, first thing I’ll do is call a cop,” but Vered said quietly, “You may think differently, Paul, after we’ve talked awhile.”
The following morning Zodman, the American Jew, took Vered, the sabra, to Cyprus, where they were married by a Church of England minister who made a lucrative business out of uniting couples who were honestly in love but who, under Jewish law, were not permitted to marry. He was a wizened little man with ill-fitting teeth, and when he blessed the Zodmans he said, “Tell all my good Jews not to be disturbed about this monkey business. Years ago my church used to have the same kind of silly laws, which made people run away from England to get married in Gretna Green, but we got over it. Bet you didn’t know Gretna Green was in Scotland.” He made the marriage a deeply tender thing, a true religious ritual, and at the end he asked shyly, “Since there is no one to give away the bride, may I be permitted to kiss the beautiful lady?” He was barely as tall as Vered.
The unpleasant manner in which Zodman and Vered departed from Makor left a residue of bitterness, and it was Cullinane who observed, “In 70 C.E., after General Vespasian captured Makor, his son Titus captured the symbols of Judaism and hauled them off to Rome. Today Zodman buys them for immediate transshipment to America.” Eliav added glumly, “Maybe he was right. Maybe the leadership of Judaism will pass to American hands.” And the unhappiness of the two men was so depressing that Cullinane was relieved to invent an excuse for running off to Jerusalem. Explaining to no one he banged out of his office, calling over his shoulder, “You fellows better start boxing up the papers,” but Tabari, aware of Eliav’s gloom, thought: It would be a lot better if Cullinane stayed here and let Ilan get away for a few days.
The thoughtful Arab therefore scouted around for some fresh work to divert Eliav’s attention from Vered, and one morning as he stood on the bedrock of Trench B, under which there could be nothing, he chanced to notice that at the northwestern end of the uncovered rock there was a barely perceptible dip to the west, and taking a small pick he began gingerly to undercut the perpendicular west wall of the trench, finding, as he had suspected, that the falling away of the rock continued in the direction of the wadi. Satisfied on this basic point he sat in the trench for some two hours and did nothing but look at the massive rock; and as he visualized the various settlements that had occupied the tell he was constantly left with a mystery. Where had the original well stood? And he began to direct all his speculation to the earliest settlement—Level XV, about eleven thousand years ago, as man was just beginning to farm—and he came again and again to the conclusion that the original families must have lived somewhere off the face of this gently sloping rock and closer to the fugitive well, wherever it was. His thought processes were not entirely conscious: as a member of the Family of Ur he had a keen sense of land and he somehow felt that the earliest farmers must have sought fields at the bottom of sloping land, so that what rains fell would irrigate their crops and bring down each year fresh sediment to serve as fertilizer for soil which would otherwise be quickly depleted. Near the rock of Makor, where would such land have been?
He stopped his thinking, made his mind a blank, and tried to conjure up the bedrock of this tell as it had existed, not eleven thousand years ago, but two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand … He began to perspire as his body grew one with the ancient land. His hands grew clammy and he breathed hard. For if he could calculate where this sloping rock had ended he might deduce where the missing well had been, and if he found that, he might project the history of the tell backward sixty or a hundred thousand years. Perhaps Makor would turn out to be one of the great archaeological sites, a classic that scholars would refer to as they now spoke of Carmel, Jericho and Gezer.
“Eliav!” he called at the end of three hours. The Jew was working at Trench A but a runner summoned him, and soon from the top of the cut he looked down.
“Find something interesting?” he asked, using the archaeologist’s constant inquiry.
“Come on down here,” Tabari said, masking the excitement he felt. When Eliav saw the pick work at the base of the west face of the trench he asked what was up, and Tabari said, “Study it. See anything?” The Jew dropped to his knees, inspected the unbroken rock closely and said, “No tool marks. No inscriptions.” He drew back and looked at the whole area for some minutes, then dropped to his knees again and studied the level. He rose in great excitement and said, “The whole thing slopes definitely that way.” He paused, looked at Tabari with flashes of excitement in his eyes and said, hesitantly, “And if the slope continued, it could easily be that somewhere out there, outside the tell …” He stopped.
“Ilan,” the Arab said cautiously, “I think this slope may lead us to the well.”
“There’s a chance,” Eliav agreed, with even greater caution. “If so, the well would have to be down in the wadi,” and he pointed in exactly the direction that Tabari had deduced.
Controlling their eagerness the two men climbed down the steep bank to inspect each likely site for a well, but so much detritus had accumulated in that area that any source which might have been there had long since been smothered and now sent its water off through subterranean channels. The men therefore ranged far afield through the bottom of the wadi, searching for some undetected outcropping of water, but none showed. Finally Tabari said, “I think we’ve got to follow the slope of the rock. See where it leads.”
Eliav agreed, but protocol demanded that they get permission from John Cullinane, who was, after all, the man in charge. Eliav side-stepped this by saying slowly, “I think our responsibility permits us to make a little dig on our own,” and with timbers to shore up the ceiling behind them, the two men started a small boring which led them down past the edge of the basic rock. The timbers were not really needed, for over a period of some twenty thousand years the limestone from the waters that had seeped off the rock had transformed the once-soft earth into breccia, a kind of semi-rock which was easy to cut through but which held its own form, and on the fifth day of this digging Jemail Tabari encountered a small pocket of this breccia and realized that the dig was fundamentally altered.
“Get Cullinane back here at once,” he called as he stuck his dusty, dirty head from th
e minute tunnel.
“Find something?” Eliav asked nonchalantly.
“Not the well …” Tabari held out his hands and in them he carried a chunk of breccia containing a human bone, some sharp-pointed flints and a substantial deposit of charred fragments. “I think I’ve struck the edge of a large cave that had its opening on the face of the wadi.”
With controlled excitement Eliav studied the find and said, “Let’s get a girl in there to sketch it.”
“I touched only what my pick broke off,” Tabari explained. “The main part is encased in solid breccia, but I did see something that seemed indicative. The corpse was buried with these flints. It wasn’t an accidental burial.”
Eliav raised his eyebrows. “This could go back thirty thousand years,” he suggested.
“That would be my guess,” Tabari agreed cautiously. “And that’s not all. Right beyond the cave … It’s all filled up, you understand. I thought I was running into a rock that echoed. As if on the other side it were empty.”
“Unlikely,” Eliav replied.
“I thought so too. But go on in and take a sounding. I’ll call the photographer.”
So Ilan Eliav wormed his way through the low tunnel until he came to the end; and there, to the right or northern side, he saw imbedded in the hard breccia the cache which Tabari had come upon. His first thought was: It’ll take two years to excavate this properly. He felt a pang of regret to think that he would not be there to help; but then his imaginative mind started to dress in living flesh the ends of bone which projected from the breccia, and he wondered who this ancient thing—this man, perhaps—had been. What hungers had he known, what security from realizing that when he died he would carry with him stone beads? How had he gone finally to earth and with what immortal longings? Here in the darkness of the tunnel thousands upon thousands of years later, another man, much like him perhaps, still wearing his flesh for a few more inquisitive years, met him face-to-kneebone and knew only that there was mystery.
Eliav crawled a few paces beyond the imbedded skeleton and found himself facing the end wall of which Tabari had spoken. Using a fragment of the breccia which had held the bones he tapped on the wall ahead. In some strange way it echoed. He was convinced it echoed. He therefore tapped the side walls and the roof and the floor on which he knelt, and from them there returned a different sound. He tapped the end wall again, and there could be no doubt: perhaps it wasn’t really an echo, but it was something different.
He reached back for Tabari’s pick, left where the important bones had been found, and with it tapped cautiously at the facing semi-rock. The point of the pick dug in easily, and when it was pried backward, broke away a small chunk of the soft rock. Carefully he placed the rock behind him for the basket men to haul out, and with another cramped blow chipped away some more. On the third strike he was startled by the clarity of the echo sound, and he began to dig with some force, throwing the broken rock over his shoulder. His lantern was now obscured by the debris which he was accumulating, and he knew that he should stop to clear it, but he was gripped by a most intense excitement. Swinging his pick with un-archaeological vigor he felt its point bite through a thin layer of semi-rock and then leap forward into nothingness.
He began to perspire copiously, even though the tunnel was cool and he was lean, but he mastered his excitement and became again the professional archaeologist. He left the pick where it was and started slowly to back away, crawling over his own rubble. When he reached the spot where the bones projected he stopped and began flattening the rubble out, piece by piece, until his lantern again threw light on the face of the tunnel, from which the pick suspended at a curious angle. When the tunnel was again in order he returned to the pick and gently rotated it in various directions. Its hidden point contacted nothing and he was tempted to withdraw it and strike again, opening a real hole into the mysterious void, but he felt that this would be unfair to Tabari. He therefore left the pick in position, placed the lantern so that it illuminated not the pick but the projecting bones, and started the crawl back to Trench B.
When he got there Tabari had the girl artist and the photographer waiting, but Eliav in a businesslike manner called for a basket man to go in first and haul out the rubble. “And don’t touch the pick,” he warned. When the man was gone he instructed the artist and the photographer to get the most complete data on the breccia-held bones, and also to catch the details of the pick as it pierced the end wall. When the briefing was completed he took Tabari aside and said, “I dug out a little more of the end wall, and on the last blow your pick cracked through a thin facing of the soft rock. It struck emptiness.”
“You’re sure?” Tabari asked.
“I tested it in different directions. Nothing. But I left it for you.”
“A cave? A well?”
“I don’t even have an opinion,” Eliav said.
At lunchtime the girl who had crawled in to do the sketching took one of Cullinane’s cards and drew the probable disposition of the skeleton embedded in the breccia. There was hushed excitement as the card circulated, and Tabari asked, “Where’d you dredge up the date 70,000 B.C.E.?”
“Educated guess,” the artist explained. “The flints in the breccia seem to correlate with ones shown for such dating in Garrod and Stekelis.”
When the matter had been well discussed Eliav ventured the opinion that carbon dating would probably place the skeleton at no earlier than 30,000 B.C.E. and Tabari supported him. “Our bones aren’t going to be as old as those found in the Mount Carmel caves by Dorothy Garrod,” he predicted.
“You think the breccia indicates a cave?” the photographer asked.
“We’ll know better after lunch,” Eliav assured the group.
“What’s the mystery about the pick?” the photographer asked.
Tabari pushed back his food and leaned forward on the table, whereupon talking ceased and the kibbutzniks drew closer, for it was their tell, too. “When I found the bones,” he said, “I did a little more digging and thought I heard an empty echo. When Dr. Eliav went down to check the bones he did some digging on his own. His last blow …” Tabari swung an imaginary pick. “On the other side … emptiness.”
“Another cave?”
“Let’s consider that for a moment,” the Arab said. “If it had originally been a cave, say, fifty thousand years ago, and the entrance was filled in, wouldn’t it now be filled in, too? How could there possibly be any empty space left?”
“He’s probably right,” Eliav confirmed, and the kibbutzniks dissected the theory for some time, concluding in the end that it could not have been a cave.
“Not an original cave,” one of the kibbutzniks agreed, “but why not a dug cave, like the ones Kathleen Kenyon found outside the walls at Jericho?”
“Let’s consider that too,” Tabari said. “In your opinion, what would be the oldest date we might logically assume for such a dug cave … one that wasn’t now filled in with breccia?”
“Kenyon’s graves were 2000 B.C.E.,” the kibbutznik volunteered. “And they were certainly not filled in. So ours could be … what? Maybe 3000 B.C.E. at the most.”
Eliav listened with pleasure. In Israel everyone was an archaeologist, and the kibbutznik had his dates right, but Tabari pointed out, “You’re a little early. Remember that Jericho is very dry and we’re very wet. In wet areas caves fill in much faster.”
“Then what is the empty space?” the kibbutznik demanded.
Tabari thought for some time, then said cautiously, “Since some of you want to work here for the next eight or ten years, let’s try some pure deduction. I’ll tell you categorically that I’ve ruled out caves. Now what else might it be?” There was silence. “What major component of a tell are we lacking here at Makor?”
“Water supply,” a kibbutznik suggested.
“Correct.” He still pronounced it koe-rect. “And what does that suggest?”
“The source was either at the base of the tell, which at
Makor seems unlikely because of the bedrock. Or it was outside, as at Megiddo and Gezer.”
“Correct. And where does that lead us?”
“Judging by what happened at those two places, sometime around 1100 B.C.E. they dug a vertical shaft through the tell, then a horizontal tunnel to the well.”
“Correct. And which have we hit?”
“If it were the vertical shaft,” a girl volunteered, “it would surely have been filled solid in three thousand years. Therefore it’s got to be the horizontal.”
“Correct, but what if I tell you that the horizontal would also be packed solid in that time?”
This stumped the kibbutzniks and there was silence. The English photographer asked, “Is your assumption accurate? Would it be packed solid?”
“Correct.”
General Teddy Reich’s daughter asked in a very small voice, “But we know there was a Crusader castle on the tell. They had to have water to withstand sieges. Couldn’t they have redug the tunnel? About a thousand years ago?”
“I wish I could say ‘correct,’ because that’s my theory, too,” Tabari laughed, “and I pray that we’re both right.”
The meal ended and he rose casually, sauntering out to Trench B with an insouciance he did not feel. Everyone who could get away from work tagged along with equal casualness but flushed with excitement, and kibbutzniks in the fields, sensing that something important was about to happen at their tell, quit their work to become archaeologists. At the site the Arab offered Eliav the lantern, saying, “You found the opening. Go ahead.”
The Jew would not accept. “It was your deduction.” He reviewed for the crowd Tabari’s shrewd guess regarding the sloping rock. “And it’s your deduction about the tunnel. Besides,” he added, “there may be one hell of a drop on the other side.” He led Tabari to the small tunnel and stepped away.
In this manner the latest scion of the Family of Ur crept back into the earth from which his prodigious people had sprung. He went past the bedrock on which the Canaanites had built; past the sixteenth and seventeenth levels where his ancestors had come upon the pre-primitive settlement which they had destroyed around the year 13,000 B.C.E.; down past the eighteenth level of men who had developed the concept of religion; to the nineteenth and twentieth levels where women had discovered that their dead could be buried with affection; and on to the face of the rock from which the pick handle projected. He was breathing hard, tense with the feel of his ancient earth, and he took the handle gently, twisting it in various directions. Eliav was right. The hidden tip was free.
The Source: A Novel Page 129
