A Long Way to Shiloh (16 page)

A grey and lowering sky sat over the desert next day, but the rain was off. We were out in it early, with a laden jeep. I’d sat up late the night before brooding over the Commander’s
large-scale
map. If a spoke was to be put in this Galilean lunacy the Menorah obviously had to be located smartly. This called for energy and a pioneering spirit. There were two days’ rations and a couple of tents in the jeep in addition to a handy
prospector’s
kit comprising pickaxes, a mine detector and
explosives
.

The wilderness of Zin was the southern limit of the territory variously ascribed to the tribes of Simeon and Judah; the northern one of their much-abused neighbours the Edomites. They were all of them quite welcome to it. It looked perfectly hideous this morning, the great rubble-strewn plain coloured a diarrhoeic green by the torrential rains. Away to the left three thousand years ago had appeared the enormous horde of the Children of Israel, whose appalled reaction is well reflected in Moses’s plaintive cry in the 17th chapter of Exodus: ‘What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me.’ The Children had a point, of course.

In the moisture-laden air the whole eastern section of the wilderness stood revealed with startling clarity. It looked
distinctly
implacable. Under the thunderous sky, the mountains seemed to have moved angrily forward as though to inspect this intrusive and noisy insect that was buzzing over the silent plain. We were buzzing westwards, as rapidly as the suspension would bear, to the nearest high ground.

There was plenty of it, I was glad to see, both to west and north; no shortage of peaks, either, that on closer acquaintance might be recognizable as The Curtains.

I had a pretty good idea of what the procedure should be. The Galilean experience had shown, at least, what kinds of spots Sidqui had looked out for. They’d all been a kilometre or two from some central high point; in rock foothills, in a fault in the rock.

This made sense. With the primitive tools available to the priest’s party, nobody was going to start digging holes in solid rock. They would naturally look for a fault, and with their crowbars and hammers widen it, and crack the rock and lever out the pieces, and then replace them when finished. So I wanted a vein of blue rock, with a fault in it, and in the fault a number of broken slabs; possibly overlaid, by the workers or by time, with rubble.

As we drummed closer it was possible to see that there was plenty of coloured rock here. The rain had brought out the stratification quite clearly, and dull veins of maroon, pink and dark green were visible. There didn’t seem to be any blue; but this wasn’t discouraging. Blue marble was a rarity anywhere, and I’d already decided the priest had specifically mentioned it as a further point of identification. It would need a bit of
looking
for.

The rain had decided me on my course of action today. While the rock was wet and the colours so clearly discernible it was obviously an idea to cover as much ground as possible. Even a cursory inspection would show much more today than a closer one when the rock had dried to its normal
brownish-grey
. So with binoculars and a tankful of petrol I hoped to cover – at least to cast eyes on – all the high ground from Har Marzeva in the south-west to Ma’ale Akrabim, the Scorpion’s Pass, in the north. This would still leave the rocky elevations around the Makhtesh Hakatan, the highly interesting crater to the east of the Scorpion’s Pass, to be covered the following day. I had high hopes of this makhtesh. I’d been to the bottom of it a couple of years before. I was still using as a paper-weight a stone I’d picked up there; a blue stone. This didn’t mean that the surrounding high ground would have a vein of blue stone. But it was a nice sort of pointer.

‘So why don’t we go there right away?’ the girl said on
hearing
this reminiscence.

‘I know where it is. It’s a better idea to see the rest while there’s a chance. We might not have such good conditions again.’

‘You just want to leave it to the end, to look forward to.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘You’re a baby.’

‘Don’t you like having things to look forward to?’

‘Of course. You’re still a baby.’

It wasn’t the only thing I was looking forward to. I allowed my mind to wander ruminatively over the tents and sleeping bags in the back, while scanning the hills of Zin through binoculars.

We’d covered the immediate south-west by ten-thirty, and turned north, gingerly crossing a couple of flooded wadis. About half past eleven we stopped to eat. We stopped by a curious table-like eminence of rock.

‘Which mountain is that?’

‘Mount Hor,’ I said, checking with the map.

‘Oh!’ She swallowed her mouthful guiltily. ‘We shouldn’t picnic here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Aaron the high priest died here,’ she said, looking at it a bit superstitiously.

I looked at it a bit that way myself. A gloomy place, an exceedingly Genesis type place, half as old as time. It wouldn’t have looked any different the day they’d taken him to the top and stripped him of his vestments and left him there. The House of Israel had stood and watched. They’d stood and watched here, and mourned him for thirty days.

The sky overhead had turned a subtle shade of black, and a couple of rays of light shot through to spotlight a tiny patch of wilderness on either side the table of rock. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see the single eye popping through as well to see who was sitting here eating
wurst
sandwiches in this place of awe.

We stayed all the same. Once you stopped there was a curious lack of will to move. The silence was so gigantic you found yourself straining to hear something through it. There was nothing at all to hear through it: no breeze, no trees, no birds, no life; nothing. A vast waste of gloomy desolation, dead flat under the grey sky, watched only by washed mountains. I had an awareness, never so totally realized, of being on a planet, of being a speck of consciousness dropped on the planet and
blinking
this way and that to orientate. Here indeed was context and reality, the planet as it was; as it still was beneath the green growths that had sprouted elsewhere. Unsettling.

We finished the
wurst
sandwiches in silence and had an orange each and somewhat broodingly proceeded.

By two o’clock we’d covered the ranges of Rekhev, Halak and Golehan, and were looking for a place to ford a wadi
flooding
out of a ravine. Beyond it was the Ma’ale Akrabim.

‘
Venosav
lachem
hu-gevul
mi-negev
le
ma’ale
akrabim
,’ God had said. ‘And your border shall turn southward of the ascent of Akrabim.’ And here it was, unchanged in name, only slightly changed in feature, the Scorpion’s Pass. The British had built the first road through it. It rose twelve hundred feet in just over half a mile, by way of twenty-two hairpin bends. On the
western
side was the precipice known as the Frog’s Head.

It was after three before we ground to the top, and almost too dark to see anything. The overcast was lower still here; it was sitting almost on the Frog’s Head. The only illumination came from a single shaft of sunlight that cut apocalyptically through the gloom. Following it down, you could see it shining like a silver sixpence on a spot of valley below. It was raining in that valley below; not yet here. We turned and went back.

Large single spots of rain began to fall as we descended. It seemed wisest to make for the ravine. We’d noted as we passed that there were overhanging shelves of rock there that could provide shelter. We dropped cautiously down the hairpin bends to the plain, came out on it and made for the ravine.

The wadi was running in spate down the centre of the ravine, red-brown water gurgling. There was still room on the right bank for the jeep to proceed. We nosed slowly along, found an inlet that sloped gently upwards, ran the jeep up it and got out. It wasn’t raining here yet. The air was warm, close,
palpable
as cotton wool. We got the tents out of the jeep and pitched higher up, under the overhang, and then laid out the rest of the kit. There were groundsheets, waterproofed sleeping bags, a paraffin lamp, a small pressure stove and a barbecue set.

It was still not four o’clock, too early to eat, yet weirdly, almost luminously, dark. I lit the paraffin lamp and in its yellow conspiratorial glow wrote up my notes while the girl made coffee. The day had been useful. There were three or four places where green veins in the rock might have blended into blue, where the funny light had made it hard to tell anyway. None of these places was more than fifteen miles from Hatseva; Mount Hor only eleven. Could Hor possibly be the point of reference, the eminence from which the distance had to be taken?

It would certainly have been an important eminence to the priest, and to his priestly superiors who had authorized the disposal of the consignment. No fighting would have been expected here. The Menorah could lie in peace. And certainly it was the kind of ‘difficult terrain’ the priest had mentioned. He might have plodded with his ten men and his twenty pack animals through this very ravine; have camped in this very inlet. Could this have been the ‘first halt’ on the way back where the work had been done ‘with cords, and to the letter’? It was just about one halt distant from Mount Hor; six miles …

The hairs on the back of my neck began to bristle. I suddenly knew in my bones the area was right. We mightn’t be in the exact vicinity, might be ten, twenty, thirty miles from it. But it was here somewhere, in the south, the harsh prophetic south. I knew it, had sensed it in the priest’s coded words, had been feeling it more strongly all day. I’d felt nothing in the north, the merely melancholy north with its many springs and green fertility. It was in the south that Israel had found its ethical purpose, to the south that it always looked for renewal; renewal seen in terms of hard rock and desert austerity, not Jordan water and baptism.

I’d sensed myself this morning the four-square rock-like quality of the old religion, its permanent air of having survived a catastrophe and of having to lay down survival laws for the sojourners on the planet. The planetary sense was very strong in the desert. This was the desert inheritance. When affairs became complex and uncertain one made for the desert to find reality again – one made for the south.

In the south, too, that the first Menorah had been made. It had been made from the ear-rings and the bracelets that the women had brought from Egypt. They had given up their ornaments in this austere place; had had them melted down and purified and fashioned into ‘one beaten work’, an ornament for the people, a light for Israel.

It was here. If it was anywhere, it was here, in the south.

I couldn’t sit still. We drank the coffee and clambered down the bank and wandered into the ravine. We took the lamp with us. It was pitch dark now, not merely overcast; no moon, no stars. It was much cooler, too, and I put an arm round her. The ravine went into a couple of S-bends, widened, narrowed, widened again. The water gurgled steadily, rain still sluicing off the mountains, draining through the run-off wadis into this main one. From the state of the wadis we’d seen earlier I’d
expected
this one to be much higher. Water was evidently trapped somewhere in the mountains, in a catchment of rocks. Another good rain in the night, and that would probably come down, too – a flash flood.

The prospect wasn’t disturbing. We were high enough up the bank with the jeep, and the ravine was wider there. We turned presently and went back. I washed out the coffee things in the wadi and then set clean water to boil on the pressure stove while the girl got the barbecue going and rubbed mustard into the steaks.

We ate on our sleeping bags, and by seven were happily digesting. ‘What do you want to do now?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. What about a game of cards?’

‘Have you got any cards?’

‘A soldier always carries cards.’

We had a game, on a groundsheet, not at all unpleasant in the yellow light. She played with immense concentration and rummied out in about five minutes.

‘Hollywood system?’

‘All right.’

‘What stakes?’ she said keenly.

‘Strip stakes.’

‘Which stakes?’

‘Haven’t you heard of strip poker?’

‘Oh, that. I’m cold enough already.’

‘Why don’t we go in a tent?’

She looked at me a bit carefully. ‘All right.’

It wasn’t any warmer in the tent, but it was a lot more snug. She took half a quid off me and was shuffling for another rubber when I leaned over and kissed her. She didn’t exactly repel me, but she didn’t do anything else much, either. When I drew back, she started shuffling the cards again, erratically.

I said, ‘Leave the cards.’

She said, a bit wobbly, ‘Don’t you want another game?’

‘Not that kind.’

‘Caspar, let’s just be – friends.’

‘I’m friendly as hell.’

‘I mean – what is it?’ she said, licking her lips distractedly, ‘– chums! I want you as a chum.’

‘Were you only feeling chummy at the Cave of Shulamit?’

‘We didn’t go in the Cave of Shulamit.’

‘And you were very angry.’

‘I was ashamed. I hated myself.’

‘Is that all it was?’

She dropped half the cards and started picking them up again. ‘Yes,’ she said doggedly.

I said, ‘All right. Chum,’ and leaned over again.

It was longer this time, and she didn’t mess about with the cards. She said presently, a bit wildly, ‘Can’t we be like brother and sister?’

‘We’re not brother and sister, Shoshana.’

‘Caspar –’

I moved the lamp out of the way and lowered her on the sleeping bag.

She said, ‘No, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Caspar, stop!’

‘Shana.’

‘Please –’

I kissed her while she was saying it, and felt her tongue. She didn’t withdraw it, and presently her arms went round my neck. This was nothing but food and drink to the old adam, who in course of time began steamy manoeuvres. Her face swivelled sharply round under mine. She said, ‘No!’