A Long Way to Shiloh (21 page)

The finely elegiac mood had gone by morning and only the flatness remained. I hardly felt like getting up at all; but I did, at ten, well soused with sleep but still gravely unresolved. It was hot. I showered, shaved, managed to get myself some coffee and yoghurt in the dining-room, and went and sat outside to wait glumly for the girl. There was a lively hum of
agriculturalists
at work. It’s a pretty little kibbutz, Ein Gedi, with its trim lawns, shade-trees and chalet type buildings. Under the blue sky and wedged between mountain and sea, the plantations of palm and catch crops looked like an illustration in a child’s book. Just such a picture of primary-coloured bliss the People of the Land must have carried with them in their cold northern exile; Paradise Lost indeed as viewed from the stinking ghettoes of Europe. This picture, and another; the older emblem, that had preserved their consciousness more surely; the emblem of a people, of a light in darkness, a seven-branched light. And
incredibly
the light had not failed. It had gone on shining through the ages of darkness, perpetuated in the homes, synagogues and tombstones of the faithful, the countless million descendants of those who had been here before, who had actually seen the thing itself.

More incredibly still, the thing itself still existed; it was up there somewhere on the plateau, the fantastic old artifact, older than the Caesars, older than almost anything. What hadn’t happened since it had lain there! The planet had spun and the cup had filled and run over for The Children. The frenetic neighbours had taken sides in their family quarrels,
shouldering
one of them to divinity and kicking the others into the incinerator to affirm his message of brotherly love. What a darkness this lamp had revealed, what a conflagration it had started! And it was still there. And legend had it that it would remain there till the Jew returned to reclaim his own. Well, he was back now; but reclamation might take a little longer.

A trailer truck rumbled past interrupting these musings and Shoshana jumped off the back, like a coffee-coloured sprite in her working shorts. ‘Why are you sitting here like a monk? she said, blowing on my tonsure. The head dressing had got wet in the shower and I’d taken it off.

‘I feel like a monk.’

‘Learn to act like one,’ she said softly in my ear, and stuck the dressing back on. There was still a bit of stick left in it.

*

We went up top twice that day, in the morning the hard way via the canyon and the cliff, and in the afternoon by jeep and the new road. There was a certain satisfaction in
regarding
the size of the job that lay before Agrot; albeit of a sour kind.

I’d hoped, of course, to get a paper out of this, but it was obvious now I’d simply be there in the foreword, the man
without
whose remarkable insights, etc…. Years ahead one could see the eventual publications; the folio academic works done up to the knocker with diagrams, figs and plates (the work of Dr Hilde Himmelwasser). And the later lusher coffee table books. And the television talks, and the newspaper interviews … A whole new field of lore lay waiting germinally here for the harvesters. A further required subject for the syllabus; to be taught to the budding social pests by such as me.

A sour look at the field before it was plundered, a last
lingering
glance over what might have been; these were the only fruits for me. Dead Sea fruits, of course, that vanished in the mouth to leave only a nasty taste; but no less resistable for that

*

I phoned El Al in the evening and told them to book me on a plane on Monday.

‘Which class?’

Tourist
sprang aptly enough to the lip, but I stopped it in time. To feel like one didn’t mean I had to travel like one. ‘First,’ I said firmly. Out like a lord, anyway. In three days’ time.

We took the jeep again next day and hit the plateau from a new angle, climbing almost to Arad before turning off. The trouble was to know which way the priest had come. He’d certainly climbed down the canyon, but after travelling from where – north, south, west? We were having a go from due south.

Almost at once the track vanished and we were on a
fantastic
switchback, the jeep rising and swooping through an incredible maze of towering rock walls. We went through Biq’at Quannai’m, the stark Valley of the Zealots, passed the squat sugar loaf of Massada, away on the right, and came out on the plateau.

On all sides the solid mesas of rock stood like ruined castles, reddish-brown in the baking sun. The geological structure here was very complex. As Agrot had said, there was everything, billions of tons of workable rock of all kinds. A handy hosepipe could help to bring up fleetingly the colour of the marble. Without it, you could only guess at the true shades: the clay browns that might be beige or red, the dull charcoals that could be green or blue. The great flanks of rock sat baking in the sun.

We neared the area of the canyon and stopped while I checked with the map. A point that had to be watched here was to keep on the right side of the border. There was very little indication of it, just a line of oil drums, spaced at wide intervals. From the canyon it ran in a straight line south west. We seemed to have room to spare.

We got out of the jeep and continued the somewhat
meandering
procedure of the previous day. This was to leave the jeep in a central position and cover a square all round it, jotting down on the map promising areas for Agrot’s brigade to
investigate
. It didn’t take long to see that from this southward
approach
very few of the areas were unpromising. The plateau was mainly hard limestone, much of it almost certainly coloured. It stretched for miles, to Barot and beyond, broken here and there by great stands of rock in every known
formation
.

After an hour of it the girl stopped singing out, ‘To your right,’ ‘The hill over there,’ and such, and I stopped making marks on the map. There wasn’t really any point. You could look left right and centre and not run out of promising places for weeks. You could probably approach it from several other directions and find just as promising places. Almost every yard in an area of several hundred square miles had to be regarded as promising.

We’d walked quite a long way from the jeep and weren’t bothering about the ‘square’ any more. I was simply swivelling the binoculars this way and that to see how much more there could possibly be. I was doing that when I saw it. I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t even thinking of it. It hit me like a hammer-blow between the eyes.

I’d swung past it and had to swing back and hunt for it again. I found myself trembling all over. My hands were trembling. They were trembling so much I couldn’t keep the binoculars still. But I found it again. A tall spire-type formation; a column of rock vertically striated, like a stalactite.

Through the shaking field of vision I looked to right and left. It was part of a group. The others, almost end on to me, were in a zigzagging crescent. I was looking at the far end of the crescent. The rocks stood in fluted columns; like folding doors; like curtains.

I went there and back and up and down, and stopped. I’d been holding my breath, and it came out then, slowly. I thought I’d glimpsed it the first time. It was centred in the field of vision now: an oil drum. The rocks were beyond the oil drum.

I let the binoculars hang and wiped the sweat out of my eyes and found the spot on the map.

‘What is it?’

‘Interesting range of rock.’

She had a look where my pencil made a shaky ring on the map.

‘That’s no good. Nobody’s going there. It’s over the border, silly.’

‘So it is,’ I said, and crossed the ring off. The cross was pretty shaky, too.

*

In the afternoon I told her off to sketch a range of hills to the south, and nipped off myself in the jeep back to the north. I found the spot and studied it.

Four distinct peaks, three in the zigzag, one squarely towards me. They lined the western side of a narrow gorge, three or four kilometres across the border. It was utterly deserted, not a bird in sight, all bathed in calm sunlight.

An hour’s walk.
Could
this be The Curtains? And if so, which one?

‘
The
Curtain
you
cannot
see
from
here,
it
is
turned
away
,’
he’d written.

Turned away from where?

I got back in the jeep and drove to the top of the Ein Gedi canyon, stopping from time to time to keep the thing in view. From the top of the canyon I could see the peaks of two; just the peaks. Which one was ‘turned away’. It was impossible to say.

Down below the kibbutz swam in the rising air currents. The biblical village had lain farther to the north, beyond the canyon. It had been near the spring. I looked down to the site. Bare now, simply a waste of salt mud, but once covered with palm trees. The groves of Ein Gedi had been famous; the groves and the sweetly-scented camphire (the Semitic
kufra
, the
perfumier’s
Chypre.)

I suddenly recalled the phrase that had awakened a song in the flinty heart of Teitleman, the ‘pleasant fruits and camphire, in a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters’. No question what the poet had in mind. ‘My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Ein Gedi’, he’d written. Of course! The well of living waters of Ein Gedi – the waterfall. Wasn’t it up the course of the waterfall that the priest had been carried in the flower basket, to be ‘buried
behind
the spring’? Wasn’t
that
where The Curtains had to be viewed from – the top of the waterfall, above the Cave of Shulamit? All at once everything seemed to fall in place, the rest of the man’s account of his stewardship.
‘I
put
another
farther
on,
down
low
,’ he’d written,
‘the
bottom
of
the
cliff,
beyond
as
you
go
.’

Exactly. Exactly beyond as you go. He’d written an entirely factual account of what he’d done. Start off in the direction of The Curtains – if this was The Curtains – and ‘beyond as you go’ you’d hit Murabba’at. I could almost see it from here, the place itself just blocked by a small headland. Beyond it, clearly visible, was the bulge below Qumran. No doubt he’d been going there, to call on his oil-using, wrong-date-keeping customers; and had found time to dispose of a couple of scrolls on the way. Well. The Arabs had one now, containing the full coded directions that Sidqui had misunderstood. The other,
presumably
, was still where he’d left it, high in the dry
preservative
air of The Curtains. H’m.

I still hadn’t said anything to her by the evening. I sat pensively through the rendition of
L
’
Cha
Dodi
. I fell abstractedly on my sabbath victuals. I was still brooding as I left the dining hall.

‘Miriam has a party,’ she said.

‘I thought you weren’t talking to Miriam just now.’

‘Miriam is too interfering. But a party is a party.’

‘I’m not in the party mood tonight.’

‘Broody bear, why are you so broody?’

‘I’m tired.’

‘Too tired for a walk even?’

‘Much too tired.’

‘But it’s a quarter moon. We could go to the Cave of
Shulamit
.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘That’s not very flattering.’

‘I’d never manage it.’

‘Never manage what?’ she said.

*

We didn’t, anyway. We went to the shore instead and watched the quarter moon from there. It was farther down the lake, the crescent moon over the lands of the crescent; over the crescent of rocks. If one could only get to those rocks there might be no need for the work brigades, the army support, the weeks, months, years of laborious exploration … Why not tell her, then? What instinct of self-survival, duplicity,
secretiveness
, prevented me?

I’d been pondering this. The thing at the moment was mine, all mine; to brood over, worry about, marvel at, adore. To tell her, to tell anyone, was to take it out of the realms of fable and speculation. And there was still much to speculate about.
Were
they The Curtains? Was there any certainty the thing was still there? And either way was it proper or even reasonable for the Professor of Semitics at Beds, so much as to think of …? These were good questions. The wrong answers could easily land the professor in the manure.

Supposing the madness came on me, and I decided to go. To tell her was to risk having her try to stop me or to come with. The latter certainly wasn’t on. A British tourist caught straying over the border was one thing; a female Israeli
lieutenant
quite another. Yet to go alone and not tell anyone might be more unpleasant still. It was dangerous country. Dangerous things could happen in it to the solitary cliff-sealer.

‘Broody bear, what’s the matter?’

‘Too much exercise. I can hardly keep my eyes open.’

‘Come back, then. You’re no answer to a maiden’s prayer,’ she said dolefully.

But I was, in a gentle way, in the guest hut.

But I still hadn’t told her when she left.

I was up early on the Saturday, trembling finely all over, much oppressed.

‘What do you want to do?’ she said after breakfast. I hadn’t had much breakfast. I’d had a cup of coffee.

‘Nothing. You’d better have a sabbath.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Take it off, love. Relax. Have a lay-off.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I am going to be broody bear,’ I said.

‘You don’t want me?’

I did. As some men fly to food or sleep at time of trouble, I flew to females. She was all legs, eyes and hair this morning,
excessively
female in her shorts, shirt and sandals. I’d seen her whip out of this ensemble in less time than the telling. Reason called on me to get her at it and keep her at it till plane time Monday.

‘Not today,’ I said.

‘What will you do?’

‘Mooch about and think.’

Twenty minutes later I was doing it, in the direction of the waterfall. I mooched like a broody bear, but once out of the kibbutz, smartened up.

By ten o’clock I was on top, observing the curtain that was turned away.

*

There wasn’t really any question about it. From this angle they were more like curtains than ever, four flowing folds of rock, and only one turned away – the first of the zigzag, nearest the border.

Through the glasses it was possible to see a series of ridges running laterally across the faces of the others; they were quite climbable. What about the one that was turned away? ‘
It
is
in
the
first
hole,
you
get
down
from
the
top
,’ he had written. How? From the back? The side? Certainly not this side. What I could see of it dropped steeply in an unbroken line.

The gorge was not in view from this position. Yesterday’s position offered a better view. It also offered a view of the back of the curtain. I made a quick sketch of what was to be seen from here and then moved along there.

A warm wind blew on the plateau, and I was thirsty. I hadn’t brought a flask with me. It was half an hour before I
remembered
the spring, and then I couldn’t be bothered going back. The morning was getting on. I’d have to wait till lunchtime. One conclusion at least had been arrived at. Nothing was going to be done about The Curtains today. Tomorrow, perhaps, but not today. Today was Saturday, and the kibbutzniks were at large.

I hadn’t brought a hat and sweat was soon trickling down from my head. I could feel the dressing there, unpleasantly hot and itching. But the walk brought its reward: a splendid view, altogether more explicable now, of the gorge and the zigzag of Curtains. The first, its back now squarely towards me, showed a faint diagonal ridge and then a series of sharp knobs that continued to the top. The ridge wound round from the far side, the beginning out of sight.

I moved farther to the left and up to the border for a better look. It was only fractionally better. I couldn’t see any more of the ridge, but got a rather clearer view of the section already visible. It seemed very narrow, and also very smooth, no doubt from erosion. It was always possible that the lower section had been eroded away completely; that the thing was no longer climbable.

I lowered the glasses. I was on a slight elevation and could see the whole length of the gorge. The wall opposite The
Curtains
was lower and broken by clefts in the rock, through which water would rush in time of spate, across the plateau and down to the Dead Sea. No water rushed now. Nothing at all moved, except the slight hissing wind. All quite still in this dead deserted land.

I looked at my watch. Half past eleven. Time I was getting busy with a sketch. It would take me an hour and a half to get back; for the late lunch. I didn’t actually feel like any lunch. I didn’t actually feel thirsty, either. Inexplicably I was shaking all over. This was ridiculous, of course. Excitement had to be kept firmly in check. A steady hand was needed for the sketch.

I actually had the pencil in my hand when I walked over the border. I walked over it in a state of cold fright. What was this? Not today. I’d
decided
not today. Back, then. Down Rover!

Rover didn’t go back or down. After some moments I even felt a certain mild elation. It wasn’t such a bad idea after all. To plan, prospect a route and do it all in one go was asking for trouble. It was obviously a better idea to do it in bits. Find the best way to the gorge and the ascent up the rock one day, and do it the next. Here was sense. And one side of the border was no different from the other. The difference was purely
technical
. Any infringement was purely technical – supposing there was anybody to notice; which there wasn’t. All the same, it was obviously prudent to keep one’s head down.

I kept my head down, in the lee of the jumble of rocks, and scurried briskly to the gorge. A certain amount of weaving was necessary. Even so, without undue exertion, or even hard breathing, I made it in three quarters of an hour. A quarter past twelve. Very nice.

From close up, the gorge was not as straight as had appeared. There were two quite pronounced bends in it, and also a sharp inlet, immediately this side of the first curtain. I observed this from behind a rock. I waited for some minutes, listening. Then I came out of cover and entered the gorge.

Not even a fly disturbed the massive calm. But it was as well to be careful. I nipped lightly over to the opposite wall where, dodging in and out of the small inlets and occasional large clefts, I was able to look up at the line of curtains. They stretched for a quarter of a mile, enormous monumental walls, their fluted faces turned geometrically in towards each other, very sombre. Here and there, high up, were ‘windows’, evidently the eyries of birds. None of them looked particularly difficult to climb; except the first. This one rose sheer for quite six hundred feet before turning outwards in a sort of small lip like the curling crest of a wave. There were no windows here. Holes, if any, must be above the lip.

I waited a moment, listening again for any slight click of stone, and then padded briskly over to the other side and
entered
the inlet at the side of the first curtain.

The monumental flank was less smooth here, more pitted and craggy, but still, on the face of it, impossible to climb. There was, however, the ridge. I couldn’t see it from this angle, but I knew it was there, a hundred feet above me. I followed the curtain round, a couple of hundred yards round its base, climbed a mound of crags like a heap of giant broken dinner plates, and found the beginning of the ridge.

It started thirty feet or so up the rock, easily approachable by tumbled boulders, and by no means as smooth or as narrow as it had appeared. Perhaps it became narrower. It seemed a good idea to find out. Perhaps I’d be able to see if some simple aids such as rubber shoes or a bit of rope might be necessary for tomorrow. There wasn’t any danger of exposing myself on the Jordanian side. This face of the rock was turned to the frontier.

The ridge ran like a normal mountain track, the usual litter of rubble and fallen stones underfoot. I concentrated on not kicking them over, preternaturally anxious to avoid sound. I hadn’t much of a head for heights. The thing to do was to keep one’s eyes firmly on the track.

The track did seem to narrow after a bit. I couldn’t notice any actual change in the dimensions – it had begun to swim slightly owing to a certain fixity of vision – but was conscious presently of my shoulder against the rock, and the need to go a bit more slowly.

I went a bit more slowly. I tried to reason whether I was going more slowly through choice or because a sharp change in the angle of ascent had made it necessary. There was no doubt it
was
a bit steeper. I could feel it in my legs and in my wind. The best thing might be to take it a step at a time. This was difficult. It was suddenly hideously difficult. I seemed to be engaged in some precarious balancing act, the whole act of walking suddenly highly complex. Absurd, of course. It was only because of the illusion of height. The thing to do was to put this illusion out of mind. I was simply having this slow sort of walk along a ledge a few feet off the ground, and the only difficulty was the proximity of the wall. It wasn’t a
real
difficulty
; plenty of room, if somewhat smooth now and less secure underfoot. Perhaps it would be best, all things considered, if I turned in to the wall and went sideways. No difficulty at all then; how could there be?

I turned in to the wall and went sideways, arms outstretched on the rock. There was no difficulty except the mental one of preserving the idea that I was just a few feet off the ground. The sudden effort required from the right leg indicated quite clearly now that I was climbing, and climbing very steeply. I shuffled sideways for a few minutes more, and stopped for a breather, and incautiously looked down through my legs, and saw the gorge about two miles below and nearly fell off.

I leaned sickeningly in, head on the rock, and felt it lurching and wheeling as I fought the sick horrors of vertigo. I was stuck on the rock face like a fly on the wall. My knees were trembling, delicate fly’s knees, and they’d give in a minute and I’d drop, drop, drop …

They were giving. I could feel them giving. There was
nothing
to hold on to, nothing to lean in to. The rock itself was
leaning
out, and I was leaning out with it, stuck there for seconds only by tactile adhesion, by the pads on my fingers, by the film of sweat…

The rock swung, and I fought it, and it leaned in again and I could lean in with it, shaking all over, wet with sweat and suddenly very cold. I could hear my teeth rattling above the calm hiss of the wind.

Still now. Stay quite still. Everything was all right. One had simply to collect oneself and start edging back. One got led into these things without preparation. It needed preparation; mental preparation. Enough had been done for today. One had got the flavour. Another day.

I stayed there collecting myself, aware even as I did it that nobody was being fooled. If one thing was more certain than another it was that once I was down nothing on earth would get me back up again. I couldn’t do it; couldn’t make myself do it; would work out all manner of reasons why the thing couldn’t be done. And it could be done; I’d done it; had got
myself
in this position at least, more than half-way up; more than three quarters perhaps. Why not continue, as far as possible? I’d never be in this position again.

I’d got my eyes closed, and they were still closed as I started moving again, upwards. The thing to do was to put
everything
else out of mind, to concentrate simply on the physical act of moving one foot and then the other, with the certain knowledge that I’d be doing it once only, and that if it proved impossible, then I’d
know.

Showers of small stones fell as I moved. I couldn’t be bothered about them now, all my earlier fears, of noise, of exposure, left behind, as I concentrated simply on the primary task of staying on the narrow ledge, shuffling sideways, eyes closed and arms embracing the rock.

I stopped presently and opened my eyes and looked up. The series of knobs was still some way above, fifty feet perhaps – above and to the right. I could see them standing black against the sky, reassuringly wide slabs of rock. The ledge had
narrowed
still farther and was no longer flat, the exterior edge rounded. I wasn’t going to look down. I could feel well enough with my feet. No occasion for another fit of the horrors here. I wasn’t going to fall. I was going to go as far as I could. There was a certain technical interest in seeing how far I could go. The rock face must certainly have changed since the man came up it with the scroll. Technically speaking, the thing wasn’t climbable at all now. No experienced climber would tackle it, anyway, without crampons, ropes, iron pegs.

I went on, shuffling very delicately, eyes open now, not
taking
the weight off one foot till I was quite sure of the other. With three or four yards to the first projection, I stopped and had another breather and considered.

The ledge was narrowing quite sharply now. Right at the very end it narrowed to a mere bulge in the rock and merged into the projection and didn’t continue again at the other side. By that point one could practically fall across the projection. It stuck out for six feet or so, quite flat on top. The question was, how to get back? One could fall
on
the projection. One didn’t want to fall off it. How to get down from it again on to the narrow ledge?

I got my breath back and stood in the crucifixion position, and tried to work it out. I’d have to get down off the projection backwards, and feel with the left leg and for a moment carry all my weight on it while the other rested on a mere bulge. I would still, however, be within arm’s reach of the projection. If I teetered the projection would be there. I could teeter by the hour, of course, before nerving myself to take the one further step that would put me out of reach of it. How safe was it to take that step?

I knew I was going to leave it till the moment came. I was too tired now to frig about rehearsing the move. Some faint signal beep-beeped in my brain that I was burning my boats this way, that I ought to try it, that it was lunatic to go up before ensuring that I could get down again. But I moved anyway. I moved without breathing, just clinging, till my right foot brushed the bulge, and I got my arms down from the rock and just laid them on the flat slab of the projection, and bent over it at waist level, face on the warm rock, enormously relieved. I suddenly realized the impossible strain I’d been
under
, perched on tiptoe almost, arms outstretched, every muscle protesting. Then I hoisted myself on to it, stood up, found the whole series of projections, going up like a giant staircase; and I went up them, and found myself on top, and for the first time looked around.