A Long Way to Shiloh (22 page)

There was no vertigo now; only a sense of weary wonder that I’d actually made it. The incredible landscape slanted below as though seen from a wheeling plane. To the east, three
quarters
of a mile below, lay the still blue pool of the Dead Sea, while to the west the maze of tumbled rock rolled away higher and higher, somewhere among it a tiny glimmer of white
buildings
and flashing glass pinpointing Hebron, fifteen miles away. The road ran north from there to Bethlehem and Jerusalem; both out of sight now in the faint apricot haze that hid the
division
between rock and sky.

On the plateau floor stretched the usual lunar confusion. A stark place; but not a lowering or a hopeless one like Zin. Here was the Judean wilderness; a lion-coloured wilderness; a place of prophets. If a landscape could be said to have nobility, then this one had it. No life here, so no death; no growth, so no decline. And yet, curiously, no sense of sterility, either; only of calm wonder and of the seamed face of reality. As ever the place hit me like the breath of a baker’s oven, agelessly fresh, like its enduring Children.

But this was no time to be admiring noble wildernesses. The top of the Curtain was flat and grained like a lump of sugar, and descended in two steep steps to the sheer face that was ‘turned away’. I lowered myself down. There was a cave at the first step. There was a cave at the second. Which was the ‘first’: the first up the rock or the first from the top? There was certainly nothing below, anyway. The second step formed the overhanging lip that I’d seen from below. I decided on this one first.

I got my lighter out, bent and crawled in. There was a musty, sickly smell of droppings inside; all pitch black. I lit the lighter.

Farther in, the cave widened and heightened. Something fluttered and brushed my head, and all of a sudden the dimness was full of fluttering; scrofulous, membraneous things, queerly angled, flapping about. Bats. Scores, hundreds of them,
fluttering
in the air, startled by the light, others stuck on the walls, wings heraldically stretched. The commotion stirred up clouds of the sickly stench, so nauseous I found myself gagging, on my knees.

While I was doing it, one flew directly at the lighter,
knocking
it out of my hand. At once, some dozens of them seemed to beam in at me, dusty bodies knocking into and skittering about my head and face. I struck out and kept striking out‚ still gagging, till the cloud cleared.

I breathed through my mouth and mastered the nausea. It was possible to see now that the cave wasn’t entirely black. A faint glimmer was coming in from outside. I looked towards it and saw the bats in a dense mass at the entrance, scuffing and squeaking as they jostled to get out. They were streaming out, twenty, thirty, forty of them, wheeling in the gorge. I turned back and found the lighter, but didn’t light it this time. Now my eyes were accustomed to it, there was enough light to move by. I raised myself slowly, found I could stand upright I moved to the end of the cave.

It was a long one, easily thirty feet. If the scroll was
anywhere
, it would be at the far end; as the Ein Gedi one had been. The floor was springy underfoot; the droppings of thousands of years. It would have been just as soft when he’d left his
package
here. The true bottom would be several feet under.

Not all of the bats had gone. A somnolent rearguard
remained
, hung on the walls and in the crevices, twitching slightly as I passed. The roof began to lower, and I had to crouch again, till at the end I was on my knees. I lit the lighter.

The ground was level, and I felt it carefully all along the line of the back. Uniformly spongey, no spot showing any
particular
firmness. I put the lighter in my pocket, and, feeling with my hand, began to scoop up the muck for a distance of a foot from the back. The surface was dry but slightly glutinous on its underside, warm to the touch, and drier as one went deeper. At about four inches it was powdery, at between five and six too compacted to shift. I excavated to here and continued right along the line, the back of my hand flat in the channel and scooping the soft muck upwards. The width of the cave here was some seven or eight feet, and after about four, I found it.

I just touched the edge with my fingers, and whipped the hands back as if burnt; and sat on my backside in the dark, mouth wide open. I couldn’t believe it. I simply couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to light the lighter in case it wasn’t. But I did, and it was. The edge of a scroll, inside a piece of rotted linen; tightly curled, still springy, still elastic.

I let the lighter out, and sat for a few moments, and then very carefully lit myself a cigarette and sat and smoked it. I could see my hand trembling in the glow from the burning end. It had never happened to me like this before. A piece of pure deduction, and it had worked. I felt I should be bounding about the cave screaming with joy. I sat and smoked the cigarette and felt sick.

I smoked it to the end, and stubbed it out on the wall, and lit the lighter again and carefully dug the scroll out. The linen crumbled away, but the skin itself seemed to be in good
condition
. The dung had been the finest preservative, moist when fresh, drying slowly, never wholly parched on top, never wholly damp below; practically museum conditions. The only danger was that the phosphates and ammonia in it might have worked through the skin.

I delicately opened it. There were three sections, as at Ein Gedi. The middle one slipped out, and I examined it first. The priest’s introductory note, poorly copied. The second – the same order in which we’d got it – the footnote from the semi-literate. I opened the third with my heart thumping dully. The list of places. Crystal clear; clear as the day it was written.

I rolled the skins up at once, unbuttoned my shirt and shoved the roll inside. Home, James.

Half a dozen of the bats were still clinging to the entrance as I emerged. They fluttered off, joining the others that still wheeled in the gorge. I got a toehold on the first step, fiddled the roll more snugly under my armpit and started levering myself up. I was doing that when the shot rang out.

I didn’t, all at once, identify it as a shot. I didn’t identify it as anything in particular. I turned to see what the hell it was, and was in time to see the flash of the next. A uniformed man was standing on a rock platform of the opposite curtain firing a rifle. He was firing it towards but not at me. His voice came thinly over the intervening hundred yards or so, in Arabic. “Narcotics Patrol. Stay where you are.”

I didn’t stay where I was. After one glazed moment, I turned and scrambled like a madman up the step. I hadn’t got half up it before another bullet whined and wanged; this time from a different direction, and this time at me. Rock splinters from it actually hit me in the face. I looked towards where it had come from. Not twenty yards away another man was standing, on a broad ridge on the next curtain. As I looked he studiously sighted and fired again.

I came down off the step faster than I’d ever moved in my life, and nipped back in the cave.

Bloody hell.

The bats, of course. The flaming bats! I’d forgotten the great police narks of the area. All along the cliffs of the Qumran
section
the authorities kept an eye open for bats, to check the Ta’amireh in their illegal scroll hunts. No doubt the Narcotics Patrol did the same. Looking for caches of hashish, of course. No hashish here. More important things than hashish. Mustn’t find it. What in God’s name to do with it?

I’d scrambled frenziedly to the back of the cave while these thoughts flashed through my head, with the deranged notion of simply burying the thing again. No point in that, of course. They’d go through every inch of the muck. What then?

I couldn’t think. The only clear picture in my mind was of the studious look on the face of the man who’d tried to shoot me. He’d really tried! And if I poked my nose out he’d try again. The proprieties had been observed; they’d warned the smuggler and he’d disregarded the warning. Now there was simply the enjoyable job of shooting him and impounding his hoard.

This was terrible. I had to make it known I wasn’t a smuggler. I had to make it known I was ready to surrender – immediately. But not the scroll! I was damned if I’d surrender that. Not here. Not in The Curtains – so that whoever finally got it would be able to work out the implications. I’d sooner burn it first.

I was on hands and knees, turning distractedly this way and that like a mixed-up dog when this unacademic solution
occurred
. I stopped, chittering to myself with horrified obscenity. Burn it? Unthinkable. What a pass we’d come to! We couldn’t go about burning priceless old scrolls. The thing to do was to memorize the contents, then try and hide them. If all else failed there was always the possibility they’d get it wrong.

In a trice, I’d whipped the roll out and moved nearer to the patch of grey light in the entrance. The list was whippy, coiled tight as a spring and difficult to keep open. The abominable handwriting danced before my eyes like black spiders. Hebrew letter, back-to-front Greek; copied from the priest’s original. Hard enough to decipher in the calm of the scrollery. Here, with the gunman a few yards away keeping my hands rhythmically aflutter, it was impossible. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t get a single word. No time to copy it. No time to do anything now but try and hide it.

I was turning to do this when sounds outside indicated the gunman was no longer a few yards away. I heard him yelling, heard both of them yelling, quite distinctly. I peered cautiously out of the opening and went out, flat on my stomach. He was going down the ridges of the next curtain, going down fast like a man on a ladder, evidently familiar with it. He was having a shouted conversation as he did it with his colleague high on the opposite curtain. I listened.

He’d seen how I must have got into the cave. I’d got into it from the rock he was on. It needed ropes and hooks. I must have them with me. He was going down to radio to Hebron for more men, and ropes and hooks.

I edged forward and had a look down. Miles below, a little toy jeep stood on the floor of the gorge. He was scrambling rapidly down to it.

‘Tell them to bring lights!’ the other man yelled down to him.

‘Of course lights!’

Lights? I looked at my watch. Incredibly, it was three o’clock. It would be dark in less than a couple of hours. It would take them nearly that getting anybody over from Hebron. But why hadn’t they found the way I’d got up? Perhaps from the
Jordanian
side the ridge looked very much worse than it was. Perhaps it had always been thought to be unclimbable.
Whatever
the hell they thought, it looked as if I had a couple of hours’ security, at least. I went back in the cave with a certain heady relief. Two hours. Time, anyway, to have a more
reasonable
go at the list. Time to find some reasonable place to hide it. It suddenly seemed important to secure this first. I lit the lighter and had a look round.

There was no shortage of crevices in the place. The cave was seamed with crevices. The bats fluttered in them as I went
carefully
round. The difficulty was to find one that wouldn’t show disturbance to the experienced eye. I went slowly up and down the walls with the lighter. The crevices ran down to floor level. Doubtless they continued underneath. I became suddenly excited. How about tunnelling underneath the muck to find one? No disturbance would show on the surface then.

I found a promising looking crack in the wall, followed it down to floor level, and starting a couple of feet away, began excavating. Four or five inches down I turned inwards and made towards the crack, careful not to disturb the spongey surface. In no time my fingers were touching the wall. I searched
carefully
with them for the crevice, found it, began to scoop out the muck. A wide crevice; beautifully wide. It went in a long way, too, which was all to the good. It seemed to go in a hell of a long way. I was having to stretch full length on the floor now, my arm in almost as far as it would go. Still filled with muck; all muck. Suddenly there wasn’t any muck. There wasn’t anything. There was moving air on my fingers.

I lay stretched out on the floor and considered this. How could there be moving air in the crevice? Did the crevice
continue
in some way to the next cave above? Or to some
unknown
one below? But even if it did, why was the air moving? It wasn’t moving in this cave. It was still and dead, though
outside
it was blowing quite strongly. It suddenly struck me it was blowing quite strongly against my fingers, too. I thought,
Oh,
Jesus
Christ
, and pulled my arm out, and with mild hysteria began using both hands to dig like a dog. It didn’t take five minutes to see it was no crevice but a sizeable hole in the wall. At the other side of it was the gorge.

I had a quick cigarette to steady my nerves, and while I was smoking it, worked on, enlarging the hole. I had to use my
penknife
to chip out the hard compacted stuff underneath. Here was very ancient muck indeed. Davidian, possibly Abrahamic. Certainly it had been here when the man had popped in with his scroll; no sign of the hole would have been visible then.
Millennial
ages of bats had fouled it, sealing it up entirely.

There was no need to dig far into the lowest reaches. I made an opening about eighteen inches and stuck my head out. Dizzyingly far below was the front end of the jeep. I could
suddenly
pick out the minute figure of the man who’d gone down standing there. He seemed to be smoking a cigarette. Just as I looked he gazed casually up and away, and began strolling up and down.

My heart was bumping erratically. Just below me, below and to the right, I’d spotted something else. It was a knob of rock, one of the steps of the ‘staircase’. The rest passed at an angle. This one projected laterally across the rock face. It projected to a point only a yard to the right of the hole. It was, however, five yards below. If I could only get at it, I could get to the
staircase
, to the ridge, and right down, unobserved …

I knew I couldn’t. My heart failed me as I looked at it. There was no way of doing it, anyway. I couldn’t lower myself to it. There’d still be a gap nearly ten feet. I couldn’t drop to it. It was a yard to one side. I couldn’t jump to it: it was suicidal. It needed a rope. I could perhaps make a rope, of trousers, shirt, belt, and secure it to something in the cave, and lower myself on that. Perhaps I could. I’d been up to any number of boy scout feats of late. I knew I wasn’t going to. The thing was a piece of breath-taking lunacy. There was a much better than even chance of killing myself here, and for what? To spare myself trouble with the Jordanian authorities? To win a bit of glory with the scroll? To ensure that Israel got it instead of Jordan? Who cared who got it, so long as somebody did? Anyway, with the jeep sitting below, the thing wasn’t feasible. It wasn’t
feasible
during daylight at all. And even to think of it in darkness was such a mind-reeling absurdity that I pulled my head in again, palpitating.

I crouched there for a moment and then shambled to the front and had a look out. The other fellow was still on the rock platform of the opposite curtain. He’d made himself
comfortable
there and was having a leisurely cigarette as he lay, legs crossed and back to the rock, taking in the late afternoon sun. He saw me, but didn’t bother picking up his gun. He was simply keeping an eye on the front door. He knew there was no other way out.

I went back in and sat on the floor and had another cigarette myself. I didn’t look at the scroll. I didn’t even think about it. What I was thinking about precluded thinking about anything else. I just sat and dragged hungrily on the cigarette,
palpitating
.