A Long Way to Shiloh (23 page)

The reinforcements from Hebron turned up in a couple of jeeps around half past four. I remained inside the entrance and heard them. In the sunset the jumbled peaks of Judea had turned to coppery cinders. I couldn’t see the man who still remained on the opposite curtain, but could hear him well enough. He was carrying on an interested conversation with the men below, to ensure they not only had lights to illuminate the scaleable rock, but one for him on a long lead so that he could keep me under observation. They apparently had it, and started up with it.

I withdrew into the cave and hopped about, shivering. With evening the air had turned brisk, and I was hopping about in my shoes, socks and underpants. The rest of my clothes were tied together in a bulky and dangerous-looking rope, at present fixed to a spur of rock at the bottom of the back exit. The only other article I carried was the scroll, now strapped to my chest with the adhesive tape the doctor had given me in Jerusalem.

My teeth chattered in short rhythmic spasms as I sprang about. It would almost be better to be getting on with it than to hang about here. But I hung on a bit longer. The sun was setting fast; but it was setting against my back exit, at the moment beaming in through it like a blood-tinted searchlight. Anyone chancing to look up from below might see the
fluttering
rope and the figure dangling from it, like some maniac taking the short route from the eighty-eighth floor.

In the front the peaks were already turning a plummy maroon. Energetic cries came from the men climbing up with equipment. I scurried from one exit to the other, teeth horribly a-chatter, trying to gauge whether it was dark enough. Below in the gorge it was grey-purple dusk. As I looked down, through the back exit, the headlights sprang suddenly to life on the jeep, and the thing moved. It turned round in a couple of sharp
movements
like some ray-eyed insect and went back the way it had come, no doubt to add more candlepower to the scene at the front. At the same moment, the entrance of the cave lit up with a pale milky luminescence. The lamp in position on the opposite curtain: not long before they’d be climbing round. Now, then.

With the strangest sensation of watching the thing happen to someone else, I went numbly into the routine. I gave a series of strong tugs on the rope to see it was thoroughly fixed. I tugged sideways, downwards, jerked the thing from side to side. Then I hung on to it and went backwards out of the window, kneeling, feet first. I got one foot out and then the other, and lay over on my stomach and wriggled the rest out, till I was on my elbows; and then slowly eased off them, too.

I went down the rope hand over hand, feet walking down the rock, till I’d come almost to the end of it; then I let my feet down and dangled.

My teeth had stopped chattering now, and I wasn’t shivering any more. With the weirdest sensation of normality, I hung from my familiar trousers over the gorge, and felt sideways with my foot for the step. The step wasn’t there. Not far enough over.

I came up a bit on the rope, got my feet on the rock and walked myself farther over to the left. It was a long way over, farther than the yard I’d estimated. I could just feel it, feel the beginning of it with my toe. I let myself down on the rope again, got my foot flat on it, tried to get the other one on, couldn’t, was suddenly swinging on the rope, both feet away, swinging nightmarishly on a pendulum, knees barking on the rock, hearing the hideous creaking of the belt above, and a peculiar stretching sound from the shirt next in the line to it.

Still
now.
No
floundering.
No
further
strain
on
the
rope.
Just
hang
. The pendulum came to rest. I hung. Shoulders, arms, wrists, ached as I hung. Sweat trickled into my eyes. What, in God’s name, now? Hanging, I tried to work it out.

I could very carefully get one foot up on the rock. I could very carefully walk myself over and make another try for the step. If no good, back up the rope as soon as possible, while arms still capable.

Very carefully, I got the foot up. Very carefully I walked myself to the left, felt with the left foot for the step, and found it. Then the right foot, agonizingly careful. My arms seemed practically out of their sockets, fully extended and straining on the rope. Just as I got both feet on, perched at an angle and ready to swing if I lost the foothold again, I heard the shirt slowly rip.

Wordless prayers at once went up. There wouldn’t be any swinging now. There wouldn’t be any climbing back up, either. One way or another, I’d be going down.

With mindless horror, teetering at an angle of forty-five degrees with my hands grasping my trouser turn-ups and my feet just on the step, I saw the sequence of operations. I was going to have to throw myself to the left. One enormous heave on the rope, and with its last bit of goodness working for me I’d be over there, to land on my stomach. It wouldn’t do the scrolls a lot of good if it worked. It would do me so much less if it didn’t that there was really no thinking about it. I simply did it.

With a single grunt and a disc-slipping heave, I pushed off from the rope, lurched over, and turned in to the step. I didn’t roll, trip, slide, bounce, judder, ricochet or do anything else Charleyish. I simply landed, flat on my stomach, with a dismal crackling from the scroll on my chest, and lay there, horribly winded. I lay for several minutes till the night air on my
underclothed
torso awoke a realization of the position. We weren’t home yet. We were simply alive. Any minute now someone would enter the cave and find my trousers, belt and shirt (an Israeli shirt, acquired in Tiberias), and realize not only how I’d got out, but where I’d be heading. This was an evil turn-up. I’d planned to unhitch the clothes. They were fluttering now out of reach. The thing to do now was to try and get down before they got up.

I picked myself up on the step and got moving. The passage from the bottom step back to the ledge, after all my qualms, was no more difficult than it had been getting up, and in no time I was shuffling briskly down, the thing such a piece of cake after my ordeal on the rope that I wondered why the hell it had given me any bad moments during the ascent.

Shouting had been going on from above as the men flung hooks, but nobody seemed to have entered the cave yet. I climbed down from the crags, moved cautiously up the inlet and peered out. The three jeeps were in a semi-circle, nosing in to the front of the Curtain, headlights on and motors
running
to provide the power for the lights that were beamed up on the rock. Two men were standing gaping up at the
operations
. I bent low and nipped across to the other side of the gorge, made the opposite inlet and paused there a moment, looking up.

They’d got one hook attached. A man was swinging on the rope now, pulling himself up on to the lip of the curtain. In minutes he’d be calling down. No time for me to run for the border. The jeeps would get there before me; at an obvious advantage on the plateau. What I’d better do was get off the plateau; down the cliffs to sea level where my slight start would be of some use.

The inlet was a cleft in the gorge, open on both sides. I went haring down it, came out on to the plateau and made off to the east towards the cliffs. I ran till I was out of breath, and just as I slowed down, heard a tumult start up behind me, and took off again. It was dark, very dark, and in the maze of rock very easy to run round in a circle to where I’d started. I found a wadi bed and ran beside it: the wadi was bound to lead to the cliffs. And presently it did. It was half past six by the dim figures on my watch-face as I came out to the Dead Sea. Across the gap, slightly darker than the dark sky, the Mountains of Moab crouched.

I went down the cliffs via the wadi bed, on my backside. My legs were already badly scratched and bruised, and my behind was soon worse. But the journey was enlivened by noisy
goings-on
on the plateau. Distant cries had been audible, and before I hit the bottom a burst of firing broke out. God knew what flights of fancy were being indulged, or what poor bastards were getting it in the neck. They were liable to be Beduin bastards, of course. It suddenly struck me there might be some here, along the shore, offshoots of the Ta’amireh. And that a stranger dressed mainly in a valuable scroll would appear a veritable gift from Allah.

I came out on to the dark shore and looked very carefully around. Away over to the right, in the direction of the border, something was gleaming. It might be phosphorescent rock. Or it might not. My own underpants were glimmering in the dark. I took them off and shoved them under a rock. It was warm down here, a sulphurous closeness in the air. The border,
slanting
sharply up to the sea, couldn’t be more than a kilometre away. A dangerous kilometre. All manner of authorities might have been alerted on the jeep radios by this time. It was nearly a couple of hours since the Israeli spy had made his escape. Crossing the border was not going to be such a piece of cake, apart from the Beduin-type hazards of getting to it.

I was looking at the sea when this thought occurred, and I started walking down to it. I’d certainly never be better dressed for it than now. The salt flats on the way down, crisp and
sun-cracked
on the surface, gave underfoot and I was soon clumping leadenly with my shoes covered in the underlying black
bitumen
. I kicked them off. I picked the adhesive tape off my chest as I walked, and re-applied it with the scrolls to the more familiar position on top of my head. While I was doing it, my socks got sucked off too, so that by the time I entered the water I was clothed only in the holy tongue. Let it be unto me as a shield, I thought, and kicked off.

The water was warm and greasy, with the consistency of blood and the sea-bed was a sediment of thick slime; both so
peculiarly
repellent I nearly got out again. This wouldn’t do, of course. It had to be borne. I’d seen the patients lolling in it at the health station of Ein Bokek farther down the coast. But nobody forced them to swim a couple of miles in it at Ein Bokek. It looked to me now that I’d have to swim at least that. The border wasn’t discernible, and Ein Gedi was three
kilometres
past it. There was no way of gauging distance here. Until I saw the lights of the kibbutz it wouldn’t be safe to come out.

Some of the water had splashed in my face at the first kick and I could taste it on my lips, bitter rather than salt, a flat acrid bitterness; manganese and potash. Trying to swim in it was like striking out in a vat of treacle; dark chemical treacle. The stuff was so uncannily buoyant that at waist level it was a major job even to touch bottom: you simply bobbed up like a cork.
Swimming
on your front simply gave you a crick in the neck and a sensation of doing press-ups. I turned on my back.

This was definitely better. It wasn’t swimming. It was more in the nature of punting, but it certainly got you along. Restful, too, after the exertion, if the stuff didn’t also have the effect of seeking out every scratch and abrasion on the body. My behind came practically on fire suddenly; arms and legs meticulously flayed. I punted on, hissing with the maddening irritation, eyes on the beach. The little gleam had come closer. I could suddenly identify it as a fire, a tiny fire smouldering, occasionally
flickering
with flame.

I stopped, sitting in the water, and peered at it Nobody seemed to be at it, nothing at all near it; but the Beduin tents were black, black as the night: somebody had lit the fire.

I swore softly to myself, wriggling with the exquisite agony. Nothing to be done about it. There was certainly no getting out here. I’d have to put up with it. Maybe it would ease off when it had done its worst. I lay back and punted a bit farther out, watching the fire. Nothing moved; not a soul to be seen. But were eyes now curiously regarding me? I punted far enough out to be lost in the darkness and then turned parallel with the beach again. Could somebody be keeping pace with me there in the darkness?

I concentrated on making no disturbance, pushing very slowly, legs kept effortfully under. The fire passed. The
exquisite
agony passed slowly with it, leaving just an overall
rawness
. I punted slowly on. When you came to think of it, it was more like riding a bicycle, slowly, backwards. The stars came out. I lay back, and watched them, and rode the bicycle
backwards
, through the warm sulphurous night.

*

I fell into a short doze about ten o’clock, and came out of it with a jaw-snapping jerk. My head was lying gently on the water. The scroll! The scroll was all right; farther up on my head. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes past ten. It had been ten when I looked at it last. It couldn’t be doing the watch a lot of good, of course. It wasn’t doing me a lot of good, legs now like lumps of lightly-pickled meat. I got back on the bike again and shoved off.

I’d been humming the Eton Boating Song when I dozed off, and I picked it up again. I hummed it to the moon. A
last-quarter
moon. Was it only last night I’d watched this moon with the girl farther down the shore? How much farther down the shore? No lights yet. I’d been in the water over three hours now. It didn’t seem that I’d ever been anywhere else; warm, womb-like. You could sit in it, lie in it, sleep in it, ride your bicycle in it …

Humming the Eton Boating Song I passed slowly along the moonlit pit of the world, riding my bicycle, backwards.

*

It was eleven o’clock when I saw the lights. There weren’t many lights. They’d turned the outside ones off. There was an occasional gleam from an uncurtained window. There were other lights I couldn’t understand; two or three little lights moving like fireflies on the clifftop, and others coming down the canyon. Could they possibly have crossed the border? Could they still be after me here?

I couldn’t cope with this; wasn’t able to concentrate any more. I simply had to get out here. This was understood. I turned the bicycle cumbersomely round and pedalled in. I kept on pedalling after I landed. Slow on the uptake. No more pedalling needed. Switch off motors. I switched off, turned round, faced front to the beach and stood up. The idea was to stand up. For some inscrutable reason I wasn’t standing up. I was flat on my face. I tried again, observed with scholarly interest that I was still on my face, and made one of those little adjustments that scholars must learn to make. I went up the beach on my face.

The crunchy surface gave under me, covering me in the black mud. I picked up so much I had to stop altogether after a while and content myself with watching the little moving lights that had moved now down the cliff and were proceeding at a
briskish
pace towards me across the moonlit beach. It had struck me what these lights might be, and I began calling to them.

I kept calling till Shoshana and Avner and two or three of the other searchers had almost reached me, and only gave up then because of enfeebling waves of laughter. The professor, no doubt about it, had landed himself in the manure after all. It seemed a uniquely memorable moment. And there’d been a few to choose from, taking it on the whole, today.