A Long Way to Shiloh (9 page)

It was dusk when we picked up the road to the Dead Sea, night when we finally dropped down to it. We ran along the shore, headlights blazing. It was hot, close, very still. Across the water the Mountains of Moab lay like crouched animals. It had been raining up above, but here it was just overcast.

‘It’s Shabat already. We won’t make a disturbance,’ she said, pulling in under the trees at Ein Gedi. ‘They’ll just have gone into the dining-hall. We’ll wait a bit. We can wash.’

A rather switched-on version of
L’Cha
Dodi
, the ancient hymn that greets the sabbath as a bride, was coming out of the dining-hall as we washed. We sat and smoked in the steamy darkness and listened to further renditions. Presently, the season of song over, we went in.

A couple of hundred young kibbutzniks of both sexes, in shorts and shirts, were at their sabbath victuals. We made for the table under the sabbath candles where the sister had kept a place for us, and shortly after, my hand was being wrung all round the table.

All this was very genial, and after dinner became more so, when a social do in our honour developed at the sister’s place. The sister, Miriam, bearer of the family look as Shoshana had said, bore it however in a heavier and more lowering way. She seemed to regard me, an Englishman and a Gentile, with some suspicion as a friend of her sister’s. At all events, when the party broke up she announced that Shoshana would be sleeping with her. The husband, one Avner, walked me to a guest hut.

‘So tomorrow you’ll relax,’ he said. ‘It’s a relaxing place. Just look at us – we relax all the year round.’

I’d already ringed him as the family joker, simple deadpan type, and I contributed a weary smile.

‘Shoshana will show you round. She’s a great kid, full of life.’

‘Is she?’

‘Of course. It’s a shame she’s saddled herself with this
Moroccan
.’

‘What’s up with him?’

‘He’s a strong silent type – a pain in the arse. Still, Miriam likes him.’

‘So does Shoshana.’

‘She doesn’t know what she likes. Incidentally, get her to take you up to the Cave of Shulamit when it’s cooler tomorrow.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Up beside the waterfall. You’ll like it. Shalom.’

‘Shalom.’

*

In the morning I ran myself in the jeep to Barot. No account was being taken of the sabbath there; work was in full swing. I found Agrot in the administrative tent, out of sorts. He said, ‘I want to give you a run-down on my problems. Then you tell me yours.’

I’d been prepared for this, but I listened. His classification system had gone wild in the scramble to complete; two seasons of work were being endangered; on the results of this
expedition
would depend his financing for the next; etc. All good and sufficient reasons.

‘Have you finished?’ I said.

‘Also I know what you want me to do. I want
you
to try and understand the difficulties.’

I listened to them, too: the invaluability of the Faculty of Science; the need to avoid conflicts; the dangers of chemical treatment to an old skin; the fact that decisions on the latter subject were not his but the Department’s.

‘Is that the lot?’ I said again.

‘Speak if you want to! We’re not in a law-court.’ He’d been hanging on to his temper, but he lost it then, and I was glad. It’s easier to be angry with an angry man than a reasonable one, and I’d been feeling my own troubles drowning in the general sea of his.

I said, ‘Because my position is much simpler. I’m doing no good up there, and I won’t, until we get some more dope. I’m not prepared to stay without it.’

‘So we won’t get excited. We’ll try and stay calm. Just tell me what you think I can do. In the light of everything I have told you.’

‘You can take the skin from Himmelwasser and give it to Isaacs. If necessary you can allow chemical treatment on your own authority and get departmental approval
afterwards
.’

‘Even if I were prepared to do this, I can’t leave here at the moment to organize it.’

‘I’ll organize it.’

‘I mean organize Dr Himmelwasser.’

‘That’s what I meant.’

He took a bottle of brandy out of a cupboard,

‘Have a drink,’ he said.

*

When I left matters stood like this: I was going back to Galilee. By Wednesday if I were still unhappy I’d call him at Barot. Whatever the state of the nation at Barot, he would then leave and join me in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, he’d fix
Himmelwasser
.

I ran back to Ein Gedi not dissatisfied.

She didn’t want to see the scroll cave in the afternoon – ‘
Nobody
works on Shabat and it would be hard to stop interested people coming with us’ – so we went after dinner.

It was dark when we’d entered the dining-hall; bright day when we came out. I stopped, stunned. It wasn’t overcast now. An incredible moon shone from a clear sky. With night the mountains had closed in and now the fantastic Judean peaks seemed to be on top of us, old and primeval and hoary in the moonlight. The folds of rock, drenched in the pale
luminescence
, seemed like pockmarks on some giant face peering down into the canyon. Above them, the stars pulsed with
extraordinary
brilliance.

‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ she said, watching me.

‘Wonderful.’

‘We’re in the lowest spot on earth – like being in a hole and looking up. I don’t think it’s like this anywhere else at full moon, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, how about getting the torch, then, and we’ll go.’

I’d sooner have just stood and watched. A number of
kibbutzniks
were standing or sitting about doing the same. We went to the hut.

‘Here’s the electric light.’

‘All right. Don’t switch it on,’ I said.

‘No. You’re funny, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’

‘There’s a word in English “moonstruck”, isn’t there?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re
very
funny.’

A lot of this seemed to be going on, but no answers were expected. We went out again.

A second look only confirmed the first. The entire rift was alive and electric in the lunar light.

To get to the canyon – the kibbutz being on a slight plateau – you have to descend. We descended. Below were the remains of an earlier pioneer kibbutz. The crude buildings of fibre board and palm thatch stood silent in the moonlight. We went past them and headed into the canyon.

We got to the ledge and climbed up. ‘There you are.’

‘How far in were the scrolls?’

‘At the very end. It runs in for six metres.’

‘Can I go in?’

‘Go ahead.’

She took the torch and wriggled in; and a few minutes later, somewhat dusty, wriggled out again. I gave her a cigarette. We sat and smoked, dangling our legs over the ledge.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it? Why should he have come from Galilee to Jerusalem via Ein Gedi?’

‘Maybe troops were blocking the direct way.’

‘And why leave the Jerusalem copy
here
?’

‘It was the only one he had. He’d hidden the other two on his way south – one in The Curtains, the other at
Murabba’at
.’

‘Wasn’t there a raid here round about that time?’

‘Yes. From Massada. Passover of 68.’ The revolutionaries at Massada had swarmed down and attacked the village. The men of Ein Gedi had run away. The theory was that our character had run away with them, hiding the scroll and his money for safety.

‘A very bloodthirsty one?’

‘Yes. The revolutionaries were annoyed at the men running away. They took all the food and killed the women and
children
. Josephus mentions it.’

‘
Can
it have been a raid just for food, do you think?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘All that senseless killing. I’ve wondered about it. It’s almost as if they were after something else, and didn’t find it … You don’t think it could have been … It’s silly, I know. I just felt something while I was in there, in the cave.’

Silly or not, I felt my own back hairs tingling a bit.

I said, ‘I don’t think it’s silly at all, Shoshana.’

‘You mean it?’

‘I think you might be on to something.’

‘Oh, Caspar, that’s marvellous. Does it help?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how the people at Massada can have known there was a scroll here.’

‘It was only a feeling,’ she said anxiously.

‘I’m hot on feelings, love. Very strong on instinct.’

‘So am I.’

‘Are you?’

‘Oh, yes. Always,’ she said, neat little head shaking its usual baffling negative.

We finished the cigarette and clambered down. The canyon, if anything, was brighter than when we’d walked into it. We seemed to be levitating in a river of silver.

‘Where are we going?’ I said, minutes later.

‘I don’t know. We seem to be heading for the waterfall. Where do you want to go?’

‘The Cave of Shulamit?’ I said, suddenly remembering.

‘All right,’ she said, after a pause. It had struck me that the deadpan joker might well have put me on to the local romancing spot. There was nothing wrong with that, of course, and my words of commendation seemed to have put her in a party mood. We made towards it, anyway.

The soft hiss of the waterfall swelled as we drew nearer, and suddenly we saw it flashing white down the cliff.

The biblical spring – the
ein
in Ein Gedi – spurts several hundred feet up in the hard limestone, and cascades down over a series of ledges. Some of the ledges are so big that they form large water basins; others are small grottoes. A rough stairway of stones and boulders leads from one level to the next, the path so overgrown with bamboo and tropical foliage that often it’s like ascending a tunnel.

We paused at each level, and had a lengthy rest at the third, perching on a large boulder on the lip of a narrow water basin. The moonlight was filtered here by overhanging foliage from a higher level. It spread a glow so dim and astral that it was hard to tell rock from water and water from air, the whole grotto seemingly adrift in pale liquid motion.

We left it at last and climbed higher, sometimes so damply near the main flashing column, and so much a part of its muffled roar, that we seemed literally to be climbing up it.

‘Hang on to me here,’ the girl said, some levels later. ‘We go in a tunnel. The surface is uneven.’

She went head first into the bamboo, bent double, and I followed. The only thing to hold on to was her nubile behind, which I did, firmly. The tunnel rose for thirty feet of
impenetrable
blackness and then ended, in a brightness so
theatrical
I couldn’t all at once take it in.

We were in a large natural amphitheatre, about a hundred yards across, a bowl of rock; a focussing bowl for the moon at the moment. We were not, evidently, at the top, for water still ran, from a higher level, but somewhere it had been blocked, and now it moved everywhere, trickling, rippling, seeping, down rock faces and across them, every facet glittering silver as it reflected back the unbelievable globe that hung over the hole in the sky.

The main stream wandered musically down the middle of the amphitheatre, collecting other rivulets before falling
thunderously
below. Trees and vegetation grew out of the rock, and a number of boulders stood starkly shadowed like Henry Moore figures.

We went and sat on one and smoked another cigarette,
staring
about transfixed. I began to wonder about the cave. There was a somnambulist quality about her in the moonlight that seemed to preclude any advances. A good dark cave, of course, was another matter.

She pulled herself out of her trance at last and looked at her watch.

‘Eleven o’clock. We ought to be going soon.’

‘What about the cave?’

‘It’s here.’

We were sitting outside it, the opening entirely covered by a fan of hanging fronds. Water ran down the fronds, forming a continuous flowing curtain. I cursed a little. A beauty spot,
evidently
, not a romancing one.

‘Why the Cave of Shulamit?’

‘From the Song of Songs. The Shulamite had long hair – like that. Don’t you like it?’

‘Very pretty. I thought it was the kind of cave you could go in,’ I said lamely.

‘You’d get wet, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe we ought to have brought our swimming things,’ I said bitterly.

She smoked her cigarette very carefully to the end, and stood up. ‘Let’s go, then.’

Half an hour later, drearily, I found myself back in the slumbering kibbutz. We hadn’t talked much on the way down. I walked her to her sister’s door.

‘Good night, then, Shoshana.’

‘Good night.’

She turned her face just as I kissed her, and got it on the cheek.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. It’s late. We don’t want to wake them up.’

‘Shoshana –’

She slipped out of my arms.

‘Good night,’ she said, and was inside in a flash.

Somewhere, somehow, one of her compound signals had been misread. Or was her brother-in-law right, and the girl didn’t know her own mind?

Next day, early, we went back to bloody Galilee.

I wasn’t, by the Wednesday, so much ‘unhappy’ as in a state of manic depression. I’d shuttled so many times past the tomb of Rabbi Meir I was ready to blow it up; also sawn-off rocks that might once have stood 600 feet; and Arabs keen to sell me blue stones. We couldn’t pass a village anywhere in Lower Galilee now without half the population running out with beads and marbles. In the morning we visited Nazareth, on what I’d already decided was the last chore – a visit to an Arab lapidary reputed to know the home of every coloured stone in Galilee.

Above and beyond these problems were two others. The weather had broken and rain now fell dismally. And the girl had become suddenly hostile. This last nonsense had manifested itself on the run back from Ein Gedi, and hadn’t improved. It seemed to me her sister was behind it somewhere.

I said, ‘Look, love, what’s your particular problem?’

‘I have no particular problem.’

‘Have you got a period or a face-ache or what?’

‘Neither of these things,’ she said coldly, ‘and if I had they’d be my concern, not yours.’

‘I’m not an Anglo-Saxon rapist, you know, whatever your sister might think.’

‘And leave my sister alone.’

‘Well, you leave me alone,’ I said, and meant it. She’d already offered to throw me in the lake again, the result of an
unfortunate
pleasantry. ‘Might doesn’t solve anything,’ I’d sneered at her; but even that didn’t rouse her.

Well, damn her, I thought, and damn Agrot, too. Particularly damn Agrot. I decided to tell him so, whatever the lapidary might say.

The lapidary didn’t say much. He was a little old man about ninety, a pronounced case of curvature of the spine, and his main preoccupation seemed to be with the price of reefers. He was sitting on a rug smoking one when we entered his miniscule shop, and his only interest in the visit was the possibility that I might know of a reasonable source of supply.

‘They have gone mad in Akko,’ he said. ‘It’s the
wholesalers
. Mad or crooked. Possibly both.’

‘It’s not the wholesalers, Grandpa,’ Shoshana told him in her lilting Arabic. ‘It’s hard for them, too. In Jordan they stop the hashish going out, and in Israel we stop it coming in. There are new roads at Barot and Arad where the old tracks were. The price is bound to go up.’

‘Yes. It’s a part of the degeneracy of the age,’ the old man said sadly. ‘So what is this book you are writing?’

I told him about the book I was writing; allegedly on the biblical geology of Galilee. He didn’t listen much. He stubbed out his reefer presently on his black thumb nail. ‘The finest marble,’ he said, ‘is in the south. You must go there to see good marble.’

‘What about Galilee?’

‘No. There are no commercial deposits here. There never were.’

‘Can you suggest how I might come on even small supplies, reasonably?’

‘Certainly. Hang the ringleaders,’ he said, taking out another reefer, and then reluctantly putting it back again. ‘You would find prices tumbling overnight. It would have an immediate effect on the cost of living. You don’t happen to indulge
yourself
?’ he said wistfully.

I left him a quid or two to help with the cost of living, and we went out. It was raining like hell, and we had to dash back into the suk again. We stood drearily in a café entrance, crammed between numerous sodden Arabs. In the roadway – a tiny cobbled path that ran like a ditch between the high pavements – donkeys lumbered by, hocks awash in the rain water swilling down the street, their panniers brushing past us.

‘Let’s go in and have some coffee,’ I said, and we did, coldly, the only words being mine, and to a young Arab pimp, telling him a bit abruptly to eff off. He was back again in a brace of shakes with a pal, and I told them both to eff off. The pal said he had five children, and what with that and the weather, he’d do me a nice tour of the Church of the Annunciation, the Chapel of the Angel, Joseph’s Workshop and Mary’s Well at half price; alternatively he’d take my photo. He managed to take it, too, before the proprietor, alarmed by the flash, threw him out. By that time the rain had slackened, so he effed off anyway, without extracting any money.

We went, too.

At the hotel, the girl waited below while I went up and phoned Agrot. She was leafing moodily through a magazine in the lounge when I came down again. She looked up a bit
nervously
.

‘Have you made the – arrangements?’

‘Yes. Pick me up tomorrow morning about eight.’

‘Will we be coming back here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you want me next week?’

‘I don’t know that, either.’

She got up slowly, and seemed to be trying to say something. I didn’t help her, and whatever it was, she didn’t say it.