Leon Uris (42 page)

Directly below Jericho, we drove over bone-breaking ground along the Dead Sea. My father began to smell the place in remembrance.

‘We are close. We are close. Keep an eye out for the ruins.’

‘There,’ Omar cried.

We had come to ancient Qumran, which was now no more than a pile of rubble. My father’s eyes scanned the forbidding wall of cliffs and canyons inland from the sea. He chose the first wadi bed to enter because a dry gulch would offer us some kind of road. We inched in. Within a half mile, we were stopped quite close to a canyon entrance. The truck dropped dead and we, likewise, were almost as dead from being jarred around and choked by dust and the feverish heat.

It was quickly turning dark. We would have to await daylight before setting out to find a perfect hideaway. I was only twelve years old, but already I was an Arab general.

W
E AROSE WITH THE
SUN. Sabri went to work immediately, repairing the truck. He reckoned that the vehicle was very sick.

Jamil was left to guard the provisions, the women, and Sabri. The four remaining men—I call myself a man cautiously—started climbing a long steep slope toward the canyon opening in search of a proper cave. It was a great day for me: I got to carry a rifle for the first time.

Several hundred feet up, the wadi bed leveled off onto a higher plateau. We moved into the canyon with its great cliffs, many thousand feet in height, hovering over both sides of us. A quarter to a half-mile inland, we found an entrance to a second canyon and split the party into two sections. I stayed with my father, while Omar and Kamal took the fork.

I had the watch which Gideon Asch had given me and Kamal also had one, courtesy of the Iraqis. I suggested we coordinate a time to meet later, but Ibrahim did not trust timepieces. He pointed to the sun and indicated that when it reached the midday position in the sky, we retrace our steps to the fork and discuss our findings.

Within another half mile, my father and I began to run into caves, but nothing was suitable. Most of them were several hundred feet up the cliffs, making access extremely difficult or impossible. We came to another fork. My father opted to continue down the main wadi bed, while I would go into a mini-canyon that appeared to dead end. It was a serious mistake for us to split up. As I approached the apparent dead end, it suddenly opened up into another branch of the canyon and when I tried to retrace my steps I discovered I was in a labyrinth.

As the sun seared down, the canyon walls seemed to close in. I nipped at my canteen of water and told myself not to panic. After an hour I realized I was stumbling around in a circle, unable to get my bearings and unable to find the opening.

Perhaps I said I was a man too quickly because I felt like a little boy. Do not panic, I kept telling myself. The sun slipped into the afternoon sky. I began to shout and whistle, but my own voice mocked me in echoes bouncing off the walls.

The cliffs were so high that the sun became lost and as the heat lessened I knew late afternoon was coming on. Another series of frantic shouts brought no response but my echo. I slid down to the ground, put my face in my hands, and was about to cry when I looked up.

I thought I saw a cave opening that was only fifty or so feet up a cliff. I ran across the canyon floor to get a better angle. Yes! There was an extremely large cave above me! I wanted so badly to be the one to discover the cave that some of my fear passed.

The climb was sheer, but my hands and feet were like claws. I worked my way up like a spider. A familiar smell reached my nostrils. It was the stench of corpses. I hung there on the side of the cliff, trying to make up my mind whether to go up or down.

Come on, Ishmael, I admonished, get up there. I reached a small ledge by the opening. I was frightened again, really frightened. My hand shook almost uncontrollably as I flicked on my flashlight and advanced to the opening. The beam revealed an enormous cavern, many times the size of our house. My light probed the walls. There were a number of corridors off the main room. I dared go no further, for I was already lost in the canyon and didn’t want to make it worse by getting lost inside the cave.

Suddenly I panicked. The flapping of wings, bloodcurdling screeches, and a mass of black birds storming toward me! I screamed as a half-dozen vultures poured out, almost knocking me off the ledge, then circling and coming at me angrily. I backed up against the wall and fired my rifle. I did not hit anything, but the shot drove them away.

I controlled my desire to flee and inched back to the cave opening and discovered the source of the smell. Four women, a number of small children and infants, and one single man. They were recently dead and had been stripped naked by the Bedouin. Billions of those awful little maggots were devouring them.

The sound of my own breathing and grunting was so loud that it startled me. I began to hear other eerie cave noises. Had the Bedouin been watching me all the time? I realized I had intruded on a domain belonging to foul little creatures and the elusive Bedouin. Yet the cavern was so great and so close to the ground I continued to probe. I made out bird droppings and assumed I would meet their owners shortly. Bats, no doubt.

I retreated back to the ledge. From here the entrance to the subcanyon was clearly visible and could be easily guarded. Above the ledge, the cliff went up straight for what seemed like a thousand feet or more. Not even a Bedouin could make his way down to us from the top without being discovered.

How to get back to the truck and find this cave again in the morning? Could we smell our way back in? If I threw the bodies out, could we locate the cave by watching the vultures? It was revolting, but I went back in, pulled all the bodies out and threw them over the ledge, and watched the vultures cautiously continue their banquet.

There! On the edge of the ledge! They had made a rope ladder! I tested it to see if it were rotted, but it seemed strong and I knew I must take the chance. I scampered down quickly.

It was turning dark. Do I stay here now and let Father and Omar and Kamal look for me in the morning? I fired another shot at the vultures, hoping it would catch my father’s ears. I missed again, but it scattered them. It occurred to me to take a rock and make markings on the walls that could lead us back to the cave.

The night closed in on me terrifyingly. I could go no further. I tucked myself into a crevice, loaded the rifle, and tried to glare through the blackness.

All kinds of noises startled me—falling rocks, the jackal who cried out that he knew of my presence, the cackle of taunting birds sizing me up for a meal.

I kept awake until I could not hold my head up any longer, snapping up with each new eerie sound.

‘ISHMAEL! Ishmael! ishmael!
Ishmael! ishmael!
’

I opened my eyes with thumping heart and dry mouth!

‘ISHMAEL! Ishmael! ishmael!
Ishmael! ishmael!
’

Lights and shadows played off the canyon walls and ten trillion stars were above me. For a moment I did not know where I was and when I realized, Najnun—the spirit that makes you crazy—began to consume me.

‘ISHMAEL! Ishmael! ishmael!
Ishmael! ishmael!
’ bounced through the canyon. It was Allah, calling out for me to come to him! No! No! It was my father’s voice!

‘FATHER! Father! father!
Father! father!
’

Oh God, please, please, please! I begged.

‘Ishmael!’

‘Father!’

‘Ishmael!’

‘Father!’

We could not find each other, even with the moonlight, but we managed to bring our voices closer and closer. ‘Can you understand me!’ his voice called.

‘Yes!’

‘Stay where you are! Do not move! I will find you in the morning! We can call each other throughout the night!’

‘Are you with Kamal and Omar!’

‘No, but we hear each other faintly! Do not fear, my son, Allah will protect you!’

I wished I had my father with me instead of Allah at this moment, but suddenly I was no longer afraid. The moon passed directly over, making a great display of lighting the walls. Along with the stars, I was suddenly in paradise again. I was a Bedouin! Like a Bedouin, I slept sitting up, crouched over, with one eye and both ears open. Throughout the night my father comforted me with his calls.

At dawn I saw the sight of my father and brothers coming toward me. I had strange feelings. I wanted them to save me, but I had learned not to be afraid and I had seen the desert by night and wanted more of it. I went to them, trying to act nonchalant, but babbled with overwhelming excitement as I led them to the cave. It was simple to find, for the vultures were out in force.

We climbed up the rope ladder and into the cavern. My father surveyed the defensive possibilities.

‘It is perfect! Let us hope the vultures do their work quickly and do not lead the Bedouin back to us!’

‘Who do you think those people were?’ Kamal asked.

‘Only Allah knows. There seems to be only one man. The rest are women and children. The man was probably left to guard while the other men went looking for supplies. I’m sure they got lost trying to find their way back in and the women and children starved.’

Ibrahim proved to be right, for in ensuing days we found the bodies of three men who had trapped themselves in a fool’s opening. Nothing was left of their clothing or any supplies they might have been packing in. The Bedouin got them first and the vultures shortly thereafter.

We found the main wadi bed again and carefully marked the canyon walls to find our way back in. At twilight we reached the truck. Although the women could not embrace us in front of each other, they stood before us and wept, for they had been certain we were lost.

My heart sank as I saw the truck. Sabri had a hundred parts scattered about on blankets on the ground.

‘Everything is clogged with dirt and sand. Each piece must be cleaned before I can put it back together.’

‘Will it run?’

‘We have a problem. The radiator is broken. There is no water in it.’

‘If we don’t get this truck out of here and sell it, we will be in a very dangerous situation,’ Ibrahim said. He was completely puzzled by what he saw spread before him and I knew he was thinking it would not be possible to put it back together again, much less run.

We made a plan to guard the truck in shifts. Sabri would stay and work, for we were now in race against time. The rest of us would unload the provisions. A person could carry no more than twenty-five to fifty pounds of supplies and water on each trip, for there were stiff climbs and the heat was tormenting. We were concerned that the wall markings were not efficient. A false marking, made by nature, could easily lead us astray.

‘When I was very young, before my father inherited the garage, I was a shepherd,’ Sabri said. ‘I would take the flock on winter pasture into the Bab el Wad. I marked my way back to my cave by piling a small pyramid of rocks every short distance.’

The idea was perfect, but it annoyed me. Sabri had been in our life for only a few days, but already he had answers to most of our problems. What is more, he had lived for several winters in a cave. He would know even more answers. Since I had learned to read and write, I had beaten off Kamal and had brushed Jamil and Omar aside. I had had no challenges for the attention of my father and Sabri now represented a threat. I did not know how to contend with it, for we needed him.

We barely dented the supplies on our first trip and found the journey was even more grueling than suspected. Our initial chore was to burn the cave out by sprinkling kerosene around and igniting it. We not only killed the maggots but drove out the bats, which I had suspected were deeper in the cave. When the fire died and the smoke dissipated, we rigged up slings and pulleys to haul the provisions up. Father put us on rotating guard duty in the cave. Since the women could not stand guard, they were always in the supply caravan. Two round trips a day were all we could manage. In a few days our water supply, in five-gallon army cans, was diminishing severely.

We scavenged through the ruins of the Qumran settlement, knowing it had been picked over for centuries by the Bedouin, but hoping beyond hope of finding a source of water. The water works, which filled during the winter floods, were long since destroyed. All the cisterns were cracked, probably from the many earthquakes that ravaged the area down through time.

Ibrahim felt that we could build our own cistern or some method of damming and trapping water by winter, the only time it rained here. During an ordinary rain, water would stream down from the high cliffs and fill the narrow canyons. With no places to go into the rocky soil, the water would build up, then find its way to a wider wadi bed. When a half-dozen canyons emptied into a single wadi, the result was a flash flood which sent water gushing down into the Dead Sea. Ibrahim remembered almost getting trapped and drowned in a flood as a boy.

It was midsummer. There would be no rain for months and we only had a week or ten days’ supply of water. Our caravan back and forth from the truck to the cave was slave business and it was all we could do to keep from devouring our water. It took a full week to unload the truck. During that time, Sabri had it almost put back together.

Sabri gave us the bad news that the radiator had many leaks and all the water was gone from the engine, the battery was cracked, and the spare not properly charged up. Even with new parts, he did not know for certain if the truck would start up again.

Meanwhile the cave was made livable by the women. Once up the fifty-foot ladder, they would seldom come down. It was cool inside and a refuge from the heat. We found a number of corridors off the main room to give everyone privacy, although privacy was tantamount to total darkness. We were allowed to flick on our flashlights only to get back and forth to the main cavern. I discovered a tunnel that led out to another opening and from there I could climb to a ledge from where I could look down on the entire north end of the Dead Sea. I claimed the place for Sabri and me, much to the dismay of my brothers. If they wanted their own ledges, they could find them as I had.