“You must go in!” the slaves shouted, and they pushed their master into the tunnel. On his knees he crawled through those difficult first cuttings which had determined the success of the venture, past the bulge that Meshab had corrected for him, and to the longed-for spot where he saw a lamp shining through the rock. The men on the other side were waiting for him and he heard a slave saying, “When he puts his hand through, shout!” And when he reached the small opening he could see Meshab the Moabite and he said, “You are my brother. This moment you are free to leave.”
“I’ll finish the tunnel with you,” the Moabite promised; and at that glowing instant when they met in the darkness of the earth, a slim, exhausted man with a black beard was painfully climbing the ramp to enter the town, and when the guards at the gate stopped him he said that he was Gershom, seeking sanctuary, and he carried with him a small kinnor, called a lyre.
• • • THE TELL
Vered Bar-El had been in Chicago only a short time giving her lectures on the Candlestick of Death when a withering example of the “fifty days” drifted in with searing winds from the desert, making work at the dig almost impossible. These days were now called khamsin, from the Arabic word for fifty, but they were as enervating as they had always been. During khamsin only the Moroccans made any attempt to keep digging, and even they preferred the bottom of the trenches, where they could hide in shadows and pick at the rubble with their fingers.
In this impossible weather John Cullinane often sat on the back porch of the headquarters building, watching the amusing little hoopoe birds as they hurried about, probing into sandy holes, and he remembered Vered’s lilting voice as she once said, “The hoopoe bird ought to be the world symbol for archaeologists. We also go furiously about, poking our noses into the earth.” He missed Vered even more than he had expected, and hoped she would soon return; at his desk he sometimes blew at the skirted figurine of Astarte and convinced himself that he was going to take both the clay goddess and the living back to Chicago. In fact, he was pleased that she was having a chance to see the city which was to be her future home.
When the lingering khamsin continued to make digging impractical, he resumed work on his progress report, but even here Vered’s lovely figure haunted him, for when he wrote of ceramics he could see her darting back and forth to her washing troughs with basketfuls of fragments, and he recalled with affection the phrases that so often appeared in the prefaces to archaeological reports: “I am especially indebted to Miss Pamela Mockridge (later Mrs. Peter Hanbury)” and a few lines farther on one would discover that Mr. Peter Hanbury had been the expedition’s architect. Few presentable girls could survive two seasons of digging in the Holy Land without getting married, and Cullinane thought how saucy it would be to include in his preface: “We are all indebted to our brilliant ceramicist, Mrs. Vered Bar-El (later Mrs. John Cullinane).” He chuckled. “Let ’em figure out what happened on that dig.”
But when he submitted his provisional draft to Eliav and Tabari he ran into trouble, for they feared that in his section covering Level XII at Makor he had been too much influenced by what had happened at collateral sites elsewhere. Eliav warned, “Your guesses are too derivative.”
“What he means,” Tabari interpreted. “You’d be a lot smarter if you were a lot dumber.”
“Forget what happened at Megiddo and Gezer,” Eliav advised. “Trust your own eyes.”
“We don’t work in a vacuum,” Cullinane said defensively. “Don’t you suppose the men at Gezer and Megiddo faced the same problems our fellows did?”
Tabari evaded the question. “We want you to take a little trip with us, John,” and as the three men climbed into the jeep the Arab said, “It’s the year 3000 C.E. and we’re archaeologists coming to excavate four sites, all of which perished in some great cataclysm in 1964.”
“Let’s just use our eyes,” Eliav said, “and decide what kind of report we’d write.”
They drove to a bright new suburb of Akko, where Tabari stopped at the home of a friend to show Cullinane and Eliav a modern house, whose components he ticked off: “Age of electricity, refrigerator, stove, air-conditioning, wiring in all rooms. Accessible to a lively foreign trade, because the rug’s from Britain, the radio from Germany. Where’d you get the chair, Otto?”
“Italy.”
Eliav continued the analysis: “And if we found fragments of these books we could state that the family had attained a high culture with works in German, French, English, Hebrew, Arabic and something I don’t recognize.”
“Hungarian,” Otto explained.
“We could go on through the rest of the house,” Eliav said, “with eyeglasses as proof of medical skill, the wine bottle linked with France. So let’s agree that this is the norm for Level XLV.”
“And a very high norm it is,” Cullinane said amiably to the owner.
“We’ve worked since we got out of Hungary,” he replied.
They drove to a village not far away, where Tabari sought permission to enter a house, which was granted by a group of recent oriental immigrants who as yet spoke no Hebrew. “Look at the contents here,” he said. “No electricity. Practically no objects dating since 1920. Very few signs of cultural attainment. Different cooking methods, different mode of life altogether.” He gave the owners some cigarettes and thanked them for their kindness.
“But the real jolt to our archaeologists in 3000 C.E. will be when they dig up this next house,” and he led the way to an Arab village north of Makor, where he shouted to a man standing in the unpaved road, asking him if they could visit his house. The villager nodded, and standing amid chickens, Tabari pointed out, “Completely different architecture. No electricity, no stove. Clay pots such as were used two thousand years ago. No books, one picture with Arabic writing, a manner of dress centuries old. But what I want you to see especially is this mill for grinding wheat. It’s all wood, but tell me—what are those little things sticking out to grind the grain?”
Cullinane got on his hands and knees to inspect the ancient grinding system from whose upper section small points projected. “Are they what I think they are?” he asked.
“They’re not metal,” Tabari said.
“They’re flints,” Cullinane said. “Where’d they get flints in this age?”
“Where the people of Makor got them ten thousand years ago,” Tabari replied. In Arabic he checked with the owner of the mill. “That’s right. Nodules from the wadi bed.”
The three scientists returned to the jeep, where Tabari said, “Now before you tell me how you’re going to date that Arab hut when we dig it up, let’s look at item four.” He drove to a ravine up whose sides they climbed on foot until they came to the mouth of a cave, at whose entrance they called. From the dark depths came a petulant voice, and they crept in to find an old man who lived alone with his goats. Eliav whispered, “This cave’s been occupied like this for at least thirty thousand years, and the only thing that I can see that would tell us it’s the twentieth century is the plastic buttons on the old man’s shirt.”
“You’re wrong,” Cullinane said as he probed into the area where the goats slept. “Here’s a Danish beer bottle.”
“Suppose you dug that up,” Tabari continued. “You’d swear it was an inappropriate intrusion.” He gave the old man three pounds and said, “Get yourself some more beer.”
As they descended to the jeep Eliav said, “This is what we meant about your report, John. Within a few miles in modern Israel we find a 1964 house, a 1920, a 1300, and a cave dating back to who knows when? Yet side by side they exist, and it takes all four to represent our civilization. Don’t you think that in King David’s time Makor must have been equally varied?”
“I’m not sure your reasoning’s good,” Cullinane said cautiously. “Today we have so many more levels that might be held over from the past. After all, King David could have seen houses from only four or five different levels at most.”
“Granted. But the homogeneity
you write about probably didn’t exist,”
“Point’s made,” Cullinane admitted. Standing in the road he tried to summarize the trip. “In Akko, the new house …”
Tabari interrupted. “On our first day you oriented yourself by pointing west to Akko. Do you always start that way?”
The Irishman considered this for a moment, then said, “In Israel, yes.”
“Why?” Tabari asked.
“I don’t know,” Cullinane replied. After a moment he offered tentatively, “As a child I’d heard a good deal about Jesus,” and he pointed back over his shoulder to Galilee. “But the Holy Land never became real for me until I read about the Crusades. For weeks I went around making believe I was in the boat that brought Richard the Lion Heart to Acre.”
“Interesting,” Tabari said. “You visualized yourself coming ashore to save the Holy Land, so you’ve always moved from west to east.”
“For me, that’s the way Israel is.”
“Most curious,” Eliav said with restrained enthusiasm. “I’ve always seen it lying north to south. I’m Abraham wandering out of the north and seeing this marvelous land for the first time. Or I’m a Jew of King Solomon’s age, stationed up here and looking south toward Jerusalem.” He hesitated, then added, “I first saw Israel from the north, and its wonderful hills invited me southward as they must have done Abraham. It never occurred to me until just now that you could visualize it any other way.”
Tabari said, “During the War of 1948 I met an Arab from across the Jordan and he told me how excited he was when his unit invaded Palestine. Coming out of the desert and seeing our explosive richness … the greenness. His company had merely to march westward to the ocean and the land was theirs.”
“How do you see it?” Cullinane asked.
“Me?” Tabari asked in surprise. He had never considered the question before. Cautiously he continued, “I see it as if it had always been here, with me standing on it. No west, no east, no south. Just the land as far back as my family can remember. I could probably live in any of the four spots we’ve been in today and be reasonably happy.”
“Even in the cave?” Cullinane asked.
“I’d get rid of the goats.”
And the three scientists, each with such a different view of the land they were excavating, returned to Makor.
• • •
Gershom was a singer of the hills, a man who had tended his father-in-law’s sheep in the upland valleys where he had killed a man and had fled, leaving his family and his wife behind. He wore the plain sheepskin garment of a countryman and he arrived in Makor with no trade, no spare clothing, no tools and no money. He carried a small seven-stringed lyre made of fir wood trimmed with antique bronze and strung with twisted sheep’s gut, which now hung slack across the sounding board. He came seeking sanctuary from the brothers of the man he had slain and it had been his hope to reach the anonymity of Accho, but his strength had given out and his pursuers were bearing down upon him, for they rode donkeys while he had to make his way on foot.
He stumbled past the guards, gasping merely, “Sanctuary.” They pointed toward where the temple lay, then ran to inform the governor, who appeared in time to see the shepherd hurrying down the main street. As he disappeared to the left three dusty men on donkeys rode up the ramp and demanded entrance. “If you’re looking for the other one,” the governor said, “he reached the temple.”
The men were disgusted, and their sense of urgency vanished. Stiffly they dismounted, kicked their donkeys free to find their own shade, and followed the governor as he showed them the way to the temple. The building was intentionally kept small to avoid giving the priestly leadership of Jerusalem competition; it was built of a reddish uncut field stone and was quite plain, lacking even columns or imposing steps. Its two doors were of olive wood—thin strips nailed together with little art—and when the governor pushed them aside their stone hinges groaned. Inside was darkness, for the temple held no blazing windows or perpetual fires, but a few simple oil lamps did show the built-up levels, one after the other, terminating in a raised section upon which stood an altar of black basalt, well carved and decorated with the head of a bull which represented the sacrifices that were traditionally associated with such altars, though no animals had been offered in Makor for many years, that function being reserved for Jerusalem. The outstanding feature of the altar was a series of four horns which projected upward from each corner; through the centuries these had undergone such modification that except for their name, few in Makor would have known they represented horns, for they had become merely rounded corners of rock, but they had always held a special significance, and now as the murderer knelt on the topmost platform, his sheepskin falling carelessly about him and his kinnor thrown to one side, he clutched two of these horns.
“He’s taken sanctuary,” the governor said, pointing to the altar.
“We’ll wait,” the brothers said.
“We’re obligated to feed him,” the governor warned. “As long as he stays by the altar.”
“We’ll wait,” the brothers repeated.
“Not here,” the governor ordered.
“We’ll go outside.”
“Not within fifty cubits. King David established the law, not me.”
The three brothers said they understood and left the temple without speaking to the man who had murdered their brother. When they were gone the governor asked the fugitive what crime had been committed, and the man with the lyre replied casually, “Angry words … over nothing.”
“For that you killed a man?”
The kneeling man dropped one hand from the altar and pointed to a scar across his neck, a long, livid welt that had not yet healed. “For that I killed a man,” he repeated.
“What will you do?” the governor asked, indicating the three watchers outside. They had retired the stipulated fifty cubits and were asking townspeople for water.
“They’re hot-tempered,” the murderer said. “If they could catch me now, they’d kill me. In three days they’ll see how foolish this is and go home.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“They saw their brother cut me. I think they may even be pleased that I found sanctuary. Gives them the excuse they need.”
The governor was surprised at the cynical realism of the exhausted man, and with some doubts stationed four guards at the temple, charging them with the preservation of the fugitive’s life so long as he could grasp even one horn of the altar. This was a custom which the Hebrews of the desert had had to adopt when they moved into settled land, for blood feuds had ravaged the tribes, continuing through generations and causing the loss of many men who were needed as herdsmen and husbands. Moses himself had proposed a system whereby cities of refuge would be established to which accidental murderers could flee, achieving sanctuary merely by entering the city gates, but nothing had so far been accomplished in this respect. In the meantime, in any town, refuge was assured those who succeeded in grasping the horns of the altar, as Gershom now did.
“Feed him,” the governor directed the guards, and he was about to consult with the brothers concerning the fugitive’s story when shouts came from the northern wall of the town, and excited figures started running toward the governmental quarters. “What’s happened?” the governor called, and the messengers turned in their running to cry, “The tunnels have met!”
He hurried to the main shaft, at whose base he heard the shouting of the slaves, and excited hands wanted to lead him down the steep stairs so that he might see the penetration, but he was satisfied with their report. After a while Meshab the Moabite climbed out, exulting, and the governor greeted him as an equal. “Hoopoe told me that when this happened you would be a freedman,” the governor said.
“I am.”
“Are you returning to Moab?”
“I promised Hoopoe I’d help round out the tunnel.”
“That will please him. How did the two ends meet?”
Using his fore
fingers Meshab started with his elbows wide apart and slowly brought the fingertips toward each other. Even without words the gesture was dramatic, and the governor could sense the blind probing that had been involved. “At this point we could each hear the other side, and Hoopoe’s tunnel was slightly off line, but right in elevation. Mine was a little high.” He brought his fingertips together, not perfectly but showing his tunnel a little high and Hoopoe’s skewed to the north. Only a quarter of the two faces had met, and the nearness of the miss demonstrated what a miracle had occurred.
“We were fortunate,” the governor said, appreciating the drama.
“Hoopoe did it,” the Moabite replied, and the governor realized that this was not flattery.
“What do we do next?” he asked. During the months when it looked as if the project might fail he had shown no interest in the slaves burrowing under his town, but now that success was assured he was clever enough to see that it could be used to bring him to the attention of Jerusalem. Henceforth it would be “our tunnel.”
“The rest is easy,” the Moabite said, but before he could explain, Hoopoe came through the postern gate, dirty and happy, and Meshab deserted the governor, running to Hoopoe and embracing him as a brother, after which the governor called in to Hoopoe’s house, “Kerith, come and greet the victor!” She appeared in a shimmering blue robe which her husband had brought her from Accho, which it had reached by boat from Greece, and as a pendant she wore the braided glass rope. She understood the happiness of the two men and kissed her husband warmly, whereupon he directed her, “You must also kiss my brother Meshab, who is today a freedman.” Gravely Kerith kissed the former slave, and he had to bite his lip to keep his face from trembling, or perhaps even from showing tears. He grasped the hands of his two good friends and said, “You are indeed of my family.”
To Hoopoe the governor said, “Tomorrow we start paying him a salary,” but to Meshab he said, “Why not accept circumcision and become one of us?” As the governor spoke he gestured toward the temple with his right hand, and to those who were watching, the movement was a subtle invitation, for his hand indicated the many different peoples who had come to make up the Hebrew population of Makor: the men from Cyprus, who had accepted circumcision in order to marry local girls; the Hittites, who had made a secure place for themselves after years of slavery; the Babylonian refugees; the clever Egyptians, who had stayed behind with local families when their empire crumbled; the dark-skinned Africans and the red-headed Edomites. All were now legally Hebrews and there was no reason why a Moabite should not join them.
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