The Source

by James A. Michener

  “Get Cullinane back here at once,” he called as he stuck his dusty, dirty head from the minute tunnel.

  “Find something?” Eliav asked nonchalantly.

  “Not the well …” Tabari held out his hands and in them he carried a chunk of breccia containing a human bone, some sharp-pointed flints and a substantial deposit of charred fragments. “I think I’ve struck the edge of a large cave that had its opening on the face of the wadi.”

  With controlled excitement Eliav studied the find and said, “Let’s get a girl in there to sketch it.”

  “I touched only what my pick broke off,” Tabari explained. “The main part is encased in solid breccia, but I did see something that seemed indicative. The corpse was buried with these flints. It wasn’t an accidental burial.”

  Eliav raised his eyebrows. “This could go back thirty thousand years,” he suggested.

  “That would be my guess,” Tabari agreed cautiously. “And that’s not all. Right beyond the cave … It’s all filled up, you understand. I thought I was running into a rock that echoed. As if on the other side it were empty.”

  “Unlikely,” Eliav replied.

  “I thought so too. But go on in and take a sounding. I’ll call the photographer.”

  So Ilan Eliav wormed his way through the low tunnel until he came to the end; and there, to the right or northern side, he saw imbedded in the hard breccia the cache which Tabari had come upon. His first thought was: It’ll take two years to excavate this properly. He felt a pang of regret to think that he would not be there to help; but then his imaginative mind started to dress in living flesh the ends of bone which projected from the breccia, and he wondered who this ancient thing—this man, perhaps—had been. What hungers had he known, what security from realizing that when he died he would carry with him stone beads? How had he gone finally to earth and with what immortal longings? Here in the darkness of the tunnel thousands upon thousands of years later, another man, much like him perhaps, still wearing his flesh for a few more inquisitive years, met him face-to-kneebone and knew only that there was mystery.

  Eliav crawled a few paces beyond the imbedded skeleton and found himself facing the end wall of which Tabari had spoken. Using a fragment of the breccia which had held the bones he tapped on the wall ahead. In some strange way it echoed. He was convinced it echoed. He therefore tapped the side walls and the roof and the floor on which he knelt, and from them there returned a different sound. He tapped the end wall again, and there could be no doubt: perhaps it wasn’t really an echo, but it was something different.

  He reached back for Tabari’s pick, left where the important bones had been found, and with it tapped cautiously at the facing semi-rock. The point of the pick dug in easily, and when it was pried backward, broke away a small chunk of the soft rock. Carefully he placed the rock behind him for the basket men to haul out, and with another cramped blow chipped away some more. On the third strike he was startled by the clarity of the echo sound, and he began to dig with some force, throwing the broken rock over his shoulder. His lantern was now obscured by the debris which he was accumulating, and he knew that he should stop to clear it, but he was gripped by a most intense excitement. Swinging his pick with un-archaeological vigor he felt its point bite through a thin layer of semi-rock and then leap forward into nothingness.

  He began to perspire copiously, even though the tunnel was cool and he was lean, but he mastered his excitement and became again the professional archaeologist. He left the pick where it was and started slowly to back away, crawling over his own rubble. When he reached the spot where the bones projected he stopped and began flattening the rubble out, piece by piece, until his lantern again threw light on the face of the tunnel, from which the pick suspended at a curious angle. When the tunnel was again in order he returned to the pick and gently rotated it in various directions. Its hidden point contacted nothing and he was tempted to withdraw it and strike again, opening a real hole into the mysterious void, but he felt that this would be unfair to Tabari. He therefore left the pick in position, placed the lantern so that it illuminated not the pick but the projecting bones, and started the crawl back to Trench B.

  When he got there Tabari had the girl artist and the photographer waiting, but Eliav in a businesslike manner called for a basket man to go in first and haul out the rubble. “And don’t touch the pick,” he warned. When the man was gone he instructed the artist and the photographer to get the most complete data on the breccia-held bones, and also to catch the details of the pick as it pierced the end wall. When the briefing was completed he took Tabari aside and said, “I dug out a little more of the end wall, and on the last blow your pick cracked through a thin facing of the soft rock. It struck emptiness.”

  “You’re sure?” Tabari asked.

  “I tested it in different directions. Nothing. But I left it for you.”

  “A cave? A well?”

  “I don’t even have an opinion,” Eliav said.

  At lunchtime the girl who had crawled in to do the sketching took one of Cullinane’s cards and drew the probable disposition of the skeleton embedded in the breccia. There was hushed excitement as the card circulated, and Tabari asked, “Where’d you dredge up the date 70,000 B.C.E.?”

  “Educated guess,” the artist explained. “The flints in the breccia seem to correlate with ones shown for such dating in Garrod and Stekelis.”

  When the matter had been well discussed Eliav ventured the opinion that carbon dating would probably place the skeleton at no earlier than 30,000 B.C.E. and Tabari supported him. “Our bones aren’t going to be as old as those found in the Mount Carmel caves by Dorothy Garrod,” he predicted.

  “You think the breccia indicates a cave?” the photographer asked.

  “We’ll know better after lunch,” Eliav assured the group.

  “What’s the mystery about the pick?” the photographer asked.

  Tabari pushed back his food and leaned forward on the table, whereupon talking ceased and the kibbutzniks drew closer, for it was their tell, too. “When I found the bones,” he said, “I did a little more digging and thought I heard an empty echo. When Dr. Eliav went down to check the bones he did some digging on his own. His last blow …” Tabari swung an imaginary pick. “On the other side … emptiness.”

  “Another cave?”

  “Let’s consider that for a moment,” the Arab said. “If it had originally been a cave, say, fifty thousand years ago, and the entrance was filled in, wouldn’t it now be filled in, too? How could there possibly be any empty space left?”

  “He’s probably right,” Eliav confirmed, and the kibbutzniks dissected the theory for some time, concluding in the end that it could not have been a cave.

  “Not an original cave,” one of the kibbutzniks agreed, “but why not a dug cave, like the ones Kathleen Kenyon found outside the walls at Jericho?”

  “Let’s consider that too,” Tabari said. “In your opinion, what would be the oldest date we might logically assume for such a dug cave … one that wasn’t now filled in with breccia?”

  “Kenyon’s graves were 2000 B.C.E.,” the kibbutznik volunteered. “And they were certainly not filled in. So ours could be … what? Maybe 3000 B.C.E. at the most.”

  Eliav listened with pleasure. In Israel everyone was an archaeologist, and the kibbutznik had his dates right, but Tabari pointed out, “You’re a little early. Remember that Jericho is very dry and we’re very wet. In wet areas caves fill in much faster.”

  “Then what is the empty space?” the kibbutznik demanded.

  Tabari thought for some time, then said cautiously, “Since some of you want to work here for the next eight or ten years, let’s try some pure deduction. I’ll tell you categorically that I’ve ruled out caves. Now what else might it be?” There was silence. “What major component of a tell are we lacking here at Makor?”

  “Water supply,” a kibbutznik suggested.

  “Correct.” He still pronounced it koe-rect. �
�And what does that suggest?”

  “The source was either at the base of the tell, which at Makor seems unlikely because of the bedrock. Or it was outside, as at Megiddo and Gezer.”

  “Correct. And where does that lead us?”

  “Judging by what happened at those two places, sometime around 1100 B.C.E. they dug a vertical shaft through the tell, then a horizontal tunnel to the well.”

  “Correct. And which have we hit?”

  “If it were the vertical shaft,” a girl volunteered, “it would surely have been filled solid in three thousand years. Therefore it’s got to be the horizontal.”

  “Correct, but what if I tell you that the horizontal would also be packed solid in that time?”

  This stumped the kibbutzniks and there was silence. The English photographer asked, “Is your assumption accurate? Would it be packed solid?”

  “Correct.”

  General Teddy Reich’s daughter asked in a very small voice, “But we know there was a Crusader castle on the tell. They had to have water to withstand sieges. Couldn’t they have redug the tunnel? About a thousand years ago?”

  “I wish I could say ‘correct,’ because that’s my theory, too,” Tabari laughed, “and I pray that we’re both right.”

  The meal ended and he rose casually, sauntering out to Trench B with an insouciance he did not feel. Everyone who could get away from work tagged along with equal casualness but flushed with excitement, and kibbutzniks in the fields, sensing that something important was about to happen at their tell, quit their work to become archaeologists. At the site the Arab offered Eliav the lantern, saying, “You found the opening. Go ahead.”

  The Jew would not accept. “It was your deduction.” He reviewed for the crowd Tabari’s shrewd guess regarding the sloping rock. “And it’s your deduction about the tunnel. Besides,” he added, “there may be one hell of a drop on the other side.” He led Tabari to the small tunnel and stepped away.

  In this manner the latest scion of the Family of Ur crept back into the earth from which his prodigious people had sprung. He went past the bedrock on which the Canaanites had built; past the sixteenth and seventeenth levels where his ancestors had come upon the pre-primitive settlement which they had destroyed around the year 13,000 B.C.E.; down past the eighteenth level of men who had developed the concept of religion; to the nineteenth and twentieth levels where women had discovered that their dead could be buried with affection; and on to the face of the rock from which the pick handle projected. He was breathing hard, tense with the feel of his ancient earth, and he took the handle gently, twisting it in various directions. Eliav was right. The hidden tip was free.

  Harshly he pulled the handle backward, dislodging a large chunk of semi-rock which started to come toward him, then teetered and disappeared in the opposite direction. Ominously, its fall made no sound. With four vigorous blows of the pick, using it head-on as a ram rather than as a pry, he knocked in the face of the wall and found himself with a jagged hole leading into nothingness.

  His lips were parched and his breathing forced as he grasped the lantern, and thrusting it before him, crawled halfway into the opening. At first his eyes could see nothing, for the falling rocks had aroused an ancient dust which obscured all, but as it gradually subsided he saw that his prognostication had been correct. He had come upon a long tunnel cut through the limestone accretion. To left and right the partially filled tunnel ran, its beautifully arched ceiling still showing the careful work completed in the year 963 B.C.E. by his ancestor, Jabaal the Hoopoe, and later reworked in the year 1105 C.E. by his other ancestor, Saliq ibn Tewfik, called Luke. The falling stones had made no sound because they had dropped into soft dust which had been filtering into the tunnel since that April day in 1291 C.E., when the Mamelukes had killed Count Volkmar and had started the destruction of the Crusader castle.

  To the right or to the left? Which way lay the well? Stuck halfway through the opening he began patiently reconstructing his orientation, and he had such a keen sense of the land, even when lost in its bosom, that he could deduce that the well must lie to the right, or north, of the accidental junction he had made with the tunnel; so he eased himself through the opening and started lifting his feet slowly, quietly, so as not to disturb the dust, moving toward the phantasmagoric darkness which dissolved like the passage of time as his lantern brought light where for seven centuries there had been no light.

  Through those years the dust, thick and silent, had sifted down, and now it rose revitalized by the touch of a living foot, only to fall back as the unaccustomed beams flashed upon his ankles, and at last he came to a silent place where things ended, dust and footfall alike; and as he looked down into the darkness he could not estimate how far below him lay the water, but he dislodged a fragment of the roof and dropped it. After a while water splashed. The well of the Family of Ur was found, that sweet source from which all had sprung.

  In the days that followed, Tabari and Eliav tried several times to acquaint Cullinane in Jerusalem with the stunning developments, but the telephone operators were unable to track him down, so on their own initiative the men strung lights which enabled them to work at the well, and after digging about the rim and finding only fragments of Crusader pottery—water jars broken by careless Christian women seven hundred years before—Tabari happened to notice in the wall, slightly above eye level, a discoloration of soil which previous visitors had failed to find, for they had been Canaanites or Jewish women like Gomer or Crusaders, and not archaeologists. But on a hunch Tabari began digging into the darkened earth and thus uncovered the original level of the well, finding a few charred stones on which men had sat around one of the world’s first intentional fires, and it was among these stones that Eliav found imbedded the item that was to give Tell Makor its prehistoric significance: a piece of flint the size of a large flat hand, shaped into an obvious weapon, slightly convex on the sides and sharpened along the pointed end. It was a hand axe dating back some two hundred thousand years to that nebulous period when beings walked half-erect and hunted animals with simple rocks, cutting the flesh apart with precious hand axes like the one the Englishman was now photographing in situ.

  “My God!” he cried. “What’s that?” His flash bulbs had disclosed in the darkness a monstrous shining object, as big as a plate, serrated in many ridges. He had found a petrified elephant’s molar, relic of a great beast slaughtered at the water hole when the climate of Israel was different and the wadi a deep river.

  To call them men—those walking creatures that had killed the elephant—was in some ways repugnant, for they could neither farm, nor fish, nor tend fruit trees, nor tame a dog, nor build a house, nor make clothes, nor even form words with their apelike lips; but neither could they be called animals, for there were these things which they could do: they could make a tool; they could grasp it in a hand; and by grunts and shoves they could organize a team and plan a system for killing a huge thing like an elephant … and for these reasons they were men.

  When Cullinane finally returned to Makor he wore a black patch over his left eye, which he explained merely by growling, “Hospital.” Then he added, “The nurses told me you were trying to phone, so I knew you’d struck something great, but there was nothing I could do about it.” He climbed down to the first cache of bones, then on to the well and the charred stones. It was more than he had hoped for, more than any archaeologist had a right to expect. When he crawled back to sunlight he assembled the group and said, “We’ll be working here for years, and when Ilan Eliav becomes prime minister of Israel, say, about 1980, we’ll invite him to deliver the closing-down address.” The kibbutzniks cheered, after which he said, holding aloft the hand axe, “Whenever you think Israel is moving too slowly, remember that our ancestors used implements like this for more than two hundred thousand years before they reached the next big invention. Small flints shaped to a point that could be used in subtler weapons.” The first year of the dig was ending in a blaze of accomplis
hment.

  When he was alone with the staff he said, “Tomorrow we must airmail carbon samples from Level XIX to Sweden and America. And I want everybody to pray that they prove out to some date before 30,000 B.C.E.”

  A moment of silence followed, after which the photographer ventured, “There’s got to be one stinker in every show. Where’d you get the shiner, boss?”

  Cullinane did not laugh. “It was Saturday morning and I was riding in a taxi to an informal meeting with the minister of finance. About getting our spare dollars cleared for transfer to Chicago. And suddenly out of hiding came a gang of boys and young men in fur caps, long coats and curls about their ears, screaming at us ‘Shabbos’ and hurling rocks—not stones, rocks. The taxi driver shouted, ‘Duck,’ but I didn’t catch the Hebrew soon enough, and by the time he repeated his warning I had taken one hell of a rock right in my eye. The doctors thought I might lose it.”

  “I didn’t read about it in the paper,” Eliav said, half defensively.

  “The government wanted no publicity. The cab driver said it was nothing unusual. Orthodox Jews insisting that no vehicle move on the streets of Israel during Shabbat.”

  “So they’ve started the stoning business again?” Eliav groaned.

  “I almost lost my eye. And the police made no arrests. They say that when they do the rabbis fight with them, pointing out that the Talmud condones the stoning of Jews who break Shabbat.”

  “It’s your problem,” Tabari said to Eliav. “You’re in the government now.”

  “Not quite,” the Jew argued. “But when I am I’ll do what I can to halt this Mickey Mouse stuff.”

  “This what?” Cullinane asked.

  “A bad phrase I picked up,” Eliav explained. “I’ll have to drop it now.”

  “That Shabbat the young hoodlums broke lots of taxi windows,” Cullinane said. “The taxi men are becoming afraid to drive on Saturday.”

  “That’s what the religious group is after,” Eliav explained. “They argue that Israel can exist only if it goes back to the laws of the Torah … in every detail.”