The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Now, in the month of Abib in the spring of the year 966 B.C.E., when spring rains marked the day and floods filled the wadi, when barley was ripening in the fields and anemones and cyclamen were reappearing along the swamp, nodding to that strange flower which people of another religion would later call jack-in-the-pulpit, in this month of Abib when the rebuilding of the walls had ended, Hoopoe walked home along the curving street in some dismay, and when his wife greeted him at the door of their home he fell heavily onto the earth-and-tile bench.

  “I’m worried, Kerith,” he said.

  “I saw your new walls and they seem very solid.” She brought him some barley cakes and a drink of hot wine mixed with honey, and he relaxed.

  “When I was inspecting them today I looked down upon the richness of this town. In back of this street, the best dye vats in the north. Outside the walls, the resting places for the camel caravans. And these good houses. Kerith, this town is a temptation to all our enemies to the west. It’s the gateway to Jerusalem.”

  “But isn’t that why you built the wall?” she asked.

  “The wall will hold them off. Of that I’m sure. But do you know how we’ll lose this town?”

  She knew. Like all the young women of Makor she had often placed her water jug upon her head and walked through the postern gate and down the dark waterwall to the well. One day during the siege four years ago, when she was pregnant with her youngest son, she had made the dangerous journey and had heard Phoenician warriors trying to pierce the fragile protecting walls, and the people of Makor knew then that if the Phoenicians had brought their siege engines against the well instead of trying to reduce the old town walls they would have captured Makor. It was illogical to suppose that in the next invasion, when the new town walls would appear so formidable, the invaders would again fail to hit upon the obvious strategy of knocking down the waterwall. Kerith well knew that whenever the Phoenicians really wanted to capture Makor they could, and she acknowledged that her husband’s new wall represented not security but an additional hazard; but in the tentative discussions that would recur in the weeks ahead she would refuse to admit these facts because of the complex reasons which now kept her silent. She loved her dumpy little engineer and supported him against men like the governor who viewed him with amusement, but she also knew that if Hoopoe launched some extensive new building project in Makor she would be held prisoner in the town and thus her dream of the future would be destroyed.

  Therefore it was with apprehension that she heard him say, “I’ve made up my mind. The Moabite and I have a plan that will save this town. Today the governor wouldn’t listen, but tomorrow he must.”

  Convinced that she was doing right, Kerith placed her hand on Hoopoe’s arm and said quietly, “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Jabaal. If the governor doesn’t agree with you, don’t argue. You can find work elsewhere.”

  Her words soft and reasonable, her voice low and comforting had an almost frightening effect on Hoopoe, for he understood exactly what they meant, and for a fleeting moment he was prepared to sit down with her now and to speak frankly of all problems confronting them; but so many significant ideas were involved that he shied away. He loved Kerith too much to disturb her before his plans were formulated, so he finished his sweet wine and carried a roll of scraped leather into another room, where he stayed up late drawing rough sketches of his scheme to save Makor, and in the morning, after he had started his slaves upon their work, he reported to the governor’s office, where he told that official, “Sir, now that the wall is completed I grow more worried about our water supply.”

  “I asked you to mend the waterwall,” the governor said. “I inspected it the other day and your Moabite did an excellent job on the repairs.”

  “Sir! It fools no one. Fifty Phoenicians could knock it down.”

  “Last time they overlooked it.”

  “Next time they won’t.”

  “What do you want to do?” the governor asked. “Have your slaves build a new set of walls?”

  “I have a much different plan,” Hoopoe said.

  The governor laughed. Placing his hand on the shoulder of the fat builder he said condescendingly, “I understand your problem, Hoopoe. You’ve finished the town walls and you’re afraid that if you don’t start something right now Jerusalem will take away your slaves. Isn’t that it?”

  “I’m concerned not about slaves but about the safety of my town.” He corrected himself. “Your town.”

  The little man had spoken with such gravity that the governor had to listen. “Well, what is it?”

  Hoopoe gulped from nervousness and made the first formal presentation of his daring scheme. Using his hands as great shovels he said, “Here in the center of town, inside the walls, we must dig a shaft almost as big as this room straight down through rubble and solid rock for ninety cubits.” The governor gasped. “At the bottom we begin to dig a tunnel that will take us far under the town walls and out to the well.”

  “How long a tunnel?”

  “Nearly two hundred cubits, and high enough for women to walk in. Then we bury the well under mound after mound of rock, and we are secure from any besieger.” He moved his right hand back and forth to indicate women walking in safety through the subterranean passageway.

  To the governor the concept was so fantastic that he could only laugh. He was unable to visualize a hole almost as big as his room, sinking so far into the earth; and as for the idea of a tunnel burrowing through solid rock and somehow striking the well, he knew this to be folly. “Hoopoe, we need no more digging around here,” he told his engineer. “Get yourself a farm outside the wall and dig for worms.” His joke appealed to him, so he bobbed his head up and down like a hoopoe bird and added, “For worms! You understand?”

  Hoopoe hid his resentment. “On one point you’re right, sir. We should start this before they take away our slaves.”

  “See! I knew that’s what worried you.”

  “It does. We have a trained team now. The Moabite is the best foreman we’ve ever had in Makor, and the others make a fine unit.”

  “I’m sure Jerusalem will take the slaves,” the governor said. Showing his engineer to the door he bobbed his head up and down several times. “You go dig worms.” And he closed the door on the preposterous idea of digging a hole through the heart of the town.

  Hoopoe did not go to the workings but wandered home, where he laid before Kerith his intricate plan: shaft, tunnel, burial of the well; and she irritated him by saying that she was sure the plan wouldn’t work. “How could anyone start from the bottom of a shaft, dig a sloping tunnel, and hope to find a thing as small as a well?”

  “That’s my job.”

  She laughed. “How will you see underground? Like a mole?”

  He was weary from trying to explain ideas to people who could not visualize them, so he kissed his wife good-bye and climbed onto the ramparts back of his home; and the mound on which Makor stood had now grown so high that from the walls Hoopoe could look westward and see Accho, where Phoenician ships from many ports brought the men and the riches which would one day be thrown against Makor. How far away the tempting city looked to one who had seen it only as a boy; how close it seemed to a man who understood the power and cupidity of the Phoenicians.

  In deepening gloom he walked along the ramparts to the north edge of town, where he studied the doomed waterwall as it left the postern gate and ran to the well, but he did not spend much time worrying about that obsolete system which had rarely impeded a determined adversary. He looked instead down into the wadi and up the opposite slopes until he reached a point on the mountainside above which stood the monolith to Baal. He satisfied himself that on the mountain he could reach the point he sought. “I know it’s possible,” he growled. And then he looked again at the waterwall, and in its place he visualized the combination of shaft and tunnel that would comprise his system. Imagining it to be already in operation, he looked westward at Accho and thought: When the Phoe
nicians do strike at us again they will find no well to attack.

  But for some weeks it looked as if there would be no system of tunnels, for when Hoopoe returned to the governor’s office, fortified with new enthusiasm, he accomplished nothing. The governor had won Jerusalem’s respect by sending surplus income to the capital rather than asking for assistance, and he had no intention of reversing this process. He would not divert Makor’s wealth into a bunch of hoopoe holes struck here and there in the ground. “If I took this plan to Jerusalem,” he predicted, “they’d hoot me out of the capital.”

  Hoopoe became angry. “How could you take the plan to Jerusalem? You don’t know what it is.”

  “I can recognize waste without seeing plans,” the governor replied, and a servant showed the engineer to the door.

  In order not to lose his well-co-ordinated team of slaves, Hoopoe put them to work resurfacing the temple square. When this was done he started them on two additional silos for wheat storage, and as the slaves dug deep into the earth of Makor, waterproofing the sides with lime plaster to keep out insects and seepage, he often climbed inside to inspect the work; and when his round face and black beard appeared at the openings as he came back out, townspeople would cry, “What you looking for, Hoopoe? Worms?”

  But in the evenings, when his slaves were dismissed, Hoopoe used to go to the northern wall and continue the calculations that would form the basis of his work if the water system were ever authorized. Judging from the relative terrains he deduced that he would have to sink his main shaft from a point inside the postern gate through some forty feet of rubble that comprised the mound, then ninety feet below that through solid rock, at which level he would begin his sloping tunnel, which would run for a distance of about two hundred and eighty feet to the well. The finished system would thus require about four hundred and ten feet of boring, mostly through solid rock. “But in the end we’d have a system that no enemy could touch.” He could see women walking down the stairs of the shaft, bearing empty water jars on their heads, then reaching the tunnel and walking along an easy slope to the buried well, impervious to enemies that might rage above. Even to the imagination Hoopoe’s system imparted a sense of security, so one evening toward the end of Abib he finished his master drawing on the leather and began scratching working details onto a set of small clay tablets.

  It was frustrating to have no one at hand with whom he could discuss his revolutionary plan—the governor could not imagine what abstract lines meant and Kerith was hampered by her initial visualization of Hoopoe as a mole digging blindly in the earth—so late that night he rolled up his leather and left the town, heading for the slave camp outside the walls. It was a ghastly place, the last way station of futility, where prisoners from many nations were herded in foul pens and fed on slops. Hebrew guards ringed the encampment, ready to kill those who tried to escape, and the slaves dragged out their lives in the misery of forced labor until after a few cruel years they died. Only two justifications could be found for the ugly system: when Hebrews were captured by Egyptians or Amalekites they were treated the same way; and from these particular slave pits there was a steady flow of men into positions of responsibility or even freedom, because Hoopoe despised the system and did what he could to liberate men from it. Many of the present citizens of Makor had started their local lives in this foul camp and in response to the engineer’s pleading had converted to Yahweh and had won a new life.

  On this night the engineer ignored the ordinary pens festering with rats and sought the worst part of the slave area, the walls within the walls where dangerous prisoners were kept, and there, lying on a rush mat, he found a tall, clean-shaven, rugged man some years older than himself. He was well known in the town as Meshab the Moabite, a man of extraordinary fortitude, captured by King David in one of his wars against Moab, and he was the most resourceful and intelligent of the slaves. For the building of the wall he had served as Hoopoe’s foreman, and from his rotting bed he now raised himself, half insolently, on one elbow to greet his superior. The faltering old lamp that Hoopoe carried showed the man’s strong face against the filth, and the engineer said, “Meshab, the time has come to build the water system.”

  “It can be done,” the big slave grunted, “if you solve one problem.”

  “We face many. Which one?”

  “The shaft we can dig. The tunnel we can dig.”

  “Then you’re not afraid of the rock?” Hoopoe asked.

  “You get us iron tools from the Phoenicians,” he growled, “we’ll cut the rock. But when we stand hidden at the foot of the shaft, how will we know where to start our digging to reach the well?”

  Hoopoe laughed nervously. “My wife asked the same question.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said, ‘That’s my job.’ ”

  “You have a plan?” the slave asked, sitting upright among his foul rushes.

  “When I was a boy we used to recite an old Canaanite proverb: ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’ ” The flickering light threw deep shadows across the bald head and composed features of the engineer, disclosing the face of one who even as a child had wondered about the natural world. “ ‘The way of a ship in the midst of the sea,’ ” he repeated softly.

  “What have we to do with ships?” Meshab asked, for he had never seen the sea nor the ships that go upon it.

  “One day years ago when I was in Accho with my father, we walked along the sea front and watched as a small ship … Meshab, it was so small it had no right to be upon the waves. Rocks lurked everywhere and there were shoals, but somehow this little ship from Cyprus picked its way exactly into harbor. How?”

  “Magic?”

  “I thought so, but when I asked the captain he laughed and pointed to three flags rising from the tops of buildings far inland. ‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘The range,’ he said, and he explained that a sailor lost at sea, if he watches those flags and keeps them in line, will be on a secure course to his anchorage.”

  The two men sat silent while bugs, attracted by the lamp, whirred in the night and snores came from filthy mattings where exhausted slaves were sleeping. Then Hoopoe said, “The other day …” He stopped, considered his words and started over. “I stood on the north wall by the postern gate. I could see where the well was. And looking up the mountainside I could see a spot at which we could put a flag …” He paused. “No, we’d need two flags.”

  He had scarcely spoken the word two when Meshab caught his wrist. “We’d have a range. We could see the flags from inside the walls and they’d control our direction.”

  Excitedly Hoopoe placed his clay lamp on the ground and tried to clear away a small area on which to spread his leather, but even the earth was contaminated, so Meshab, with a bold swipe of his right arm laid bare an area, and in flickering light Hoopoe showed his slave the well, and the mountain behind. Poking his finger at a spot halfway up the slope he said, “If we put our first flag here, and our second here …”

  “Our third, our fourth …” With great jabs of his finger Meshab indicated the fifth and sixth flags, placing the last on the roof of the governor’s quarters. “It would work! We’d have a range!”

  “You have seen into my mind,” Hoopoe said in a solemn whisper, and the two men were so tantalized with the project that they could not wait till morning and wanted to climb the mountain that night to check their theory, but at the gate leading from the camp, guards stopped them, warning Hoopoe that Meshab was a dangerous prisoner who must not leave the compound.

  “He is my foreman, and I need him,” Hoopoe replied.

  “He has killed many men,” the guard said, but Hoopoe took him through the gates on his own recognizance and they entered the moonless night.

  They crossed the road to the walls of Makor but did not enter the zi
gzag gate. Instead, they circled to the north where the waterwall made a small circle, indicating that the well lay beneath. Climbing to the roof they stuck there a small cloth which would be visible from a distance. They then left the well and started to climb the mountain of Baal, halting now and then to look behind them, and when they reached a spot which put them well above the level of the town they stopped to review their position, and the Moabite said, “Here we put our first flag. Let’s wait a little and the moon will rise.”

  They sat in darkness and studied as much of the town as they could see in the flickering lights which burned in some areas like distant stars on a murky night. The slave was much larger than Hoopoe, more powerful, and he could easily have killed the engineer and fled westward to Phoenicia; instead, he sat beside his friend and said, “Now that we’ve seen the town from here I’m convinced we can do it.”

  When the three-quarter moon rose over the Galilean hills, the water-wall stood out clearly, a sharp, straight line leading from the postern gate to the well, and the two planners maneuvered themselves until they stood in a direct line with that wall. Hoopoe said, “See how the line projects itself across the town till it intersects the roof of the governor’s house.”

  “That’s where we’ll put the sixth flag,” Meshab said, and he could visualize that unfaltering range which the engineers would use to maintain their orientation when digging the first deep shaft, but he could also visualize himself at the bottom of that shaft, about to start the tunnel toward the unseen, unknown well. “There’s the hard part,” he growled. “From the bottom of the shaft, how can we see the range?”