A Long Way to Shiloh

by Lionel Davidson

  I went to sleep. He was in the mood for a chat and I seemed to have been hearing a lot of his voice lately.

  I woke briefly at Beersheba (where Tanya had to pick up stores), to find the unseemly mess of a couple of years before but more of it; and found that Agrot was disposed to enlarge on its growth problems, and so went to sleep again.

  When I finally came to we were chugging up a steep incline in the rightly-named Judean wilderness and the sun was striking hard off the lion-coloured rock. A hot breeze blew. I took my jacket off and lit a cigarette and looked around. A place of jackals and prophets, very old, very dry, very dead. On all sides the jagged peaks and castle-like rock formations stood in the canyons; silent petrified cities under the blue sky. I looked at my watch. Half past ten. A couple of hundred yards behind, the other jeep laboured in a cloud of dust out of the gulch from which we’d just, apparently, emerged.

  Agrot, beside me, seemed to have gone into a slight trance, hands clasped in his lap, eyes narrowed.

  I said, ‘Good morning.’

  ‘I like this place,’ he said softly, not looking at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could live here.’

  ‘That would be carrying enthusiasm too far.’

  ‘I mean it,’ he said in the same tones of trance. ‘I truly love it. I could live here in a cave and be happy.’

  ‘Drinking the mountain dew.’

  ‘Pooh, there’s water here. There’s water all under here.’

  ‘How do you get at it?’

  ‘Drill for it. There’s everything here – phosphates, minerals of all kinds, oil probably. Seek and ye shall find.’

  ‘Would you still like it when everybody’d sought and found?’

  He blinked and came out of his trance and lit himself a cigarette. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s the problem, of course. Wait till you see what Teitleman has done at Barot. He found water there. He finds everything, that bastard. There’s a great lake of it miles under the rock. Tahal, the water people, said there wasn’t. He said there was. He got together money and he found it. Now nobody can do enough for him. He sends water down to the Nafta gasfields at Zohar, they send him back gas. With the gas he has free power for his generators. He’s building everything, including an hotel with a lagoon – a lagoon in Beduin country.’

  ‘Very convenient for the Beduin.’

  ‘They have a need for Teitleman’s lagoon, of course,’ Agrot said, drawing quickly at his cigarette, ‘like I have a need for Teitleman himself. You know the Beduin.’

  ‘Nice people.’

  ‘Beautiful people, wonderful people. Give a Bedu his camel for milk and an onion to eat – and he lives. He can live on nothing. A magnificent, hard, enduring creature. What does he care if he’s in Israel, Jordan? He has the rock, the sky – this. He wants nothing more. He is my brother, the Bedu.’

  Just then we saw one, a rather old one, sitting in a dry wadi with a camel and actually eating an onion. Agrot nodded to his brother. The Bedu nodded back. We ground slowly past. No word and no smile accompanied the communication but both seemed satisfied. I’d seen it before, this affinity for the starker qualities of land and person in the Agrots of Israel. Arabism isn’t confined to elderly romantics in the British Foreign Office; but it certainly seemed a bit more natural here. And the contemplation of it, fortunately, kept Agrot quiet. He remained quiet till we reached Barot.

  *

  You can’t, I suppose, as a private capitalist, make much of a show in a couple of years against a wilderness of rock that’s been quietly petrifying for several million; but Teitleman, as Agrot had indicated, was certainly doing his best. An unpleasing array of aluminium workers’ huts marked the limit of his industrial operations. In a largish shallow excavation several bulldozers were noisily at work around the almost completed structure of a rock-crushing plant. An aerial railway had been erected to carry the phosphatic ore from a nearby mountain of it, and on the ground a train of wedge-shaped trucks stood on a turntable under a chute to collect the finished product. A small section of double-track rail connected the turntable with a loading point for motorized carriers, which in turn was connected with the road. It was this road, in its lower section, that Teitleman had closed. He was building a new fork from it to connect with his further operations that extended for the next couple of miles to the east.

  Agrot pointed them out as we hit the new road and cruised smoothly along it. There was a fertilizer plant; a number of prepared sites for a small chemical complex; a number of unprepared sites allocated, Agrot said, for an extravagant dream of Teitleman’s, a factory garden city, no less; a housing estate in process of construction; and then – the fount from which all this stemmed – Teitleman’s well.

  Wells do not have to be big to have significance in a wilderness. Teitleman’s well was not big, but it was quite awesome in its significance. A small bath house or temple housed its mysteries in multi-coloured marble; and this Teitleman had surrounded, as a kind of oblation or testimonial to its potency, with a border of shrubs, well-watered and growing with maniacal fury. In a large paved compound an intricate assembly of pipes and pumping apparatus directed the water to its various destinations, south to the Zohar gasfields and the National Water Carrier, west to his industrial operations, and east to his greatest pride and joy – the Hotel Camphire and the Camphire Lagoon.

  ‘Why Camphire?’ I said as we brought in view the astonishing edifice. It towered eighteen storeys high, a slender column of glass and unpolished marble sprouting from a broader bulbous base like an enormous fertility symbol.

  ‘Teitleman had a song in his heart,’ Agrot said. ‘The Song of Songs. You’ll remember the poet speaks of “pleasant fruits and camphire, in a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters”. Teitleman is providing it to the last item. Over there on both sides of the tel is the site of his garden with fountains. And here we have the living waters – it’s to be an aereated lagoon. The hotel is actually in the middle of it. He’s got a hydro in there and a Turkish bath, even a mikveh – a ritual bath for women. Also a bowling alley, a cinema, an observatory, four restaurants, two ballrooms and a synagogue. And from his Hanging Gardens on the roof you’ll be able to see the Dead Sea together with the Mountains of Moab on the other side. He believes in making the desert bloom, does Teitleman. What can you do with such a man?’

  The question admitted of ready answer for at that moment Teitleman himself materialized, like some pantomime fairy on cue – and was almost done to death. He seemed to spring out of a crevice at the side of the road, missing the braking jeep by an inch. The crevice turned out to be a section of the lagoon, as yet dry, the walls of which Teitleman had been inspecting with a brigade of architects and foremen.

  ‘Ah, Agrot!’ he said, and came forward, no whit disturbed by his close escape, one cotton-gloved hand extended.

  The inspirer of these constructional marvels was not himself designed on the grand scale. He was a small man, very small, and his bow-tie and glasses were very big; but there was an overall neatness and completeness about his specification that made up for the lack of inches. A certain stony greyness about the face told of a stoical quality in Teitleman, of vicissitudes endlessly endured; so that despite his grey city suit he did not, among his sweat-streaked and begrimed entourage, look a dude. He looked a dangerous little bastard.

  ‘You didn’t need to come – we could have done it on the phone. Never mind, I’ll show you,’ he said to Agrot, and in a trice, uninvited, had sprung into the jeep.

  ‘Almost I didn’t bother you at all,’ he said, turning in his seat. ‘I could have fixed it with your beautiful wife – how is she? Ah. All right. I see. Very good. Hello,’ he said, and made tiny flapping motions with his cotton-gloved hand at the following jeep, mouth opening suddenly in a dog-like grin to reveal a double row of unexpectedly powerful-looking teeth.

  ‘So what’s the trouble?’ Agrot said.

  ‘No trouble.’ The grin went as suddenly as it had co
me. ‘Readjustments. They’re just now held up here so they want to do a try-out for the fountains. The same supply is serving the lagoon and the mikveh, for which the water has to be pure. It’s simply a matter of running power and water lines through from the filtration beds at the other side of the fountain site.’

  ‘That would be under my tel,’ Agrot said.

  ‘Under that part of it you finished last season.’

  ‘Mr Teitleman,’ Agrot said mildly, ‘I have an Order, as you know, that applies to all of the tel.’

  ‘And Professor Agrot, as you know,’ Teitleman said, his little month hardening slightly, ‘I can go in a case of emergency to any court in the land who will tell you what to do with your Order.’

  ‘It would have to be a funny court that saw a delay to your mikveh as a national emergency.’

  ‘So we won’t argue about it,’ Teitleman said, the stoical quality stealing more greyly about his face as he strove to retain a degree of amiability.

  The tel was long, shaped like a hog’s back and rounded with the rubbish of three and a half thousand years. The soft detritus, as the open workings showed, went down to a depth of thirty feet or so. At the bottom, the first level of human habitation, a pattern of worked stones showed the crude outlines of the ancient settlement, built on the same hard limestone and marble as the rest of the plateau.

  Because of its length, the tel had been divided into three sections, and because of Teitleman the Agrots had dealt with the two westerly ones first. Both of these had been opened up the previous season, and now the whole expedition was engaged on the third. Several dozen young men and women with some Beduin day labourers were swarming on the far slope, their camp visible at the foot of it.

  ‘We want to run pipes through here,’ Teitleman said. It was a narrow section of the tel some fifty yards from the tip.

  Tanya got out of her jeep and joined us. ‘Those are very old stones down there, Mr Teitleman,’ she said. ‘They have to be photographed and numbered and taken away.’

  ‘Everything will be done the way you want it,’ Teitleman said. ‘Under your supervision.’

  ‘But we can’t spare the people just now.’

  ‘I’ll get you people. As many as you want. A bus-load, today.’

  ‘You’ll need to move some earth here, surely,’ Agrot said.

  ‘A very little.’

  ‘But the contour isn’t level down there. There are outcrops of rock. You’ll have to do some boring or blasting.’

  ‘So maybe we’ll do a little,’ Teitleman said, his grey patience shifting slightly. ‘As little as possible. You’ll feel nothing at all.’

  ‘Mr Teitleman,’ Agrot said, sorrowfully shaking his head, ‘I’m afraid that would shake the site. There are open workings here, very ancient. The slightest tremor will disturb them.’

  ‘What tremor?’ Teitleman said, and suddenly lost his temper completely. ‘The bleddy rock is like bleddy iron. It needs a bleddy atom bomb to get a tremor. I spent five bleddy weeks blasting that bleddy lagoon and you could have rested a bleddy egg on top. I promise you there’ll be no disturbance. You can sleep on top. I’ll sleep on top. What other guarantees do you want?’

  ‘Only that you respect the terms of the Order. In five weeks you can have the whole tel.’

  ‘And leave a hundred men and machines to stand idle?’

  ‘If it’s simply a try-out, run your water and power from another point.’

  ‘And double my costs when I can run it from this point, where it’s supposed to run from?’

  ‘In five weeks’ time,’ Agrot said.

  Teitleman’s teeth snapped to with an audible click and he turned and practically skied down the slope. ‘Just ask some favours from me in the future,’ he said, holding up one cotton-gloved finger at the bottom. ‘Just do that!’

  ‘Take the jeep,’ Agrot called after him.

  Teitleman didn’t take the jeep.

  ‘That means no more water from him,’ Tanya said.

  ‘So you’ll send the truck down to Arad,’ Agrot said. ‘Give that man an inch and he’ll take a mile. It wouldn’t be just a try-out. He’d have gone ahead with the whole works. And he knows that I know. You’ve really got to admire such a bastard … So how is it going here while I’ve been away?’

  We went and had a look how it was going. Agrot’s face was dark and moody as we turned back to the jeep.

  ‘They need me back here,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll have you soon.’

  ‘So let’s get on with it. To the Ein Gedi canyon,’ he said to the driver. ‘Along the top.’

  It’s eight miles ‘along the top’ of the plateau from the tel to the Ein Gedi canyon, and it took us forty-five boulder-dodging minutes in first gear.

  Then we got out and climbed down the slit in the world, to the very bottom.

  4

  Either you like deserts, wildernesses, the hot rock stillnesses of the world, or you don’t. If you do, you like the Dead Sea. There is a deathly, an infernal romanticism about the place that no amount of familiarity can stale. Suddenly from the high craggy wastes of the plateau a fantastic panorama opens half a mile below, the dead livid plain of the ’Arava, flickering in a haze of heat and salt evaporation. The Great Rift runs here, from Turkey to Tanganyika, and finds its deepest depression between the crusted walls of Judea and Moab. And in the very centre, still as a pool of pus, lies the salt lake, forty-eight miles long and eleven wide; the pit of the world.

  Six and a half million tons of water enter it daily from the Jordan and other sources, and find no outlet. The stuff simply evaporates in the bakehouse heat.

  Great waves of heat wafted up out of the canyon as we clambered down into it. Half a mile below on the floor the trim kibbutz of Ein Gedi swam with its date palms in the dizzy currents. A thin slash of green foliage in the cliffs farther along marked the kibbutz’s lifeline and its raison d’être – the biblical spring and the waterfall.

  We came down behind the kibbutz, three quarters of a mile behind, in a narrow part of the canyon, and then had to climb again, up the opposite wall. Thirty feet up, under an overhang, there was a narrow shelf.

  ‘Here,’ Agrot said.

  It was a little hole, scarcely big enough for a man to crawl in. But someone had crawled in it, nineteen hundred years ago, and left a scroll and his money there, and never gone back for them.

  I sat and mopped myself, slightly addled with the heat and the effort, while Agrot enlarged on it. He enlarged on the gold, too, and why he didn’t expect any of it still to be around. Sweat poured down my body as I sat and listened. We stayed about a quarter of an hour and then climbed back.

  It isn’t difficult or dangerous climbing in the Ein Gedi canyon; just laborious and also, as it happens, unnecessary. A perfectly good road runs to Ein Gedi along the shore. Agrot hadn’t taken it because the detour would have knocked the time-table out by an hour or so.

  I was too tired to eat when we got back to Barot, slept all the way back to Jerusalem, and then went to the hotel and slept again.

  Agrot woke me on the phone about nine.

  ‘Well. There’s a lot to do,’ he said. ‘You want to come out for a meal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want I should come round there for a meal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  I told him what I wanted and hung up and got on with it. Carry on his way, I thought, drifting off again, and the man would have me nackered in no time. Tomorrow had better go my way.

  4 Precept Upon Precept

  Here a little, and there a little. [Isaiah 28.10]

  1

  The next day went my way. I rose late, told them not to put calls through, bathed and breakfasted at leisure, and made my own way to the university by bus. A peaceful but diligent day followed, marred only by a couple of incidents, the first with Agrot who wanted to know too abruptly where the hell I’d been, and the second with Dr Hilde Himmelwasser, e
xpert on photographic emulsions. This pest, on loan from the Faculty of Science, had set up a high-security photo lab in Agrot’s scrollery, one of her tasks being to try and make readable some parts of the scroll that were unreadable. She had notably not succeeded.

  ‘Any good having a go with American Kodak infra-red plates?’ I said helpfully.

  ‘No, Dr Lenk, I think not.’

  ‘Not worth a try even?’

  ‘If I thought so, Dr Lenk, I would surely have tried.’

  She was a tall sinewy type with a face not unlike General de Gaulle’s and a pair of very thin legs. She stood quite still on them, hands in the pockets of her white lab coat and regarded me with grave attention as if I were some sort of natural curiosity. Her annoying habit of replying to my perfectly good Hebrew with her zis and zat type English had already put me in a state of twitch.

  I said, ‘I know Nejid Albina got excellent results in Jordan.’

  ‘That is interesting.’

  ‘And Isaac Isaacs here, at Megiddo.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘They both used Linhoff cameras,’ I said, and was suddenly driven nearly mad by a slow supercilious smile that crossed her face. ‘With a number three red filter!’ I cried. ‘And developed in ID2, and printed on soft bromide. The stuff came up like yesterday’s newspaper!’

  ‘But we are not here dealing with yesterday’s newspaper,’ she said, still smiling and shaking her head at this foolishness. ‘It is an old skin, Dr Lenk, almost totally blackened. I think it’s best to stick to our own fields. I cannot tell you anything about philology and I don’t think you have much to tell me about emulsions. The emulsion used here is one I made myself. To improve the quality I will perhaps make adaptations of the emulsion.’

  ‘Fine. Only it isn’t quality we’re after, Dr Himmelwasser,’ I told her earnestly. ‘We only want to try and read what’s on it. And time is pressing.’

  ‘So. Then if you will excuse me, I will continue.’

  ‘Don’t for God’s sake antagonize her,’ Agrot said anxiously as we went down the corridor. ‘She’s a big noise in her department and they give us a lot of help. It’s going to take a miracle to get anything off that skin anyway.’