A Long Way to Shiloh

by Lionel Davidson

  She’d stopped kissing my nose while I unloaded this lore, and at the end she shivered. ‘The land is soaked with blood,’ she said, quoting somebody, Isaiah possibly. I’d taken a few nips during my recital and no longer had a fine grasp of quotable sources or I’d have capped it. I felt like capping it, my mood no longer flat and dismal, but now finely elegiac. Nothing came to mind, however, so I said, ‘How about locking the door, then?’

  And in a finely elegiac mood herself, she did.

  13 Before I Go

  I may take comfort a little. [Job 10.21,20]

  1

  The finely elegiac mood had gone by morning and only the flatness remained. I hardly felt like getting up at all; but I did, at ten, well soused with sleep but still gravely unresolved. It was hot. I showered, shaved, managed to get myself some coffee and yoghurt in the dining-room, and went and sat outside to wait glumly for the girl. There was a lively hum of agriculturalists at work. It’s a pretty little kibbutz, Ein Gedi, with its trim lawns, shade-trees and chalet type buildings. Under the blue sky and wedged between mountain and sea, the plantations of palm and catch crops looked like an illustration in a child’s book. Just such a picture of primary-coloured bliss the People of the Land must have carried with them in their cold northern exile; Paradise Lost indeed as viewed from the stinking ghettoes of Europe. This picture, and another; the older emblem, that had preserved their consciousness more surely; the emblem of a people, of a light in darkness, a seven-branched light. And incredibly the light had not failed. It had gone on shining through the ages of darkness, perpetuated in the homes, synagogues and tombstones of the faithful, the countless million descendants of those who had been here before, who had actually seen the thing itself.

  More incredibly still, the thing itself still existed; it was up there somewhere on the plateau, the fantastic old artifact, older than the Caesars, older than almost anything. What hadn’t happened since it had lain there! The planet had spun and the cup had filled and run over for The Children. The frenetic neighbours had taken sides in their family quarrels, shouldering one of them to divinity and kicking the others into the incinerator to affirm his message of brotherly love. What a darkness this lamp had revealed, what a conflagration it had started! And it was still there. And legend had it that it would remain there till the Jew returned to reclaim his own. Well, he was back now; but reclamation might take a little longer.

  A trailer truck rumbled past interrupting these musings and Shoshana jumped off the back, like a coffee-coloured sprite in her working shorts. ‘Why are you sitting here like a monk? she said, blowing on my tonsure. The head dressing had got wet in the shower and I’d taken it off.

  ‘I feel like a monk.’

  ‘Learn to act like one,’ she said softly in my ear, and stuck the dressing back on. There was still a bit of stick left in it.

  *

  We went up top twice that day, in the morning the hard way via the canyon and the cliff, and in the afternoon by jeep and the new road. There was a certain satisfaction in regarding the size of the job that lay before Agrot; albeit of a sour kind.

  I’d hoped, of course, to get a paper out of this, but it was obvious now I’d simply be there in the foreword, the man without whose remarkable insights, etc…. Years ahead one could see the eventual publications; the folio academic works done up to the knocker with diagrams, figs and plates (the work of Dr Hilde Himmelwasser). And the later lusher coffee table books. And the television talks, and the newspaper interviews … A whole new field of lore lay waiting germinally here for the harvesters. A further required subject for the syllabus; to be taught to the budding social pests by such as me.

  A sour look at the field before it was plundered, a last lingering glance over what might have been; these were the only fruits for me. Dead Sea fruits, of course, that vanished in the mouth to leave only a nasty taste; but no less resistable for that

  *

  I phoned El Al in the evening and told them to book me on a plane on Monday.

  ‘Which class?’

  Tourist sprang aptly enough to the lip, but I stopped it in time. To feel like one didn’t mean I had to travel like one. ‘First,’ I said firmly. Out like a lord, anyway. In three days’ time.

  2

  We took the jeep again next day and hit the plateau from a new angle, climbing almost to Arad before turning off. The trouble was to know which way the priest had come. He’d certainly climbed down the canyon, but after travelling from where – north, south, west? We were having a go from due south.

  Almost at once the track vanished and we were on a fantastic switchback, the jeep rising and swooping through an incredible maze of towering rock walls. We went through Biq’at Quannai’m, the stark Valley of the Zealots, passed the squat sugar loaf of Massada, away on the right, and came out on the plateau.

  On all sides the solid mesas of rock stood like ruined castles, reddish-brown in the baking sun. The geological structure here was very complex. As Agrot had said, there was everything, billions of tons of workable rock of all kinds. A handy hosepipe could help to bring up fleetingly the colour of the marble. Without it, you could only guess at the true shades: the clay browns that might be beige or red, the dull charcoals that could be green or blue. The great flanks of rock sat baking in the sun.

  We neared the area of the canyon and stopped while I checked with the map. A point that had to be watched here was to keep on the right side of the border. There was very little indication of it, just a line of oil drums, spaced at wide intervals. From the canyon it ran in a straight line south west. We seemed to have room to spare.

  We got out of the jeep and continued the somewhat meandering procedure of the previous day. This was to leave the jeep in a central position and cover a square all round it, jotting down on the map promising areas for Agrot’s brigade to investigate. It didn’t take long to see that from this southward approach very few of the areas were unpromising. The plateau was mainly hard limestone, much of it almost certainly coloured. It stretched for miles, to Barot and beyond, broken here and there by great stands of rock in every known formation.

  After an hour of it the girl stopped singing out, ‘To your right,’ ‘The hill over there,’ and such, and I stopped making marks on the map. There wasn’t really any point. You could look left right and centre and not run out of promising places for weeks. You could probably approach it from several other directions and find just as promising places. Almost every yard in an area of several hundred square miles had to be regarded as promising.

  We’d walked quite a long way from the jeep and weren’t bothering about the ‘square’ any more. I was simply swivelling the binoculars this way and that to see how much more there could possibly be. I was doing that when I saw it. I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t even thinking of it. It hit me like a hammer-blow between the eyes.

  I’d swung past it and had to swing back and hunt for it again. I found myself trembling all over. My hands were trembling. They were trembling so much I couldn’t keep the binoculars still. But I found it again. A tall spire-type formation; a column of rock vertically striated, like a stalactite.

  Through the shaking field of vision I looked to right and left. It was part of a group. The others, almost end on to me, were in a zigzagging crescent. I was looking at the far end of the crescent. The rocks stood in fluted columns; like folding doors; like curtains.

  I went there and back and up and down, and stopped. I’d been holding my breath, and it came out then, slowly. I thought I’d glimpsed it the first time. It was centred in the field of vision now: an oil drum. The rocks were beyond the oil drum.

  I let the binoculars hang and wiped the sweat out of my eyes and found the spot on the map.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Interesting range of rock.’

  She had a look where my pencil made a shaky ring on the map.

  ‘That’s no good. Nobody’s going there. It’s over the border, silly.’

  ‘So
it is,’ I said, and crossed the ring off. The cross was pretty shaky, too.

  *

  In the afternoon I told her off to sketch a range of hills to the south, and nipped off myself in the jeep back to the north. I found the spot and studied it.

  Four distinct peaks, three in the zigzag, one squarely towards me. They lined the western side of a narrow gorge, three or four kilometres across the border. It was utterly deserted, not a bird in sight, all bathed in calm sunlight.

  An hour’s walk. Could this be The Curtains? And if so, which one?

  ‘The Curtain you cannot see from here, it is turned away,’ he’d written.

  Turned away from where?

  I got back in the jeep and drove to the top of the Ein Gedi canyon, stopping from time to time to keep the thing in view. From the top of the canyon I could see the peaks of two; just the peaks. Which one was ‘turned away’. It was impossible to say.

  Down below the kibbutz swam in the rising air currents. The biblical village had lain farther to the north, beyond the canyon. It had been near the spring. I looked down to the site. Bare now, simply a waste of salt mud, but once covered with palm trees. The groves of Ein Gedi had been famous; the groves and the sweetly-scented camphire (the Semitic kufra, the perfumier’s Chypre.)

  I suddenly recalled the phrase that had awakened a song in the flinty heart of Teitleman, the ‘pleasant fruits and camphire, in a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters’. No question what the poet had in mind. ‘My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Ein Gedi’, he’d written. Of course! The well of living waters of Ein Gedi – the waterfall. Wasn’t it up the course of the waterfall that the priest had been carried in the flower basket, to be ‘buried behind the spring’? Wasn’t that where The Curtains had to be viewed from – the top of the waterfall, above the Cave of Shulamit? All at once everything seemed to fall in place, the rest of the man’s account of his stewardship. ‘I put another farther on, down low,’ he’d written, ‘the bottom of the cliff, beyond as you go.’

  Exactly. Exactly beyond as you go. He’d written an entirely factual account of what he’d done. Start off in the direction of The Curtains – if this was The Curtains – and ‘beyond as you go’ you’d hit Murabba’at. I could almost see it from here, the place itself just blocked by a small headland. Beyond it, clearly visible, was the bulge below Qumran. No doubt he’d been going there, to call on his oil-using, wrong-date-keeping customers; and had found time to dispose of a couple of scrolls on the way. Well. The Arabs had one now, containing the full coded directions that Sidqui had misunderstood. The other, presumably, was still where he’d left it, high in the dry preservative air of The Curtains. H’m.

  3

  I still hadn’t said anything to her by the evening. I sat pensively through the rendition of L’Cha Dodi. I fell abstractedly on my sabbath victuals. I was still brooding as I left the dining hall.

  ‘Miriam has a party,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you weren’t talking to Miriam just now.’

  ‘Miriam is too interfering. But a party is a party.’

  ‘I’m not in the party mood tonight.’

  ‘Broody bear, why are you so broody?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Too tired for a walk even?’

  ‘Much too tired.’

  ‘But it’s a quarter moon. We could go to the Cave of Shulamit.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘That’s not very flattering.’

  ‘I’d never manage it.’

  ‘Never manage what?’ she said.

  *

  We didn’t, anyway. We went to the shore instead and watched the quarter moon from there. It was farther down the lake, the crescent moon over the lands of the crescent; over the crescent of rocks. If one could only get to those rocks there might be no need for the work brigades, the army support, the weeks, months, years of laborious exploration … Why not tell her, then? What instinct of self-survival, duplicity, secretiveness, prevented me?

  I’d been pondering this. The thing at the moment was mine, all mine; to brood over, worry about, marvel at, adore. To tell her, to tell anyone, was to take it out of the realms of fable and speculation. And there was still much to speculate about. Were they The Curtains? Was there any certainty the thing was still there? And either way was it proper or even reasonable for the Professor of Semitics at Beds, so much as to think of …? These were good questions. The wrong answers could easily land the professor in the manure.

  Supposing the madness came on me, and I decided to go. To tell her was to risk having her try to stop me or to come with. The latter certainly wasn’t on. A British tourist caught straying over the border was one thing; a female Israeli lieutenant quite another. Yet to go alone and not tell anyone might be more unpleasant still. It was dangerous country. Dangerous things could happen in it to the solitary cliff-sealer.

  ‘Broody bear, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Too much exercise. I can hardly keep my eyes open.’

  ‘Come back, then. You’re no answer to a maiden’s prayer,’ she said dolefully.

  But I was, in a gentle way, in the guest hut.

  But I still hadn’t told her when she left.

  4

  I was up early on the Saturday, trembling finely all over, much oppressed.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she said after breakfast. I hadn’t had much breakfast. I’d had a cup of coffee.

  ‘Nothing. You’d better have a sabbath.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Take it off, love. Relax. Have a lay-off.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I am going to be broody bear,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t want me?’

  I did. As some men fly to food or sleep at time of trouble, I flew to females. She was all legs, eyes and hair this morning, excessively female in her shorts, shirt and sandals. I’d seen her whip out of this ensemble in less time than the telling. Reason called on me to get her at it and keep her at it till plane time Monday.

  ‘Not today,’ I said.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Mooch about and think.’

  Twenty minutes later I was doing it, in the direction of the waterfall. I mooched like a broody bear, but once out of the kibbutz, smartened up.

  By ten o’clock I was on top, observing the curtain that was turned away.

  *

  There wasn’t really any question about it. From this angle they were more like curtains than ever, four flowing folds of rock, and only one turned away – the first of the zigzag, nearest the border.

  Through the glasses it was possible to see a series of ridges running laterally across the faces of the others; they were quite climbable. What about the one that was turned away? ‘It is in the first hole, you get down from the top,’ he had written. How? From the back? The side? Certainly not this side. What I could see of it dropped steeply in an unbroken line.

  The gorge was not in view from this position. Yesterday’s position offered a better view. It also offered a view of the back of the curtain. I made a quick sketch of what was to be seen from here and then moved along there.

  A warm wind blew on the plateau, and I was thirsty. I hadn’t brought a flask with me. It was half an hour before I remembered the spring, and then I couldn’t be bothered going back. The morning was getting on. I’d have to wait till lunchtime. One conclusion at least had been arrived at. Nothing was going to be done about The Curtains today. Tomorrow, perhaps, but not today. Today was Saturday, and the kibbutzniks were at large.

  I hadn’t brought a hat and sweat was soon trickling down from my head. I could feel the dressing there, unpleasantly hot and itching. But the walk brought its reward: a splendid view, altogether more explicable now, of the gorge and the zigzag of Curtains. The first, its back now squarely towards me, showed a faint diagonal ridge and then a series of sharp knobs that continued to the top. The ridge wound round from the far side, th
e beginning out of sight.

  I moved farther to the left and up to the border for a better look. It was only fractionally better. I couldn’t see any more of the ridge, but got a rather clearer view of the section already visible. It seemed very narrow, and also very smooth, no doubt from erosion. It was always possible that the lower section had been eroded away completely; that the thing was no longer climbable.

  I lowered the glasses. I was on a slight elevation and could see the whole length of the gorge. The wall opposite The Curtains was lower and broken by clefts in the rock, through which water would rush in time of spate, across the plateau and down to the Dead Sea. No water rushed now. Nothing at all moved, except the slight hissing wind. All quite still in this dead deserted land.

  I looked at my watch. Half past eleven. Time I was getting busy with a sketch. It would take me an hour and a half to get back; for the late lunch. I didn’t actually feel like any lunch. I didn’t actually feel thirsty, either. Inexplicably I was shaking all over. This was ridiculous, of course. Excitement had to be kept firmly in check. A steady hand was needed for the sketch.

  I actually had the pencil in my hand when I walked over the border. I walked over it in a state of cold fright. What was this? Not today. I’d decided not today. Back, then. Down Rover!

  Rover didn’t go back or down. After some moments I even felt a certain mild elation. It wasn’t such a bad idea after all. To plan, prospect a route and do it all in one go was asking for trouble. It was obviously a better idea to do it in bits. Find the best way to the gorge and the ascent up the rock one day, and do it the next. Here was sense. And one side of the border was no different from the other. The difference was purely technical. Any infringement was purely technical – supposing there was anybody to notice; which there wasn’t. All the same, it was obviously prudent to keep one’s head down.