A Long Way to Shiloh

by Lionel Davidson

  I kept my head down, in the lee of the jumble of rocks, and scurried briskly to the gorge. A certain amount of weaving was necessary. Even so, without undue exertion, or even hard breathing, I made it in three quarters of an hour. A quarter past twelve. Very nice.

  From close up, the gorge was not as straight as had appeared. There were two quite pronounced bends in it, and also a sharp inlet, immediately this side of the first curtain. I observed this from behind a rock. I waited for some minutes, listening. Then I came out of cover and entered the gorge.

  Not even a fly disturbed the massive calm. But it was as well to be careful. I nipped lightly over to the opposite wall where, dodging in and out of the small inlets and occasional large clefts, I was able to look up at the line of curtains. They stretched for a quarter of a mile, enormous monumental walls, their fluted faces turned geometrically in towards each other, very sombre. Here and there, high up, were ‘windows’, evidently the eyries of birds. None of them looked particularly difficult to climb; except the first. This one rose sheer for quite six hundred feet before turning outwards in a sort of small lip like the curling crest of a wave. There were no windows here. Holes, if any, must be above the lip.

  I waited a moment, listening again for any slight click of stone, and then padded briskly over to the other side and entered the inlet at the side of the first curtain.

  The monumental flank was less smooth here, more pitted and craggy, but still, on the face of it, impossible to climb. There was, however, the ridge. I couldn’t see it from this angle, but I knew it was there, a hundred feet above me. I followed the curtain round, a couple of hundred yards round its base, climbed a mound of crags like a heap of giant broken dinner plates, and found the beginning of the ridge.

  It started thirty feet or so up the rock, easily approachable by tumbled boulders, and by no means as smooth or as narrow as it had appeared. Perhaps it became narrower. It seemed a good idea to find out. Perhaps I’d be able to see if some simple aids such as rubber shoes or a bit of rope might be necessary for tomorrow. There wasn’t any danger of exposing myself on the Jordanian side. This face of the rock was turned to the frontier.

  The ridge ran like a normal mountain track, the usual litter of rubble and fallen stones underfoot. I concentrated on not kicking them over, preternaturally anxious to avoid sound. I hadn’t much of a head for heights. The thing to do was to keep one’s eyes firmly on the track.

  The track did seem to narrow after a bit. I couldn’t notice any actual change in the dimensions – it had begun to swim slightly owing to a certain fixity of vision – but was conscious presently of my shoulder against the rock, and the need to go a bit more slowly.

  I went a bit more slowly. I tried to reason whether I was going more slowly through choice or because a sharp change in the angle of ascent had made it necessary. There was no doubt it was a bit steeper. I could feel it in my legs and in my wind. The best thing might be to take it a step at a time. This was difficult. It was suddenly hideously difficult. I seemed to be engaged in some precarious balancing act, the whole act of walking suddenly highly complex. Absurd, of course. It was only because of the illusion of height. The thing to do was to put this illusion out of mind. I was simply having this slow sort of walk along a ledge a few feet off the ground, and the only difficulty was the proximity of the wall. It wasn’t a real difficulty; plenty of room, if somewhat smooth now and less secure underfoot. Perhaps it would be best, all things considered, if I turned in to the wall and went sideways. No difficulty at all then; how could there be?

  I turned in to the wall and went sideways, arms outstretched on the rock. There was no difficulty except the mental one of preserving the idea that I was just a few feet off the ground. The sudden effort required from the right leg indicated quite clearly now that I was climbing, and climbing very steeply. I shuffled sideways for a few minutes more, and stopped for a breather, and incautiously looked down through my legs, and saw the gorge about two miles below and nearly fell off.

  I leaned sickeningly in, head on the rock, and felt it lurching and wheeling as I fought the sick horrors of vertigo. I was stuck on the rock face like a fly on the wall. My knees were trembling, delicate fly’s knees, and they’d give in a minute and I’d drop, drop, drop …

  They were giving. I could feel them giving. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to lean in to. The rock itself was leaning out, and I was leaning out with it, stuck there for seconds only by tactile adhesion, by the pads on my fingers, by the film of sweat…

  The rock swung, and I fought it, and it leaned in again and I could lean in with it, shaking all over, wet with sweat and suddenly very cold. I could hear my teeth rattling above the calm hiss of the wind.

  Still now. Stay quite still. Everything was all right. One had simply to collect oneself and start edging back. One got led into these things without preparation. It needed preparation; mental preparation. Enough had been done for today. One had got the flavour. Another day.

  I stayed there collecting myself, aware even as I did it that nobody was being fooled. If one thing was more certain than another it was that once I was down nothing on earth would get me back up again. I couldn’t do it; couldn’t make myself do it; would work out all manner of reasons why the thing couldn’t be done. And it could be done; I’d done it; had got myself in this position at least, more than half-way up; more than three quarters perhaps. Why not continue, as far as possible? I’d never be in this position again.

  I’d got my eyes closed, and they were still closed as I started moving again, upwards. The thing to do was to put everything else out of mind, to concentrate simply on the physical act of moving one foot and then the other, with the certain knowledge that I’d be doing it once only, and that if it proved impossible, then I’d know.

  Showers of small stones fell as I moved. I couldn’t be bothered about them now, all my earlier fears, of noise, of exposure, left behind, as I concentrated simply on the primary task of staying on the narrow ledge, shuffling sideways, eyes closed and arms embracing the rock.

  I stopped presently and opened my eyes and looked up. The series of knobs was still some way above, fifty feet perhaps – above and to the right. I could see them standing black against the sky, reassuringly wide slabs of rock. The ledge had narrowed still farther and was no longer flat, the exterior edge rounded. I wasn’t going to look down. I could feel well enough with my feet. No occasion for another fit of the horrors here. I wasn’t going to fall. I was going to go as far as I could. There was a certain technical interest in seeing how far I could go. The rock face must certainly have changed since the man came up it with the scroll. Technically speaking, the thing wasn’t climbable at all now. No experienced climber would tackle it, anyway, without crampons, ropes, iron pegs.

  I went on, shuffling very delicately, eyes open now, not taking the weight off one foot till I was quite sure of the other. With three or four yards to the first projection, I stopped and had another breather and considered.

  The ledge was narrowing quite sharply now. Right at the very end it narrowed to a mere bulge in the rock and merged into the projection and didn’t continue again at the other side. By that point one could practically fall across the projection. It stuck out for six feet or so, quite flat on top. The question was, how to get back? One could fall on the projection. One didn’t want to fall off it. How to get down from it again on to the narrow ledge?

  I got my breath back and stood in the crucifixion position, and tried to work it out. I’d have to get down off the projection backwards, and feel with the left leg and for a moment carry all my weight on it while the other rested on a mere bulge. I would still, however, be within arm’s reach of the projection. If I teetered the projection would be there. I could teeter by the hour, of course, before nerving myself to take the one further step that would put me out of reach of it. How safe was it to take that step?

  I knew I was going to leave it till the moment came. I was too tired now to frig
about rehearsing the move. Some faint signal beep-beeped in my brain that I was burning my boats this way, that I ought to try it, that it was lunatic to go up before ensuring that I could get down again. But I moved anyway. I moved without breathing, just clinging, till my right foot brushed the bulge, and I got my arms down from the rock and just laid them on the flat slab of the projection, and bent over it at waist level, face on the warm rock, enormously relieved. I suddenly realized the impossible strain I’d been under, perched on tiptoe almost, arms outstretched, every muscle protesting. Then I hoisted myself on to it, stood up, found the whole series of projections, going up like a giant staircase; and I went up them, and found myself on top, and for the first time looked around.

  5

  There was no vertigo now; only a sense of weary wonder that I’d actually made it. The incredible landscape slanted below as though seen from a wheeling plane. To the east, three quarters of a mile below, lay the still blue pool of the Dead Sea, while to the west the maze of tumbled rock rolled away higher and higher, somewhere among it a tiny glimmer of white buildings and flashing glass pinpointing Hebron, fifteen miles away. The road ran north from there to Bethlehem and Jerusalem; both out of sight now in the faint apricot haze that hid the division between rock and sky.

  On the plateau floor stretched the usual lunar confusion. A stark place; but not a lowering or a hopeless one like Zin. Here was the Judean wilderness; a lion-coloured wilderness; a place of prophets. If a landscape could be said to have nobility, then this one had it. No life here, so no death; no growth, so no decline. And yet, curiously, no sense of sterility, either; only of calm wonder and of the seamed face of reality. As ever the place hit me like the breath of a baker’s oven, agelessly fresh, like its enduring Children.

  But this was no time to be admiring noble wildernesses. The top of the Curtain was flat and grained like a lump of sugar, and descended in two steep steps to the sheer face that was ‘turned away’. I lowered myself down. There was a cave at the first step. There was a cave at the second. Which was the ‘first’: the first up the rock or the first from the top? There was certainly nothing below, anyway. The second step formed the overhanging lip that I’d seen from below. I decided on this one first.

  I got my lighter out, bent and crawled in. There was a musty, sickly smell of droppings inside; all pitch black. I lit the lighter.

  Farther in, the cave widened and heightened. Something fluttered and brushed my head, and all of a sudden the dimness was full of fluttering; scrofulous, membraneous things, queerly angled, flapping about. Bats. Scores, hundreds of them, fluttering in the air, startled by the light, others stuck on the walls, wings heraldically stretched. The commotion stirred up clouds of the sickly stench, so nauseous I found myself gagging, on my knees.

  While I was doing it, one flew directly at the lighter, knocking it out of my hand. At once, some dozens of them seemed to beam in at me, dusty bodies knocking into and skittering about my head and face. I struck out and kept striking out‚ still gagging, till the cloud cleared.

  I breathed through my mouth and mastered the nausea. It was possible to see now that the cave wasn’t entirely black. A faint glimmer was coming in from outside. I looked towards it and saw the bats in a dense mass at the entrance, scuffing and squeaking as they jostled to get out. They were streaming out, twenty, thirty, forty of them, wheeling in the gorge. I turned back and found the lighter, but didn’t light it this time. Now my eyes were accustomed to it, there was enough light to move by. I raised myself slowly, found I could stand upright I moved to the end of the cave.

  It was a long one, easily thirty feet. If the scroll was anywhere, it would be at the far end; as the Ein Gedi one had been. The floor was springy underfoot; the droppings of thousands of years. It would have been just as soft when he’d left his package here. The true bottom would be several feet under.

  Not all of the bats had gone. A somnolent rearguard remained, hung on the walls and in the crevices, twitching slightly as I passed. The roof began to lower, and I had to crouch again, till at the end I was on my knees. I lit the lighter.

  The ground was level, and I felt it carefully all along the line of the back. Uniformly spongey, no spot showing any particular firmness. I put the lighter in my pocket, and, feeling with my hand, began to scoop up the muck for a distance of a foot from the back. The surface was dry but slightly glutinous on its underside, warm to the touch, and drier as one went deeper. At about four inches it was powdery, at between five and six too compacted to shift. I excavated to here and continued right along the line, the back of my hand flat in the channel and scooping the soft muck upwards. The width of the cave here was some seven or eight feet, and after about four, I found it.

  I just touched the edge with my fingers, and whipped the hands back as if burnt; and sat on my backside in the dark, mouth wide open. I couldn’t believe it. I simply couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to light the lighter in case it wasn’t. But I did, and it was. The edge of a scroll, inside a piece of rotted linen; tightly curled, still springy, still elastic.

  I let the lighter out, and sat for a few moments, and then very carefully lit myself a cigarette and sat and smoked it. I could see my hand trembling in the glow from the burning end. It had never happened to me like this before. A piece of pure deduction, and it had worked. I felt I should be bounding about the cave screaming with joy. I sat and smoked the cigarette and felt sick.

  I smoked it to the end, and stubbed it out on the wall, and lit the lighter again and carefully dug the scroll out. The linen crumbled away, but the skin itself seemed to be in good condition. The dung had been the finest preservative, moist when fresh, drying slowly, never wholly parched on top, never wholly damp below; practically museum conditions. The only danger was that the phosphates and ammonia in it might have worked through the skin.

  I delicately opened it. There were three sections, as at Ein Gedi. The middle one slipped out, and I examined it first. The priest’s introductory note, poorly copied. The second – the same order in which we’d got it – the footnote from the semi-literate. I opened the third with my heart thumping dully. The list of places. Crystal clear; clear as the day it was written.

  I rolled the skins up at once, unbuttoned my shirt and shoved the roll inside. Home, James.

  Half a dozen of the bats were still clinging to the entrance as I emerged. They fluttered off, joining the others that still wheeled in the gorge. I got a toehold on the first step, fiddled the roll more snugly under my armpit and started levering myself up. I was doing that when the shot rang out.

  I didn’t, all at once, identify it as a shot. I didn’t identify it as anything in particular. I turned to see what the hell it was, and was in time to see the flash of the next. A uniformed man was standing on a rock platform of the opposite curtain firing a rifle. He was firing it towards but not at me. His voice came thinly over the intervening hundred yards or so, in Arabic. “Narcotics Patrol. Stay where you are.”

  I didn’t stay where I was. After one glazed moment, I turned and scrambled like a madman up the step. I hadn’t got half up it before another bullet whined and wanged; this time from a different direction, and this time at me. Rock splinters from it actually hit me in the face. I looked towards where it had come from. Not twenty yards away another man was standing, on a broad ridge on the next curtain. As I looked he studiously sighted and fired again.

  I came down off the step faster than I’d ever moved in my life, and nipped back in the cave.

  Bloody hell.

  14 Fear and Trembling

  Which made all my bones to shake. [Job 4.14]

  1

  The bats, of course. The flaming bats! I’d forgotten the great police narks of the area. All along the cliffs of the Qumran section the authorities kept an eye open for bats, to check the Ta’amireh in their illegal scroll hunts. No doubt the Narcotics Patrol did the same. Looking for caches of hashish, of course. No hashish here. More important things than hashish. Mustn�
�t find it. What in God’s name to do with it?

  I’d scrambled frenziedly to the back of the cave while these thoughts flashed through my head, with the deranged notion of simply burying the thing again. No point in that, of course. They’d go through every inch of the muck. What then?

  I couldn’t think. The only clear picture in my mind was of the studious look on the face of the man who’d tried to shoot me. He’d really tried! And if I poked my nose out he’d try again. The proprieties had been observed; they’d warned the smuggler and he’d disregarded the warning. Now there was simply the enjoyable job of shooting him and impounding his hoard.

  This was terrible. I had to make it known I wasn’t a smuggler. I had to make it known I was ready to surrender – immediately. But not the scroll! I was damned if I’d surrender that. Not here. Not in The Curtains – so that whoever finally got it would be able to work out the implications. I’d sooner burn it first.

  I was on hands and knees, turning distractedly this way and that like a mixed-up dog when this unacademic solution occurred. I stopped, chittering to myself with horrified obscenity. Burn it? Unthinkable. What a pass we’d come to! We couldn’t go about burning priceless old scrolls. The thing to do was to memorize the contents, then try and hide them. If all else failed there was always the possibility they’d get it wrong.

  In a trice, I’d whipped the roll out and moved nearer to the patch of grey light in the entrance. The list was whippy, coiled tight as a spring and difficult to keep open. The abominable handwriting danced before my eyes like black spiders. Hebrew letter, back-to-front Greek; copied from the priest’s original. Hard enough to decipher in the calm of the scrollery. Here, with the gunman a few yards away keeping my hands rhythmically aflutter, it was impossible. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t get a single word. No time to copy it. No time to do anything now but try and hide it.