Hannah and the Magic Eye

by Tyler Enfield

  Soon Hannah could hear the bells that jangled from the camels’ bridles, and she saw the Bedouin drivers riding atop them. Men of the desert, their eyes dark and unreadable. They parked their camels in a line before the children. Staring at them without a word from atop the twin humps of their beasts.

  Each of the three men carried an umbrella.

  r

  The Bedouins were the nomads of this land, and they knew every ridge, every canyon, every shade-bearing tree and outcrop in this desert like the back of their hand. Hannah and Clooney were each hoisted atop a camel with little discussion. They glanced at each other, sharing a smile as they set out across the desert with their new friends leading the way.

  The Bedouins didn’t speak much, but they shared water and cashews, and by late afternoon, the hazy reflection of the Dead Sea shone whitely in the distance. Hannah heard cars on the unseen highway that hugged the eastern shore.

  The sun was setting when they reached the Dead Sea. The shore was white as snow, a beach made entirely of salt crystals. On the far side of the sea, the smoky mountains of Jordan shouldered into the darkening sky.

  The Bedouins moved single file along the shore. Hannah had her journal out now, and she kept glancing down at the first illustration and then back to the sea in an attempt to match the exact location it was drawn from. She looked back and forth. Out on the water, she saw little islands of white crust, and places where the salt had gathered into strange alien mounds.

  Soon the highway came into view, with cars and buses zipping along the two-lane road. Faces pressed against windows to glimpse the wondrous vision of two children riding camels along the white crystal shore of the Dead Sea, their Bedouin companions holding umbrellas against the pinking light of the sun.

  As they traveled the shore, the sounds of a radio playing pop music drifted toward them. Then laughter and voices, and they soon came upon an encampment of tents perched beside the sea. People frolicked on the white beach, digging holes in the salt, tossing Frisbees, reading books, juggling soccer balls, and floating on the buoyant water.

  “Hippies,” said Clooney. “Americans.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Hannah.

  He pointed to a cluster of bicycles, both large and small. Apparently they had all ridden here. “American hippies tour Israel on bicycle this time of year. I don’t know why, but it is common. You see them riding here. Though not usually with so many children.”

  Hannah noticed one man in particular. He was tall and skinny, with a thick beard and long dreadlocks down to his hip. He sat on the shore playing a flute. The sight was oddly beautiful.

  Momentarily distracted by the little village and its unexpected activity, she almost forgot to check her journal. She glanced down, and realized the illustration lined up perfectly with her present view of the sea. It was an exact match.

  “Stop,” she told the camel driver. “We will get off here.”

  She and Clooney waved their thanks to the departing Bedouins and their camels and then returned their attention to the journal. Hannah flipped the illustration upside down for a better look. “This is the place,” she said.

  “It looks the same to me,” Clooney agreed. “Those mountains in the background look exactly right. And that bend in the shore… I think your Julien was standing right here when he drew it. But why did he draw it upside down?”

  It really was one of the strangest parts of this puzzle. Hannah could think of no good reason why Julien Dubuisson, a talented artist, would sketch his locations upside down. But the light was failing, and they would soon be in the dark. Hannah decided to snap a photo so she could study it later.

  As she took off her backpack and began digging out her camera, something occurred to her. Her hand froze on the camera’s pebbled grip.

  “Are you all right?” asked Clooney. “You look like a statue.”

  “I just had a thought.” She removed the camera. She gazed at it, tapping her chin. She looked at Clooney.

  “I think I got it.”

  “Got what?” said Clooney with surprise.

  “Henri is the one who taught me how to use a camera. Which, of course, he could not do without a history lesson. Did you know photography first began in this part of the world?”

  Clooney shook his head.

  “Look,” she said, removing her phone. She saved all kinds of files on her phone, anything that might come in handy when you least expect it. She opened a file called “Camera Stuff” and scrolled through until she came to an entry about the history of cameras. “It says here, the first mention of a camera dates back to 1021. It was described by an Iraqi scientist in the Book of Optics. It wasn’t until 1604 that the famous German astronomer, Johannes Keppler, named the device. He called it the camera obscura.”

  The website included a picture of the camera obscura. It was nothing like today’s cameras. The device was basically a box with a pinhole on one side. “As the light of an image refracted through the pinhole,” she read aloud, “it naturally projected itself upon the opposite wall of the camera—

  upside down.”

  “Upside down?” repeated Clooney. “So you think Julien Dubuisson used a camera obscura to sketch these pictures?”

  “Of course!” said Hannah. “It all makes sense now. Henri told me about the Dutch painters who would place a thin piece of paper onto the projected image and then trace its detail. Even Leonardo Da Vinci wrote about it. The camera obscura was once a sensation in the art world.”

  Then Hannah gasped in her excitement, realizing there was more. “And if you were an artist at that time and suddenly you could draw what you saw with perfect detail… do you see what this means?”

  “Not really,” said Clooney.

  She pointed to the image of the camera obscura on her phone, to the pinhole where the light passed through.

  “For those artists, the pinhole of the camera obscura truly was a ‘magic eye.’ It allowed them to see and do what could not be done before.”

  Bingo. It all tied together. The mystery of the ‘magic eye’ and the upside down images came down to the same thing: Julien Dubuisson used a camera obscura to draw them.

  Clooney looked at her. “Do you have a camera obscura?”

  “No, but I have this.” She held up the camera. “When Henri said I have the ‘magic eye,’ I think that was his clue. He was telling me I had everything I needed to decipher the map. It would have been too risky to write a full explanation on paper, so he did what he always does. He gave me a riddle.”

  “Let’s see if you are right.”

  Her belly tingling with excitement, Hannah looked through the viewfinder of her camera. She checked its alignment against the illustration in the journal. She made a slight adjustment. When the image in the camera and the image in the journal were identical, she snapped the shutter.

  She pushed the review button on the camera so they could see the photograph she just took. And there it was, exactly the same as the illustration in the journal.

  And Hannah’s heart sunk. Apart from being identical, the two images were meaningless. She was no closer to deciphering the map than before.

  “I thought this would be the answer,” she said, staring at the camera in disbelief. “It all made such sense…”

  Clooney rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “The answer will come. You’ll figure it out. You are smart. Smarter than anyone I know. Perhaps just let it go for now.”

  She looked at him. Let it go? That was about the worst possible thing he could have said in that moment. Henri had been kidnapped, and he needed Hannah to decipher this map. There was no time to let anything go.

  As her frustration mounted and the voice in her head became more outraged and insistent, the familiarity of it suddenly reminded her of another conversation—with Henri, long ago, during the first archaeological dig she had ever help
ed him with.

  They were working at a site in Jerusalem. It was Hannah’s first day on the job. Henri explained the site they were excavating had been the location of several battles, and there had once been a church, a mosque, and a synagogue, each in their own day, though not even a foundation stone remained standing from any one of them.

  Henri had put Hannah on sifting duty because he knew sifting would be fun, and he hoped to snare Hannah’s interest as soon as possible. Hannah’s job was to scoop mud from a bucket and spread it across a sifting screen. Then she sprayed the mud with a hose, washing it away until only solid items remained. Sifting was an exciting duty because with the least amount of work, you had a chance to uncover genuine treasures and artifacts hidden from human eyes for centuries,

  even eons.

  Within five minutes of beginning her task, Hannah’s hose had a revealed fragment of green glass with bubbles still in it. Thinking it a broken beer bottle, she was prepared to throw it away until Henri stopped her. Holding an umbrella above them both to shade their view from the sun, he pointed to the glass in her hand. “See those bubbles, deep in the glass?”

  She nodded.

  “That means it’s old. Very old. When they used to make glass long ago, they couldn’t get the fires as hot as we can today and so little bubbles formed in the glass. This, Hannah, is a genuine artifact.”

  Later that afternoon she uncovered a small chunk of pink plaster, which Henri said came from a mosque that once stood on this site. And then, just before day’s end, she discovered the most interesting find of all: A copper medallion, tarnished green with age. The medallion was a cross. But instead of being T-shaped, each arm of the cross was equal in size and shape, giving it the overall appearance of a square with four identical, smaller crosses around it.

  “It’s the symbol for the Order of the Holy Sepulcher,” said Henry with interest. “Left behind by the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher when they ruled Jerusalem. Probably from around 1100 CE or so.”

  Hannah stared in awe. She was holding a piece of history. Someone, a real person, and possibly an actual knight, held this very object in their hand nearly nine-hundred years ago. Bewitched with wonder, she quietly turned the object in her hand, holding it up to the light.

  “I believe you have caught the bug,” winked Henri. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  “What bug?”

  “The archaeology bug!”

  When Hannah left the dig site that evening, she couldn’t wait to return. All night she thought about the things she had seen and found and touched with her own hands.

  When she and Henri returned the next day, however, they found the site had been demolished. Everything was upturned. The pulleys were shattered and tools tossed about. Hannah was speechless.

  “Who would do this?” she whispered.

  Her grandfather sighed. “Many people, actually. More than you might think.”

  “But why?”

  Henri stroked his bushy white mustache, appearing to search for an explanation. “It’s like this,” Henri said. “Jerusalem is a land of many cultures, many religions, all fighting for ownership of one place. Something as simple as a coin, which we call an artifact, could be used as evidence to disprove another man’s beliefs.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, one man looks at this coin, and he says, You see! This coin, which has the image of our ancient king printed alongside a date, it’s proof that my people were here first! And therefore we have most right to be here! And another man disagrees, or worse, he fears it may be true, and so what does he do?”

  “He destroys the dig site and all the evidence in it,” said Hannah, looking about at the destruction.

  Henri handed her the umbrella as though it were a token of some initiation. “Hannah, if you stay here long enough, you’ll see. This is all part of being an archaeologist in Jerusalem. You must let it go.”

  “I will not!” she yelled, storming away. She immediately began righting tipped objects and cleaning up the mess. “I will not let it go, and stop saying I should.”

  Because that’s what they said at the funeral.

  Because that’s what they said when she’d cried.

  Because no matter what they said, Hannah feared letting go might be the same as forgetting.

  Then she saw the sadness in Henri’s eyes, and she suddenly felt ashamed of her outburst. She wanted to apologize, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. And she didn’t need to because Henri understood. He always understood.

  Her grandfather had taken her in his arms. “He was my son, too, you know. When your father died in that fire, I lost someone as well. I know how it feels, how much pain one heart can feel.”

  She sniffed against his shoulder. “Then how do you do it? How do you say goodbye when it hurts so bad?”

  “I let it in,” he said. “I let it in.”

  He pulled back from the hug. He strode to the table, which had been flipped on its side. He scouted about in the dirt and then bent to retrieve the medallion. The one Hannah had found the day before. He strung it on a leather cord.

  “Here,” he said, placing it around her neck. “Worse things have happened at this location than the disappearance of one cross. I want you to wear this.”

  “But it’s a cross, Henri. We are Jewish. How can I wear a cross?”

  “We are archaeologists!” he said. “We seek only the truth! Remember that Hannah. No matter our beliefs, it is our job to remember what others have forgotten.”

  r

  “Hannah?” said Clooney, still standing on the shore of the Dead Sea. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, stroking the copper medallion around

  her neck.

  “They are inviting us to their fire,” said Clooney.

  Hannah turned and saw most of the campers were now gathered around a fire, several of them enthusiastically waving her over.

  The moment she and Clooney entered their circle she was patted on the back, and everyone announced his or her name. Hannah counted eight adults, six children, and three or four in between. She had no idea which were parents and which were friends, or who might be related to who. It was all pleasantly mixed up.

  “Do you two need a place to camp?” asked a friendly woman with a child resting on her lap.

  “We do,” said Hannah.

  “Do you have blankets? Any gear for sleeping?”

  Reluctantly, Hannah shook her head, fearing the woman might ridicule her for traveling unprepared.

  But the woman just said, “No problem. We can set you up in the kid’s tent. That ok with you guys?” she asked the little ones, and they all yelled hooray.

  The woman’s name was Cara. She said they were all touring Israel by bicycle for the next six weeks. Even the little ones rode. All four families had been resting and camping here at the Dead Sea for the last few days.

  “So are you guys travelling on your own or what?” asked Cara.

  Hannah and Clooney shared a look.

  “Yes,” confessed Hannah, uncertain how Cara would respond. But Cara just said cool, that’s cool, she was hitchhiking through Central America when she was their age, or maybe a little older, but man was that ever amazing, to be cruising through Costa Rica in the nineties before tourism ruined it and anyway, Israel is way safer for young travelers, and are they hungry?

  “Very!” said Hannah and Clooney in unison.

  They were each given bowls of steaming rice with lentils. No one ever asked Hannah why she was without her parents or where she was headed. Everyone just seemed to accept she and Clooney were part of the family for the night, and that was that.

  After dinner, the tall skinny man with the dreadlocks and long beard began to play his flute. Everyone called him Gumbo. At first, Hannah thought he looked a bit scary, especially when she saw the tattoos on his neck, but
he turned out to be the silliest person she had ever met—more like a child than an adult.

  “Gumbo! Do your eyes!” yelled the children. “Do your eyes!”

  And Gumbo would cross his eyes until his pupils nearly disappeared and hop about and even do somersaults, all the while playing his flute. The children rolled with laughter.

  Then a young man whose entire back was covered in colorful tattoos fetched a guitar from his tent. He strummed and sang, and others sang along and tapped at little handheld drums and even cooking pots, whatever they could find to keep a beat. Hannah and Clooney were given pots as well, and they sat beside one another as they played.

  The first tune was a Christian hymn. Hannah knew the melody but not the words, so she just hummed along. Next they sang an old Hebrew song, which Hannah did know. This time she sang. Hannah loved to sing.

  After the song came a short lull, and everyone gazed quietly at the fire until Clooney asked aloud, “So how does one become a hippy?”

  Everyone laughed and clapped, as though this were the best question on earth, and Hannah explained to their new friends that Clooney had a certain fascination with American culture. Any tips they could offer would be appreciated.

  In response, the guitarist with the tattoos started up a catchy tune, saying, “This one’s for you, Clooney. It’s a Sufi song. The Sufis are Muslims who love to sing and dance. You know this one?”

  “Of course!” Clooney jumped from his seat and launched into a dance, singing at the top of his voice. Everyone shouted him on, and then Gumbo jumped up and did a wild jig alongside him. Hannah was surprised to discover Clooney had an amazing voice, and he belted it out with genuine passion.

  When the singing finished, a young woman with cropped blonde hair continued tapping quietly at a small drum, lost in thought, all the while watching Hannah and Clooney across the fire. Eventually she set the drum down and said, “You guys should be, like, the poster children for peace.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Hannah.

  The woman said, “You do realize your people and his people are, like, basically at war?”