Джеймс Миченер - The Source

At midnight, in gruesome jest, the round little general ordered the signal fires of Ma Coeur to be lighted, and they flamed as in the past and were hopefully seen at Acre, but in the silent morning, when the great engines of war were needed no more, the general ordered that Ma Coeur be leveled: “No tower here will ever again cause us trouble.” The slaves began, stone by stone, to throw down the turrets and to destroy this most powerful of the small Crusader castles. Work on which Gunter of Cologne had spent years was destroyed in days, and when it was clear that slaves could be trusted to complete the task the red-faced general ordered the mangonels and the ballistas and the turtles and the walking towers to be moved westward until they reached the walls of Acre, where the miners resumed their patient underground tapping until the sound echoed ominously throughout that city.

At Ma Coeur the slaves continued their work for the better part of a year, disassembling the castle as children might break apart a toy. Many of the larger stones were hauled away to build new Mameluke castles and smaller ones were broken and scattered over the landscape. The well shaft was filled in, and shortly there were no towers and no walls to betray where the castle had stood. The slaves withdrew and the spot was desolate. The once-lovely fields were barren and remained so; the ancient olives were untended and no human being lived where the town had existed for so long.

On his yearly trip in the winter of 1294 Muzaffar, a one-armed Arab still operating caravans out of Damascus, had difficulty identifying the mound of Ma Coeur, for the Galilee was covered with snow. He found the location only by spotting the roadway which had always climbed the hill to the zigzag gates, and here he halted his camels for a moment, bowing in reverence to the knight who had saved his life. “Poor men,” he whispered when his prayers were done. “They knew nothing of the land they occupied, so they built huge walls to lock reason out.” And he plodded his way westward to ruined Akka, where no bells rang and where the harbor was silting up.

In summer searing khamsins from the now treeless hills blew across the plains, bringing minute dust which eddied into the crevices, imperceptibly solidifying the fallen mass and slowly covering it. In 1350, half a century after the fall, numerous rocks were still evident, and shepherds remembered that there had been a castle; but by 1400—a century after the annihilation—only a few rocks were visible and people were beginning to forget what they pertained to.

Now the only visitors to Makor—for the Frankish name was forgotten, having passed into history with the last of the Volkmars—were jackals, which sent forth their strange, penetrating yowls when the moon was full, and which picked over the area for things that might be trapped in their swift rush. Birds flew over the mound and sometimes nested among the last of the whitish rocks strewn haphazardly in the dunes of sand. There were snakes and toads coming up from the malarial marshes that had taken the place of the irrigated fields which for twelve thousand years had fed the people of Makor. And there were a few rodents seeking for the wheat which once again grew wild.

By 1450 the wind had moved enough blowing earth into the area to cover completely every sign of human occupancy, and there were now none who recalled the name by which the place had been known. In fact, it had neither name nor visible existence. It was a mound rising from the foothills of the Galilean mountains; grass grew upon it and flowers, and three or four times a year some camel caravan from Damascus passed on its way to Akka—now a dismal port town in no way distinguishable from the other rotting towns along the once-noble Phoenician seacoast.

By 1500 the mound was higher and the obscurity greater. There was then probably no living human being who knew that Makor had ever existed or where Ma Coeur, that notable stronghold of the Crusaders, had stood. Historians and archaeologists had not yet begun to tantalize themselves with such concerns, but of course the name did continue to exist in that ancient list of towns, and occasionally some Christian scholar in Bologna or Oxford would idly speculate on where Makor, like the other vanished cities of the past, might have stood, while Talmudic scholars remained familiar with the name Rab Naaman of Makor but not with the village from which he came. For all practical purposes the name and the mound were lost. Only the olive grove existed.

Winds blew in from the desert. Inch by inch the tell grew, and the solitude increased. The silent mound slept beneath the sun, hiding the sweet well that through ten thousand years had brought life to so many. Its waters trickled away through subterranean channels until they entered the malignant swamp which extended itself year after year over the no longer fertile ground. How great the desolation was, how crushed and puny the grandeur that had existed here. Even the birds came no more, for the grasses that had grown centuries before now perished in the desiccated air; the mound had become part of a desert.

This land of richness and great orchards. This land where bees had made a honey famous before the Bible was composed. These far, sweet lands that had gladdened a man’s heart and made his wife sing. These sacred valleys where men had wrestled with the concept of God, and with God Himself. These marvelous hills where the baals had stood and the fair girls had danced naked, all slept under dust.

How contradictory it was: the swamps spread, wasting their waters, while at the same time the land became desert for want of water. Occasionally a tribe of Bedouins would sweep through the area, senselessly killing any farmers who might be trying to revive the soil, then passing on. Their coming was meaningless and their going was unrecorded; and the mournfulness of the land increased.

Then, in the early 1500s, a few men and their families began returning from the far ends of the Mediterranean and from ports in between. They were Jews, and they came not to Makor, from which they had sprung but of whose existence they knew nothing; they came to Safed, seventeen miles to the east, and a new cycle was begun which would later encompass Makor, too.

LEVEL

III

The Saintly Men of Safed

Menorah made of gold in accordance with instructions laid down by God in Exodus 25: 31–40. Cast by Moorish workmen in Avaro, Spain, about 1240 C.E., during the period when Judaism was still permitted in that kingdom. Deposited at Makor June 21, 1559, after sunset.

It was an age of expansion. Constantinople, under Ottoman rule since 1453, was offering Europe such riches drawn from India and China as to make the dreams of Marco Polo seem unimaginative. Columbus had presented the world with a new hemisphere to balance the old, and daring Portuguese navigators were proving that cargo ships could reach the wealth of Asia by doubling the tip of Africa. Spain was amazing Europe with the wealth of Aztec and Inca, and all the world’s horizons were being expanded so that the center of power was no longer the Mediterranean; for on the Atlantic hitherto unimportant nations suddenly found themselves possessed of empires so enormous as to be indescribable. Even a trivial kingdom like England, beset on three borders by hostile Scots, Welsh and Irish, could visualize acquiring territory a thousand times larger than itself, while the Dutch were about to prove that they could establish commercial stations wherever their daring captains located safe anchorage and fresh water.

It was an age of intellectual discovery. From the cellars of forgotten monasteries, from the long-unused libraries of princes, and most often from Arabic scholars who had preserved the wisdom of the west, the books of Aristotle and Thales, of Plato and Euclid were rescued from the past to astonish men and enlarge their concepts. Dante and Boccaccio reminded a forgetful world of Virgil and Ovid, while the glories of Sophocles and Seneca awakened new appreciations of the drama. And not only was the intelligence of the past being discovered; each ship returning from Java or Peru brought with it, packed among the spice and silver, fresh discoveries of the mind, and thus the way was prepared for that succession of world-changers who followed Gutenberg, Copernicus and Galileo.