Джеймс Миченер - The Source

He stopped his thinking, made his mind a blank, and tried to conjure up the bedrock of this tell as it had existed, not eleven thousand years ago, but two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand … He began to perspire as his body grew one with the ancient land. His hands grew clammy and he breathed hard. For if he could calculate where this sloping rock had ended he might deduce where the missing well had been, and if he found that, he might project the history of the tell backward sixty or a hundred thousand years. Perhaps Makor would turn out to be one of the great archaeological sites, a classic that scholars would refer to as they now spoke of Carmel, Jericho and Gezer.

“Eliav!” he called at the end of three hours. The Jew was working at Trench A but a runner summoned him, and soon from the top of the cut he looked down.

“Find something interesting?” he asked, using the archaeologist’s constant inquiry.

“Come on down here,” Tabari said, masking the excitement he felt. When Eliav saw the pick work at the base of the west face of the trench he asked what was up, and Tabari said, “Study it. See anything?” The Jew dropped to his knees, inspected the unbroken rock closely and said, “No tool marks. No inscriptions.” He drew back and looked at the whole area for some minutes, then dropped to his knees again and studied the level. He rose in great excitement and said, “The whole thing slopes definitely that way.” He paused, looked at Tabari with flashes of excitement in his eyes and said, hesitantly, “And if the slope continued, it could easily be that somewhere out there, outside the tell …” He stopped.

“llan,” the Arab said cautiously, “I think this slope may lead us to the well.”

“There’s a chance,” Eliav agreed, with even greater caution. “If so, the well would have to be down in the wadi,” and he pointed in exactly the direction that Tabari had deduced.

Controlling their eagerness the two men climbed down the steep bank to inspect each likely site for a well, but so much detritus had accumulated in that area that any source which might have been there had long since been smothered and now sent its water off through subterranean channels. The men therefore ranged far afield through the bottom of the wadi, searching for some undetected outcropping of water, but none showed. Finally Tabari said, “I think we’ve got to follow the slope of the rock. See where it leads.”

Eliav agreed, but protocol demanded that they get permission from John Cullinane, who was, after all, the man in charge. Eliav side-stepped this by saying slowly, “I think our responsibility permits us to make a little dig on our own,” and with timbers to shore up the ceiling behind them, the two men started a small boring which led them down past the edge of the basic rock. The timbers were not really needed, for over a period of some twenty thousand years the limestone from the waters that had seeped off the rock had transformed the once-soft earth into breccia, a kind of semi-rock which was easy to cut through but which held its own form, and on the fifth day of this digging Jemail Tabari encountered a small pocket of this breccia and realized that the dig was fundamentally altered.

“Get Cullinane back here at once,” he called as he stuck his dusty, dirty head from the minute tunnel.

“Find something?” Eliav asked nonchalantly.

“Not the well…” Tabari held out his hands and in them he carried a chunk of breccia containing a human bone, some sharp-pointed flints and a substantial deposit of charred fragments. “I think I’ve struck the edge of a large cave that had its opening on the face of the wadi.”

With controlled excitement Eliav studied the find and said, “Let’s get a girl in there to sketch it.”

“I touched only what my pick broke off,” Tabari explained. “The main part is encased in solid breccia, but I did see something that seemed indicative. The corpse was buried with these flints. It wasn’t an accidental burial.”

Eliav raised his eyebrows. “This could go back thirty thousand years,” he suggested.

“That would be my guess,” Tabari agreed cautiously. “And that’s not all. Right beyond the cave…It’s all filled up, you understand. I thought I was running into a rock that echoed. As if on the other side it were empty.”

“Unlikely,” Eliav replied.

“I thought so too. But go on in and take a sounding. I’ll call the photographer.”

So Ilan Eliav wormed his way through the low tunnel until he came to the end; and there, to the right or northern side, he saw imbedded in the hard breccia the cache which Tabari had come upon. His first thought was: It’ll take two years to excavate this properly. He felt a pang of regret to think that he would not be there to help; but then his imaginative mind started to dress in living flesh the ends of bone which projected from the breccia, and he wondered who this ancient thing—this man, perhaps—had been. What hungers had he known, what security from realizing that when he died he would carry with him stone beads? How had he gone finally to earth and with what immortal longings? Here in the darkness of the tunnel thousands upon thousands of years later, another man, much like him perhaps, still wearing his flesh for a few more inquisitive years, met him face-to-kneebone and knew only that there was mystery.

Eliav crawled a few paces beyond the imbedded skeleton and found himself facing the end wall of which Tabari had spoken. Using a fragment of the breccia which had held the bones he tapped on the wall ahead. In some strange way it echoed. He was convinced it echoed. He therefore tapped the side walls and the roof and the floor on which he knelt, and from them there returned a different sound. He tapped the end wall again, and there could be no doubt: perhaps it wasn’t really an echo, but it was something different.

He reached back for Tabari’s pick, left where the important bones had been found, and with it tapped cautiously at the facing semi-rock. The point of the pick dug in easily, and when it was pried backward, broke away a small chunk of the soft rock. Carefully he placed the rock behind him for the basket men to haul out, and with another cramped blow chipped away some more. On the third strike he was startled by the clarity of the echo sound, and he began to dig with some force, throwing the broken rock over his shoulder. His lantern was now obscured by the debris which he was accumulating, and he knew that he should stop to clear it, but he was gripped by a most intense excitement. Swinging his pick with un-archaeological vigor he felt its point bite through a thin layer of semi-rock and then leap forward into nothingness.

He began to perspire copiously, even though the tunnel was cool and he was lean, but he mastered his excitement and became again the professional archaeologist. He left the pick where it was and started slowly to back away, crawling over his own rubble. When he reached the spot where the bones projected he stopped and began flattening the rubble out, piece by piece, until his lantern again threw light on the face of the tunnel, from which the pick suspended at a curious angle. When the tunnel was again in order he returned to the pick and gently rotated it in various directions. Its hidden point contacted nothing and he was tempted to withdraw it and strike again, opening a real hole into the mysterious void, but he felt that this would be unfair to Tabari. He therefore left the pick in position, placed the lantern so that it illuminated not the pick but the projecting bones, and started the crawl back to Trench B.

When he got there Tabari had the girl artist and the photographer waiting, but Eliav in a businesslike manner called for a basket man to go in first and haul out the rubble. “And don’t touch the pick,” he warned. When the man was gone he instructed the artist and the photographer to get the most complete data on the breccia-held bones, and also to catch the details of the pick as it pierced the end wall. When the briefing was completed he took Tabari aside and said, “I dug out a little more of the end wall, and on the last blow your pick cracked through a thin facing of the soft rock. It struck emptiness.”