Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Through those years the dust, thick and silent, had sifted down, and now it rose revitalized by the touch of a living foot, only to fall back as the unaccustomed beams flashed upon his anides, and at last he came to a silent place where things ended, dust and footfall alike; and as he looked down into the darkness he could not estimate how far below him lay the water, but he dislodged a fragment of the roof and dropped it. After a while water splashed. The well of the Family of Ur was found, that sweet source from which all had sprung.

In the days that followed, Tabari and Eliav tried several times to acquaint Cullinane in Jerusalem with the stunning developments, but the telephone operators were unable to track him down, so on their own initiative the men strung lights which enabled them to work at the well, and after digging about the rim and finding only fragments of Crusader pottery—water jars broken by careless Christian women seven hundred years before—Tabari happened to notice in the wall, slightly above eye level, a discoloration of soil which previous visitors had failed to find, for they had been Canaanites or Jewish women like Gomer or Crusaders, and not archaeologists. But on a hunch Tabari began digging into the darkened earth and thus uncovered the original level of the well, finding a few charred stones on which men had sat around one of the world’s first intentional fires, and it was among these stones that Eliav found imbedded the item that was to give Tell Makor its prehistoric significance: a piece of flint the size of a large flat hand, shaped into an obvious weapon, slightly convex on the sides and sharpened along the pointed end. It was a hand axe dating back some two hundred thousand years to that nebulous period when beings walked half-erect and hunted animals with simple rocks, cutting the flesh apart with precious hand axes like the one the Englishman was now photographing in situ.

“My God!” he cried. “What’s that?” His flash bulbs had disclosed in the darkness a monstrous shining object, as big as a plate, serrated in many ridges. He had found a petrified elephant’s molar, relic of a great beast slaughtered at the water hole when the climate of Israel was different and the wadi a deep river.

To call them men—those walking creatures that had killed the elephant—was in some ways repugnant, for they could neither farm, nor fish, nor tend fruit trees, nor tame a dog, nor build a house, nor make clothes, nor even form words with their apelike lips; but neither could they be called animals, for there were these things which they could do: they could make a tool; they could grasp it in a hand; and by grunts and shoves they could organize a team and plan a system for killing a huge thing like an elephant…and for these reasons they were men.

When Cullinane finally returned to Makor he wore a black patch over his left eye, which he explained merely by growling, “Hospital.” Then he added, “The nurses told me you were trying to phone, so I knew you’d struck something great, but there was nothing I could do about it.” He climbed down to the first cache of bones, then on to the well and the charred stones. It was more than he had hoped for, more than any archaeologist had a right to expect. When he crawled back to sunlight he assembled the group and said, “We’ll be working here for years, and when Han Eliav becomes prime minister of Israel, say, about 1980, we’ll invite him to deliver the closing-down address.” The kibbutzniks cheered, after which he said, holding aloft the hand axe, “Whenever you think Israel is moving too slowly, remember that our ancestors used implements like this for more than two hundred thousand years before they reached the next big invention. Small flints shaped to a point that could be used in subtler weapons.” The first year of the dig was ending in a blaze of accomplishment.

When he was alone with the staff he said, “Tomorrow we must airmail carbon samples from Level XIX to Sweden and America. And I want everybody to pray that they prove out to some date before 30,000 B.C.E.”

A moment of silence followed, after which the photographer ventured, “There’s got to be one stinker in every show. Where’d you get the shiner, boss?”

Cullinane did not laugh. “It was Saturday morning and I was riding in a taxi to an informal meeting with the minister of finance. About getting our spare dollars cleared for transfer to Chicago. And suddenly out of hiding came a gang of boys and young men in fur caps, long coats and curls about their ears, screaming at us ‘Shabbos’ and hurling rocks—not stones, rocks. The taxi driver shouted, ‘Duck,’ but I didn’t catch the Hebrew soon enough, and by the time he repeated his warning I had taken one hell of a rock right in my eye. The doctors thought I might lose it.”

“I didn’t read about it in the paper,” Eliav said, half defensively.

“The government wanted no publicity. The cab driver said it was nothing unusual. Orthodox Jews insisting that no vehicle move on the streets of Israel during Shabbat.”

“So they’ve started the stoning business again?” Eliav groaned.

“I almost lost my eye. And the police made no arrests. They say that when they do the rabbis fight with them, pointing out that the Talmud condones the stoning of Jews who break Shabbat.”

“It’s your problem,” Tabari said to Eliav. “You’re in the government now.”

“Not quite,” the Jew argued. “But when I am I’ll do what I can to halt this Mickey Mouse stuff.”

“This what?” Cullinane asked.

“A bad phrase I picked up,” Eliav explained. “I’ll have to drop it now.”

“That Shabbat the young hoodlums broke lots of taxi windows,” Cullinane said. “The taxi men are becoming afraid to drive on Saturday.”

“That’s what the religious group is after,” Eliav explained. “They argue that Israel can exist only if it goes back to the laws of the To-rah…in every detail.”

“Preposterous!” Cullinane said.

“As a Catholic you know it’s preposterous,” Tabari laughed, “and as a Muslim so do I. But the Jews don’t, and even Cabinet Minister Eliav isn’t quite sure. Because pretty soon he’s going to have to face up to that problem.”

“While I was in the hospital,” Cullinane said, “I had the gloomy feeling that one of these days all of us were going to have to face up to certain moral problems. And we just don’t seem to be wüling. I had a long talk with an official of the Italian government. Up to arrange with the Jordanians for the entry of Catholic pilgrims into Bethlehem. He told me how close the Italian voters had come to electing a Communist government. Explained how a small swing of the total votes would have done it. He asked, ‘Supposing this happens? What does the world then do with the Vatican? Does it go to Russia? Or to the United States? Or does it stay locked up within the walls, impotent, in Italy?’ The day could come when we’d have to face that problem.”

“Religions are always in trouble,” Tabari said. “In adversity they grow honest. It’s good for them.”

“And I also had the feeling,” Cullinane added, “that perhaps at the same time the world might have to face up to the problem of Judaism. ‘To what extent are we prepared to protect Judaism as our parent religion?’”

Eliav caught the significance of this question, but Tabari did not. The Arab spoke first: “The other day I joked about putting the world’s Jews into orbit, but seriously, I suppose the day is past when you can exterminate six million Jews.”

But Eliav said, “You’re equating Israel with Judaism and you Wonder what the world will do if the Arabs try to eliminate Israel altogether?”

“Yes,” Cullinane said. “For the first time since I’ve been in Israel…lying there in the hospital with the crazy cut across my face, thinking of the distorted ideas behind the religious hoodlums who threw the rocks…What I’m trying to say is that if such zealots represent the new Israel, you can’t expect people like me to come to your aid if the Arabs attack. And the death of Israel would raise the moral problem I spoke of.”