Джеймс Миченер - The Source

It was frustrating to have no one at hand with whom he could discuss his revolutionary plan—the governor could not imagine what abstract lines meant and Kerith was hampered by her initial visualization of Hoopoe as a mole digging blindly in the earth—so late that night he rolled up his leather and left the town, heading for the slave camp outside the walls. It was a ghastly place, the last way station of futility, where prisoners from many nations were herded in foul pens and fed on slops, Hebrew guards ringed the encampment, ready to kill those who tried to escape, and the slaves dragged out their lives in the misery of forced labor until after a few cruel years they died. Only two justifications could be found for the ugly system: when Hebrews were captured by Egyptians or Amalekites they were treated the same way; and from these particular slave pits there was a steady flow of men into positions of responsibility or even freedom, because Hoopoe despised the system and did what he could to liberate men from it. Many of the present citizens of Makor had started their local lives in this foul camp and in response to the engineer’s pleading had converted to Yahweh and had won a new life.

On this night the engineer ignored the ordinary pens festering with rats and sought the worst part of the slave area, the walls within the walls where dangerous prisoners were kept, and there, lying on a rush mat, he found a tall, clean-shaven, rugged man some years older than himself. He was well known in the town as Meshab the Moabite, a man of extraordinary fortitude, captured by King David in one of his wars against Moab, and he was the most resourceful and intelligent of the slaves, For the building of the wall he had served as Hoopoe’s foreman, and from his rotting bed he now raised himself, half insolently, on one elbow to greet his superior. The faltering old lamp that Hoopoe carried showed the man’s strong face against the filth, and the engineer said, “Meshab, the time has come to build the water system.”

“It can be done,” the big slave grunted, “if you solve one problem.”

“We face many. Which one?”

“The shaft we can dig. The tunnel we can dig.”

“Then you’re not afraid of the rock?” Hoopoe asked.

“You get us iron tools from the Phoenicians,” he growled, “we’ll cut the rock. But when we stand hidden at the foot of the shaft, how will we know where to start our digging to reach the well?”

Hoopoe laughed nervously. “My wife asked the same question.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said, ‘That’s my job.’”

“You have a plan?” the slave asked, sitting upright among his foul rushes.

“When I was a boy we used to recite an old Canaanite proverb: ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’” The flickering light threw deep shadows across the bald head and composed features of the engineer, disclosing the face of one who even as a child had wondered about the natural world. “‘The way of a ship in the midst of the sea’” he repeated softly.

“What have we to do with ships?” Meshab asked, for he had never seen the sea nor the ships that go upon it.

“One day years ago when I was in Aecho with my father, we walked along the sea front and watched as a small ship … Meshab, it was so small it had no right to be upon the waves. Rocks lurked everywhere and there were shoals, but somehow this little ship from Cyprus picked its way exactly into harbor. How?”

“Magic?”

“I thought so, but when I asked the captain he laughed and pointed to three flags rising from the tops of buildings far inland. ‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘The range,’ he said, and he explained that a sailor lost at sea, if he watches those flags and keeps them in line, will be on a secure course to his anchorage.”

The two men sat silent while bugs, attracted by the lamp, whirred in the night and snores came from filthy mattings where exhausted slaves were sleeping. Then Hoopoe said, “The other day …” He stopped, considered his words and started over. “I stood on the north wall by the postern gate. I could see where the well was. And looking up the mountainside I could see a spot at which we could put a flag …” He paused. “No, we’d need two flags.”

He had scarcely spoken the word two when Meshab caught his wrist. “We’d have a range. We could see the flags from inside the walls and they’d control our direction.”

Excitedly Hoopoe placed his clay lamp on the ground and tried to clear away a small area on which to spread his leather, but even the earth was contaminated, so Meshab, with a bold swipe of his right arm laid bare an area, and in flickering light Hoopoe showed his slave the well, and the mountain behind. Poking his finger at a spot halfway up the slope he said, “If we put our first flag here, and our second here …”

“Our third, our fourth …” With great jabs of his finger Meshab indicated the fifth and sixth flags, placing the last on the roof of the governor’s quarters. “It would work! We’d have a range!”

“You have seen into my mind,” Hoopoe said in a solemn whisper, and the two men were so tantalized with the project that they could not wait till morning and wanted to climb the mountain that night to check their theory, but at the gate leading from the camp, guards stopped them, warning Hoopoe that Meshab was a dangerous prisoner who must not leave the compound.

“He is my foreman, and I need him,” Hoopoe replied.

“He has killed many men,” the guard said, but Hoopoe took him through the gates on his own recognizance and they entered the moonless night.

They crossed the road to the walls of Makor but did not enter the zigzag gate. Instead, they circled to the north where the waterwall made a small circle, indicating that the well lay beneath. Climbing to the roof they stuck there a small cloth which would be visible from a distance. They then left the well and started to climb the mountain of Baal, halting now and then to look behind them, and when they reached a spot which put them well above the level of the town they stopped to review their position, and the Moabite said, “Here we put our first flag. Let’s wait a little and the moon will rise.”

They sat in darkness and studied as much of the town as they could see in the flickering lights which burned in some areas like distant stars on a murky night. The slave was much larger than Hoopoe, more powerful, and he could easily have killed the engineer and fled westward to Phoenicia; instead, he sat beside his friend and said, “Now that we’ve seen the town from here I’m convinced we can do it.”

When the three-quarter moon rose over the Galilean hills, the water-wall stood out clearly, a sharp, straight line leading from the postern gate to the well, and the two planners maneuvered themselves until they stood in a direct line with that wall. Hoopoe said, “See how the line projects itself across the town till it intersects the roof of the governor’s house.”

“That’s where we’ll put the sixth flag,” Meshab said, and he could visualize that unfaltering range which the engineers would use to maintain their orientation when digging the first deep shaft, but he could also visualize himself at the bottom of that shaft, about to start the tunnel toward the unseen, unknown well. “There’s the hard part,” he growled. “From the bottom of the shaft, how can we see the range?”

“That’s my job,” Hoopoe said and he was about to lead the way back to the slave camp when he saw, coming down the mountain, a chain of people bearing torches. They had spent the night on the high place, worshiping Baal in the old manner, and since this god had been so generous to the engineers that night, Meshab suggested, “Perhaps I too should go to the high place to worship Baal?” And Jabaal said, “I shall go with you,” and the two men crossed the mountainside until they came to the footpath which the pilgrims had descended, and this they climbed to the sanctuary which had been the site of worship for more than a thousand years.