Джеймс Миченер - The Source

On what would be the last day Hoopoe tried to mask his excitement, and he refused to be the man at the facing when the puncture was made. He chose an ordinary slave who had done good work and sent him crawling in with his sledge while he remained in the well cave, looking at the sweet water which would bubble quietly to the surface for the next two thousand years as women came along with their water jars. His work had made the future existence of Makor possible; and since he was deep in the earth, working with the earth, he prayed to the god who controlled that earth: “Sweet Baal, you have brought me face to face with my friend Meshab. Hidden from the eyes of others, you have brought us together, and the triumph is yours.”

“Hoopoe!” the men in the tunnel began calling. Shouts of joy echoed through the cave and reverberated across the surface of the water. “Hoopoe!” The voices became confused and men backed out of the tunnel, their eyes filled with tears.

“You must go in!” the slaves shouted, and they pushed their master into the tunnel. On his knees he crawled through those difficult first cuttings which had determined the success of the venture, past the bulge that Meshab had corrected for him, and to the longed-for spot where he saw a lamp shining through the rock. The men on the other side were waiting for him and he heard a slave saying, “When he puts his hand through, shout!” And when he reached the small opening he could see Meshab the Moabite and he said, “You are my brother. This moment you are free to leave.”

“I’ll finish the tunnel with you,” the Moabite promised; and at that glowing instant when they met in the darkness of the earth, a slim, exhausted man with a black beard was painfully climbing the ramp to enter the town, and when the guards at the gate stopped him he said that he was Gershom, seeking sanctuary, and he carried with him a small kinnor, called a lyre.

… THE TELL

Vered Bar-El had been in Chicago only a short time giving her lectures on the Candlestick of Death when a withering example of the “fifty days” drifted in with searing winds from the desert, making work at the dig almost impossible. These days were now called khamsin, from the Arabic word for fifty , but they were as enervating as they had always been. During khamsin only the Moroccans made any attempt to keep digging, and even they preferred the bottom of the trenches, where they could hide in shadows and pick at the rubble with their fingers.

In this impossible weather John Cullinane often sat on the back porch of the headquarters building, watching the amusing little hoopoe birds as they hurried about, probing into sandy holes, and he remembered Vered’s lilting voice as she once said, “The hoopoe bird ought to be the world symbol for archaeologists. We also go furiously about, poking our noses into the earth.” He missed Vered even more than he had expected, and hoped she would soon return; at his desk he sometimes blew at the skirted figurine of Astarte and convinced himself that he was going to take both the clay goddess and the living back to Chicago. In fact, he was pleased that she was having a chance to see the city which was to be her future home.

When the lingering khamsin continued to make digging impractical, he resumed work on his progress report, but even here Vered’s lovely figure haunted him, for when he wrote of ceramics he could see her darting back and forth to her washing troughs with basketfuls of fragments, and he recalled with affection the phrases that so often appeared in the prefaces to archaeological reports: “I am especially indebted to Miss Pamela Mockridge (later Mrs. Peter Hanbury)” and a few lines farther on one would discover that Mr. Peter Hanbury had been the expedition’s architect. Few presentable girls could survive two seasons of digging in the Holy Land without getting married, and Cullinane thought how saucy it would be to include in his preface: “We are all indebted to our brilliant ceramicist, Mrs. Vered Bar-El (later Mrs. John Cullinane).” He chuckled. “Let ’em figure out what happened on that dig.”

But when he submitted his provisional draft to Eliav and Tabari he ran into trouble, for they feared that in his section covering Level XII at Makor he had been too much influenced by what had happened at collateral sites elsewhere. Eliav warned, “Your guesses are too derivative.”

“What he means,” Tabari interpreted. “You’d be a lot smarter if you were a lot dumber.”

“Forget what happened at Megiddo and Gezer,” Eliav advised. “Trust your own eyes.”

“We don’t work in a vacuum,” Cullinane said defensively. “Don’t you suppose the men at Gezer and Megiddo faced the same problems our fellows did?”

Tabari evaded the question. “We want you to take a little trip with us, John,” and as the three men climbed into the jeep the Arab said, “It’s the year 3000 C.E. and we’re archaeologists coming to excavate four sites, all of which perished in some great cataclysm in 1964.”

“Let’s just use our eyes,” Eliav said, “and decide what kind of report we’d write.”

They drove to a bright new suburb of Akko, where Tabari stopped at the home of a friend to show Cullinane and Eliav a modern house, whose components he ticked off: “Age of electricity, refrigerator, stove, air-conditioning, wiring in all rooms. Accessible to a lively foreign trade, because the rug’s from Britain, the radio from Germany. Where’d you get the chair, Otto?”

“Italy.”

Eliav continued the analysis: “And if we found fragments of these books we could state that the family had attained a high culture with works in German, French, English, Hebrew, Arabic and something I don’t recognize.”

“Hungarian,” Otto explained.

“We could go on through the rest of the house,” Eliav said, “with eyeglasses as proof of medical skill, the wine bottle linked with France. So let’s agree that this is the norm for Level XLV.”

“And a very high norm it is,” Cullinane said amiably to the owner.

“We’ve worked since we got out of Hungary,” he replied.

They drove to a village not far away, where Tabari sought permission to enter a house, which was granted by a group of recent oriental immigrants who as yet spoke no Hebrew. “Look at the contents here,” he said. “No electricity. Practically no objects dating since 1920. Very few signs of cultural attainment. Different cooking methods, different mode of life altogether.” He gave the owners some cigarettes and thanked them for their kindness.

“But the real jolt to our archaeologists in 3000 C.E. will be when they dig up this next house,” and he led the way to an Arab village north of Makor, where he shouted to a man standing in the unpaved road, asking him if they could visit his house. The villager nodded, and standing amid chickens, Tabari pointed out, “Completely different architecture. No electricity, no stove. Clay pots such as were used two thousand years ago. No books, one picture with Arabic writing, a manner of dress centuries old. But what I want you to see especially is this mill for grinding wheat. It’s all wood, but tell me—what are those little things sticking out to grind the grain?”

Cullinane got on his hands and knees to inspect the ancient grinding system from whose upper section small points projected. “Are they what I think they are?” he asked.

“They’re not metal,” Tabari said.

“They’re flints,” Cullinane said. “Where’d they get flints in this age?”

“Where the people of Makor got them ten thousand years ago,” Tabari replied. In Arabic he checked with the owner of the mill. “That’s right. Nodules from the wadi bed.”

The three scientists returned to the jeep, where Tabari said, “Now before you tell me how you’re going to date that Arab hut when we dig it up, let’s look at item four.” He drove to a ravine up whose sides they climbed on foot until they came to the mouth of a cave, at whose entrance they called. From the dark depths came a petulant voice, and they crept in to find an old man who lived alone with his goats. Eliav whispered, “This cave’s been occupied like this for at least thirty thousand years, and the only thing that I can see that would tell us it’s the twentieth century is the plastic buttons on the old man’s shirt.”