A Long Way to Shiloh by Lionel Davidson Page A

pipes through here,’ Teitleman said. It was a narrow section of the tel some fifty yards from the tip.
    Tanya got out of her jeep and joined us. ‘Those are very old stones down there, Mr Teitleman,’ she said. ‘They have to be photographed and numbered and taken away.’
    ‘Everything will be done the way you want it,’ Teitleman said. ‘Under your supervision.’
    ‘But we can’t spare the people just now.’
    ‘I’ll get you people. As many as you want. A bus-load, today.’
    ‘You’ll need to move some earth here, surely,’ Agrot said.
    ‘A very little.’
    ‘But the contour isn’t level down there. There are outcrops of rock. You’ll have to do some boring or blasting.’
    ‘So maybe we’ll do a little,’ Teitleman said, his grey patience shifting slightly. ‘As little as possible. You’ll feel nothing at all.’
    ‘Mr Teitleman,’ Agrot said, sorrowfully shaking his head, ‘I’m afraid that would shake the site. There are open workings here, very ancient. The slightest tremor will disturb them.’
    ‘What tremor?’ Teitleman said, and suddenly lost his temper completely. ‘The bleddy rock is like bleddy iron. It needs a bleddy atom bomb to get a tremor. I spent five bleddy weeks blasting that bleddy lagoon and you could have rested a bleddy egg on top. I promise you there’ll be no disturbance. You can sleep on top. I’ll sleep on top. What other guarantees do you want?’
    ‘Only that you respect the terms of the Order. In five weeks you can have the whole tel.’
    ‘And leave a hundred men and machines to stand idle?’
    ‘If it’s simply a try-out, run your water and power from another point.’
    ‘And double my costs when I can run it from this point, where it’s supposed to run from?’
    ‘In five weeks’ time,’ Agrot said.
    Teitleman’s teeth snapped to with an audible click and he turned and practically skied down the slope. ‘Just ask some favours from me in the future,’ he said, holding up one cotton-gloved finger at the bottom. ‘Just do that!’
    ‘Take the jeep,’ Agrot called after him.
    Teitleman didn’t take the jeep.
    ‘That means no more water from him,’ Tanya said.
    ‘So you’ll send the truck down to Arad,’ Agrot said. ‘Give that man an inch and he’ll take a mile. It wouldn’t be just a try-out. He’d have gone ahead with the whole works. And he knows that I know. You’ve really got to admire such a bastard … So how is it going here while I’ve been away?’
    We went and had a look how it was going. Agrot’s face was dark and moody as we turned back to the jeep.
    ‘They need me back here,’ he said.
    ‘Perhaps they’ll have you soon.’
    ‘So let’s get on with it. To the Ein Gedi canyon,’ he said to the driver. ‘Along the top.’
    It’s eight miles ‘along the top’ of the plateau from the tel to the Ein Gedi canyon, and it took us forty-five boulder-dodging minutes in first gear.
    Then we got out and climbed down the slit in the world, to the very bottom.

4
    Either you like deserts, wildernesses, the hot rock stillnesses of the world, or you don’t. If you do, you like the Dead Sea. There is a deathly, an infernal romanticism about the place that no amount of familiarity can stale. Suddenly from the high craggy wastes of the plateau a fantastic panorama opens half a mile below, the dead livid plain of the ’Arava, flickering in a haze of heat and salt evaporation. The Great Rift runs here, from Turkey to Tanganyika, and finds its deepest depression between the crusted walls of Judea and Moab. And in the very centre, still as a pool of pus, lies the salt lake, forty-eight miles long and eleven wide; the pit of the world.
    Six and a half million tons of water enter it daily from the Jordan and other sources, and find no outlet. The stuff simply evaporates in the bakehouse heat.
    Great waves of heat wafted up out of the canyon as we clambered down into it. Half a mile below on the floor the trim kibbutz of Ein Gedi