swam with its date palms in the dizzy currents . A thin slash of green foliage in the cliffs farther along marked the kibbutz’s lifeline and its raison d’être – the biblical spring and the waterfall.
We came down behind the kibbutz, three quarters of a mile behind, in a narrow part of the canyon, and then had to climb again, up the opposite wall. Thirty feet up, under an overhang, there was a narrow shelf.
‘Here,’ Agrot said.
It was a little hole, scarcely big enough for a man to crawl in. But someone had crawled in it, nineteen hundred years ago, and left a scroll and his money there, and never gone back for them.
I sat and mopped myself, slightly addled with the heat and the effort, while Agrot enlarged on it. He enlarged on the gold, too, and why he didn’t expect any of it still to be around. Sweat poured down my body as I sat and listened. We stayed about a quarter of an hour and then climbed back.
It isn’t difficult or dangerous climbing in the Ein Gedi canyon; just laborious and also, as it happens, unnecessary. A perfectly good road runs to Ein Gedi along the shore. Agrot hadn’t taken it because the detour would have knocked the time-table out by an hour or so.
I was too tired to eat when we got back to Barot, slept all the way back to Jerusalem, and then went to the hotel and slept again.
Agrot woke me on the phone about nine.
‘Well. There’s a lot to do,’ he said. ‘You want to come out for a meal?’
‘No.’
‘You want I should come round there for a meal?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want?’
I told him what I wanted and hung up and got on with it. Carry on his way, I thought, drifting off again, and the man would have me nackered in no time. Tomorrow had better go my way.
4 Precept Upon Precept
Here a little, and there a little . [ Isaiah 28.10 ]
1
The next day went my way. I rose late, told them not to put calls through, bathed and breakfasted at leisure, and made my own way to the university by bus. A peaceful but diligent day followed, marred only by a couple of incidents, the first with Agrot who wanted to know too abruptly where the hell I’d been, and the second with Dr Hilde Himmelwasser, expert on photographic emulsions. This pest, on loan from the Faculty of Science, had set up a high-security photo lab in Agrot’s scrollery , one of her tasks being to try and make readable some parts of the scroll that were unreadable. She had notably not succeeded .
‘Any good having a go with American Kodak infra-red plates?’ I said helpfully.
‘No, Dr Lenk, I think not.’
‘Not worth a try even?’
‘If I thought so, Dr Lenk, I would surely have tried.’
She was a tall sinewy type with a face not unlike General de Gaulle’s and a pair of very thin legs. She stood quite still on them, hands in the pockets of her white lab coat and regarded me with grave attention as if I were some sort of natural curiosity. Her annoying habit of replying to my perfectly good Hebrew with her zis and zat type English had already put me in a state of twitch.
I said, ‘I know Nejid Albina got excellent results in Jordan.’
‘That is interesting.’
‘And Isaac Isaacs here, at Megiddo.’
‘Indeed.’
‘They both used Linhoff cameras,’ I said, and was suddenly driven nearly mad by a slow supercilious smile that crossed her face. ‘With a number three red filter!’ I cried. ‘And developed in ID2, and printed on soft bromide. The stuff came up like yesterday’s newspaper!’
‘But we are not here dealing with yesterday’s newspaper,’ she said, still smiling and shaking her head at this foolishness. ‘It is an old skin, Dr Lenk, almost totally blackened. I think it’s best to stick to our own fields. I cannot tell you anything about philology and I don’t think you have much to tell me about emulsions. The emulsion used here is one I made myself. To improve the quality I will perhaps make adaptations of the emulsion.’
‘Fine. Only it isn’t
We came down behind the kibbutz, three quarters of a mile behind, in a narrow part of the canyon, and then had to climb again, up the opposite wall. Thirty feet up, under an overhang, there was a narrow shelf.
‘Here,’ Agrot said.
It was a little hole, scarcely big enough for a man to crawl in. But someone had crawled in it, nineteen hundred years ago, and left a scroll and his money there, and never gone back for them.
I sat and mopped myself, slightly addled with the heat and the effort, while Agrot enlarged on it. He enlarged on the gold, too, and why he didn’t expect any of it still to be around. Sweat poured down my body as I sat and listened. We stayed about a quarter of an hour and then climbed back.
It isn’t difficult or dangerous climbing in the Ein Gedi canyon; just laborious and also, as it happens, unnecessary. A perfectly good road runs to Ein Gedi along the shore. Agrot hadn’t taken it because the detour would have knocked the time-table out by an hour or so.
I was too tired to eat when we got back to Barot, slept all the way back to Jerusalem, and then went to the hotel and slept again.
Agrot woke me on the phone about nine.
‘Well. There’s a lot to do,’ he said. ‘You want to come out for a meal?’
‘No.’
‘You want I should come round there for a meal?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want?’
I told him what I wanted and hung up and got on with it. Carry on his way, I thought, drifting off again, and the man would have me nackered in no time. Tomorrow had better go my way.
4 Precept Upon Precept
Here a little, and there a little . [ Isaiah 28.10 ]
1
The next day went my way. I rose late, told them not to put calls through, bathed and breakfasted at leisure, and made my own way to the university by bus. A peaceful but diligent day followed, marred only by a couple of incidents, the first with Agrot who wanted to know too abruptly where the hell I’d been, and the second with Dr Hilde Himmelwasser, expert on photographic emulsions. This pest, on loan from the Faculty of Science, had set up a high-security photo lab in Agrot’s scrollery , one of her tasks being to try and make readable some parts of the scroll that were unreadable. She had notably not succeeded .
‘Any good having a go with American Kodak infra-red plates?’ I said helpfully.
‘No, Dr Lenk, I think not.’
‘Not worth a try even?’
‘If I thought so, Dr Lenk, I would surely have tried.’
She was a tall sinewy type with a face not unlike General de Gaulle’s and a pair of very thin legs. She stood quite still on them, hands in the pockets of her white lab coat and regarded me with grave attention as if I were some sort of natural curiosity. Her annoying habit of replying to my perfectly good Hebrew with her zis and zat type English had already put me in a state of twitch.
I said, ‘I know Nejid Albina got excellent results in Jordan.’
‘That is interesting.’
‘And Isaac Isaacs here, at Megiddo.’
‘Indeed.’
‘They both used Linhoff cameras,’ I said, and was suddenly driven nearly mad by a slow supercilious smile that crossed her face. ‘With a number three red filter!’ I cried. ‘And developed in ID2, and printed on soft bromide. The stuff came up like yesterday’s newspaper!’
‘But we are not here dealing with yesterday’s newspaper,’ she said, still smiling and shaking her head at this foolishness. ‘It is an old skin, Dr Lenk, almost totally blackened. I think it’s best to stick to our own fields. I cannot tell you anything about philology and I don’t think you have much to tell me about emulsions. The emulsion used here is one I made myself. To improve the quality I will perhaps make adaptations of the emulsion.’
‘Fine. Only it isn’t
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