The Source

  At the end of the ninth blow Meshab would call back that he had finished, and the signal would pass to the shaft and up to the slave on the wall. With a flourish he would drop his flag toward the well outside the walls, and there other slaves would echo, “Hoopoe, Hoopoe! It is your turn,” and in the darkness of his tunnel the master engineer would strike his wall nine times in stately rhythm while Meshab listened; but always the mass of rock between the two men absorbed the sound.

  Each dusk the men sent nine signals nine times, then crawled out of their holes and met to discuss what was happening. Since they could measure with cords how far each had penetrated into the earth, and since they could lay off those measurements along the line of the waterwall, they could see from the ground approximately where the ends of the tunnels must be, and as night came they would stand on the surface where the cords lay and deduce how far apart they were.

  They were now separated by some sixty feet and were reaching the point at which it ought to be possible for sounds to be carried through limestone, and they began to hope that at the next sunset they would hear each other, but even when they didn’t they felt a growing sense of assurance that they must be on the right headings. Their work was an act of faith so intense that of itself it had sustained them during the first two years, and they went each morning to the tunnels refreshed. Perhaps this would be the day when the first sound would be heard. But when the month of Abib passed and Ziv came again, when men coming out of the dark tunnels looked with whatever joy slaves can know at the new flowers, the two leaders began to lose courage because of the failure of their signals to penetrate the rock. Could something be wrong? Could they be so wide of each other, or so ill placed vertically, that they were missing by a large margin?

  Patiently they reconstructed the operation, confronting each possible source of error honestly like men well trained. “You go to the mountain this time,” Hoopoe suggested, “and check the range I laid out.” The Moabite left the town while Hoopoe climbed the walls and the various houses, making signals with a flag, and Meshab satisfied himself that all was in order. He came back to report, “The range is right.” They then checked to see if the poles across the two openings conformed to the range, and they did. Next came the critical part of the work. Did the lines dropping down into the holes accurately reproduce the range established above? At the main shaft this was relatively easy to check, for the diagonal was adequate, permitting the two cords to stand relatively far apart, and this insured a secure heading. “This end has got to be right,” Hoopoe said, but when they went to the well, where the opening was small and where the critical cords could not be far apart, it was apparent that error might have crept in.

  With the greatest care the two men checked and rechecked the orientation at the well and they had to conclude that it was impossible to be sure. “It could be a little more to the north,” Meshab said honestly, and even a small error at the beginning would yield a tragic error when the length of the tunnel was so great. It was at this moment that Jabaal spoke like a true engineer. He was lying prone near the well while Meshab stood by the strings, and from this position he said, “This tunnel has got to be right. There can be no error and we must meet. But if we do not, it is because I have failed. My eye has erred and the fault is on me.”

  Disconsolate, he left the slaves and climbed out of the well, a tired, perplexed man. Turning his back on the tunnels, on the flags that hung limp in the humid heat, he climbed the mountain seeking the high place where Baal lived, and there alone he lay face downward before the god of this earth, these rocks, these dark burrowings in the ground that seemed to have gone wrong. “Baal, show me the way,” he pleaded humbly. “I am lost in the deep earth like a pitiful mole and my eyes are blinded. Great Baal, guide me through the darkness.”

  He stayed for many hours talking with the ancient god from whom his ancestors had derived much consolation, and as the night progressed on the high place, the stars moving across the heavens as Baal had long ago appointed them to move, Jabaal the Hoopoe felt his confidence returning, and he intensified his prayers; and as dawn came it seemed to him that Baal was giving his blessing. Then, as he started down the mountain, morning broke out of the eastern hills and its radiance filled the valleys of Galilee, showing the olive trees gray and beautiful, the birds winging from the tall oaks and the little town snug within its walls, with red flags fluttering slightly in the morning breeze, and the glory of that day was so profound that Jabaal fell to his knees and cried, “Yahweh, Yahweh! I am your child, your instrument. Use me as you will. Drive my head through the earth like a battering ram to accomplish your purposes, great Yahweh, who has given me this day.”

  And he left the high place where he had talked with his gods, and he went to the cave of the well and once more laid himself flat in the tunnel to study the critical strings on which so much depended; and again he cried, “It has got to be right! It can be no other!” And he drove his slaves all day, working often at the rock face himself, and that evening when the slave on the wall signaled and the slaves in the well cried, “Hoopoe, Hoopoe! It is your turn,” he slammed his sledge against the rock nine times, but before he had finished there came from the other side, through feet upon feet of primeval rock, the unplanned hammering of another sledge, and the two captains beat upon the rocks, ignoring signals and hearing each other through the solid darkness. Men began to cheer, first in the well and then from the shaft and then all across the town, and flags were waved from the walls and after a while Meshab and Hoopoe met in the open field where the cords were approaching each other, and they knew where they were, and it was exactly as they had planned so long ago.

  That night Hoopoe walked with the Moabite to their house by the edge of the shaft, and he bade the southern slave good night. He entered his portion of the house, where he bathed; he came into the room where Kerith had a fine meal waiting, but he was not hungry. “We have done it!” he told her with quiet exultation. “In a few weeks we shall meet.”

  “I heard the shouting and ran to the shaft. Even the governor came and we were very proud.” And as she kissed him she whispered, “Today Jerusalem is closer,” and she begged him to eat. But he could not eat that night, and after a while he took his fair wife to bed, where he was soon the happiest man in Makor.

  By sound testings Hoopoe and Meshab corrected their headings and set their teams to work on the final push that would unite the two test tunnels, but work was slowed by the fact that the iron tools required for chopping out the rock had been overused and were no longer effective. The two men decided that new tools were required, and to obtain them it was necessary that someone go into the Phoenician seaport of Accho, which was the only source for iron tools in the area. Because bargaining for a just price was important, Hoopoe felt that he must go, and at first it was his intention to take Meshab along—as an earned reward for having dug his end of the tunnel properly—but the governor dissuaded him from this by pointing out that now more than ever it was essential to have skilled help on hand to supervise what seemed to him the critical stages of the work. Hoopoe was tempted to point out that the true critical stages had occurred seven months ago when he and the Moabite had studied their strings and had oriented their tunnels properly. “Anyone who can listen to sounds can finish the work now,” he said to his wife, but she supported the governor, and so when he started out for Accho he was forced to go alone.

  To have seen Hoopoe set forth on his exciting journey one would have thought that he was heading for some distant territory: even though the hot season was approaching he dressed in a long robe, wore a dagger, climbed on a donkey and waited while the caravan of two groats merchants formed up around him. He waved good-bye to Kerith as if he did not expect to see her for some years, called instructions to the Moabite, who stood on the wall, and saluted the governor. He kicked his donkey, gathered his robes about his knees and was off.

  Accho lay eight miles west of Makor, along an easy road that caravans had been trave
ling for thousands of years, but it was a mark of this land that throughout history Accho and Makor were rarely held by the same nation. In most ages Makor marked the westward terminal of some inland people; in all conditions of the land strangers usually occupied the seaport. This year after long negotiation it happened to be Hebrew in Makor, Phoenician in Accho; in other years it would be other combinations, for control of the sea was so vital that tribes and nations would fight to retain Accho, whereas they usually lost heart when called upon to besiege Makor for even ten or eleven months; so that over a period of several thousand years, to go from Makor to Accho was usually a trip of magnitude, an exploration into unknown ways and alien tongues.

  Two miles west of Makor the caravan of the groats merchants came to a border guard, where Phoenician soldiers wearing iron shields inspected them, took away Hoopoe’s dagger, gave him a clay tablet receipt and grudgingly allowed him to pass. After a few more miles customs officials checked his possessions, noted the amount of gold he was carrying and gave him another clay tablet, which when presented on his return trip would insure his right to depart. The Phoenicians were polite but they seemed like powerful men who would tolerate no nonsense from strangers, and Hoopoe treated them with deference.

  Soon he saw on the horizon the walled city of Accho, rising from the plains at the point where the River Belus entered the sea. It was even then, in the years before it was moved westward to the hooked promontory where it would become famous in history, an enticing city, for ships from many parts of the Mediterranean came to its harbor and its shops contained a variety of goods matched only in the bazaars of Tyre and Ashkelon. It was through this port that the iron smelted in distant forges reached the Hebrews, and in the shops of Accho, Hoopoe expected to find the tools his slaves needed.

  At the gate to the city he was stopped for the third time, and the receipts given him by the outlying inspectors were filed against the day of his departure. He was warned that he must not get drunk; for the Phoenicians had found that whereas their men could drink copious amounts of beer with little damaging effect, visiting Hebrews after a few jugfuls were apt to become riotous. Hoopoe promised to behave and was allowed to enter the exciting world of Accho.

  He went first to the waterfront, which had charmed him as a child, and there he stayed for some time fascinated as before by the concept of a floating house that was able to drift across an open sea yet put into port whenever its sailors directed. He still could not understand the principle of the sail and wondered how sailors could slow the craft down when it approached land; he was delighted with the ships and the multitude of strange faces that looked down at him from the decks, and he was pleased to see that one of the boats was unloading a cargo of iron.

  How varied were the men who climbed half naked up the gangways leading from the dock! He could recognize the Egyptians, the Africans, the Canaanites and the Phoenicians, but there were half a dozen other types, stalwart men with enormous shoulders whom he had not seen before. They must have come from Cyprus and the distant islands, and they spoke languages which he did not understand. In those years Accho was an international seaport, and it took a rural Hebrew from Makor to appreciate the wonder of the place.

  He left the docks and wandered along the main thoroughfares, looking into shops whose richness was strange to him: one jeweler who dispatched camels to various parts of the east had turquoise from Arabia, alabaster from Crete, amethyst and carnelian from Greek traders and chalcedony from Punt. He had faïence and enamel from Egypt and from the workshops of Accho one of the loveliest things Hoopoe had ever seen: a short length of glass rope braided from eighteen strands of different-colored glass. Across the face it had been cut on a diagonal, which was then polished, so that from any angle the intricate interweavings were resplendent. “I would like that for my wife,” he said hesitantly to the shopkeeper, not knowing whether he would be understood or not, but the jeweler could speak in half a dozen languages—poorly but enough for trade—and the bargaining began. Hoopoe feared that the cost might be prohibitive, for the glass rope was more appealing to him than turquoise, and he was surprised at how little it cost. “We make it here,” the jeweler said, and he showed Hoopoe his courtyard where slaves were blowing the colored glass, spinning it out like cobwebs.

  Finally he came to the ironmonger’s, where he entered with reverence, for it had been with iron that the Phoenicians and their southern neighbors had conquered the land of Israel. King David, in his years as mercenary for the Philistines, had learned the use of iron and in the end had accumulated enough of the metal to turn it against them and win back much of the land; but dark iron, in many ways more mysterious than gold, remained a monopoly of cities like Accho and it still accounted for Phoenician superiority along the seacoast.

  The ironmonger stared at Hoopoe with suspicion, for the Hebrew was obviously a wanderer and it was forbidden to sell iron carelessly, but Hoopoe was able to present a signed clay tablet granting him permission to purchase iron tools “providing none be weapons such as soldiers use.” The Phoenician shopkeeper could not read, but he understood the restrictions and indicated the portion of the shop from which the stranger was free to choose. With his arms akimbo he stood protecting the other area where spearheads, sword blades and pikes were stacked along with other weapons whose use Hoopoe could not fathom. The Phoenicians wanted their visitors to see this arsenal, so that when they returned to the hinterland they would repeat its awesome character; and Hoopoe, properly impressed, muttered a small prayer to Baal: “Help us finish the water system before these men of iron decide to attack again.”

  From among the permitted items Hoopoe identified the chisels, hammers and wedges he needed for finishing the tunnel, but when the time came for him to place them in a pile, an amusing impasse took place which the Phoenician had anticipated by inviting several of his neighboring shopkeepers in to watch. Iron was so precious that as soon as any was cast and sharpened, it was covered with animal fat to prevent rusting, and now Hoopoe grasped the first of his implements. The fat stuck to his fingers and he drew his hand away, staring at the greasy substance.

  “That’s right,” the ironmonger said. “It’s pork.”

  Even in those days the Hebrews were forbidden to eat pork, which they had learned from sorrowful experience could cause death if improperly cooked, and to them the entire body of the hog was repugnant. Phoenicians, of course, and the other seacoast peoples who knew how to prepare the meat, liked the tasty food and enjoyed laying little traps to embarrass the Hebrews—which the ironmonger was now doing.

  “It’s pork fat,” he repeated, and Hoopoe backed away, but when he saw the precious tools he could not refrain from grasping them and placing them in his pile. His hands became covered with pork fat, which at the end he smeared back onto the implements lest they suffer. At the end the Phoenicians laughed and helped the little engineer, providing him with a cloth for cleaning his hands.

  “Pork fat never hurt a man who likes iron,” the storekeeper said. “I’ll watch the tools till you bring your donkeys around.”

  Hoopoe left the ironmonger’s to inspect the interior of the city and was met by a guard from his caravan, who advised him where they would be sleeping, for he was not concerned about hurrying home; a sensible man could have left Makor that morning, been in Accho before noon, completed his business and been home again by nightfall, but the opportunity to visit a Phoenician city came so seldom to any Hebrew that Hoopoe intended to stretch it out as long as possible. Beside the waterfront he found an inn, where he sat at ease eating strange fish and looking with increasing thirst at an Egyptian merchant who was attended by two attractive girls who served him jugs of beer. Some of the brown liquid spilled along the corners of the man’s mouth and as it wasted itself on the pavement Hoopoe became increasingly fascinated by the bubbles it formed. They seemed like the essence of liquid, water intensified and wine improved upon.

  Remembering the warning that Hebrews must not drink beer in Accho, h
e turned away from the Egyptian and attended to his fried fish, but it had been so richly salted that his thirst increased. Bad luck brought an Aramaean to the eating place, and he ordered beer, which he drank in four huge draughts, throwing the last inch of liquid onto the pavement in front of Hoopoe.

  “They don’t strain the husks out,” the Aramaean said, ordering a second jug.

  “No, they don’t,” Hoopoe echoed, professionally. He picked up one of the barley husks and tasted it.

  “You like to have a beer?” the Aramaean asked.

  “I think I would,” Hoopoe said, and the Phoenician beer man brought him a large jug of the cool beverage.

  “Tastes good with fish?” the Aramaean asked. When Hoopoe nodded without taking the jug from his lips, the man said, “You know, in these places they put extra salt on the fish to make you want their beer.”

  At midnight Hoopoe was still at the inn, drinking beer and singing Egyptian songs with some sailors. He was loud but not boisterous, and the Phoenician guards did not molest him, even though they knew that he was not supposed to be there at that hour. It would have been difficult for them to explain why they did not arrest him, but primarily it was because he was a happy-looking man, visibly free of mean intentions. They supposed he had been working hard on some farm and was enjoying himself. At the one-o’clock watch he was singing noisily but stopped to explain to bystanders, “I do love a song. Listen to how that Cypriot sings. I tell you, a man who can sing like that is very close to Yahweh.” No sooner had he mentioned his god’s name among the unbelieving Phoenicians than he clamped his hand over his mouth in apology, but when he did so he began to giggle. “You mustn’t mind me,” he told the guards. “At home they call me Hoopoe.” And he left the table and walked unsteadily up and down, bobbing his head this way and that as his fat bottom weaved in the moonlight. “I’m a hoopoe bird,” he said.