8

The Mine in the Desert

Aleph, the scribe, continues his journey—The Dead Sea—The Egyptian copper mines in the Sinai peninsula—Information of attack on Gebal by the Egyptians—The first inscription in the new alphabet—Pigeon post

When Aleph returned with Ish to Jericho, after their patrol in the mountains, they found everything in a state of turmoil. The column was already re-forming, getting ready to resume its march south. Though the soldiers of the patrol, and Aleph, and Ish, were weary, the commander of the column told them to prepare to leave at once and barely listened to their report on the hill tribes. Ish was roughly ordered to get his things packed, and Aleph was beaten for being late to fall in with the prisoners. The easy-going discipline of the previous part of the journey had vanished, and there was nothing but bad temper, cursing, and grousing. What had happened? Soon they were on their way again, marching due South. Aleph was surprised when an hour’s march over the plain brought them to the shore of another sea. It was more than a lake, for though both sides were easily visible its ends could not be seen in the hot haze that hung over it. There was something strange about its waters, a leaden color even in the sunlight, and a sluggish motion to its waves, but the sight of it was refreshing as they journeyed along at the foot of the mountains on its eastern shore. The air was oppressive, the sun beat down and there was no vegetation at all, yet Aleph felt happier to be between the mountains and the sea again; and he promised himself the pleasure of a bath when they halted in the evening.

The sun was going down behind purple mountains on the far shore when they halted and prepared camp. Aleph approached the sergeant in charge of the prisoners.

“May I bathe?” he asked.

The sergeant exchanged a curious glance with some of the other soldiers. “Feel like a nice swim, lad?” he grinned.

“I can’t swim,” Aleph said, “but I’d like to cool down after the march.”

“Better have a proper swim, hadn’t he?” the sergeant said to the soldiers, and they laughed.

“But I can’t swim,” repeated Aleph. “I’ll just paddle in a shallow place.”

The sergeant turned cross. “You prisoners come to me and bother me with requests to go paddling like children! We’ll give him paddle, won’t we, men? All right, you four, see that this prisoner has his swim like a man. See that he dives in where it’s good and deep.”

The four soldiers got up grinning and took hold of Aleph. “No, no!” he protested. “I don’t want to swim, I can’t swim. I don’t know how.”

They dragged him to a rock overhanging deep water.

“Don’t push me in! I can’t dive! I’ll drown!” cried Aleph.

When he struggled in panic they found a rope and tied his hands and legs and carried him bound to the water. “How can I swim if you tie me up?” moaned Aleph. Why had they suddenly decided to drown him? “You’ll get into trouble if you drown a valuable prisoner,” he panted. “They need me in Egypt, I’m a scribe.”

The soldiers roared with laughter, swung him three times, and launched him into the water. His last hour had come, and he prepared himself to sink into chill depths and never breathe air again.

But what was this—mouth and nose full of the tastes of an apothecary’s pots? Eyes smarting with salt? A warm sticky liquid that bore him up and left him floating ridiculously on the surface, while his arms and legs stuck up in the air, and to his ears came the shouts of laughter from the soldiers on the shore?

They left him in the Dead Sea until he drifted like a log to the shore. It was Ish who helped him out and untied him; he was none the worse except that he felt ridiculous and longed for a wash in fresh water to get rid of the salt from his body and clothes. But it was to be a long time before he would be able to do that.

Ish, as they sat talking that night in the camp, told him the reason for the sullenness of the troops and the despondency of the prisoners. The news had got round that they were not going to Egypt at all. There was a shortage of workers in the copper and turquoise mines of Sinai, and so the destination of both guards and prisoners had been changed.

Aleph was silent. Was he not even to see the palaces and temples of Egypt, after all this journeying?

“What is Sinai like?” he asked.

“I know a little about it,” Ish replied; “A God-forsaken wilderness of barren mountains, they say. Only a Pharaoh could condemn people to live there, and only copper and turquoise come out of it.”

It was a dreary march from then on. They came to hate this sea of dead chemical liquid, where no fish jumped, no birds hovered or dived, but when they left it there was even less relief for the eyes among the burning rocks. They climbed up again to plateau country, where the air was drier and more tolerable, then to a few oases and cultivated settlements, and at last to a port on what Ish said was an arm of the Red Sea. This was a real sea, apparently linked with the great ocean that surrounded the world.

Ish had sought out Aleph among the prisoners the day after they arrived, and found him looking longingly at the waves.

“If I got on a ship here, could I sail back to Gebal, do you think?” Aleph asked him.

“It is best not to torment yourself with such thoughts,” said Ish. “Besides, I think that would be impossible.”

“All the same,” said Aleph, “it looks the same as the sea at Gebal. It is some comfort.”

“I am glad,” said Ish, “for I fear I have little comfort for you. You must go your way to Sinai. And I—”

“You are not leaving us?” said Aleph anxiously.

“I am to take a ship to Egypt,” said Ish.

Aleph hung his head. “It is a good thing for you. I am happy for it,” he said at last.

“Perhaps we shall meet again,” said Ish encouragingly. “In Egypt, perhaps even in Gebal some day. And maybe some good will even come of your being in Sinai.”

They said their farewells, but Aleph felt they would not see each other again.

Aleph was never to remember much about the southward march to Sinai. He was not living, yet not dead; he had no friend, no hopes, and hardly any recollections. Existence was merely a matter of putting one foot before the other in the shimmering heat of the rocky desert, and collapsing into exhausted sleep at the end of each day. The one thing that reminded him that he was a person, with a life of his own, was the companionship of the incongruous bird in its cage, miraculously thriving despite all the rigors of the march. The effort to keep it alive was perhaps the only thing that kept him going. Perhaps it would have been kinder to have let it go before, but Beth’s words ran through his head as if they were a solemn vow he had taken. “Let him go when you get to where you are going.” And while he still had to put one foot in front of another, he had not yet got there.

He was hardly aware of arriving at their destination, a valley like a great open oven among the baking mountains. Scorched slaves toiled in galleries digging out the copper ore and carrying it away in baskets on their heads; others suffered worse torments at the refinery, where the heat of the smelting furnaces was added to the fantastic heat of the sun. He looked dazedly at the infernal scene. Could anyone live long in such a place? Or had he perhaps died already and been sent to a region of eternal punishment?

Yet when he was led to his place of work he found that he was asked to do something even more impossible. He was being asked to work with his brain, although he felt that it had long ago oozed out in sweat through his scalp.

He was received by the chief of the clerks, a dried-up chip of a man. He asked Aleph if he could count and tally in the Egyptian manner and assigned him to the stockpiles of smelted copper from the refineries. The penalty for any deficiency or mistake was to be sentenced to stoking the furnaces. “They only last a few months there,” said the chief clerk. “That’s why we’re short of tally clerks at present.” It was some time before Aleph’s slow brain worked out what he meant.

His name had to be registered on a big scroll of papyrus. When he said he came from Gebal, the chief clerk gave him a sharp look from his black gimlet eyes. “You’ve got yourselves to thank for this extra work, then, you Canaanites,” he said.

Aleph stood dumb and uncomprehending. The chief clerk went on speaking, not that he cared to enlighten this wretched Giblite, but in this outpost of exile he liked to keep his brain going by talking politics. “All the news comes here, you know, and none goes out. So there’s no harm in me telling you. Tyre, Sidon, Gebal—these places have always belonged to Egypt. But since the revolution you’ve all wanted to be independent. Especially rude and defiant your King was, they say. That’s why Pharaoh wants weapons to arm an expeditionary force. They’re going to march up the coast and put things to rights. Going to raze Gebal to the ground and put your lot to the sword, I’m told. And we’ve got to sweat to make the copper.”

Slowly Aleph began to understand what the chief clerk was saying. It was not enough that he should suffer here but everything he did would be helping to make weapons that might be used against his own family.

“Get on with it, then!” snapped the clerk. “Don’t stand there! You can start at once!”

Aleph turned away, but the chief clerk called after him, “What’s this about a bird you’ve got? See that it’s turned in at the temple, we’re always short of sacrificial animals here.”

Aleph walked slowly out of the building to where he had left the pigeon in the cage, and looked at it without feeling. This was the end of his journey, sure enough. This was where he was going to. All he had to do was to open the door of the cage and let the bird go. That it would make his captors angry did not matter; he was glad to be capable of this small gesture, even though it would do him little good. Yet it was difficult to believe the bird would find its way back over all those weary marches to Gebal. Gebal? It existed in another world, and it was in another age that he had said good-bye so casually to his sister, that he had looked down upon the city from the height, that he had looked over the mountain range for the first time, and even felt a childish excitement at the prospect of seeing Egypt. And if her white pigeon were to arrive at the loft, what could it tell Beth of her brother’s sufferings? Nothing. And if it could, would that make her happier? Perhaps it was too late anyhow, and Pharaoh’s armies had taken Gebal by surprise and put it to the sword.

He picked up the birdcage and walked in a stupor to the sweltering warehouse where he was to work. In a corner was a rough table, papyrus rolls, pens, and ink. Other clerks were stacking ingots of copper in piles and morosely tallying them on the strips of papyrus. He looked at the thin papery strips, the pens, and the ink; then at the bird. What about the sign game he had played with his sister? How much of it, he wondered, did she remember?

Perhaps it was not too late to get a message through to Gebal—a message that would tell his sister what had become of him. At the same time it might warn the King of Gebal of the danger that threatened the city. But it was unheard of, to send a message through the air a distance of many weeks’ marches. Fearful doubt told him it was preposterous, but he had to believe it was possible. It was possible, and that was enough to make him forget the oppressive heat and the hopelessness of his situation.

He must take no risks with his plan, nor arouse any suspicions. He put the birdcage inconspicuously in a corner and set immediately to work with the other clerks, piling ingots, checking and tallying them, packing them in panniers ready to be sent off by ass-train to the armorers in Egypt. It was exhausting work, physically and mentally, yet he kept a corner of his brain alive and apart, and through it paraded the signs that meant nothing in the world to anyone but him and his sister—the twenty-two letters. Could he remember them himself? He said their names over:

“Aleph—the ox

beth—the house

gimel—the stick

daleth—the door

the little man who said Ha!

waw—the peg

zayin—the weapon

(and where was he, Zayin, his elder brother?)

keth—the hurdle

teth—the ball of twine

yod—the hand

kaph—the palm branch

lam—the rod

mem—the water

nun—the sea serpent

(and the sailor, voyaging confidently over the seas)

samekh—the fish

ain—the eye

pe—the mouth

quoph—the monkey

resh—the head

(and he thought of his father, head of the family)

shin—the teeth

taw—the mark they put on the felled timber

and ssad—the grasshopper”

He recited the list over and over like a magic spell, and it gave him a marvelous confidence. And yet the words were not magic. There was no mystery to them: if you remembered them correctly, they were as sure as counting; it could not go wrong. Just put the first sounds together, and you could make any word in the language.

Of course it wasn’t real writing, Aleph still told himself. But he no longer cared what the priests or the gods might think. They could not condemn him to any worse punishment than that he was suffering now; bodily here in Sinai and in his imagination whenever he thought of the Egyptian armies descending upon Gebal.

When the long day’s work came to an end and the exhausted workers trailed off to their quarters, Aleph pretended he had a spoiled papyrus to recopy, and stayed behind in the shed with the pens and the ink to write what he had to write. The light was fading, and in addition he was exhausted, but he forced his brain to remain clear and his hand to write neatly and clearly in tiny characters. He knew he must do it that night, for he was sure tomorrow they would take the bird from him. The guards looked curiously at the new slave working overtime, but the last thing that entered their heads was that he was writing a message of vital importance to his sister.

Aleph finished writing and hid the tiny missive safely in his dress. The sun was setting. He could not set the poor bird free unfed and in the dark. He took it to the sleeping quarters, where he presumed there would be food and water for the prisoners; indeed, by the time he got there he found barely enough even for a pigeon. He was desperately anxious lest they should take the bird from him that night. One of the soldiers threatened to do so, but Aleph managed to make it appear that the man was trying to make off with a sacrificial fowl for his own purposes, and the soldiers were just sufficiently respectful to the clerks, slaves though they were, for Aleph to have his way.

In the squalid, stifling sleeping quarters, Aleph spent a restless night during which sheer exhaustion battled with anxiety for his plan, and with desperate dreams in which he was flying over mountains or falling helplessly into deep gulfs.

He was awake before dawn, and in the dim light he managed to wrap the message round one of the pigeon’s legs and tie it with a thread pulled from his garment. As the sun rose, and the rest of the workers were roused, Aleph announced that he was taking the bird to be sacrificed.

The temple was near the clerks’ quarters. As he approached the priest standing outside he called out: “I have here a dove for the sacrifice.” And at the same time he opened the cage door and held the bird aloft in his hand. “See, a snow-white dove!” he cried.

Then, in front of all the guards and priests he pretended to stumble. As he did so he let the bird go. The pigeon was so astonished that it fluttered to the ground. Aleph ran at it shouting and flapping, as if to catch it, and now the bird took fright and fluttered up, up into the air. The priest cursed him for a fool, the soldiers laughed at him, and he stood there and watched the white bird, bright in the rays of the early sun, circling higher and higher into the blue sky.

“Go with the gods to Gebal!” said Aleph quietly. The sun was rising on his right hand, but the pigeon continued to circle above him, until Aleph’s heart sank: how foolish it was to expect it to know in which direction its distant home lay. Then suddenly the bird straightened out on a course that lay directly in front of him. Gradually Aleph watched the pigeon dwindle out of sight, to the northward.

Only then did the thought come to him that, even if his message did get through, he would never know. Yet as he returned to the work of the sweltering copper mine, and day after day passed in relentless routine, a spark of hope kept him alive: the hope that the pigeon might survive the dangers of the desert, and arrive in the pigeon loft in Gebal to tell Beth that he had not forgotten his family; and a fainter hope that Beth might find and understand the message he had carefully composed in their private sign language, that it might even somehow help Gebal in its danger. And deeper still within him was a faith so faint that he did not yet acknowledge it to himself, that his twenty-two letters might be neither a sin against the gods nor a childish game but something for which he, Aleph, might be remembered.

There were days when these hopes were all that saved him from feeling that his spirit was being sucked from his body by the pitiless heat as water evaporates from a jar. And there were days when he felt clearer-headed and more able to think—and this was worse, for he would tell himself that all his hopes depended upon a bird, already perhaps no more than a few feathers blowing in the desert wind, a frail monument to be remembered by!

At the back of his mind during all this time, there must have been forming the idea of leaving for himself a more lasting monument. Yet what opportunity did he have? There were no holidays in this inferno, and no rest hours while the sun was in the sky. Every hour of work was organized according to the ruthlessly efficient Egyptian production system. At night the silence of exhaustion fell on the valley and a few soldiers kept guard and saw that the slaves did not move from their sleeping quarters.

When his opportunity came at last, he did not immediately recognize it. The small temple used by the overseers and soldiers needed a new inscription. Aleph, it was discovered, was not only a clerk but also an apprentice monumental mason; since there was none other on the staff of the mine he was taken from his tallying job and told to copy out an inscription in hieroglyphs on to the rock face near the temple. The Egyptian symbols had now come to stand for everything that Aleph hated, and at first he considered pretending that he was incapable of the job. But at least it would be a change from counting copper ingots, so, taking the engraving tools and the hammer and constructing for himself a rough scaffolding to stand on, he set to work.

The work took days, and when the Egyptians saw that he was keeping at it conscientiously they left him to it. But something was forming in his mind as he chipped away: another inscription, in different letters.

In the middle of a forenoon, he finished the hieroglyphic inscription, with its usual fulsome praise of Pharaoh and its dedications to the Egyptian gods. Then, moving his scaffolding to another smooth rock face, and with his heart thumping, he began to work, cutting his own signs into the rock and spelling out words as he went along. He carved out a dedication to his own goddess, Balaat-Gebal. Then he climbed down and stood back to admire his work. He could not feel very proud of it. It looked crude, formless, almost barbaric compared with the stylish neatness of the Egyptian writing. But it was his own!

It was at this moment that the priests of the temple came to inspect his progress. When they saw what he had done they were aghast. Was he mad to deface the approaches to the temple with this illiterate scrawl? Why had he not been supervised? Take the slave away! Give him fatigue punishment! Let him learn his place!

Aleph did not mind. His letters, and the name of the goddess of Gebal, were cut truly and deeply into the rock of Sinai. They would stand as a memorial to him for many years to come.

They stand there today.

But even today there is no one who can explain the working of the brain of a white pigeon that was carried in a wicker cage all the way from Gebal to Jericho and Sinai, and suddenly released over the desert.

For weeks now this bird had been carried southward at the slow human pace of the march, over mountains, through valleys, by the shores of seas and across deserts. Absurd to say that its small round eye had registered the details of the landscape and that its tiny brain had remembered them for the return journey. Every day the sun had wheeled overhead at right angles to the line of march. Had this perhaps been automatically recorded on some mechanism of orientation in the bird’s brain? Or had it been all the while conscious of invisible forces, magnetic fields stretching from pole to pole of the globe, which its human masters had never even thought of? Or did it possess some extra sense of whose existence we still know nothing which enabled it to find its way over the surface of the earth?

The eyesight of the white pigeon was good, yet when it suddenly took off into the blue, alarmed by the clumsy behavior of the human who had set it free, its bird’s-eye view showed it nothing but barren, unfamiliar mountains and featureless desert, with the hazy western arm of the Red Sea to the southwest. If it had memories of tree-clad mountains and fertile coasts, nothing the pigeon could now see recalled them. It circled upward from the inhospitable landscape, gained height, continued to circle—and then—?

And then all we can say is that the watchers on the ground saw it suddenly straighten out on a course north-northeast, and head directly for the pigeon loft in Gebal, some four hundred miles away as the pigeon flies.

For several hours, with nothing in the dry brown landscape below to tempt it down, the pigeon settled to a steady course. The keen eye of a desert hawk, perched on a stone in the middle of the flat wilderness, spotted it high in the southern sky, and took off to intercept. The pigeon was high, and moving at speed; the hawk was hard put to it to overtake its victim and gain superior height for the strike.

Suddenly the pigeon sensed the hawk above and behind it. But where to hide from its enemy in this emptiness of sky and sand? The hawk stooped out of the sun, the pigeon saw it coming and jinked wildly, the hawk missed, plummeted hundreds of feet below with the momentum of its stoop, recovered itself, and climbed again to the attack.

The pigeon was now diving very fast toward the ground. The hawk had little time to steady for its next stoop, and when it did so it had to check to avoid dashing itself against the rocks. The pigeon jinked again, dodged among boulders, close to the ground, and disappeared into a tiny cave among the eroded rocks. Aloft the hawk flapped frustratedly, but once out of sight the prey was soon out of mind, and the hawk took off again for the South.

The pigeon stayed in hiding until its feverishly beating heart settled a little, then it rose once more into the air, circling until the course established itself in its brain, and flew on northward. A tiny oasis, a mere spot of green in the desert below with a promise of water tempted it down a few hours later. It drank, but there was little in the way of food for a pigeon accustomed to the fertile fields of Gebal, and it was not long before the bird was on the wing again. But as the sun sank slowly in the west, its gleam was reflected by a sea horizon. To the east there were hills and mountains, and below was greenness and cultivated fields. The bird planed down and landed near a stream, drank, flapped over to a field of vetches, ate greedily, flew to a tree, and found a roost for the night.

If it had not been for the boy with the herd of goats, the Giblite pigeon might have stayed in that fertile plain instead of returning home, and this story might not have been written. Indeed, it may be that no stories would have been written in this manner, for the bird carried with him a secret that was then unique in the world.

The little goatherd came on the scene next morning, while the pigeon was sitting on a branch idly surveying the cultivated crops all round him. The boy was armed with a leather sling, and fitting a smooth round stone into it, he whirled the sling round, and let the stone fly at the bird on the bough. The stone crashed noisily through the leaves, but missed its mark. The pigeon took off in alarm and rocketed into the sky. Then, as it circled doubtfully in the clear morning air, the mysterious mechanism came into action again, the longing for home made itself felt, and it settled once more on to its north-northeasterly course.

This day, as the bird flew, it could see to the East a hot misty depression filled with a dead salt sea, then a muddy river wriggling along the bottom of a deep valley, then a sparkling blue lake, then a snow-streaked mountain. But these features of the landscape meant little to the bird’s brain, though it was the country through which, in the cage, it had made the painful march south. The little clusters of sunbaked brick or stone, that were the towns, meant even less. And who knows what the bird made of the dust clouds raised by columns of men, whose weapons and armor glinted in the sun—Pharaoh’s armies marching north?

Still on its dead-straight course, the bird found itself between mountain and sea over a coastal strip that grew narrower, and also more familiar. Late that day it came to a limestone rock standing in the sea, through which the waves had begun to carve an archway. It was swarming with pigeons, its own wild cousins. But it did not stay to pass the time of evening. Every feature now was well known. Two more blue bays to cross in the light of the sunset, and there was Gebal, lit by the last rays of the sun.