Exodus - Leon Uris [121]
They walked on until the blue-green of the Mediterranean Sea burst suddenly before them and the howling winds and cold of the past years were exchanged for a blistering heat of one hundred and twenty degrees. They plodded down the Levantine coast wearing Arab rags.
“Are there Jews here?”
Yes, there were Jews, but again they were different. These Jews looked and dressed and spoke like Arabs. But yet they knew the Hebrew language and the Torah. Like the Jews of the Pale and the Jews of Turkey, the Arab-like Jews took the Rabinsky brothers in without question and shared their homes and their food. They blessed the brothers as they had been blessed before for the sacredness of their mission.
On into Lebanon they walked—through Tripoli and the wildness of Beirut—they neared the Promised Land.
“Are there Jews here?”
The year was 1888. Forty months had passed since that night Yakov and Jossi fled the Zhitomir ghetto. Jossi had grown into a lean and leathery giant six feet three inches tall with a frame of steel. He was twenty years of age and he wore a flaming red beard.
Yakov was eighteen and also hardened by the more than three years of travel but he was still of medium height with dark sensitive features and was filled with the same intenseness he had had from childhood.
They stood upon a hill. Below them was a valley. Yakov and Jossi Rabinsky stared down at the Huleh in northern Galilee. Jossi Rabinsky sat down upon a rock and wept. Their journey was over.
“But the Lord liveth,” Yakov said, “which brought up and led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country and from all the countries whither I had driven them, and they shall dwell in their own land.”
Yakov put his hand on Jossi’s shoulder. “We are home, Jossi! We are home!”
Chapter Five
FROM THE HILL they looked down onto the land. Across the valley in Lebanon rose the towering snow-capped peak of Mount Hermon. Below them stretched the Huleh Lake and marshes. There was an Arab village nestled in the hills to their right. Jossi Rabinsky experienced the greatest exaltation he had ever known! How beautiful the Promised Land looked from here!
He vowed to himself, as young men will at such times, that he would return someday and from this very spot would look down on his very own land.
They stayed there for a day and a night and the next morning began the descent in the direction of the Arab village. The white-colored mud houses clumped together in a saddle of the hill were dazzling in the morning sun. The farmlands and olive orchards sloped from the village toward the swamp of the Huleh Lake. In the fields a donkey pulled a wooden plowshare. Other donkeys carried small harvest upon their backs. In the vineyards the Arab women labored among the grapes. The village was as it must have been a thousand years before.
The distant beauty of the village faded with each step they took nearer and was soon replaced by an overwhelming stench. Suspicious eyes watched the brothers from the fields and the houses of the village as they entered the dirt street. Life moved in slow motion in the blistering sun. The road was filled with camel and donkey excrement. Swarms of giant flies engulfed the brothers. A lazy dog lay motionless in the water of the open sewer to cool himself. Veiled women ducked for cover into squalid one-room houses made of mud; half the huts were in a state of near collapse and held a dozen or more people, as well as pigs, chickens, mules, and goats.
The boys stopped at the village water well. Straight-backed girls balanced enormous urns of water on their heads or were busy kneeling and scrubbing clothing and exchanging gossip.
The appearance of the travelers brought immediate silence.
“May we have some water?” Jossi asked.
No one dared answer. Haltingly they drew a bucket of water, splashed their faces, filled their canteens, and made off quickly.
Further on they came upon a dilapidated shack which served as a coffeehouse.