Exodus - Leon Uris [327]
The Negev Desert became Israel’s challenge. The Israelis went down to the desert! They lived in the merciless heat and they built settlements on rock. They did as Moses had done: they brought water from the rocks, and they made life grow.
They searched for minerals. Potash was pulled from the Dead Sea. King Solomon’s copper mines, silent for eternities, were made to smelt the green ore again. Traces of oil were found. A mountain of iron was discovered. The northern entrance to the Negev, Beersheba, became a boom town with a skyline springing up on the desert overnight.
The greatest hope of the Negev was Elath, at the southern tip on the Gulf of Akaba. When Israeli troops arrived at the end of the War of Liberation it consisted of two mud huts. Israel had the dream of making a port here with a direct route to the Orient, someday when the Egyptians lifted the blockade of the Gulf of Akaba. They built in preparation for that day.
It was here in the Negev Desert that Colonel Ari Ben Canaan volunteered for duty after the War of Liberation. He was assigned the task of learning every inch of this vital place hemmed in by three sworn enemies, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
Ari took troops over the killing slate fields and through the wadis in places where no human was meant to travel. He devised training so brutally hard that few armies of the world could duplicate it. All officer candidates were sent to Ari to receive some of the most severe physical testing human beings could stand.
Ari’s permanent troops became known as “the Beasts of the Negev.” They were a raw, spirited breed of desert rats who hated the Negev while they were in her and longed for her when they were away. Twenty parachute drops, hundred-kilometer forced marches, road-gang labor, hand-to-hand combat were all part of the experiences that made the Beasts of the Negev men among men. Only the toughest could qualify. The army of Israel gave no medals for bravery—one soldier was considered as brave as the next—but those who wore the shield of the Beasts of the Negev were held in special awe.
Ari’s base was Elath. He watched it grow into a town of a thousand hardy pioneers. Water was piped in and the copper mines went into full operation. Paths grew to roads as the Jews worked to strengthen their southern foothold.
There were whispers about the strangeness of Colonel Ben Canaan. He never seemed to laugh, rarely to change his hard expression. There seemed to be a sorrow and longing gnawing at him, forcing him to push himself, and his troops too, almost beyond human endurance. He refused to come out of the desert for two long years.
Kitty Fremont had become known as “the Friend,” a title hitherto conferred only upon P. P. Malcolm, the founder of the Night Raiders. After the War of Liberation, Kitty involved herself in immigration work and soon was the chief trouble shooter for the Zion Settlement Society.
In January of 1949 at the beginning of Magic Carpet, Kitty had been asked to leave Gan Dafna and go to Aden to organize the medical facilities in the children’s compound of the Hashed camp. Kitty proved a wizard at the chore. She brought order out of chaos. She was firm in her orders, yet tender in her treatment of the youngsters who had walked from Yemen. In a matter of months she had become a key official in the Zion Settlement Society.
From Aden she went directly to Magic Carpet at Bagdad, an airlift operation twice the size of the Yemenite airlift. Then with things under control in Iraq she rushed to Morocco, where tens of thousands