The Haj - Leon Uris [167]
‘How long, oh Lord, until your foolish dream comes true? How long before a Christian nation will place its fate in the hands of the Jews? I stand with Yigal,’ Gideon said and he left.
END OF PART THREE
Part Four
Jericho
1
Late Winter 1949
MY FATHER SUMMONED ME to his ledge one day after the third cease-fire. ‘We can stay here no longer. We must prepare to go into Jericho. It is Allah’s will.’
Allah had made the decision for us none too soon.
The cave had become a total disaster. Vermin and rain were rapidly diminishing our supplies. The main cavern leaked in a dozen places, so that dampness and chill were always in our bones and the smell of mildew in our nostrils. We had to keep a stronger fire burning to combat the mustiness, but at times water found its way down the chimney and would hit the fire and turn the cavern into a smokehouse. On several occasions, we were forced outside during the height of a storm to keep from choking to death.
Most of the small offshoot tunnels that led to our individual niches had low spots that had flooded, making passage impossible and forcing all of us to live and sleep in the single main room.
During one storm, Ramiza lost her footing, slipped, and plunged down through jagged rocks, battering herself up terribly and causing her to have a miscarriage. An infant would have been difficult to keep alive in our circumstances. Ramiza, next to Kamal, was the weakest of our lot and added to our burden. We made a required demonstrative show of anguish over the loss, but we did not mourn for long.
Other disasters mounted, but one dominant factor told us it was time to leave. We were becoming hungry. A major concern was what to do with our invaluable arms cache. Guns were always a prime item of trade and if we got into serious money problems we could sell off a rifle here, a pistol there. On the other hand, a man like Haj Ibrahim does not give up his weapons readily.
I was assigned the mission of finding a suitable dump for the arms someplace closer to Jericho. Tent cities were sprouting up all over the barren hillsides around the town. Inland from Jericho, there rose a sudden string of steep cliffs much like the area of our cave.
Atop one of these cliffs, only a few miles removed from the town, stood a Greek Christian monastery called St. George. Nobody could hide from the world better than Greek monks. The main trail to the monastery came off the Jerusalem road and was scarcely negotiable by foot. From the Jericho side, the monastery was buried from view. I felt that if I could scale the cliffs under the monastery, I could find a foolproof hiding place.
It was impossible to dig a trench or hole to bury the cache, for most of the desert soil was so hard that in most cases the dead were not even buried but covered with stone cairns. If I attempted to dig in the earth, it could be detected immediately by the Bedouin.
It boiled down to finding a niche or small cave, hidden from all view, that our donkey Absalom could reach. I could not handle the task alone, so Father and I discussed who else would be the most trustworthy. I personally wanted Nada, but dared not bring up the subject. Sabri was the obvious choice, but we never fully trusted him. We settled on Jamil.
For the next several days, Jamil and I left Qumran in the middle of the night so we could pass through Jericho and the camps during the darkness and position ourselves up in the cliffs below St. George by daybreak.
I was disheartened to learn that the monastery was on a clifftop called Mount Temptation. This is where the Christians believed that Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness combating Satan. I was quite certain that our cave near Qumran was the true cave of Jesus and David. The Christians and Jews were wrong about many historic locations, particularly the tombs of saints and prophets. They did not really know where Moses and Samuel were buried until Mohammed received the word from Allah and revealed the