The Haj - Leon Uris [17]
Ibrahim erected a small, one-pole Bedouin tent of strips of woven goat and sheep wool to protect him against the midday sun. He permitted only two persons to enter his solitude: Hagar, his wife, to bring him food and drink; and Farouk, to discuss village business.
He brooded about both of them. He had always detested Farouk for his weakness. Farouk was his older brother, and had he been a man of any courage he would have seized the position of muktar. Farouk’s cowardice in the attack on Shemesh Kibbutz put a capstone on Ibrahim’s loathing. He felt that Farouk had always taken advantage of his ability to read and write and he suspected his brother cheated him. He swore that when he had a son he would send him to school so Farouk would not have that mystical hold of literacy over him.
Ibrahim brooded about not having a son. Hagar had failed him with two daughters. She was with child again and the gossips seemed to be hoping to pin the ignoble title on him permanently. He had already told Hagar that if she did not give him a son he would call off their marriage.
Ibrahim brooded about the ‘victory’ over the Jews, which, down at the café, grew more fanciful each day. His men had fought like females. He knew they would never be able to dislodge the Jews. Yet as the days passed, tales of courage in the attack on Shemesh became wilder. To prove their disdain for the lowly Jews, men would leave the café every day, climb to a high spot overlooking the Jewish fields, and fire off a few rounds from a safe distance of several hundred yards. Although they were out of range and never hit anything, it added fuel to the day’s conversation.
Ibrahim brooded as the realization sunk in that the Jews were going to make a successful settlement of Shemesh. He watched them through the Turkish field glasses as they went about preparing the swamp. Within the week, stone walls had been erected as a new perimeter and these were anchored by high watchtowers. A generator not only lit floodlights to allow them to work through the night but made a future attack all but impossible.
The sound of their building never stopped. The original tent city gave way to communal buildings of stone. There was a hospital tent; he kept count of the Jews who were stricken with malaria. Sometimes half of them were down at the same time. It did not stop them. Parties of other Jews came several times a week to help with other aspects of the work.
The Jewish land was mainly a few thousand dunams of swamp and marshlands, a vicious place inhabited by snakes, mosquitoes, and other slimy creatures. Ibrahim wondered how anyone could make anything grow there. Much of their work was a mysterious digging of two large canals at points where the land tilted downward toward the coast. These canals were dug on either side of the swamp, then dammed up. There was a crisscross of smaller ditches that worked their way toward the larger canals.
The second section of the Jewish lands was a hill that ran right up against Tabah’s olive orchards to a common boundary. It was filled with ancient derelict terracing of the kind that the Hebrews had constructed thousands of years before. This was like a miniature of the mammoth terraces in the Bab el Wad and those of biblical fame in Judaea.
Stones were a constant commodity in the fields. The Jews collected and carried them by oxcart to the base of the terrace. From there they were taken by hand, much like the Hebrew slaves had done in building the Egyptian pyramids. They were carried to places where time, flood, sun, earthquake, and natural erosion had broken down the terrace walls. The restoration took on the look of the steps of a giant staircase. Each step held back a small plot