The Haj - Leon Uris [177]
‘Ah, come in, Haj Ibrahim! May Allah bless this meeting!’
‘May Allah, our divine light, bless all your days, Professor. Your sudden note caught me unawares. I did not expect to hear from you so soon.’
The copper standard lay on Mudhil’s desk as the two men hemmed and hawed through two cups of coffee, weaving toward the point. Haj Ibrahim was fine-tuned to Mudhil’s every word to catch an inference, a hidden meaning, unspoken words between spoken words, unspoken lines between spoken lines. At the same time, he held his own qualms in check and showed nothing outwardly but patience and respect.
Mudhil lifted the twin-headed ibex artifact. ‘This has created a lot of excitement. However, it begs more questions than it answers.’
‘Questions that I am certain are not beyond the range of so eminent a personage as yourself and your colleagues, whoever they may be.’
‘In order to answer the questions, we must have your full and unqualified cooperation,’ the archaeologist said. ‘The mysteries are deep enough as it is. We need all the supporting facts we can gather.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Is there a potential buyer in the winds?’
‘An excellent buyer.’
‘Aha, then Allah has blessed this day.’
Mudhil help up a finger of caution. ‘Provided you are willing to allow such a buyer to examine the entire treasure trove.’
‘All the pieces?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose you want me to turn them over to you.’
‘As you may have supposed, the buyer is not in Jericho and it would be difficult for him to come here. Even if he could come, the very tests for analysis could not be carried out in Jericho.’ While Ibrahim pondered, Mudhil held the standard up again. ‘We can assume now that this comes from a very, very early period. It is an enormously sophisticated piece of work, particularly for its time. Look at these twists in the handle, the hollow inside, the ibex heads ... art for all ages. Would it not have to have been made by a very highly advanced people? We simply have little or next to no record of such people in Palestine during the Chalcolithic Age.’
‘Forgive me, I do not comprehend the time of which you speak.’
‘It was the age that followed the Neolithic or New Stone Age. Let us call it a copper age, an era of a thousand years between the stone and bronze ages. Curiously enough, we have dug up a number of objects of the stone ages, skulls, arrowheads, a rare agricultural settlement but nothing of the age which followed it. And look here what we are dealing with, exquisite artisanship, six to seven thousand years ago. Why, the copper mines at Timna weren’t opened until three thousand years after this was made. Who were these people? How did they get to Palestine? Only through examination of the entire cache can we expect some kind of clues.’
‘And as to their value as well?’
Nuri Mudhil had the distressing habit of looking directly into the eyes of his listener when he spoke importantly. So intense were they, Haj Ibrahim had difficulty looking back squarely. ‘As a museum piece, this is priceless. It is also worthless.’
‘That is a riddle too difficult for me to follow.’
‘There are wealthy antiquities dealers. There is no such thing as a wealthy archaeologist, nor-has any Bedouin been able to retire from selling artifacts. In the Arab world, we have placed very little value on preserving our past. From Egypt to Iraq, our ancient sites have been looted down through the ages, mostly by our own people. There is a department of antiquities in Jordan, but neither a university nor museum. The department exists mainly to interest foreigners in coming to Jordan to dig. They take almost everything out. London is where you will discover ancient Egypt, usually in an unlighted basement or a vault. You see, Haj Ibrahim, the archaeologist works only for the joy of his profession, to have his name on a book of his discoveries, for the thrill of having solved the puzzles of the past. He keeps nothing from the digs for himself, no matter what the value. It all goes to the sponsoring expedition. If a dig yields an enormous treasure