The Haj - Leon Uris [18]
The Jews brought in strange trees, and Ibrahim made Farouk come up and count them. Farouk said there were hundreds, then thousands, and his mind soared, so that he saw millions, perhaps even billions.
‘What do they think they can do with those trees?’ Ibrahim muttered. ‘Drink up the swamp?’
‘That is what they are saying happened in the Valley of Jezreel,’ Farouk answered.
‘They cannot change what Allah has willed. It can never work. They are idiots.’
‘I heard in the market at Ramle,’ Farouk said, ‘that the trees have come all the way from Australia and they are always thirsty.’
‘Australia? Don’t they have savages in Australia?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Someplace past India. As far east as the earth goes east before it turns into being west.’
‘I do not understand this,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Do they really believe those trees will grow here. Look around, Farouk, do you see any trees in this valley other than this poor oak who lives only for our patron saint?’
‘No,’ Farouk agreed. But Farouk always agreed with his brother.
Six months after the Jews arrived an amazing event occurred. The Jews broke the earthen dams that separated the canals from the swamp. Ibrahim’s eyes opened like saucers as the connecting ditches sent the putrid waters oozing into the canals. Soon the canals were bulging and running downhill and before his very eyes the level of swamp began to drop. Within days he could almost see the Australian trees grow fat with the fetid juices of the swamp. As the swamp dried under the hot valley sun, incredibly black, rich topsoil appeared. A great deal of it was carried up to the terracing while the rest was reditched and turned over to drain off every last vestige of the swamp.
The canals had emptied into a lower marshland. Ibrahim wondered why they did not let it run down to the sea and ordered Farouk to find out.
‘It is some kind of sheer madness,’ Farouk said when he had learned the answer. ‘They are leaving it as a resting place for migrating birds.’
It enraged Ibrahim that the Jews sang and danced every night. It enraged him that they were able to sing and dance after the energy they had put into their daily work. When he compared it with the slow way of life and lethargy of Tabah he realized that two strange worlds were heading into a conflict.
What the Jews had done had greatly discouraged the villagers.
‘We will never get vengeance,’ Farouk whimpered one day.
‘We shall get our vengeance,’ Ibrahim retorted angrily. ‘The Jews can perform all their little tricks. They have endless money, while we have none. They can hide by night in their stockade because they are cowards. But sooner or later they must come out of hiding and plant crops and the crops must be harvested. Then they shall learn the code of the Bedouin. Wait ... patience moves mountains.’
What Ibrahim brooded about most was the frightening pattern of land sales. At first swampland and eroded fields were being dumped on the Jews. That was all right in the beginning because he and every sheik, muktar, and fellah did not believe the Jews’ soil was tillable. Sooner or later the Jews would give up and leave. It did not happen.
All over the region eviction notices were being given to entire Arab villages by the agents of absentee landowners. Some of the villages had been there for generations, even centuries. The peasants were given a few weeks to simply pack up and leave. Some went quietly, others forcibly. They went with no place to go and nothing to go to. Even the chance for marginal existence had been cut out from under them by their Arab brethren. In a matter of a few months after an area had been abandoned the land was invariably sold to the Jewish Land Fund at outrageous prices. A land boom was on because an unexpected vein of gold had