A Long Way to Shiloh by Lionel Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

generators. He’s building everything, including an hotel with a lagoon – a lagoon in Beduin country.’
    ‘Very convenient for the Beduin.’
    ‘They have a need for Teitleman’s lagoon, of course,’ Agrot said, drawing quickly at his cigarette, ‘like I have a need for Teitleman himself. You know the Beduin.’
    ‘Nice people.’
    ‘Beautiful people, wonderful people. Give a Bedu his camel for milk and an onion to eat – and he lives. He can live on nothing . A magnificent, hard, enduring creature. What does he care if he’s in Israel, Jordan? He has the rock, the sky – this. He wants nothing more. He is my brother, the Bedu.’
    Just then we saw one, a rather old one, sitting in a dry wadi with a camel and actually eating an onion. Agrot nodded to his brother. The Bedu nodded back. We ground slowly past. No word and no smile accompanied the communication but both seemed satisfied. I’d seen it before, this affinity for the starker qualities of land and person in the Agrots of Israel. Arabism isn’t confined to elderly romantics in the British Foreign Office; but it certainly seemed a bit more natural here. And the contemplation of it, fortunately, kept Agrot quiet. He remained quiet till we reached Barot.
    *
    You can’t, I suppose, as a private capitalist, make much of a show in a couple of years against a wilderness of rock that’s been quietly petrifying for several million; but Teitleman, as Agrot had indicated, was certainly doing his best. An unpleasing array of aluminium workers’ huts marked the limit of his industrial operations. In a largish shallow excavation several bulldozers were noisily at work around the almost completed structure of a rock-crushing plant. An aerial railway had been erected to carry the phosphatic ore from a nearby mountain of it, and on the ground a train of wedge-shaped trucks stood on a turntable under a chute to collect the finished product. A small section of double-track rail connected the turntable with a loading point for motorized carriers, which in turn was connected with the road. It was this road, in its lower section, that Teitleman had closed. He was building a new fork from it to connect with his further operations that extended for the next couple of miles to the east.
    Agrot pointed them out as we hit the new road and cruised smoothly along it. There was a fertilizer plant; a number of prepared sites for a small chemical complex; a number of unprepared sites allocated, Agrot said, for an extravagant dream of Teitleman’s, a factory garden city, no less; a housing estate in process of construction; and then – the fount from which all this stemmed – Teitleman’s well.
    Wells do not have to be big to have significance in a wilderness . Teitleman’s well was not big, but it was quite awesome in its significance. A small bath house or temple housed its mysteries in multi-coloured marble; and this Teitleman had surrounded , as a kind of oblation or testimonial to its potency, with a border of shrubs, well-watered and growing with maniacal fury. In a large paved compound an intricate assembly of pipes and pumping apparatus directed the water to its various destinations , south to the Zohar gasfields and the National Water Carrier, west to his industrial operations, and east to his greatest pride and joy – the Hotel Camphire and the Camphire Lagoon.
    ‘Why Camphire?’ I said as we brought in view the astonishing edifice. It towered eighteen storeys high, a slender column of glass and unpolished marble sprouting from a broader bulbous base like an enormous fertility symbol.
    ‘Teitleman had a song in his heart,’ Agrot said. ‘The Song of Songs. You’ll remember the poet speaks of “pleasant fruits and camphire, in a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters”. Teitleman is providing it to the last item. Over there on both sides of the tel is the site of his garden with fountains. And here we have the living waters – it’s to be an aereated