“There is no air-conditioning at Metsadá, Mr. Hall, at the site, of course, or in the hostel. I recommend you acclimate yourself to the heat. And I hope you brought a jacket.”
“I did. I’ve been in the desert before.” She didn’t reply, and he decided to quit trying.
He saw more road signs for Amman, Jordan, in Hebrew and English, and also for Ein Gedi and Qumran. After another thirty minutes of increasingly heavy truck traffic, the road finally bottomed out and they came to the highway that led south along the western edge of the Dead Sea. Fifteen minutes later she pulled off the road by a sign that said KHIRBET QUMRAN and drove up a dusty hill that led to a tourist information center. There were some low cliffs above and beyond the building, and when he saw the caves, David realized that this must be the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries back in 1947. He decided not to ask her if he was right. She pulled up next to the building.
“It’s not open yet,” she announced, “but the public toilets are always open. It’s another half hour or so down to Metsadá.”
She walked around one side of the building, and David went to the other side to pump bilges. When he came back out, an army jeep was coming down a dirt track leading from the bare cliffs and ruins behind the tourist building. The jeep wasn’t going very fast, but even so it was raising an enormous cloud of dust. Judith came out from the women’s room and waited for the jeep, which pulled up next to her. Two bored-looking soldiers sporting submachine guns spoke in Hebrew to her for a few minutes. From their bantering tone of voice and easy smiles, it was apparent they were a lot more interested in talking to an attractive woman than in any issues of security. One of them gestured toward David, and Ressner’s reply provoked some more smiles. After a few minutes they broke it off, waved good-bye to her, and then turned the jeep around and headed back up the hill, followed by their trusty dust cloud.
Judith returned to the car without further comment and got in. David joined her. The sun was fully up now, and the little car had become an oven in the few minutes of their stopover. Once they were back on the highway, David wiped his brow and asked if there were army outposts all along the Dead Sea.
“Along this road, the army guards Qumran, Ein Gedi, and Metsadá, Mr. Hall,” she replied. “Primarily the major tourist sites. It supposedly makes the tourists feel safer, and it also discourages the treasure hunters.”
“Is treasure hunting still a big problem out here in the desert?”
“Yes, it is. The Bedouin do most of the poking and digging, as they have been doing for centuries. It was a Bedou shepherd who discovered the original Dead Sea Scrolls. Also, there is a thriving market for antiquities in the cities.”
David wished he had positioned the water bottles in the backseat instead of in the way-back of the car. He hoped there was a concession stand at the Masada visitors center, because he was also getting hungry, a hunger accentuated by the fact that there was absolutely nothing out here in this shimmering wasteland except the coppery expanse of the Dead Sea on their left and lots more sand, stones, and scorpions on the sterile escarpments to their right.
The Dead Sea was appropriately named. It was in reality a salt lake that was roughly four hundred square miles in area, lying in the northernmost reaches of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, between Israel and Jordan. At over 1,300 feet below sea level, the Dead Sea was the lowest topographical point on earth. There were no fresh and cooling breezes coming in from the water, only the stink of sulfur and assorted halogens, a residual, he surmised, of the destruction of Lot’s wife and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The biblical legends took on a little more substance when you could actually smell the lake. The Jews of old had called it Lake Asphaltites, because it threw up gobs of bitumen from time to time.
“Tell me, Mr. Hall,” she said, speaking up over the wind noise from the opened windows. “How much do you really know about the history of Metsadá? The place, not the events.”
David had been expecting this question. He had even prepared enough of an answer to satisfy her that he was not totally ignorant, without revealing the true extent of his knowledge.
“The name Masada — Metsadá—means ‘fortress,’” he recited. “It was built upon a huge outcropping of rock at the southern end of the Dead Sea, half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide, in the shape of a broad spear point. On the Dead Sea side, it rises about twelve hundred feet from the water. On the other, western side, it is about four hundred feet to the bottom of the uphill gorge. It was probably first occupied by Alexander Jannaeus, and then King Herod added to it with palaces, storehouses, and a curtain wall with battle towers all around the top rim. When the first Jewish revolt began in A.D. 66, a band of Zealots seized the fortress from its Roman garrison and began guerrilla raids around the countryside. When Jerusalem fell in A.D. 70, the remnants of the city’s defenders and their families fled south to join their allies on the mountain.
“The Romans followed the next spring and began a siege that lasted for over two years. Since the mountain was impregnable to direct assault, and well stocked with water and supplies, it should never have been taken, but the Romans built a dirt ramp on the uphill, or western, side of the fortress and then moved a siege tower into position on the ramp to break down the walls. After a protracted fight, the defenders realized that they were going to be overrun, so they elected to commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the Tenth Legion. Of about nine hundred and sixty defenders, only two women and five children survived. The fortress fell in either A.D. 73 or 74, and the Romans occupied the site for the next several decades before finally abandoning it. There were Byzantine settlements on the mountain a couple of hundred years after that.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “What primary sources have you studied?”
“Well, I’ve read the Yigael Yadin final reports of the Israel Exploration Society’s archaeological expedition in the early sixties, and of course I’ve read Flavius Josephus’s first-century A.D. history of the Jewish Wars. The Roman historian Tacitus.”
She nodded again. “You are limited to American English, I presume?”
“Yes, I am. Limited.”
She gave him a quick glance. “I did not mean anything critical by that, Mr. Hall. It’s just that there has been a lot more written about Metsadá than the sources you mentioned, primarily in German but also, of course, in Hebrew. In my experience, nonacademic Americans are usually not literate in other languages.”
David chuckled. “Have you had a lot of experience with Americans, Mrs. Ressner?”
“Not really, Mr. Hall. I have not traveled outside of Israel except for university and a brief honeymoon trip to Cyprus. Most of the Americans I have seen are tourists.”
He nodded. “I live in Washington, D.C. We have thousands of tourists there every summer, and the crowds can be a royal pain. The reason I asked is that you seem to dislike Americans.”
She was silent for almost a minute, negotiating a series of curves in the highway. When the road straightened out she answered him.
“Not dislike, Mr. Hall. Resent, perhaps. We all know Israel is a client state of America, and dependency does not engender affection. We, too, feel that the hordes of tourists are a royal pain, as you put it, but we desperately need their money. The problem is that our two countries’ appreciations of the political realities here in the Middle East are quite different, but yours often governs, does it not?”