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A Crack in the Earth
Exerpt
At the end of the promenade, past Herod’s,
over a rainbow bridge, the swanky stores of Eilat’s
hotel strip abruptly vanish. All along the beach front,
high rise heavens with angled windows and palm-ringed
swimming pools gaze down an arm of ocean that reaches
out to them from the Arabian Sea. Only the plebian strip
of the promenade’s fast-food stands and street
vendors remind four and five-star vacationers that the
luxury they enjoy is tenuous and temporary. The gaudiest
tower of them all is the faux-palace that bears the
name of the ancient east’s greatest manipulator,
madman, and master builder. Its rococo extravagance,
all arches framed by columns and crowned by moon-bright
domes, would have deeply offended the easily-offended
king’s classical sensibilities. Herod’s
(“Where the Legend Comes Alive”) is a temple
of earthly delights that offers “everything included”
vacations of endless meals, celebrity shows, and classy
boutiques. It would have enraged the great king so much
that he’d have murdered yet another of his sons.
It’s not my kind of place. I’m staying at
the youth hostel way down past the other end of the
promenade, across the street from where the shoreline
turns south towards Egypt and Africa.
But the epicurean paradise ends at Herod’s
eastern wall. Beyond it is a placid, silent canal spanned
by an unlit convex bridge. On it, a few middle-aged
fishermen cast their lines out from the bridge into
a sea canal, observed by their wives and by a silent,
hungry cat. When I step off the bridge, the planet’s
natural terrain appears. The elements rule the October
night. Sand, sea, stone and sky—the loneliness
in which God resides. Thousands of stars suppressed
by the brash promenade street lamps reappear; the Dolphin
and the Water Carrier hover to my right, over the sea;
Polaris, low on my left, marks Route 90, the northward
path of the two-week trip that I began on Sunday. The
beach is sandy and largely deserted, except for a couple
of cars and a clapboard shack, which emits some light
and the lilt of songs with Hebrew lyrics and Arab melodies.
I stand at the landfall of a great rift
valley, a crack in the earth’s crust that begins
where the Indian Ocean’s waters mix with those
of the Gulf of Aden. It heads west by northwest, turns
more sharply to the northwest, and at the Straits of
Tiran, where the Sinai peninsula comes to a point, it
takes another turn and heads nearly due north before
ending in the mountains of Anatolia. This rift is one
of globe’s largest features, clearly visible from
space, and I live on its edge. It forms an intricate
landscape that makes the human soul turn end over end
in wonder, even in people who are sure they have no
organ by that name. One would have to be an automaton
not to stand in awe of the God who designed it. Or so
I felt when I first viewed the rift three decades ago.
In fact, we needn’t call upon God
to explain either the lay of the landscape or its origin.
The rift is a geological fact, the product of enormous
forces operating inside the globe, and it would exist
even if there were no humans to observe it. Yet humans
have been part of it nearly since there were humans;
the section I will travel, from the Red Sea north to
the mountains of Syria, served as a corridor through
which prehistoric humankind passed on its way out of
Africa to colonize Asia and Europe. From that time on,
they have left their mark on the valley, and it has
marked their minds.
Now, even in satellite photographs, the
rift cannot be seen pristinely. The light and heat emitted
by Eilat and its Jordanian sister city, Aqaba, by Jerusalem,
and by Tiberias on the shore of Lake Kinneret—the
Sea of Galilee—stain the landscape as seen from
outer space. Tiny Quaroun Lake in Lebanon’s Bekaa
valley has a ruler-straight southern bank that nature
could not fashion. It marks a dam, and shows that the
lake, which I rode past time and again when I served
as an occupying soldier in Lebanon in the early 1980s,
is manmade.
Here on earth, with my own eyes, I can
only see the valley from its edge or within. Like a
worker ant climbing a blade of grass to get a better
view of the hollow in which she will spend her brief
life, I can only use my mind as a ladder, in an attempt
to grasp this great geological object. But even this
is no simple matter, for humankind has overlaid the
geology not just with cities, dams, fields, and roads,
but also with history and biography and meanings.
I have lived, traveled, and soldiered
up and down the Israeli side of the rift valley in the
27 years since this country became my home. For many
of my fellow-citizens, the greater part of the valley
is a border that seems natural. But the location and
nature of that border have been challenged by peace
efforts and the winds of war alike. As I write, Israel’s
government is seeking to redraw the country’s
boundaries in the Gaza Strip. Israelis who live in the
Jordan Valley fear that a revision of the border along
which they live is not long to follow. October of the
year 2004 is thus an opportune time for me to travel
my part of the rift and to see it as it is, but also
as it means. Along my way I will meet geologists, biologists,
and archaeologists who study the physical facts of the
rift valley. I will speak to people who live and work
in the valley and for whom it represents the fulfillment,
or disappointment, of an ideal. And I will encounter
others who see the rift through the fun-house mirror
of myth, in which stories skip over the landscape and
where human beings themselves are mysteries.
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