332
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
An Arab offered me a holy scroll in excellent state of preservation. I feared to take it lest in the excitement I be identified
as a Jew. Further, how could I carry it through Arab customs
when I left the country? As my donor threw the scroll aside,
someone trampled it. I saw a column of Jewish youths being
marched back under heavy Legion guard. The cramped,
twisted alleys—dating from the days of Christ and even
David, a thousand years earlier—were a bedlam of jostling
men, rubble, and refugees.
Suddenly we emerged into a huge open area whose likeness
has best been executed in the classic paintings of Dante's
inferno. Heavy bluish smoke hung over a mass of huddled
people; I could see neither the sides of the square nor how far
into the haze the human masses extended. On my right was a
hospital; the smoke poured from the windows in slow, lazy
spirals, as if unwilling to leave, unwilling to consume the ancient edifice. Everything here was rooted to the past. One who
has not seen it cannot understand the extraordinary attachment of the body and flesh of man with the spirit and earth
of Jerusalem.
From group to group I moved, photographing the exodus.
Here was a blind old Jew who seemed as ancient as the Bible,
being led by his wife, almost as old as he, to the line-up of
refugees about to leave the inferno. Here was a Jewish woman
with a brood of children huddled around a swarm of baskets
and bundles. Standing next to them was the long-bearded figure of a Yeshiva scholar wearing the furred hat of the ancient
scribes. Next to him was Sarah, the studious one; oblivious to
her surroundings, she sat on her pack, a shopping basket between her legs, reading audibly from a small prayerbook. I
wondered which portion of the Holy Book absorbed her. Was
it Jeremiah, Exodus, Lamentations? "How doth the city sit
solitary, that was full of people! how is she become a widow!
. . . She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her
cheeks. . . . Judah is gone into captivity, because of affliction, and because of great servitude. . . ."