For the Time Being Part 2

What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of "the individual"? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in Asia-the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?

Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?

There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.

A dean of Canterbury Cathedral, who was perhaps a bit of a card, once found actual numbers so alarming that in a formal discussion, according to Huston Smith, he cried out, "Short views, for G.o.d's sake, short views."

N O W The good times, and the heroic people, are all gone. Everyone knows this. Everyone always has. Formerly, there were giants in the earth. The Adam and Eve of legend had every reason to think that they lost innocence, botched paradise, and erred their way into a time of suffering and evil. The men of the fifth century B.C.E. who wrote out the stories of Moses, of Abraham, and even of Noah, depicted them already pleading with G.o.d to save their visibly corrupt generations. The mournings of the wise recur as a comic refrain down the vaults of recorded time.

Kali Yuga is Sanskrit for our own degenerate and unfortunate times: "the end of the end." The Hindus first used the term between 300 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.

In the Talmud, a rabbi asks, "The ancient saints used to tarry for a while, pray a while, and tarry a while after their prayer. When did they have time to study Torah? When did they have time to do their work?"

Another rabbi answers, quoting yet earlier rabbis about the men of old, "Because they were saints, their Torah study was blessed and their work was blessed." Already in the first century thinkers thought the world was shot to h.e.l.l. Paul of Tarsus, living then too, called his days "these late times."

Almost sixteen centuries ago, Augustine looked back three centuries at the apostles and their millennialism: "Those were last days then; how much more so now!"

"Nowadays," an eleventh-century Chinese Buddhist master complained, "we see students who sit diligently but do not awaken."

In the twelfth century, Rabbi Judah Halevy mourned the loss of decent music: Music declined because it became the work of inferior people. It degenerated from its former greatness because people, too, had degenerated.

In the twelfth century in Korea, Buddhist master Chinul referred sadly to "people in this age of derelict religion."

"There is so much worldliness nowadays," Saint Teresa of avila wrote to her brother in 1570, "that I simply hate having possessions."

"Nowadays," a Hasidic rabbi said in the late 1700s, "men's souls are orphaned and their times decayed." This was only one generation after the great Hasidic masters-after the Baal Shem Tov and the Great Maggid. "Every day, miracles dwindle and marvels go away," said another. Rabbi Nachman mourned "widespread atheism and immorality in the world today."

An eighteenth-century rabbi said, "Newfangled people have appeared now who care about money." "Nowadays, in these generations," wrote a nineteenth-century Hasid master, the great teachers and prophets are dead, and all we have are "lesser lights."

John Ruskin as he aged judged that nature itself was collapsing. The weather had actually come unhinged-this after a rainy year-and it was "defiled" and "foul."

In our time, says a twentieth-century Hasidic rabbi, we are in a coma.

CHAPTER THREE.

B I R T H Generations of physicians have, in their witty way, given jocular names to our defects. Happy-puppet syndrome produces severely mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded adults who jerk and laugh. "The laughter," admonishes the physician, "is not apparently a.s.sociated with happiness."

Whistling-face syndrome, leopard syndrome, and cri-du-chat syndrome are terms to vivify diagnosis. Whistling-face people are, fortunately, rare: Their faces are thickened masks. Their eyes cross and roll up; their mouths and chins pucker. Leopard-syndrome people grow dark spots; their sharp ears protrude. The cri-du-chat babies, mentally deficient, mew. Leprechaunism babies suffer a metabolic defect. Wrinkled and tiny as leprechauns, they have big lips, big ears, and appealing full heads of hair. They fail to thrive, and die.

In sirenomelia sequence, the infant, usually stillborn, looks (to a delivery room wag, and then only somewhat) like a mermaid. That is, the sirenomelia infant has only one leg, the knee and foot of which point backward, so that if these people lived to hop around-which they do not-they would never see which way they were going. Isn't this kind of fun, once you get used to it? No. Outstandingly no fun are the dying or dead infants who look like frogs-no eyelids, gaping mouths, scaling skin. "Consanguinity," the text notes of their etiology: Incest produced them.

Many damaged infants die in a few days or weeks. The majority of those who live are mentally deficient. In Smith's Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, the infants' visible anomalies-their crushed or pulled faces, their snarled limbs and wild eyes-signal, or rather express in skin and bones, their bollixed brains.

Here they are, page after page, black-and-white photographs, frontal and profile, of infants and children and adults at every age, naked or wearing briefs. The photographer stands these people, if they can stand, against a wall. A black-and-white grid marks squares on the wall, so we can see how off plumb their bodies are.

From Degas's notebooks: "There are, naturally, feelings that one cannot render."

Turn the page. Here she is. Of the thousand or so photographs in this book, this one most terrifies me. She is an ebulliently happy and pretty little girl. She is wearing a pair of cotton underpants. She has dark hair, bangs, and two wavy ponytails tied with yarn bows. Sure of her charm, she smiles directly at the camera; her young face s.h.i.+nes with confidence and pleasure: Am I not cute? She is indeed cute. She is three. She has raised her arms at the elbows as if approaching the photographer for a hug. Actually, a physician has likely asked her to raise her arms to display them. Symptomatically, she cannot straighten her elbows; no one who suffers femoral hypoplasia-short legs-can. Her legs are pathologically short. (A photograph of an infant victim of this disorder shows feet sticking directly from loins and diaper.) If this child lowered her arms, her hands would extend well below her knees. No plastic surgery could help. Intelligence: normal. She is, in the photograph, delighted with her world and herself. Someone brushes her hair. Someone ties her hair bows. Someone adores her, and why not? "Someone loves us all," Elizabeth Bishop wrote.

On the facing page stands another short-legged kid, a crooked boy who is five. His malformed legs are short as fists-so short that his fingers, could he extend his elbows, would graze his ankles. His body is otherwise fine. He can grow up and have children. He has a handsome young face, this boy; he stands naked against the black-and-white grid wall. He looks grim. He tilts his head down and looks up at the camera. His eyes accuse, his brows defy, his mouth mourns.

The confident girl and the sorrowing boy, facing each other on opposite pages, make it appear as if, at some time between the ages of three and five, these kids catch on. Their legs are short, and it is going to be more of a problem than buying clothes.

"Rise at midnight," said a Hasid master, "and weep for your sins." But we have said that all nature disregards our sins. Our sins have nothing to do with our physical fates. When you sh.e.l.l peas, you notice that defective germ plasm shrivels one pea in almost every pod. I ain't so pretty myself.

S A N D A few years ago, I grew interested in sand. Why is there sand in deserts? Where does it come from? I thought ocean waves made sand on seash.o.r.es: waves pounded continents' rock and shattered it to stone, gravel, and finally sand. This, I learned, is only slightly true.

Lichens, and ice and salt crystals, make more sand than ocean waves do. On mountaintops and on hillsides you see cracked rock faces and boulders. Lichens grow on them, in rings or tufts. "The still explosions on the rocks/the lichens grow in gray, concentric shocks," wrote Elizabeth Bishop. These explosions blast the rocks; lichens secrete acids, which break minerals. Lichens widen rocks' cracks, growing salt crystals split them further, and freezing water shatters them.

Glaciers make some sand; their bottoms pluck boulders and stones that scour all the land in their paths. When glaciers melt, they leave in outwash plains boulders, rocks, gravels, sand, and clays-the sand ground to floury powder. Winds lift the sand and bear it aloft.

Mostly, the continents' streams and rivers make sand. Streams, especially, and fast rivers bear bouncing rocks that knock the earth, and break themselves into sharp chips of sand. The sand grains leap-saltate-downstream. So the banks and bottoms of most streams are sandy. Look in any small stream in the woods or mountains, as far inland as you like. That stream is making sand, and sand lies on its bed. Caddis-fly larvae use it as stones for their odd masonry houses.

Rivers bear sand to the sea. As rivers slow, they drop their sand, and harbors silt up and deltas spread. If the land's rock is fresh lava, as it is in Tahiti and on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, the sand the streams bear down to the beaches is black. If the inland rock is basaltic, like the Columbia River plateau's, the sand the river carries to beaches is dark and fine. If the rock is granite, as it is in the eastern United States, the sand is pale quartz and feldspar, granite's parts.

When Los Angeles and Orange Counties dammed their intermittent streams, all the beaches from Los Angeles to Newport Beach lost their sand supply. Those weak hillside streams, which had never even flowed year-round, had supplied all that sand. Now beach towns buy dredged harbor sand to s.h.i.+p and dump.

Coastal currents smear sand round the continents' edges. So there is sand on ocean beaches. Ocean waves do not make stony sand except where waves beat cliffs. Mostly, waves and longsh.o.r.e currents spread river sand coastwise, and waves fling it back at the continents' feet. Ocean waves crumble dead coral reefs. And parrotfish eat coral polyps. The fish do not digest the corals' limey bits, but instead defecate them in dribbles, making that grand white sand we prize on tropical beaches and shallow sea floors. Little or no sand lies under the deep oceans.

Why is there sand in deserts? Because windblown sand collects in every low place, and deserts are low, like beaches. However far you live from the sea, however high your alt.i.tude, you will find sand in ditches, in roadside drains, and in cracks between rocks and sidewalks.

Sand collects in flat places too, like high-alt.i.tude deserts. During interglacials, such as the one in which we live now, soils dry. Clay particles clump and lie low; sand grains part and blow about. Winds drop sand by weight, as one drops anything when it gets too heavy for one's strength. Winds carry light stone dust-loess-far afield. Wherever they drop it, it stays put in only a few places: in the rich prairies in central North America, and in precious flat basins in China and Russia.

C H I N A Teilhard had glimpsed the Gobi Desert from muleback on his 1923 Ordos expedition. It was the biggest desert on earth: five hundred thousand square miles of sandstorms and ravaged plateaus in what was then northern Mongolia. "As far as the eye could see around us, over the vast plain which had once been leveled by the Yellow River, waved the gra.s.s of the steppes." The solitudes moved him: the "wide torrential valleys where herds of gazelles could be seen, nose to wind, among the pebbles and the spa.r.s.e gra.s.s.... We were crossing the low steppes of San-Tao-Ho. The Mongolians are now no longer here.... The season of the yellow winds is over."

The next morning, he broke camp by the waters of the s.h.i.+ling-Gol and moved toward Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later, he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-five miles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the sh.o.r.e. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.

He resumed his teaching post in Paris the next year. In the next few years he lived again in China, undertook another Gobi expedition, returned to Paris, rode a mule on a geologic journey through the Mabla Ma.s.sif in Ethiopia, and trekked for months digging bones and breaking rocks in both the Ordos and Manchuria.

In the field he wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. "This man with the clear regard," a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. All his life he parted his short hair on the left. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archaeologists. Among them were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick, and Paul Valery.

Sandstorms nauseate by generating static electricity-eighty volts per square yard. A Dutch geographer discovered a cure. Walking through a sandstorm, he dragged a car jack behind him; the jack grounded the voltage.

The paleontologist once called G.o.d "punctiform": "It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that G.o.d is infinitely near." Is it useful and wise to think of G.o.d as punctiform? I think so.

Of the gospel miracles he wrote, "I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles."

C L O U D S We are fortunate to possess a kind of Domesday Book for the cloud population in the summer of 1869 in the California Sierra.

On June 12 of that year, John Muir noted from the North Fork of the Merced River: "c.u.muli rising to the eastward. How beautiful their pearly bosses! How well they harmonize with the upswelling rocks beneath them! Mountains of the sky, solid-looking, finely sculptured ..."

On June 21, he recorded a well-defined cloud: "a solitary white mountain ... enriched with suns.h.i.+ne and shade."

Crisp, rocky-looking clouds appeared on July 2: "keenest in outline I ever saw."

On July 23: "What can poor mortals say about clouds?" While people describe them, they vanish. "Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in G.o.d's calendar, difference of duration is nothing."

We who missed witnessing them are yet certain that on August 26, 1869, at Tuolomne meadow, clouds occupied about 15 percent of the sky at noon. At evening, "large picturesque clouds, craggy like rocks," piled on Mount Dana, clouds "reddish in color like the mountain itself."

September 8: A few clouds drifted around the peaks "as if looking for work."

Seventy-four years later, on August 11, 1943, a young woman wrote from Westerbork, a transition camp in the Netherlands: "It really doesn't matter if it is I who die or another. What matters is that we are all marked men."

N U M B E R S Ten years ago, I read that there were two galaxies for everyone alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble s.p.a.ce telescope, we have revised our figures. There are maybe nine galaxies for each of us-eighty billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors at least one hundred billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns-give or take 50 percent-or sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, said an early report, that the stars are "not 12 but 13 billion years old." Two galaxies, nine galaxies ... one hundred billion suns, four hundred billion suns ... twelve billion years, thirteen billion years ...

These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.

They say there is a Buddha in each grain of sand. It is this sort of pop wisdom that makes the greatness of Buddhism seem aggravating. In fact, among major religions only Buddhism and Taoism can unblinkingly encompa.s.s the universe-the universe "granulated," astronomers say, into galaxies.

Does anyone believe the galaxies exist to add splendor to the night sky over Bethlehem?

Teilhard de Chardin sent a dispatch from a dig. "In the middle of the tamarisk bush you find a red-brick town, partially exposed, with its houses, drains, streets.... More than three thousand years before our era, people were living there who played with dice like our own, fished with hooks like ours, and wrote in characters we can't read."

Who were these individuals? And who were the Mongol Wanschock family-the man and five sons who helped dig? Who, in fact, were the manic Chinese emperor, the manic Roman emperor, and the merry, monkish paleontologist who dug? Who were the peasants who worked the far tomb-fields, the painter who painted clouds, Rabbi Akiva who prayed and Rufus who flayed him? The Trojans likely thought well of themselves, as we do, yet they are as gone as we will be; their last settlement died out in 1100 B.C.E. Who was that doctor whose hand propped the bird-headed dwarfs? Who were the Israeli man who split wood across the water, the nurse Pat Eisberg who washed babies like plates, the statistician who reckoned that we people alive today-displacing as our bodies together do only 1.1 billion cubic feet-would fit into Lake Windermere?

Who were the families whose loess-buried hearths Genghis Khan rode over on ponies, the people Stalin killed, the 79.2 billion of us now dead, the 5.9 billion of us now alive, the stub-legged three-year-old girl exuberant in underpants and hair bows who held out her arms, or Isaac Luria in exile?

Which of these people might yet be alive? The red baby likely lives, and his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es have calmed to a normal color. Most of the Chinese peasants I saw working in a field are up and breathing. Maybe the Wanschock granddaughters are riding horses scornfully over the Mongolian plains, but husband and wife are long gone. The others have died, except probably the wood splitter whose maul rang the sky, and the thriving nurse Pat Eisberg. Is it important if the bird-headed dwarfs have died yet, or the statistician? If your father has died his death yet? Your child? It is only a matter of time, after all. Why do we find it supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topside? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of soil our feet poke?

"One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic." Joseph Stalin, that gourmandizer, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment.

How can an individual count? Do individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Qur'an says, "not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth escapes from him." That is touching, that Allah, G.o.d, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.

One small town's soup kitchen, St. Mary's, serves about 115 men a night. Why feed 115 individuals? Surely so few people elude most demographics and achieve statistical insignificance. After all, there are 270 million Americans, 19 million people who live in Mexico City, 16 million in greater New York, 26 million in greater Tokyo. Every day 1.5 million people walk through Times Square in New York; every day, almost as many people-1.5 million-board U.S. pa.s.senger planes. And so forth. We who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breathed air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.

"G.o.d speaks succinctly," said the rabbis.

During the war, Nelly Sachs wrote, What shall be the end of the little holiness which still dwells in my sand?

The voices of the dead speak through reed pipes of seclusion.

I S R A E L The presenting face of any religion is its ma.s.s of popular superst.i.tions. It seems to take all the keenest thinkers of every religion in every generation to fend off this clamoring pack. In New Mexico in 1978, the face of Jesus arose in a tortilla. "I was just rolling out my husband's burrito ...," the witness began her account. An auto parts store in Progresso, Texas, attracted crowds when an oil stain on its floor resembled the Virgin Mary. Another virgin appeared in 1998 in Colma, California, in hardened sap on a pine trunk. At a Nashville coffee shop named Bongo Java, a cinnamon bun came out of the oven looking like Mother Teresa-the nun bun, papers called it. In 1996 in Leicester, England, the name of Allah appeared in a halved eggplant. Several cities-Kandy, Sri Lanka, is one-claim to own a tooth from the jaw of the Buddha. A taxonomist who saw one of these said it belonged to a crocodile.

When he leads trips to Israel, Abbot Philip Lawrence of the monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, gives only one charge to his flock. "When they show the stone with the footprint of Christ in it," he says, "don't laugh." There is an enormous footprint of Buddha, too, in Laos.

"Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable," Thomas Merton wrote. "Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious." Suddenly!

One of the queerest spots on earth-I hope-is in Bethlehem. This is the patch of planet where, according to tradition, a cave once stabled animals, and where Mary gave birth to a son whose later preaching-scholars of every stripe agree, with varying enthusiasm-caused the occupying Romans to crucify him. Generations of Christians have churched over the traditional Bethlehem spot to the highest degree. Centuries of additions have made the architecture peculiar, but no one can see the church anyway, because many monasteries clamp onto it in cl.u.s.ters like barnacles. The Greek Orthodox Church owns the grotto site now, in the form of the Church of the Nativity.

There, in the Church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeonlike corridors where hushed people pa.s.sed. The floors were black stone or cracked marble. Dense brocades hung down old stone walls. Oil lamps hung in layers. Each polished silver or bra.s.s lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone, the darker the s.p.a.ce.

Packed into a tiny, domed upper chamber, Norwegians sang, as every other group did in turn, a Christmas carol. The stone dome bounced the sound around. The people sounded like seraphs singing inside a bell, sore amazed.

Descending once more, I pa.s.sed several monks, narrow men, fine-faced and black, who wore tall black hats and long black robes. Ethiopians, they use the oldest Christian rite. At a lower level, in a small room, I peered over half a stone wall and saw Europeans below; they whispered in a language I could not identify.

Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues. The music threaded the vaults.

Now I climbed down innumerable dark stone stairs to the main part, the deepest bas.e.m.e.nt: the Grotto of the Nativity. The grotto was down yet another smoky stairway, at the back of a stone cave far beneath street level. This was the place. It smelled of wet sand. It was a narrow cave about ten feet wide; cracked marble paved it. Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of floor. People had to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps, to see it.

A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall. This silver star was the X that marked the spot: Here, just here, the infant got born. Two thousand years of Christianity began here, where G.o.d emptied himself into man. Actually, many Christian scholars think "Jesus of Nazareth" was likely born in Nazareth. Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy. Here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy. It must have struck many people that we were competing with these lamps for oxygen.

In the center of the silver star was a circular hole. That was the bull's-eye, G.o.d's quondam target.

Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole's flat bottom. When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a fringed satin drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole. I could feel some sort of soft wax in it. The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide petri dish. I have never read any theologian who claims that G.o.d is particularly interested in religion, anyway.

Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of G.o.d's presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto. The ugliness of the blunt and b.u.mpy silver star impressed me. The bathetic pomp of the heavy, ta.s.seled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps-some humans' idea of elegance-bespoke grand comedy, too, that G.o.d put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.

"Every day," said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, "the glory is ready to emerge from its debas.e.m.e.nt."

The lamps' dozen flames heated my face. Under the altar cloths, in the corner where the stone wall met the marble floor, there was nothing to breathe but the lamps' oily fumes and people's exhalations. High above my back, layer after layer of stone away, people were singing. After the singing dwindled, the old walls still rang, and soon another group took up the general song in a melody faint and pure.

In the fourth century, those Jewish mystics devoted to Ezekiel's vision of the chariot wrote a text in which Rabbi Isaac said: "It is a five-hundred-year journey from the earth to the firmament.... The thickness of the firmament is a five-hundred-year journey. The firmament contains only the sun, moon and stars.... The waters above the firmament are a five-hundred-year journey. From the sea to the Heaven of Heavens is a five-hundred-year journey. There are to be found the angels who say the Kedushah."

The text goes on to describe more five-hundred-year journeys upward to levels each of a thickness of a five-hundred-year journey: to the level of myriads and myriads ministering to the Prince above the firmament, to the level of the Canopy of the Torah, to the rebuilt Temple, to "the storehouses of snow and the storehouses of hail," and above them to the treasure-houses of blessing and the storehouses of peace. Above all that lies a thick layer of wings and hooves, and "the chariot to come." Above these seven heavens and the seven thicknesses between them is a layer of wings as thick as all the seven heavens and the distances between them together, and "above them is the Holy One, blessed be He."

Standing again, rubbing my fingers together, I found more stone stairways, more levels, and the street, the sunlight, the world. I found a van in the parking lot of what used to be, I try to tell myself, a stable-but this story was worn out for now, the paradox and scandal of any incarnation's occurring in a stable. More powerful at the moment was the sight of people converging from all over the world, people of every color in every costume, to rub their fingers across a flat hole in a bossy silver star on the cracked marble floor of a cave.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel brought Hasidic teaching to Palestine in the eighteenth century. He said, "This is what I attained in the Land of Israel. When I see a bundle of straw lying in the street, it seems to me a sign of the presence of G.o.d, that it lies there lengthwise, and not crosswise."

I could not keep away from it. I saw I had a minute or two to rush back from the van into the church and down the grotto stairs to kneel again at the silver star behind the brocade, to prostrate myself under the lamps, and to rub my fingers in the greasy wax.

Was it maybe tallow? I felt like Harry Reasoner at the Great Wall of China in 1972, who, pressed on live coverage for a response, came up with, "It's ... uh ... it's one of the two or three darnedest things I ever saw."

E N C O U N T E R S Joseph took one of my cigarettes, and gave me one of his. He was a Palestinian in his fifties; his straight hair was graying. The deep lines in his face showed feeling. We smoked just outside the van, in the heat. This morning as every morning, we had smoked together after breakfast. Now at noon in a town parking lot, we were waiting for the others, who were buying jewelry.

Joseph drove a tourist van. Like 18 percent of Israelis, he was a Palestinian. Like 15 percent of Israeli Palestinians, he was a Christian. He spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and some English. Driving, he never said a word. He wore a thin cotton s.h.i.+rt in all weathers.

After our cigarette I found the jewelry store in whose lounge the others would meet after shopping. The lounge was air conditioned, and a vending machine offered cold drinks. It beat waiting in the parking lot, so I gathered Joseph from the van, led him inside, and got him a c.o.ke. We were sitting on distant couches; I brought out my book.

"Tonight or tomorrow night," Joseph said abruptly, "I invite you."

I raised my head; he saw my look.

"Before dinner, at hotel, I invite you."

Across the room, on the couch, Joseph appeared kind and sincere, as always. Thank you, I said, but I'll stay with my friends. I got myself another bottle of water. I closed my book. Joseph's lined face was relaxed.

Do you have a family at home? Joseph, with some animation, said indeed, yes he did, and told me he had a wife of many years, and two sons and three daughters. After a suitable interval, I hauled out pictures of my husband and daughter to show him. We were sitting comfortably; we smoked another cigarette in silence.

After a longer interval, Joseph brought forth mildly, "When I say 'I invite you,' I mean-for drink. For drink only."