Part 18
Eilath, where else? We were sitting in the wadi and conferred. There were too many people to accomotent. In itself it was not too difficult to build new tents with the canvas that was generously dumped by the army.
We decided to find a new spot. Along the beach people were already living in tents and self-constructed huts, but these were burned down once a month by the police. Eilath, particularly its port and the Timna copper mine needed cheap labour and in this way the authorities thought they could keep us under their thumb. We went past the ‘Queen of Sheba’ hotel, past the ‘Club Mediterranee’, to a piece of no man’s land along the Jordan border, less than 50 metres from the beach.
We found a site that, viewed square-wise, was situated between the Jordan border, the Gulf of Akaba, or of Eilath, whatever the inclination of the day might be, a wide channel with a levee on the other side and about a mile further on the kibbutz of Eilath. We all sought a spot after our liking and went to work. I had spirit-levelled a location in the bank of the channel and had it nearly finished, when I saw something that looked like a sizeable snake. I darted towards the others, but on returning it was gone. The cavity the animal had crept through was there though and on the basis of this Steve concluded with reassuring authority that it must have been a ‘giant lizard’ and by all means ‘particularly harmless’.
Steve was a tallish Englishman with very affected diction and a near encyclopaedic knowledge that when needed he supported with equally immense imagination. His tent was a gigantic ‘Teepee’, the natural centre of what we proudly came to call ‘East Village’.
My tent measured about three by three metres and one and a half in height, early bungalow model. My bed was a sleeping sensation; about two by two metres and up to twenty centimetres filled with shingles dragged in from the beach by the bucketload and ground smooth by the centuries. In there my body found its perfect fit and I slept like a desert rose.
Jan Ploeg
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