It looked more like a mirage from a comic book, but from the kibbutz you could clearly see there was a cave. Now such a theme alone would alert the monkey in the man. To that add the Death Sea Scrolls having been found in a cave near Ein Geddi and you are halfway the scenario of a riveting adventure. It was not anybody’s plan in particular to check it out, it went almost without saying. And that a cave that visible from all sides would probably not be virgin territory was merely an irritable thought to us.

The five of us hiked through the shattered landscape. After a zigzag lug we came to the beckoning hole. You could stand up straight in it and when knocking on the walls not too much came down, we walked in one after the other, torch in front. Soon the ceiling lost its height and some of us had to stoop. Talking got worse as the porous walls absorbed nearly all sound. The ceiling became lower still and soon we went on all fours. Going back became impossible as the corridor now was too narrow to turn. We had penetrated some 40 metres into the mountain when the shaft diverged: one path went straight on but was too low to continue, the other went down fairly steep, too steep actually. We talked about what to do at the igloo-shaped junction.

I don’t know who did it, it wasn’t me who threw a stone into the steep shaft. A moment later all hell broke loose. Screaming and screeching and with Inner-Earth sounds hundreds of startled bats burst out, flapping and shitting. I instantly pulled my cognac-coloured sweatshirt over my shoulder-long hair and we crouched until the panic had winged by.
Confucified we trip-trampled out of the mountain.

To be continued: ‘The Dead Sea’