Here and there his squinting eyes made out some dismal signs of life. A few goatskin tents that suggested a dark stain sprayed against a gleaming canvas of sand. A slowly disintegrating tire abandoned between nowhere and nowhere. A bullet-pocked fuel can rusting away in a downpour of winter light. Sometimes the clear purity of the desert air was violated by the stench of a dead camel or donkey, or by the mingled smells of smoke, gasoline, and engine oil. Yet time and again, it reasserted itself.

Here and there, too, were signs of a military presence. A lone antenna protruding from a distant hilltop. The chassis of a small truck by the road. Three, no four, jeeps passing on their way from the far south, their machine guns cradled on rests welded to the engine hoods. His lips were dry, his throat was parched, his eyes kept watering, but Yonatan had never felt better. As the sun dropped lower in the sky, the earth developed fissures where the desert began to fall away to the great rift valley below. The wheat had thinned out until there were only a few haggard-looking strands of it, and an occasional field of barley, to dapple the treeless stretches of scattered shrub. The gray-brown slopes of gravelly flint on the hillsides broke sharply eastward. From a high curve in the road, Yonatan caught sight of the peaks of the mountains of Edom shrouded in a veil of blue haze. A band of titans from some distant star who had lost their way and sunk down at last in this place, flashing blindingly from the sun-drunk surface of the Dead Sea. Were they able to rise at night from their lassitude and, stretching themselves to their full height, touch the farthest galaxies in the skies? Yonatan almost winked at them. He let them have the barest of waves. Hey, you, wait for me.

He recalled how his father loathed the desert. The very word made Yolek grimace, as if it were a dirty word. It often catapulted him into one of his taming-the-wilderness spiels. Deserts were a badge of shame, a mark of inequity, a disgrace to the map of Israel, an evil presence, an ancient enemy that must be subdued by armies bringing tractors, irrigation pipes, and fertilizer sacks until the last of its surly acres had been compelled to bear. And the desert shall rejoice and blossom like a rose. For in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in barren places. Jewish water engineers would turn the parched ground into fountains and the thirsty land into springs. Come, comrades, let us set the earth ablaze with a bright green flame.

From deep down in his blanket, the soldier at the wheel called out, “Hey, buddy, where to?”

“Down south.”

“How about as far as Ein-Husub?”

“Sounds fine.”

Then silence again, and wind.