Because of the mud, they couldn’t take the short route, the one that followed the tractor path in an almost straight line through the fields, curving slightly only by the cemetery, until it reached the foot of the hill. The rain had turned it into a quagmire, forcing them to take a detour to the north along the narrow, unused, but still paved British road that looped twice around the hill before entering the ruins of Sheikh Dahr. Every winter the stiff asphalt crumbled a bit more, and a wild undergrowth of nettles, thorny burnet, and prosopis broke rapaciously through it, piercing its tarry cadaver with prickly snarls. Flood waters had caused the stone shoulders to collapse, and whole sections of the road had caved in and been swept away. Craters made by shells and mines in the 48 war gaped amid the rank foliage, marking where blood had been shed. Along a curve in the road stood the hulk of a burned-out truck, through whose empty headlight casings ferns were growing. The phrase “the wrath of God” crossed Azariah’s mind.

At ten o’clock, Udi and Anat had joined Yonatan, Rimona, and Azariah, and they had all set out together for Sheikh Dahr. Udi was sure that the floods must have unearthed some of the ancient facing stones of the biblical Jewish village. He had a collection of stones like these in his garden, adding to them from time to time both for their beauty and for the feeling of vindication, or poetic justice, or biblical prophecy fulfilled, that their retrieval, or, as he preferred to call it, their “liberation,” gave him. As soon as the tractor path was dry, he would hitch up a tractor and liberate whatever they might find today. “If we do find anything, that is. And if one of us happens to come across a nice old piece of Arab junk, we can take it home for a planter and grow a creeper in it.”

Anat, for her part, was more interested in mushrooms. She thought the rocky slopes beneath the pine-reforested hilltops would be a good place to go looking for them.