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over his head.

5
    The convoy had arrived at its destination just before sunrise.
    Only the lighter trucks were able to drive up nearly to the top of the hill. Their engines roared and their radiators spouted steam as they crept at two miles an hour up the pathless incline covered with rubble and patches of dry, crumbling earth. The heavier trucks had to stop half-way up where the dirt track ended.
    Bauman and his boys awaited the convoy at the top. They had arrived two hours earlier and seemed already much at home among those inhospitable starlit rocks. Bauman had dispersed the boys along the undulating saddle of the hill and on the edge of rocks protruding over the slope; there they stood or squatted in dark clusters, the glowing sparks of their cigarettes suspended in the air, their rifles sharply silhouetted against the stars.
    On the very top of the hill, in the most advantageous position, a rectangle of a hundred by sixty yards was neatly pegged out, marking the site for the camp. A tractor with a plough rattled slowly and painfully around this rectangle drawing the first symbolical furrow, which, according to Arab custom, signified that the new settlers had effectively taken possession of the land.
    About half-past five a slight inflammation over the hills to the east showed that the sky was preparing for the rise of day; a grey pallor expanded overhead in which the stars dissolved one by one, and soon afterwards the sun rose with brisk abruptness, as if in a hurry. Within a quarter of an hour the cloudless sky had changed from light grey into a transparent greenish blue, and all around the hills emerged in their normal day-shape, arid and desolate and yet soft and gently curved. They were reddish brown at close range, chalk-grey in the distance, and became of an unreal tender violet pastel shade as they receded towards the horizon. The new settlers found themselves in thecentre of a landscape of gentle desolation, a barrenness mellowed by age. The rocks had settled down for eternity; the sparse scrubs and olive trees exhaled a silent and contented resignation. A few vultures sailed round the hill-top; the curves they described seemed to paraphrase the smooth curvature of the hills.
    On the slope across the valley to the east stood the village of Kfar Tabiyeh, silent and apparently deserted. Its houses were the colour of the hill, built from the clay and stone of the hill; they hugged the slope out of which they were carved and into which they seemed to dissolve by natural mimicry. Their walls were blind with only the smallest square window-hole or no windows at all. The terraces below the village were protected by loose stone walls, demolished in parts by last year’s rain. Some of the houses carried spherical domes of baked clay; others had flat mud roofs with grass and weeds growing out of them. The whole of the village looked like an ancient ruin spread over the slope and gently crumbling away into the dust out of which it had arisen in some timeless past; it basked peacefully under the early but already hardening rays of the Galilean sun.
    The people who had arrived in the convoy clustered round a truck from the top of which Reuben, the leader of the new settlers, read out the roll and the task allotted to each man and woman. He was a tall, bony fellow with sparse gestures and a way of commanding silence without raising his voice. After some initial muddle the groups sorted themselves out, and by 6 A.M. everybody was at his job. The largest group, of about fifty people, was engaged in clearing a path for the heavy trucks from the end of the dirt track to the camp on the hill-top, a distance of about two hundred yards. The stones they picked up were thrown into baskets; the baskets travelled from hand to hand along a chain to the top, where a second group, skilled men from the
Haganah
, used them for the building of parapets.These parapets protected five dug-outs, two of them facing north, and one each towards