1Far down from the hills, in the low hot valley near the sea of salt, there was a spring that never failed. It came out of the ground cold and loud, enough for a thousand people, and it had done so longer than anyone could tell. Around it stood a village of round houses built of mud brick, more houses than a child could count, and fields of grain, and fig trees.
2To the west of the village rose bare yellow hills, cut by a dry gorge. Most of a lifetime, nothing came down that gorge but wind. But it was said among the old that sometimes, when storms broke on the far side of the hills, the gorge remembered that it was a river.
3There was a boy in that village named Kesh, a brick-maker's son. When he was seven, the gorge remembered.
4There had been no rain in the valley that night. That was the horror of it. The sky over the houses was full of stars. The rain had fallen a day's walk away, on the high ground, and nobody below knew of it. Kesh woke to a sound like a herd running. His mother was already on her feet. She pushed him up the ladder to the roof, and she turned back for his sister.
5The water that came was not like water. It was brown and thick and it carried stones the size of sheep. It went through the west side of the village as a foot goes through an ant hill. Kesh lay on the roof and felt the house turn soft underneath him. In the morning the house was a mound of mud, and he was on top of it, and he was the only one of his house who was.
6Sixty people died that night. The seed store went too, and so the year after the flood killed more than the flood had.
7The village built itself again, for the spring was still there. People are like that. Within ten years there were children playing in the dry gorge who thought the story was a story.
8Kesh became a brick-maker like his father. He shaped the bricks by hand, long and round-backed like loaves, and before they dried he pressed his thumbs into the top of each one in a row, so that the mud mortar would grip. He was good at it. He built half the houses of the new village. And every night of his life, before he slept, he listened.
9When he was a grown man with a wife and children, he went up into the gorge alone. He stayed there six days. He looked at how high the old mud stood on the rock sides, and how wide the mouth was, and where the stones had been thrown. When he came down, he stood up at the gathering by the spring.
10"I want to build a wall," he said.
11"Build what you like," said a woman named Dara, who spoke first in most things. "You are the brick-maker."
12"Not a house wall. A wall around the village. All of it. Of stone, not brick, as thick as a man lying down and twice as high as a man standing. And outside it, on the west, a ditch cut down into the rock, to turn the water aside."
13There was a silence. Then there was a great deal of noise.
14Dara let it die down. She was no fool, and she did not mock him, for she knew who he had lost. "Kesh," she said. "How many stones is that?"
15"I have counted it as well as I can. More than all the bricks in all our houses, many times over."
16"And how long?"
17"If everyone gave one day in five, when the fields can spare them? I will be dead before it is closed. My children may be."
18"And how often does the gorge run? You were seven. You are near forty. Before that night, my grandmother had never seen it, and she was old. Once in three lifetimes, perhaps." Dara spread her hands. "You are asking living people to break their backs all their lives, to keep out a thing that most of them will never see. For the sake of people who are not born. I grieve for your mother. But the answer is no."
19"The water does not need you to see it," said Kesh. "It is on its way now. It is only that the way is long."
20But the gathering said no, and went home.
21Kesh began the next morning, alone. He dragged the first stone down from the hill on a sledge of poles. It took him half a day. He set it in the ground on the west side, where the water had come through. It looked like nothing: one stone in a field.
22His wife thought grief had turned at last to madness, thirty years late. His sons were ashamed and kept away. Only his granddaughter Yeli came, who was five and liked the sledge. She rode down the hill on the stones and thought it the best game in the valley.
23He worked every day that the bricks did not need him. In a year he had a line of stones forty paces long and as high as his knee. People brought visitors to look at it and laugh. Children jumped over it. Dara walked by and said, not unkindly, "At this pace, Kesh, the hills will wear down before your wall goes up."
24"Then I had better not stop to talk," said Kesh.
25Now hear how the others came to it, for it was not by wisdom.
26In the third winter, hill people came down by night and broke into two houses on the edge of the village. They took grain and a girl, and killed a man who came out with a torch. Such a thing had happened before, but not for years. In the morning the whole village stood in the cold looking toward the hills. Then, one by one, they turned and looked at Kesh's knee-high line of stones.
27"It would stop men, too," someone said.
28"It would," said Kesh. He did not say that men were the smaller thing to fear. He had learned something in three years of being laughed at. People will not lift a stone against a flood they have never seen. But a raider they can picture. So he let them build his wall for their own reason, and kept his reason to himself.
29After that they gave one day in five. Dara gave it too, and she drove the others harder than he did. The wall went up course by course, with the wide stones below and the lesser above. The ditch went down into the rock on the west side, cut with stone hammers and fire and cold water, a hand's depth in a moon.
30It ate their lives. Men grew bent from it. A boy was crushed under a sledge on the hill, and his mother stood before Kesh and cursed him and his wall and his dead. He stood and took it, for she was owed that. The next day she was back at the ditch with her basket. She said, "If it is not finished, he died for a heap of rocks."
31Kesh grew old. His eyes went grey and then white. Yeli grew up beside the wall, and she became his eyes. She walked ahead of him along the top with his hand on her shoulder, and he would stop and feel a joint between stones with his fingers and say, "This one is lazy. Take it out."
32When he was past seventy winters, the wall stood twice the height of a man around three sides of the village. The fourth side, the east, was still open. The east was the side away from the gorge. He had built the west first.
33He knew he would not see it closed. One evening he asked Yeli to bring him wet mud and a brick mould. He made one brick, slowly, by touch, round-backed like a loaf. He pressed his two thumbs into the top of it in a row, as he had on ten thousand others.
34"Put it in the top course on the west," he said, "over the place where the first stone is. It will not hold anything up. It is only so that I am in it."
35"You are in all of it," said Yeli.
36"I am in the bottom of it. I would like to be in the top." He turned his white eyes toward the hills. "I have heard it every night for sixty-five years, you know. It is not grief. People think it is grief. It is only that I was on the roof, and I know it is true."
37He died that winter, in his bed, on a night of stars. The gorge was dry. The wall was open on the east.
38It was Yeli who closed it. She was the builder after him, and it took her nine years more. She raised a tower too, inside the wall on the west, round and solid, as tall as five men, with a stair of stone going up through the heart of it. From the top a watcher could see into the mouth of the gorge. Nothing like it had been made by hands before. Strangers came from ten days away to stand under it with their mouths open.
39Then came the long quiet, which is harder to bear than labour. The wall was finished. No flood came. Raiders looked at the tower and went elsewhere. And every year the ditch on the west filled with blown sand and thorn and the rubbish of the village, and every year Yeli made the people dig it out.
40They hated it. A generation had grown up that had never carried a stone. "The wall is built," they said. "Why do we dig a hole each winter to guard a wall that guards us from nothing?"
41There was a young man named Tolo who spoke best against it. He was clever and he was not lazy, which made him hard to answer. "I honour Kesh," he said at the gathering. "But think. He was a child, in the dark, and afraid. A child's fear grows with telling. Has anyone living seen this water? Yeli, have you?"
42"No," said Yeli. She was near seventy by then.
43"Then we are digging out a ditch each year for an old man's dream."
44"We are," said Yeli. "And we will dig it this year also. Bring your basket, Tolo." She had the right to say it, and he brought his basket. But he made a song about it, and the diggers sang it, and it was a funny song.
45It was the autumn after that song, on a night of stars.
46The watcher on the tower was a girl of ten. She did not see anything. She heard it, a sound like a herd running, far off in the hills. She did what she had been taught since she could walk, and had always thought was a game. She beat the hollow log.
47Yeli was awake before the second stroke. She had listened every night too.
48It came out of the gorge like a brown wall with a white top. It carried trees. It carried stones the size of sheep. It struck the ditch first. The ditch took the front of it, and turned it, and sent the great weight of it roaring away south along the foot of the wall toward the open plain. But the ditch could not take it all. The rest climbed out and came against the stones.
49The whole village was on the wall or behind it by then, with torches. They felt it hit. The wall shook under their feet as a tree shakes when an axe goes in. On the inner side, mud began to weep out between the lower stones in one place, and then to run.
50"There!" said Yeli. "Everything you have. There!"
51They brought baskets of earth and bricks torn from their own house walls. They brought sacks of grain from the eating store and packed them into the wet place. When that was not enough, they put their backs against it, forty people pressed against the stones in a row, with the water beating on the other side a forearm's length from their spines. Tolo was in the middle of that row. He did not sing.
52It beat on the wall until the stars turned pale. Then the sound grew less, and less, and stopped.
53In the grey light they climbed to the top and looked over. The fields on the west were gone. In their place lay a plain of mud and broken trees and boulders, and against the wall the mud stood higher than a man's chest. Out in it, far off, were the carcasses of gazelle that had been grazing in the hills the day before.
54Then they turned and looked the other way. Every house was standing. The fig trees were standing. The seed store was dry, with its seals unbroken. Children who had slept through all of it were coming out of the doorways, rubbing their eyes and asking what the noise had been.
55Nobody had died. In all that village not one person had died.
56Tolo came and stood by Yeli. He was mud to the hair. He tried twice to speak. "He was dead before I was born," he said at last. "He never saw my face. Why would he do that for me?"
57Yeli did not answer. She walked along the top of the wall to the place above the first stone. There in the top course was a single brick of mud among the stones, round-backed like a loaf. It was cracked with thirty summers. She laid her two thumbs in the two hollows on top of it, and they fitted.
58Tolo watched her do it. After a time he went down, and found his basket, and began to dig out the ditch.