(10 of 10)
Guided by Glueck's creative archaeology, young pioneers from the cramped nation of Israel are already putting the Nabataean waterworks back into use, repairing the dams, cleaning out the cisterns, planting crops in the walled fields. The population there is rising, even beyond the ends of the spreading pipelines. Some day it may pass the level that it reached at the time of Abraham.
More than Life. But no such triumphs are enough to contain the 63-year-old adventurer. Somehow he has found time to write three books popularizing archaeology—including the well-known Rivers in the Desert. And in the intervals while he is at home being a college president, Glueck is writing a massive book about the Nabataeans.
But his heart remains in the Negev. Still active enough to keep the figure of an undergraduate, he spends his summers in Israel, taking to the field as soon as the heat has burned off all vegetation to reveal telltale potsherds. Sometimes he gets shot at, but he seems to enjoy such trouble. Last summer he briefly visited Ain-Mugharah (Spring of the Caves). "It's smack on the Sinai border," he says, "and it's a little dangerous. A cliff overhangs the spring; anyone can shoot down." There are many ancient sites there from the time of Abraham and the Judean Kings, but "no one goes there now," Glueck says, "except a few Bedouins, the Egyptian infiltrators and an archaeologist like me."
Next summer he will be back at Ain-Mugharah again. "There is something there," he says, "not just things to find, but the threads of history to tie up. That is the great reward of my kind of exploring." Danger there may be, but to the scientist it is no more than a calculated risk. "What the explorer is after," says Explorer Glueck modestly, "is more important than his life."