Yosef was at the eastern wall.
He felt it before he heard it -- the five gates, settled in his chest since the opening of the Mirkaveh, the fire responding to the significance the way a compass needle responded to north.
Not a sound, A recognition...
He turned.
He stood and looked at the garden for a long time.
Thirty years. Eleven excavations. Three continents of honest ground. The word his father had delivered correctly and gently -- finder -- carried for thirty years in the muscle, never quite set down, the stone in the shoe that you accommodated without ever accepting.
He had told himself the ground was good to him. It was true.
Underneath that truth had always been a deeper one he was taking the long way around to.
He was looking at it now.
Eden, flowering.
He stood in the amber warmth of the amber tree's blossoms with his arms at his sides -- the posture he had not worn since he knelt in the grass and understood what he had found.
