THE MENORAH MEN
By
Lionel Davidson with his wild Rose of Tibet indicated that he could take over the genre in which Hammond Innes once excelled before he became sluggish; this cinches it. This is an admirable adventure, written with flair and landscaped with style, about Caspar Laing's attempt to find the original True Menorah, the symbol of Judaism-- ""buried in darkness"" centuries ago along with two tons of gold. Working with the cryptic notations on some dead sea scrolls, against time, and against some Jordanians who also have been combing the area, Laing's search takes him through the ""deathly infernal romanticism"" of the Dead Sea terrain, up canyons, down into a bat-filled cave; he is assaulted and abducted; he has a transient romance with a Yemini girl; and the final resolution-revelation is full of irony.... All of this is handled with scientific savvy, with some fine descriptions of the wilderness and its impregnable austerity, and with a sharp sense of just where the lines of possibility and probability converge. Michener should have been in situ here: Davidson's dead sea scrollwork is the liveliest entertainment around.