Word: caveness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tradition is that when young David incurred the wrath of King Saul, he fled to the Wilderness of Judah, a forbidding desert badland just west of the Dead Sea. Later rebels lived for years among its dry stream beds and limestone cliffs, hiding their sacred writings in inaccessible caves. In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy crawled into one such cave, found the first of these writings: the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. Since then, Israeli archaeologists have watched in alarm as Bedouins haphazardly ransacked the caves for more fragments of parchment and papyrus, often sneaking across the Jordan border to rifle...
Most of the caves had been cleaned out by Bedouins, but Aharoni found several that they had missed. Inside, the floors were foot-deep with bird droppings and dust, which rose in choking clouds around the explorers. In one, amidst the midden, was a vulture's nest. With unliterary impartiality, the vultures had used fragments of parchment to complete the nest. On one fragment 16 verses of the Book of Exodus were written in Hebrew script that was current in Jerusalem about 130 A.D. This and other evidence convinced Israeli scholars that the cave had been a refuge...
...slow burn began when Johannesburg's Golden City Post, most respected of the country's African newspapers, reported that there had been an earlier severe cave-in shortly before the big blast and rockfall. Some 40 miners scrambled for the safety of the lift cage. Half were forced back at the cage entrance, reported the Post; 20 others reached the surface but found their way blocked by supervisors who ordered them back into the tunnel. Two natives who refused to go back were clapped into the mine's own jail on charges of insubordination, said the Post...
...cave-in, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd solemnly told Parliament that after five attempts to bore through 500 ft. of earth and limestone in search of the men, "all hope" had been abandoned. But wives of three of the white miners begged for one more rescue attempt. A self-styled seer, Petrus Johannes Kleinhans, 29, had told them that he had a vision in which he saw the precise position of seven black and three white men, still alive. When he pointed to the place to dig, mine officials, who had insisted all along that there was no hope, said...
...drill rushed down from the northern Transvaal 300 miles away to punch a 13-in. air and food hole straight down from the surface to the entombed men. But the drill hit solid rock 80 feet down, slowing the job. And as torrential rains began to fall, threatening new cave-ins, no one but the desperate families outside held out much hope for the 440 men sealed inside No. 10 section...