Mount Carmel is where a Saturday outing turns into a formative childhood ordeal for Shmuel Ash—and, in memory, into one of the few sweet experiences he can recover from an otherwise bleak childhood. Its harsh slopes and meagre shade frame a sudden scorpion sting whose meaning eventually exceeds the pain: Shmuel remembers the episode as opening a crack in the walls of his life and letting in a desire to forgive the world.

Setting and excursion

Shmuel and his friend Menahem set out before dawn to wander through a vegetated ravine on Mount Carmel’s western slopes. Equipped with boots, caps, walking sticks, canteens, blankets, bread, hard-boiled eggs, and potatoes, they planned to pitch a tent and cook over a fire. They climbed the steep slope for hours, naming birds whose names they did not know; only the circling, calling crows were familiar to them.

The landscape did not match the picture Shmuel had formed from books. He knew European oaks by their broad crowns, but on Mount Carmel they were little more than scrub that offered scant shade. By eleven, after walking under the burning sun, both boys were red and soaked with salty sweat. Their effort to make a campsite was equally awkward: the stakes would not go into the ground, even when they took turns holding them and hammering them with a stone.

The sting and flight

As Shmuel bent to pick up a larger stone, a scorpion stung him on the hand, at the wrist. At first neither boy understood what had happened. Shmuel thought a shard of broken glass might have lodged in him, and Menahem examined the swelling hand, trying to find and remove the supposed splinter before pouring water from the canteen over the wound. The pain intensified rather than easing.

When Shmuel writhed and cried out, Menahem suggested that he wait on a blanket while he ran for help. Then Shmuel saw a yellow scorpion moving slowly among the dry leaves—the one that had stung him, or perhaps another. Convinced he was going to die, he ran downhill clutching his burning hand with the other. He stumbled over stones and dry branches, fell, got up, and ran on; Menahem pursued but could not catch him. Fear and pain seemed to lend Shmuel wings.

Memory and significance

The sting remained with Shmuel as one of the few sweet memories of childhood. Most of those years had been spent confined within the walls of a gloomy passage where he slept, darkened by the kerosene lamp used during power cuts and capped by a low, mouldy ceiling. Against that enclosed domestic world, the excursion’s two or three days seemed to open a crack in a wall.

The memory’s lasting force lies in its reversal. The scorpion brought real pain and the terror of imminent death, yet recalling the episode as an adolescent—and still as an adult—stirred in Shmuel a hazy desire to forgive the whole world and love everyone he encountered. Mount Carmel is therefore not simply the site of a childhood accident: it is bound to a brief release from confinement and to an unexpected, enduring tenderness.