Free Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler

and from private donations. Most of the land bought by the National Fund was derelict and consisted of swamps, sand dunes, waterless desert and fields of stone. All land acquired by the Fund became unalienable property of the nation and was leased to the settlers for forty-nine years, to be renewed in subsequent generations. The settlers drained the swamps, planted trees on the dunes, dug irrigation channels, carried the stones from the fields, built terraces and resurrected the land. They had no capital and needed none; they received equipment and credit from public funds and repaid them when the land bore fruit; while the rent for the ground went back to their landlord, the nation.
    While waiting for their turn to be settled, the members of the group had worked as hired labourers; but already during that period of preparation they had paid their wages into the communal purse and had lived in common household. At times the group had had to split up: some of them went to work in the potash factory on the Dead Sea, while others found seasonal employment in the orange plantations of Samaria and a third batch went through vocational training in one of the older Communes of the Valley of Jezreel. At other times the whole group had been reunited; but whether together or not, they had regarded themselves as members of one family or order, with as yet no settled domicile. Their average age when they had come to the Land had been eighteen; now it was three and twenty. Couples had formed and re-formed during these years of preparation, and some of them had become stableunions. A few had found partners from outside who had been accepted as members, a few others had left the group. At present the group consisted of twenty men and seventeen women, two-thirds of whom were regarded as living in stable unions; and of three children, all under the age of two.
    They had been adolescents when they arrived, and now they were men and women hardened by experience. They had undergone certain transformations during those years, but as the change had been gradual and simultaneous, they were not aware of it. The men had become less talkative, their movements slower and more deliberate; the women’s faces had grown coarser under the hard climate and work, and they had a tendency to develop strong hips and breasts. But though they had aged in experience and changed in appearance twice the value of that time, they still regarded those five years as nothing but a prelude, a prehistoric era, the embryonic stage in the life of the Commune, which was really to start on the Day of Settlement. For five long and hard years they had waited for that day, dreamed of that day, schemed and prepared for it; and now the day had come—and after the day, the night.

8
    The silence which fell when the last lorry had turned its back on them and was swallowed up by the dusk had only been a short one, for they recovered quickly and went on. shovelling gravel into the stockade. But during that short moment or two they had felt like children who, after being told to be brave, were left alone in an empty house where the silent shadows crept in through the windows and reflections in mirrors froze into horrible masks. In that moment most of them would gladly have jumped onto the crowded trucks to be carried back, out of the horror of these archaic hills and their savage tribesmen, back to the safety of their own race and kin.
    The night came quickly. The searchlight on the top ofthe watch-tower was on; its sharp white beam was directed in an acute angle downward onto the stockade. They went on filling in the gravel under a shower of dazzling light which made the outer darkness even thicker and more impenetrable.
    By 7 P.M. the work was finished. The reflector lifted its beam into the air, and slowly lowered it again as it began its patient revolutions round and round, sweeping the terrain beyond the barbed-wire fence with its white broom of light. The dugouts and the