Ghazal Mhanna, 15 — Trainers’ Academy, Tulkarm
He sat on his bench in the garden sipping his coffee quietly, enjoying the warm sunshine and the gentle spring breeze. Usaid glanced towards the wall to find that its shadow had disappeared…
The Well of No Return
Fawziya Ali Abu Ra’iya, 18 — Tarqumiyah
“Whoever goes down this well never returns.” That’s what one of the residents of that small Moroccan town told me. I’d heard so much about that well that curiosity got the better of me — I had to visit it and discover the secret behind it.
“I want to go down the well,” I said to the man. “Good grief,” he replied, “you may not come back.” But I insisted on going down until the man gave in to my wish and handed me a long rope. He tied one end to the trunk of a sycamore tree near the well and threw it down. I gripped the rope and, very carefully and slowly, climbed down into the depths of the well. Down and down I went, the path to the bottom so long it was as though the well had no end, as though it had no floor at all.
But at last I reached it, and when I set my feet on the ground I felt as though I were stepping on sponge. I lit my lamp and examined the place around me: walls turned green from all the moss and weeds covering them, and a strange smell, like the smell of decay… Then I saw three dark tunnels. I gathered my courage and entered the first tunnel. I walked and walked through the tunnel’s frightening darkness and silence until I reached the end, and there I saw an inscription on the wall that said: “The first is completed by the second, and the second cannot be without the third.” I figured out that the first meant the first tunnel, the second the second tunnel, and the third the third, so I headed straight away to the second tunnel. There I found a phrase carved into the wall that said: “Carried, then four, then two, then three, then the end, and in the third lies the truth of the tale.” I thought and thought. “Carried, then four, then two, then three, then the end, and in the third lies the truth of the tale.” So I decided to head to the third tunnel — perhaps I could solve this riddle.
And so I headed to the third tunnel, and there, carved into the wall at the tunnel’s end, I found: “From so much forgetting they named him….” “An incomplete sentence,” I said to myself. So what is carried, then four, then two, then three, then the end, and is from so much forgetting…? Then I cried out, “Ah! It’s man!” Born carried, then crawls on four, then walks on two, then on three — his two legs and his stick… And I’d barely finished my sentence when a door opened from between the rocks, and out came dozens of men and children whom I later learned were all the people who had climbed down the well or fallen into it.
They were exhausted, their faces pale, their frames weak, looking gaunt and frightened. They came out of the well, and with that the curse of the Well of No Return was ended, and from that day on its name became the Well of Return.
The End
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