Clueless at the Qumran

Here's a second scenario in which a skilled reporter might have found material for a really neat story:

2.
I was 18 then, and as chance would have it (it is indeed striking how much chance had to say in those days) I found myself working in a cafeteria by the Qumran Caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were originally discovered. I was selling ice cream, soft drinks and tacky postcards showing guys with broad smiles, their bodies smeared in (mineral-rich) Dead Sea mud and their hands busy leaving dirty finger prints on girls in pink bikinis.

I was also cleaning rooms in the guest house where a group of scroll scholars from California were staying for a while. Sometimes they left their boxes of chocolate chip cookies open in their rooms as a treat - or perhaps as a test of the room maids; we were never quite sure. It seems likely, though, that no kind of intentions were involved at all. Their scholarly work, however, seemed surrounded by controversy to say the least, mainly concerning the publication of the scrolls, i.e. questions of who got access to the material and when. There was this Indiana Jones style mystery simmering quietly in their conversations (one book on the topic, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, came out around that time), and two names I still remember: Eisenman, because he seemed to actually somehow play the part of Indiana Jones in this setup by the Dead Sea, and Battenfield, because he was kind enough to show me and a couple of my co-workers around the Masada on one of our days off.

Their stories, and we heard most of them from students in the group, were solemn and intriguing and ridiculously hard to follow, and I promised myself to look into these scroll matters upon my return to Denmark - which obviously I never got around to. So ultimately my coverage of the scenario limited itself to enthusiastic, undetailed eye-witness accounts in the tacky postcard format.