They had detoured so far to the south in order to circumvent the Jordan bridge, which the customs officers guarded with guns, and had floated their commodities across the stream. These Bedouin boys belonged to a party of contrabanders who had been smuggling their goats and other goods out of Transjordan into Palestine. They wondered at the scrolls and kept them, carrying them along when they went. Though these manuscripts had faded and crumbled in places, they were in general remarkably clear. They unrolled them and found long manuscripts, inscribed in parallel columns on thin sheets that had been sewn together.
When they got these lumps out of the cave, they saw they were wrapped up in lengths of linen and coated with a black layer of what seemed to be pitch or wax. They took off the bowl-like lids a very bad smell arose this turned out to arise from dark, oblong lumps which were found in all of the jars. Inside were several tall clay jars, among fragments of other jars. But he later came back with another boy, and together they explored the cave.
There was an unfamiliar sound of breakage. Climbing up after one that had strayed, he noticed a cave that he had not seen before, and he idly threw a stone into it. At some point rather early in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammed the Wolf was minding some goats near a cliff on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
