In the 1960s, digging at Masada, archaeologists found date seeds about two thousand years old, and put them away. Some sat in a university drawer for around forty years until, in 2005, a researcher planted three, mostly to see. One came up. They called it Methuselah, and it grew into a healthy palm of a kind not seen in that country for centuries. It also turned out to be male, which for a date palm means that on its own it would never bear a single date. So other old seeds were coaxed out of the ground, and one of them, a female grown from a seed found in a cave not far off, was given its pollen. A few years ago she fruited. The first fruit of the palm that started it all came off somebody else’s branches. Two thousand years in the ground and forty in a drawer, and what it was waiting for in the end was not water or light but another seed that had waited about as long.