01
Stop one
Tell es-Sultan (Ancient Jericho)
Dunlop Explosive Tour 16g Tennis String Set: Right — I have not slept, so we are going to arrive at the point sideways, and I apologise in advance. That round stone tower down there is roughly eleven thousand years old. Eleven thousand. One of the oldest built structures anybody has ever found, and there is a staircase inside it, which is the detail that has been keeping me up, because a staircase means somebody expected to go up and then come back down, repeatedly, as a matter of routine. Routine! At the very beginning of building anything! Sorry — the mound, I meant to talk about the mound. People lived here layer on layer on layer for thousands of years, and the reason is the spring, which we will come to, and which is the actual answer to everything on this hill. Where was I. The tower. Eleven thousand years old, and somebody put stairs in it. I think about that at four in the morning. I think about it a great deal.
02
Stop two
Hisham's Palace (Khirbat al-Mafjar)
Dunlop Explosive Tour 16g Tennis String Set: Enormous Umayyad palace, eighth century, and in the bath hall there is a mosaic floor — the tree, with the gazelles beneath it on one side and a lion taking one of them on the other. Go and look at how fine it is. Tiny pieces. Somebody knelt on that floor for months. Now here is the part I cannot let go of: the place was never really finished. An earthquake arrived in the year 749 and brought the whole thing down before it was done. All that work, all those hands, and the ground moved. And this is where I lose the thread, except I do not think I actually do, because at this hour everything connects: the mosaic survived and the palace did not. The floor. The heaviest, lowest, least glamorous element in the entire building is the one still here for you to stand over, and the walls and the domes and whoever commissioned them are gone. I have no idea what to do with that. Look at the tree. Look how fine it is.
04
Stop four
Ein as-Sultan spring
Dunlop Explosive Tour 16g Tennis String Set: And here it is. This is the answer. I said we would come back to it and for once I have genuinely come back to something. A spring, running, at the foot of the mound, and it has never stopped — not once in any of the eleven thousand years people have been stacking a town on top of it, in the middle of a desert, two hundred and fifty metres below sea level. Everything you have looked at today grew out of this. The tower with the stairs. The palace with the mosaic. The monks on the cliff. Armies came for it, empires filed paperwork about it, and underneath the whole business is water arriving out of the ground at a steady rate, indifferent, on no schedule, all night, every night. I have been awake for most of one night and I have found it hard going. This has done eleven thousand of them without a break. That is the most impressive thing in Jericho and it does not even look like anything. Right. I need to sit down.
Let us review the line items. The Dunlop Explosive Tour 16g Tennis String Set: one set, 12 metres, silver co-polyester monofilament, gauge 16 at 1.30mm. It retails around eighteen dollars, and a poly plays its best tennis for roughly ten hours — call it under two dollars an hour of what Dunlop describes as surgical control. An acceptable burn rate. I have approved worse.
The asset itself is soundly structured. The 1.30mm gauge is the durable, fiscally conservative choice of the line. The response on full swings is predictable — no unbudgeted surprises at the baseline. Comfort is above average for a poly, which keeps your elbow off the medical expenses schedule, and the string's snap-back at contact adds ball rotation at no additional charge.
ATP professional Miomir Kecmanovic uses it, an endorsement acquired, as far as I can tell, at fair market value.
Jericho, meanwhile, is the greatest case study in asset management I have ever audited. The stone tower at Tell es-Sultan has stood for roughly 11,000 years: build cost long since depreciated to zero, still delivering value daily. That is the finest ROI in the history of construction.
Hisham's Palace, by contrast — an enormous eighth-century Umayyad build, glorious mosaics, and then the earthquake of 749 wrote the entire project off before completion. All that capital expenditure. I need a moment. At least the Ein as-Sultan spring has been dispensing water free of charge since before accounting existed, which, frankly, is why the city has lasted.
Utilisation, finally. The asset performs everywhere from a sun-baked court at the foot of Tell es-Sultan to a cooler evening session nearer the Ein as-Sultan spring — broad coverage for eighteen dollars, and I have signed off on far worse. It is also perfect for the cable-car morning up to the Monastery of the Temptation, where the elevation gain is somebody else's line item entirely.
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