The Mask of Troy jh-5
Page 11
Jack shone his torch. ‘You mean like that?’
Rebecca and Jeremy knelt beside him and peered ahead. Where the sides of the passageway disappeared into the unexcavated mound, there was a freshly exposed face of earth and rubble, shored up with timber planks put in place by the excavation team. Jack aimed his torch at the base of the rubble. They could see a hole about a metre high, dug back into the jagged edges of the rubble. In the centre, virtually filling the hole, was a large, shiny protrusion, as if a boulder were wedged in. Jack kept his torch resolutely aimed below it. ‘You may not want to look too closely,’ he said.
The boulder had legs with scuffed desert books sticking out of the bottom. The boulder was in fact a familiar pair of khaki shorts streaked brown and stretched taut, flying somewhere well below half-mast.
‘Oh my God,’ Rebecca said, grinning. ‘I see what you mean.’
There was a rumbling noise from somewhere inside the tunnel, and then a pause. ‘ Sheisse,’ a distant voice exclaimed.
‘What is he doing?’ Rebecca demanded.
‘He thinks we’re only about five metres from the end of the passageway,’ Jack replied. ‘The ground-penetrating radar revealed a pocket of space against the left wall of the passageway, close to the end. It’s deeply buried, but the compacted rubble may have prevented soil from filling the gaps. He’s burrowed in to take a look.’
‘That sounds safe,’ Rebecca said, looking dubious.
‘Maurice has had pyramids fall on him and has crawled out unscathed.’ Jack cracked a smile, then aimed his beam at the top of the hole. ‘There’s a stone wedged above him that acts like a lintel. I told him to go no further than that.’
‘You mean you told him to keep his butt in view?’ Rebecca peered mischievously at Jack.
‘Not exactly the words I used, but yes.’
There was a sound of intense digging and scrabbling, intermingled with grunts and curses. Hiebermeyer’s rear end shifted several inches further into the hole, plugging it completely, accompanied by a discharge of dust that completely shrouded his legs. He suddenly went still. ‘My God.’ The words were muffled, but excited. ‘ Mein Gott.’
Jack knelt down and peered in, waving away the dust. ‘Maurice! What is it?’
‘Unbelievable.’ Hiebermeyer coughed violently, a rumble that sounded like a small earthquake. ‘I can see the wall. Only a few square centimetres. But there’s an inscription on it. I’m sure of it, Jack.’ He coughed loudly. ‘An inscription at Troy. The first one ever .’
The ground shook and there was a violent discharge of dust from the hole. Hiebermeyer’s body dropped down, apparently flattened. Jack gestured quickly to Jeremy. ‘I knew this would happen. I knew it. Quick. Take the other leg.’ He passed the torch to Rebecca and grabbed Hiebermeyer’s left leg, pulling hard. ‘Maurice! Are you all right?’ he shouted. ‘Can you hear me?’
A sound of coughing and cursing came from the hole. ‘I’m fine. Let me have another go. I was nearly there.’
‘Not a chance.’ They heaved, and Jack grimaced. ‘Now, where have I done this before? At Stonehenge, on a school trip. Maurice got stuck head-first down a hole, just like this. He thought he’d seen an Egyptian mummified cat. Actually it was a very old dead rabbit. Everything,’ Jack heaved again, panting, ‘ everything was Egyptian with Maurice.’ They heaved one last time and Hiebermeyer’s head appeared, covered in dust. They dragged him clear, and he rolled over and coughed hard, then got up on his knees, shaking and patting himself. He took off his glasses and peered at Jack, his eyes burning with fervour. ‘In there.’ He coughed again, pointing. ‘ In there.’
‘What?’
‘A carved stone inscription. I only saw a few centimetres of it, but I’m absolutely sure of it. Sure of it.’
‘You’ve already said,’ Jack replied. ‘Sure of it. An inscription.’ He stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘What do you mean? Sure of what?’
‘Hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics, Jack. An ankh symbol. Egyptian.’
‘No way,’ Rebecca exclaimed. ‘ Egyptian. You should hear what we found.’
Jack put his hand up, staring at Hiebermeyer. ‘In a moment.’ Hiebermeyer staggered to his feet, patted the dust off his shorts and hitched them up, then gave Jack a triumphant look. He coughed violently again, and the stone over the hole he had been in suddenly collapsed. He turned and looked at it, swore under his breath, then raised his hands as if appealing to the gods. He let them fall again. ‘This is going to take days to excavate. Days. We’ve only got a week until the end of the permit.’
Jack patted him on the back, releasing another cloud of dust. ‘You’d better get cracking, then.’ He paused. ‘ Hieroglyphs? You sure? This isn’t, you know, another mummified rabbit?’
Hiebermeyer glared at him, his nostrils flared. Jack put up a hand. ‘Okay. Okay.’ He stared back at the rubble. His mind was racing. Hieroglyphics? Maurice had given him a quick rundown of the excavation after he and Costas had arrived by helicopter half an hour before, straight from a mercifully brief stint in the recompression chamber after their dive. Jack had been astonished to see the walls of the passageway now revealed for some fifteen metres of their length, increasing in height as the passageway cut into the centre of the citadel mound. The walls were of typical late Bronze Age Trojan form, slanting inwards towards the top. That was exciting enough. But it was the design of the passageway that was so extraordinary. It was remarkably similar to the entranceway to the great tomb outside the citadel of Mycenae, the so-called Treasury of Atreus. Was that what Maurice had found? Would there be a cavernous domed burial chamber at the end? A great royal burial chamber beneath Troy? But it didn’t make sense. If this was a tomb, how could a Trojan king, a Trojan dynasty, be buried with Egyptian inscriptions?
Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
‘I’m thinking,’ Jack replied, ‘that I’ve got a shipwreck to excavate, and you’ve got something fantastic here as well.’
‘Paydirt,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s what Costas calls it. We’ve hit paydirt.’
‘I know what you’re really thinking,’ Hiebermeyer persisted.
‘I just wonder whether Schliemann got here first. How he could have missed something like this.’
Hiebermeyer nodded pensively. He stared at the rubble, wiping the grime from his face. ‘With all this collapsed earth and masonry, it’s very difficult to tell. It seems to be one massive destruction layer. Late Bronze Age, no doubt about that. Very soon after the fall of Troy. As if somebody had this deliberately done, perhaps to create a platform for a building above.’
‘Or to hide whatever lies at the end of this passageway,’ Rebecca said.
Hiebermeyer narrowed his eyes, then sneezed. ‘There could have been a nineteenth-century excavation. If this were a layer cake of stratigraphy, we could easily tell. But because of the single destruction deposit, it’s hard to see evidence of disturbance. It’s odd, though. If it was disturbed, it was deliberately concealed again.’
‘Maybe it was,’ Rebecca added. ‘Maybe to conceal what Schliemann had found.’
‘I did find this.’ Hiebermeyer turned away and blew his nose noisily between his fingers, flicking off the drip from the end of his nose, then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a handful of dust. Nestled in the middle was a ring. He extracted a half-crumpled water bottle from his pocket, screwed off the top with his teeth and trickled water on the ring, rubbing it, then passed it over to Jack. Rebecca and Jeremy moved over to look, and Rebecca gasped as she saw it. ‘It’s gold.’
‘I found it close to the wall with the inscription.’
‘It’s modern, of course,’ Jack murmured, staring at it.
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘A signet ring, maybe late nineteenth century. My grandfather used to wear one. My American grandfather, my mother’s father. It was the fashion then, for men of means.’
‘How on earth does a Victorian signet ring get down here?’ Rebecca murmured.
Rebecca looked at him doubtfully. ‘Or someone has been in this passageway before.’
Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘Someone could have dug their way in, then carefully refilled the passageway to make it look as if it was undisturbed. Only an archaeologist could do that. Someone intimately familiar with this site, who would know how to make it look convincing. I wouldn’t put it past Schliemann and Sophia. But how? How could Schliemann, showman par excellence, find something like this passageway and not tell the world? He’d have been telegramming his friends, the British Prime Minister Gladstone, or Bismarck in Germany, the other great and the good he courted. Schliemann could never keep his discoveries secret.’
‘Maybe the showmanship was an act, carefully calculated,’ Jack murmured. ‘You know my feelings about Schliemann. A lot more there than meets the eye.’
‘You mean to persuade people that he’d told them everything he’d found, when really he hadn’t?’ Rebecca said slowly.
‘We know for sure he hid away some of that gold he and Sophia found at Troy, the so-called Treasure of Priam,’ Jeremy said. ‘Sent it secretly back to Germany. That gives a lot of weight to what Jack says.’
Jack peered at the ring. ‘There’s a design on it, a family crest. It’s a double-headed griffin, in a shield. Very German-looking.’ He paused, thinking hard. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen this somewhere before.’
‘Schliemann’s crest?’ Jeremy suggested.
‘No.’ Jack shook his head. ‘Not Schliemann. It was when I was a student. A long time ago. Something I saw in a library. I’ll have to think.’
Hiebermeyer turned and stared defiantly at the rubble face, his hands on his hips. ‘We need to dig, dig, dig. That’s the only way to solve this. It’s about time Troy gave us some answers.’
‘And you’re the man for the job.’ Jack slapped Hiebermeyer’s shoulder, and a shroud of dust erupted over them. They both sneezed explosively, then caught each other’s eye and suddenly convulsed with laughter, shaking uncontrollably, holding on to each other. Jack knew it had to happen. The pent-up excitement needed a release. Rebecca and Jeremy and Dillen watched, smiling broadly. Jack looked at Hiebermeyer, the shrouded form of his schoolboy friend, glasses askew and all steamed up. It couldn’t get much better than this. He pushed away, composing himself, wiping his eyes. ‘And now,’ he said, clearing his throat, glancing at his watch. ‘ Now it’s time for supper. Costas is waiting for us at the excavation house. Having a well-earned gin and tonic, I hope. Our excellent Turkish foreman and his wife have laid on a feast fit for King Priam.’
Jeremy coughed quietly. ‘Speaking of which. Priam, I mean.’
‘Yes?’
‘It might be,’ Rebecca cautioned Jeremy. ‘Only might be.’
‘Yes?’ Jack said.
‘Something we found.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Jack said, looking at them intently. ‘ Of course . I hadn’t forgotten. Not a chance. Maurice, they’ve found something. Where you set them digging. On our way out.’ He carefully lifted his khaki bag with the shape in it and slung it over his shoulder, eyeing Dillen as he did so. ‘It looks as if today is the day for revelations. Jeremy, lead the way.’
Two hours later, Jack walked out on to the veranda of the bungalow that served as Hiebermeyer’s excavation headquarters, the very place where Schliemann had stayed almost a century and a half before. Costas and Jeremy followed, and they went over to where Rebecca and Dillen were sitting together on a long bench swinging from a frame in the garden, with the mound of the ancient citadel looming beyond the trees in front of them. Rebecca was rocking gently to and fro, humming to herself, and Dillen was cradling his pipe, an unopened packet of tobacco on his lap. Jack and the other two sat down on garden chairs facing the swing. It had been a long day, and Jack suddenly felt dead tired, drained by the dive that afternoon and the decompression, which always sapped his energy. He and Maurice had rushed off before the main course to have another quick look at the sculpture in the passageway wall, and that had been the subject of intensive conversation for the rest of the meal. It had been a day of extraordinary discoveries, a portent of what might come. And Jack still had not told Dillen about the ancient cup from the wreck. The time for that would be later, in the right place, a special moment alone with his old mentor.
He stared off into the sunset beyond the mound of Troy, then turned to Rebecca and smiled. She was holding an old book, about five by two inches across, with faded gold lettering on the spine. Jack peered at it, and then at Dillen. ‘I recognize that, James. It’s your old edition of Pope, isn’t it?’
Dillen put the pipe between his teeth, clenched it and nodded. ‘ The Iliad of Homer, translated by Alexander Pope in the early eighteenth century, this edition published in 1806.’
‘I recognize that tear on the spine. It was always on your desk in Cambridge.’
‘It’s so cool,’ Rebecca murmured, carefully opening and closing the cover, then tracing her fingers over the worn leather boards. ‘Professor Dillen has just given it to me. I feel like a real collector now.’ She looked at Dillen. ‘Dad gave me John Wood’s Source of the River Oxus for my birthday. We’re planning to go back there again, you know, to Afghanistan, to search for it.’
‘When the war’s over,’ Jack murmured.
‘You’re a rare breed, Rebecca,’ Costas said. ‘The only seventeen year old I know who collects antiquarian books.’
Jack grinned at Costas. ‘And you’re the only submersibles engineer I know who can quote Auden.’
‘Jack!’ Costas looked aghast. ‘You promised not to tell!’
Jeremy looked in astonishment at Costas. ‘You? Poetry? I don’t believe it.’
Costas gave a theatrical groan. ‘See? My credibility shattered.’
‘No. Not at all.’ Jeremy shook his head emphatically. ‘Auden was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation at Stanford. Before I switched to palaeolinguistics, I wrote about Homeric imagery in Auden.’
‘You’re kidding me.’ Costas had been playing with a spanner, and spun it between his fingers. He looked at Jeremy quizzically. ‘I was thinking of Auden again when we arrived here this afternoon, seeing James photographing the excavation. You know?’
‘Sure,’ Jeremy replied, nodding enthusiastically. ‘About the eye of the crow and the eye of the camera, looking on Homer’s world, not ours.’
‘And earth being more powerful than both gods and men, yet being impassive, uncaring,’ Costas said.
Jeremy nodded. ‘That was published in 1952, but it was written in memory of a friend who died in April 1945, in the final weeks of the Second World War. It’s the poem I studied most intensively, along with The Shield of Achilles.’
‘Funny. Jack and I were just talking about that one,’ Costas said. ‘On board Seaquest II, before our dive.’
Jeremy cocked an eye at Jack. ‘Really? He and I talked about it in Oxford several months ago, when he and James came to talk about the Ilioupersis, just after Maria and I had found it.’
‘Jack.’ Costas narrowed his eyes at him. ‘You knew about Jeremy and Auden all along.’
‘I said you’d be surprised.’
Rebecca opened the old book, and examined the frontispiece. ‘This is what I really love,’ she murmured. ‘Where people have annotated books, written in them. It really makes them come alive.’
Dillen shifted in his seat, and raised the unlit pipe again to his mouth. ‘I was going to point that out to you,’ he said between clenched teeth. ‘Read the inscription out to us, would you?’
Rebecca angled the page, finding the best light. Jack got up to glance at it, to remind himself. The ink was faded,
but the handwriting was bold, elegant. ‘ To Hugh, with love and affection from Peter. Remembering our summer at Mycenae, 1938.’
Jack glanced at Dillen. ‘That’s Hugh Frazer, your old schoolmaster?’
Dillen nodded. ‘And Peter Mayne, a fellow undergraduate of Hugh’s at Oxford. They both studied classics, and dug together on the British excavation at Mycenae just before the war. They were close friends.’
‘Must have been very close,’ Rebecca said, looking at the inscription again.
Dillen sat back, rocking slightly. ‘They were steeped in Homer, in a world of heroes and gods, of Arcadian groves and lovers. I think it was pretty innocent, though. The war changed all that.’
‘Of course,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Young men in 1939. Just like the young men of 1915, over there at Gallipoli.’
‘They both became soldiers, army officers,’ Dillen said, putting his pipe in his mouth, thinking for a moment, then taking it out. ‘I know little about it, actually. They both ended up in special commando units, but I don’t know what happened to Peter in the end. Hugh never spoke about it, and I never pressed him. Hugh had been one of the first into the concentration camp at Belsen, so he’d seen the worst. When I was a schoolboy in the fifties, you didn’t speak to veterans about that. Chaps like Hugh who’d found some way of surviving mentally just wanted to get on with life. Maybe he’d talk now, though. The defences fall away in old age, all that suppression of trauma. They say talk can help.’
‘Where is he now?’ Costas said.
‘Lives in a flat in Bristol, the same place as when I was a schoolboy there. My parents had been killed by German bombing in the Blitz, and he put me up. He’s frail, but perfectly alert. I visit him a couple of times a year. I owe him a visit about now.’
‘Maybe his friend Peter was killed,’ Rebecca murmured, staring at the inscription.
Dillen put his pipe in his mouth, dry-sucked it, then took it out again. ‘The only time he ever said anything was when he gave me that little book as a graduation present, almost fifty years ago now. He said Mayne had been badly wounded, at Cassino. I think the wounds were more than physical. Afterwards he went into a special unit involved in the reparation of works of art, antiquities stolen by the Nazis. Funnily enough, it was Costas who jolted my memory, a few weeks ago when I was at the IMU campus, when you were arranging for the return of that painting from the Howard Gallery to Germany.’