Testament

by David Gibbins

  Those harbors owed their design to Tire, the mother city of Carthage in ancient Phoenicia. Another link was child sacrifice, something that associated Carthage with the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. Jack believed that sacrifices may have taken place on a ceremonial platform at the harbor entrance, a place where the terrifying bronze furnace described by the Romans could have been seen from far out at sea, its belching flames propitiating great voyages of discovery and trade. It was here, too, that those voyages would surely have been commemorated, by trophies and inscriptions set up by navigators such as Hanno and Himilco and others who followed them. An excavation at this spot might not only reveal the channel itself, literally the portal to those great voyages of discovery, but also find evidence of rituals that linked the Carthaginians back to the world from which they had come, to the peoples of Phoenicia and the Holy Land who had once been their kin and cousins.

  Hiebermeyer picked up another water bottle from the table and took a deep swig from it. Aysha had been right: he really should call Jack. Having found the channel, he owed it to him. He stared at the mudbank where Jack believed the ceremonial platform to have been, and narrowed his eyes. He would give it another day, just one more. He reached over and took his battered straw hat from the protuberance in the wall, revealing it to be the partly exposed tibia of a human skeleton. They had found it on the first day of the dig, and had decided to leave it in situ, to be reburied once the excavation was over. The numerous healed slash wounds on the bones and a Castilian ring showed the skeleton to be that of a Spanish soldier who had probably died during a siege of Tunis in the sixteenth century. Hiebermeyer had christened him Miguel, and had taken to brushing the bones down and watering them every morning to keep them from drying. He had become increasingly concerned about Miguel, about the bleaching of the bones, over the many hours he had spent here alone, sweltering over the trench while Aysha was busy elsewhere and before Lanowski had arrived. He had asked the workmen to build a small awning and to lay on a hose, so that the skeleton could be kept under a constant fine spray, enough also to moisten the sprigs of bougainvillea that he had planted on either side.

  He leaned toward the skull, looking around furtively. “Rien, rien,” he whispered, wagging his finger, repeating what he had said to the workmen, watching the splayed jaw as if for a response. He sat up, suddenly feeling self-conscious. Perhaps Miguel was not the only one who had become unhinged. He laughed at the pun, slapping his knee, wishing that Costas had been here. It was good German humor, something that Costas appreciated.

  Seeing the digger operator watching him, he quickly got up, straightened his hat, and stared into the trench, seeing where the hole had disappeared under the mud. He made a whirling motion with his hand, still staring. Nothing happened, and he glanced at the digger operator, who was looking at him as if waiting for the next bout of odd behavior. Hiebermeyer repeated the gesture, in some agitation. The operator shrugged, tossed away his cigarette, and the machine roared to life. Hiebermeyer glanced back at Miguel, and then stopped himself. “He’s dead,” he whispered. “Miguel is dead.” He was suddenly looking forward to Lanowski returning, to the mathematical digressions, the floppy hair, the lopsided grin. That in itself was serious. He really did need someone to talk to.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, the excavation of the harbor channel was in full swing again, the backhoe of the digger steadily revealing more gray-black ooze and the workmen clearing the waste ground ahead so that the trench could be extended toward the modern seafront. Hiebermeyer watched the water seep in after each scoop and clumps of desiccated soil fall in from above, coloring the water light brown. Everything here was either extremely wet or extremely dry. The dryness at least was like digging in Egypt. Miguel still had clumps of hair attached to the back of his skull, and mummified skin around his pelvis. Hiebermeyer emptied most of his water bottle on the bones, and then poured the remainder over the back of his own neck. He looked up just as Lanowski dropped down the side of the cut and strode over, clapping him on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Maurice. I’ve just seen the gray mud, proving you’ve found the channel. That about wraps it up here?”

  Hiebermeyer gestured at the opposite side of the trench. “I just want to test Jack’s hypothesis about the ceremonial platform. If we get nothing today, then I’ll assume it was destroyed by the Romans or robbed of its stone after the city was abandoned. It’s good to see you back. I was beginning to talk to myself. How were the cisterns?”

  Lanowski beamed back at him, nodding. “Good. Very good.”

  Hiebermeyer passed him another water bottle, and then reached into his shorts, remembering the sandwich Aysha had given him that morning. Or was it the morning before? He found it, pulled it out, took off the wrapping and handed half to Lanowski, who took the squashed offering gratefully and wolfed it down. The two had become close friends after Lanowski had revealed his passion for Egyptology the year before, a bond that had been further cemented when he had been instrumental in their escape from the Nile during the extremist takeover.

  Hiebermeyer looked approvingly at the other man’s gear. Lanowski wore mountain boots, multi-pocketed hiking shorts, and a pair of old army-surplus khaki bags crossed over from each shoulder, like a camel. He had tied his long hair back and was covered from head to foot in dust, a thin film even coating his spectacles. Now he swallowed the last of the sandwich, reached into one of the bags and pulled out a linked belt of a dozen or so 20 mm rounds, the brass ends green with corrosion. “Found these. Pretty cool, eh?”

  “Mein Gott. You’re as bad as Costas.”

  “As good as Costas, you mean. The Roman cisterns were used as tank berms by the British Eighth Army at the end of the North African campaign in 1943, and the collapsed end of one of them contained an ammunition store. It looks as if the berm might have been destroyed by a bomb and then abandoned.”

  “Leave it for the Tunisian army to deal with,” Hiebermeyer said. “I’ve lost enough people close to me in this place.”

  Lanowski pushed up his glasses. “Of course. Your grandfather. Insensitive of me. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  Hiebermeyer put a muddy hand on Lanowski’s shoulder. “It’s part of the archaeology of this place. It can’t be ignored.” He had another motive for coming here, one that arose from a chapter in his family history more than seventy years ago. His grandfather, a schoolteacher before the war, had been an officer in the German Army engineers under Rommel and had been killed in the final days of the campaign in June 1943, the same month that one of his uncles had gone down with his U-boat in the North Atlantic. His grandfather had no known grave, but Jack had accompanied Maurice during their earlier visit to Carthage to the German memorial and ossuary to the south of Tunis. The juxtaposition of stark gray slabs set against the azure Mediterranean made it difficult to comprehend how somewhere so beautiful could also be a place of war and death that had devastated so many families.

  Lanowski bagged the ammunition belt and pointed at the trench. “Got any good stratigraphy yet?”

  Hiebermeyer snorted. “Are you kidding? This is Carthage. In Egypt, you can dig through the Ottoman stuff and the Roman stuff to find the real archaeology, everything in nice neat layers. The conquerors there didn’t flatten the pyramids and build their own things on top. Here,” he said, raising a finger as the analogy came to him, “here, it’s as if you’re in biology class at school dissecting a frog and some joker of a lab partner has scooped out the entrails and dumped them on the bench for you to sift through, with everything all jumbled up.”

  “An experience you’ve had?” Lanowski said.

  “That was my introduction to Jack Howard, the day after I arrived at our boarding school. He apologized when he saw that he’d upset me, and said he was only trying it on with the world’s most boring biology teacher, not with me. He made it up to me in detention afterward by promising to take me out that weekend to his secret excavation at a nearby Roman sit
e. That nearly got us expelled, but I was hooked.”

  “Amazing you both made it to Cambridge.”

  “By then that biology teacher was the headmaster, and he wrote us both shining references. To study archaeology, that is, not biology.”

  “And now you’re both star alumni of the school, highlighted on their website as if you were model pupils.”

  “That’s always the way.”

  Hiebermeyer heaved himself upward, nearly losing his shorts in the process and quickly grabbing them before they descended to his knees. He pulled them up and tightened his tool belt, checking that everything was there: his trusty trowel, one of the pair that he and Jack had bought with their pocket money at a local hardware shop while they were at school; a geological hammer and a headlamp; various brushes and chisels; and some oddments that Costas had added, items he had found indispensable underwater that he had thought Hiebermeyer might like to have, one of them looking suspiciously like a Costas-designed multi-tool for opening bottles and stirring drinks. He shifted the weight until it was comfortable and then put his hands on his hips, surveying the excavation like a general inspecting a battlefield.

  A few moments later, there was a clunking noise from the digger, and the engine revved down. Hiebermeyer and Lanowski hurried to the edge of the trench and peered in. The backhoe had hit something hard, metallic-sounding rather than masonry, not in the trench walls but in the muddy ooze. At that location inside the channel it could not be foundations, but rather something that had fallen or been thrown in, conceivably part of the harbor-front platform that Jack had postulated for the opposite bank. Maurice waved at the digger operator to cut the engine, and felt his excitement rise. This could be it.

  “My turn,” Lanowski said, unslinging the bags over his shoulders. “You promised I’d get the chance when I returned.”

  “We’ll both go.”

  Lanowski took the lead and Hiebermeyer followed him down the ladder into the trench, past the arm of the backhoe. There was only space for one of them at a time to squeeze between the bucket and the side of the trench, and Lanowski went first, his boots slurping in the ooze that was becoming more liquid as the trench slowly filled up. Whatever it was that had stopped the digger had fallen from the dry soil above, and was covered in clumps of it. Lanowski had made his way in front of the bucket and crouched down out of sight.

  “Well?” Hiebermeyer said, forcing his girth through the narrow gap. “Metal or stone?”

  Lanowski remained stock still, staring. “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “On the flight here, I boned up on Punic Carthage, and I memorized that famous Roman account of child sacrifice. ‘There was in their city a bronze image of Ba’al Hammon, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.’”

  “Diodorus Siculus,” Hiebermeyer said, straining forward. “Usually thought of as negative propaganda. Child sacrifice, yes, we know from the osteological analysis that it happened, but a giant bronze furnace shaped like a god?”

  “Look what the digger just found.”

  Lanowski moved as far as he could to one side, heaving his feet out of the ooze that was beginning to grip them like quicksand. Hiebermeyer pulled himself out beyond the bucket and lurched forward, falling on his knees where Lanowski had been standing and splattering them both with mud. He stared at the object in front of him. It was about two meters wide, circular in shape and slightly convex, and clearly made of copper alloy. At first he thought it was a great bronze cauldron, crumpled and misshapen. Then he saw what Lanowski had seen and staggered to his feet.

  “Gott im Himmel,” he said, astonished. It was not a cauldron but the distorted face of a giant statue, more beast than man, broken off at the upper jaw where a line of jagged teeth, each as big as Hiebermeyer’s hand, extended in an arc from the mud. He slid down again, pulling the torch out of his tool belt and shining it inside. “It gets even better,” he exclaimed. “It’s blackened inside, charred. This was a furnace, no doubt about it.”

  Lanowski was squatting beside him, staring. “Incredible. So it was true. Fathers like you and me gave up their infant children to be burned alive in this thing.”

  Hiebermeyer carried on peering inside, flashing the torch beneath the bronze. “There’s something else in here. Help me get it out.”

  Lanowski slumped down in the mud and reached under the bronze teeth beside Hiebermeyer. “The upper part feels dry, desiccated, but where it’s become soaked by the water it’s almost supple, like leather,” he said. “I swear it’s hairy.”

  “It is hairy,” Hiebermeyer said, poking at it. “It’s a dead animal, a skin. It could be very old, if it’s been protected beneath the bronze and mummified.”

  He put his torch between his teeth and they both heaved, pulling the mass out and flopping it on top of the bronze. Large sections of it appeared denuded and leathery, but elsewhere there were patches of dense black hair matted together. Hiebermeyer heaved at a football-sized clump attached to one end and slipped down with it into the mud, staring at one of the most extraordinary things he had ever uncovered in his archaeological career.

  He struggled up on his elbows, the clump on his chest, and cleared his throat, seeing that Lanowski was looking in the other direction, still folding down the other sides of the skin. “You said you’d been reading up on Punic Carthage. For Jacob Lanowski, that means reading everything. In the original languages. What does your photographic memory have on Pliny and Hanno?” he said.

  Lanowski stopped what he had been doing and stared into space. “Well, there are two passages in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. The first is the controversial one in which he implies that Hanno sailed from Gibraltar to Arabia, circumnavigating Africa.”

  “I mean the other one. Book six.”

  “Ah yes.” Lanowski pushed his spectacles up his nose, dropped the hide and slipped back against the side of the trench. “‘Duarumque Gorgadum cutes argumenti et miraculi gratia in Iunonis templo posuit, spectates usque ad Carthaginem captam.’ I think I’ve got that right. Pliny had clearly read the Greek translation of Hanno’s Periplus, where the creatures he translates as Gorgons are called gorillae. He says that after capturing these gorillae, Hanno brought two of the skins back to Carthage, where they were displayed in the temple of Chronos until the Romans captured the city. For Chronos read Ba’al Hammon, the nearest Punic equivalent.”

  Hiebermeyer heaved the mass on his chest around until it was facing Lanowski. “Well, as our friend Costas would say, get a hold of this.”

  Lanowski stared, raised his spectacles and squinted, and then gave a high-pitched laugh. “Yep. That would be it. That would be a gorilla. I don’t believe it.”

  Hiebermeyer rolled the head off his chest and quickly extracted himself from the animal’s front limbs, which were threatening to wrap themselves around him and push him back into the ooze. Lanowski leaped up and heaved it back, in the process folding over part of the skin so that the interior was exposed. He stopped for a moment, peering, and then turned the rest of the skin over so that the flayed interior was fully revealed, the head lolling backward into the water. “Maurice, check this out.”

  Hiebermeyer pulled himself forward in the ooze, and stared. In the center of the skin was a rectilinear outline in flecks of gold, with further lines extending out from each corner. He leaned in, peering closely. “Gold leaf or gilding, no doubt about it. I’d say this skin had once been used as a covering for a golden box, a fairly large one, about the size of the Anubis shrine in Tut’s tomb. Probably carried outdoors where it was very hot, causing the gold to melt slightly and adhere to the skin. Interesting. Pliny doesn’t say anything about that in his account.”

  “Something Hanno brought back from his travels, perhaps?” Lanowski said.

  Hiebermeyer felt the ooze creep up above his boots and toward his knees. “Time we got ou
t of here. This is getting a bit too much like maritime archaeology.”

  “Speaking of which, Aysha called and told me to remind you. Could be time you gave Jack a ring?”

  Hiebermeyer wiped the back of his hand across his face, smearing on more mud. “Do you think we’ve found enough? I don’t want to let him down.”

  “Um, given that we’re probably looking at the cover of the next National Geographic magazine, not to speak of front-page news around the world, I’d say a big yes. I think Jack would say you’ve earned your Carthage credentials.” Lanowski leaned over, and they shook muddy hands.

  “You spotted it for what it was,” Hiebermeyer said.

  “You stuck with the excavation. It was your perseverance that paid off.”

  “All right.” Hiebermeyer cracked a broad grin, the first for a long time. “We’ve got to get the digger to raise this whole clump as one mass, and then get it to the conservation lab pronto. Before that, I want to take about a thousand photos.”

  “Roger that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, just something I’ve heard Costas say.”

  Hiebermeyer grunted, heaved himself on to the edge of the bucket, and then sprang up to the top of the trench, grabbing it and pulling himself on to the platform, his shorts miraculously in place. He stomped across to the table, the mud splattering off his boots, and poured a bottle of water over his face. Then he took off his hat and tossed it on to the outstretched tibia, watching it spin as if Miguel were giving it a twirl. He nearly said something, but then stopped himself. It was time to leave Miguel to the past, and to start communicating again properly with the land of the living. He glanced back down at Lanowski and the skin, seeing the strange golden outline. It rang a distant bell, but he could not quite put his finger on it. He would see if it meant anything to Jack.