"The Romans finally had enough of it and outlawed the use of hand gestures," he continued.
An attractive, dark-haired woman raised her hand. "Does anyone still use the sign language today?"
The question confused him, even though the answer was obvious. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I was thinking about the druids, who go to Stonehenge for the summer solstice. Do they use the hand signals?"
"Not that I know of."
"I have an uncle who is involved with a druid group," said an attractive, but shy, doe-eyed girl.
"Oh? What's he say about hand signals?" She'd never match up to Deirdre, he thought. None of them would.
"Nothing. But he says that the druids set up colonies in the Americas a long time ago, and that some of them are still alive today. Do you think that's true?"
Why did she have to ask that question? "The subject is ogham today. Let's stick with it, and not waste our time on fanciful ideas that some know-nothing druids pass off as the truth."
The woman drew back in her chair. She had hardly spoken during the entire course, and now when she finally had come out of her shell, he'd attacked her. He turned back to the blackboard and stared at it as if he were preparing to make further remarks about the letters.
He felt bad, but the question annoyed him. It made him think of Deirdre again, and their search in the Amazon for Colonel Fawcett, an English adventurer who thought ancient druids had settled in South America. He'd lost Deirdre when their airplane crashed in the jungle, and he knew that as long as he taught Celtic archaeology he would be haunted by her memory. She had been his best student, a Scot of Celtic descent who spoke fluent Gaelic. Even though she was an undergraduate student, she knew more about Celtic archaeology than most doctoral candidates in the field.
"Okay. Where was I now? Oh, yes. I got up to the letter C, coll. This one relates to creativity, imagination, inspiration, and intuition. You may want to reflect on this one awhile before you write your final essay that's due Tuesday."
Everyone laughed, and the bell rang. "Class dismissed."
As the students filed out the room Indy caught the eye of the girl he'd snapped at. "Miss Wilkens?" He motioned to her. The two note passers gaped in surprise. "Listen, I'm sorry if I offended you with my comment. I didn't mean it the way it sounded."
The girl crossed her arms over her books, which were pressed to her chest. She looked embarrassed. "It's all right. I know it... it must be hard for you sometimes. We all know about Deirdre, of course. I guess I shouldn't have asked that question. I wasn't thinking."
Indy took off his glasses and stuffed them in his coat pocket. "There was nothing wrong with the question. It's just that I'm not feeling so great today." He glanced up at the clock above the door. "That was all."
"Professor Jones, may I ask you a question?" the girl asked.
Indy gathered up his notes. "What is it?"
"Do you think it's worthwhile for a girl, I mean, you know, a woman to become an archaeologist?"
Indy shrugged. "Why not?"
"My father says it's not a ladylike thing to do. You know, digging in the ground and getting dirty. He thinks I should get married and have kids, and forget about going to graduate school."
He couldn't help thinking of Deirdre again. He glanced up at her, then looked away. "Maybe he's right."
He strode out of the classroom and quickly headed to his office. He didn't understand why Deirdre's death was hitting him so hard today. A year had passed since the tragic incident and he'd been feeling that it was behind him. Maybe the lecture on ogham had opened a door to a buried memory.
Door, duir. Something about the ogham word reminded him of the incident leading to Deirdre's death. But he wasn't sure what it was. There was a blank in his memory, a result of the airplane crash. He couldn't recall much of anything that had happened in the jungle, and that especially bothered him because he'd lost the memory of his last days with Deirdre. No matter how hard he tried to recall what had happened, the only thoughts that came to mind were vague images about an Indian village.
He entered the office area and greeted the secretary, a frizzy-haired graduate student who worked for three assistant professors. "I don't want to see anybody."
She shrugged. "No one wants to see you.... Not now."
He walked into his office and closed the door. Someday he'd have his own secretary and she wouldn't be so damned insolent. He leaned against the door and rubbed his face with his hands. Then he stared over his fingers at his desk, which took up most of the space in his cramped office. A stack of journals lay on one corner of the desk. His mail was neatly stacked in another. Ungraded term papers were piled in the center of the desk, and a smaller batch of graded ones were to the left. But the papers and journals and mail weren't what caught his attention.
He was peering at two baked clay figurines, one a woman with large breasts and wide hips, the other a man with an erect penis that was half the length of its leg. How'd they get there? They'd been packed away in a box in his closet for months.
The pair had been given to him by Deirdre, who had passed them on from her deceased mother's collection of artifacts. They'd probably been used in Celtic fertility rites, and he remembered how Deirdre had smiled and said: "They represent our love."
But now they were a profanity. They taunted him, and he had an urge to swat them off the desk and smash them against the wall. He moved further into the room and saw that the closet door was open and the box where the figurines had been stored was pulled out of its place on the floor beneath a shelf.
"Francine," he yelled, then walked back into the outer office. "Have you been messing around in my office?"
"Don't bark at me, Jones. I haven't been in your office today."
"Then how did my mail get there?"
"Two of your students were here looking for you during your so-called office hours this morning. They were disturbing me with their chatter, so I told them to wait for you in there. I gave them your mail and told them to put it on your desk."
"What did they look like?"
The phone rang and Francine picked it up. It didn't matter. He was sure they were the two gigglers who were passing notes in class. They'd visited him together last week. They'd asked a couple of innocuous questions about the course, then attempted to pry into his personal life.
He returned to his office, snatched up the figurines, put them back in the box, and closed the closet door. He shook his head in disgust and stopped in front of his bookcase. He stared at the titles and picked up a book called Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan. He leafed through it, then put it back on the shelf. He needed a change, a new challenge. Something that wouldn't remind him of Deirdre.
But where would he find it? He couldn't just walk away from his responsibilities. Classes were about to end and he was supposed to teach summer school in another week. Then in the fall back to more of the same. Celtic archaeology.
He had to talk to Pencroft. That was all there was to it. He'd ask for a sabbatical. Maybe he'd go to Egypt or Greece or India. Hell, maybe he'd go dig for the buried treasures of Chinese Turkestan. He didn't know, but he was going to do something, something different, and Pencroft would just have to bend a little.
He felt better already. He scooped up the mail, quickly riffled through it, stopped a moment as he noticed a letter from Jack Shannon, his old friend and former college roommate. He put the letter in his pocket, stuffed the rest of the mail in his backpack, and headed for the door.
He recalled that Pencroft had suggested that he save his backpack for the field and that a briefcase would be more appropriate for the classroom. He was about to leave it behind, then changed his mind. His pack was his way of keeping in touch with a part of himself that was important, and if Pencroft didn't like it, too bad.
"Are you leaving?" Francine called after him.
"I hope so."
At the end of the hall, he approached the department chairman's secretary, a round-
faced, middle-aged woman who watched after Pencroft like a mother. "Afternoon, Miss Jenkins. Is he in?"
"Yes. But you can't see him now. He's resting. He has a meeting in half an hour."
"It's important I see him."
"I'm sorry, Professor Jones. You're going to have to make an appointment. How about—"
"Indy, what can I do for you?" Pencroft stood in the doorway of his office. He was a frail, bald man in his mid-sixties. He leaned on a cane and peered through thick black-framed glasses that magnified his eyes.
"Dr. Pencroft, would it be an imposition if I spoke with you for a few minutes?"
"I told him you were resting."
Pencroft patted the air. "It's okay, Rita. Please, come in, Indy. Come in."
Indy didn't hesitate. As he quickly followed him inside and closed the door he smiled at the secretary, who crossed her arms and shook her head in disgust.
Pencroft hobbled over to his desk and eased himself into his chair. He had spent more than forty years studying Paleolithic man and had become chairman of the department after Victor Bernard had supposedly vanished without a trace on a trip to Guatemala.
Indy knew Bernard had not died in Guatemala, but in Brazil. It was one of Indy's last memories of the Amazon before everything turned fuzzy. But he also knew that no one would believe him. Even his old friend Marcus Brody had thought it was a delusion caused by the plane crash. He'd advised Indy to keep the incredible story to himself. So he hadn't said another word about it, even though he was sure that Bernard had not only been killed by Indians, but had been behind an attempt to murder Indy himself.
"Please, sit down," Pencroft said, and frowned at the backpack as Indy set it on the floor. "Now, what can I do for you?"
Suddenly Indy was tongue-tied. "Well, Dr. Pencroft, it's not that I don't like what I'm doing or that I'm not grateful to be teaching here, but something has come up and I'm not sure, I mean, I don't think I can continue on, and I'm wondering if... well, I feel like a sabbatical might be in order."
"Sabbaticals are for tenured professors. Maybe in a few years you might qualify, but right now..." He shook his head.
"I didn't really mean a sabbatical in the technical sense. I meant that I need to take a leave of absence."
Pencroft's hand rustled unsteadily through some papers on his desk. "It's interesting that you should bring up this matter about your future with this institution. I've been meaning to talk to you about that very topic."
"Oh?"
"Yes. You see, the academic review board has raised questions about how qualified you are to teach Celtic archaeology."
"What? I've been teaching it almost three years."
Pencroft found the sheaf of papers he was looking for and absently paged through it. "It's your background," he said, uttering each word as if his visitor might not understand. "They don't feel you are sufficiently educated for the task, and between you and me it doesn't help that you are an American."
Indy knew that he had been fortunate to get hired at the University of London. He also was aware that the offer had been related to his discovery of the Omphalos at Delphi, an artifact that he'd belatedly learned was linked with Stonehenge. But all that was in the past. His practical experience outweighed his lack of formal training in Celtic archaeology, and he told Pencroft so.
"The problem is not my qualifications or abilities. I'm just getting stale. I need a break to try something different."
"Let me finish," Pencroft said. "The board also criticized your fieldwork last year. Before Dr. Bernard disappeared last summer, he had submitted an extremely critical report on your work at Tikal."
"But that's got nothing to do with my Celtic teaching." He was tempted to tell Pencroft all about Bernard, but he held back.
"That's part of the problem. Your acceptance of Dr. Bernard's offer to work at Tikal shows that you are not concentrating on Celtic archaeology, and now you tell me that you're feeling stale."
"So what are you saying?"
Pencroft cleared his throat. "If I can make an observation, I'd say that your present feelings are related to what happened to you in the Amazon with Deirdre Campbell last summer."
"That's part of it."
The old professor nodded thoughtfully. "You know, her mother and I were great friends. Her loss affected me deeply. So I certainly understand your feelings, and in fact, I have been considering these mitigating circumstances."
Indy didn't feel much like talking about his feelings with Pencroft, and he didn't appreciate the professor's vague attempt at consoling him. He wished he would get to the point.
"I'm sure you recall at the beginning of the fall term I offered you an opportunity to spend the academic year translating Goidelic manuscripts from the second century B.C."
"I remember." Goidelic was a Celtic dialect, and although Indy had a working knowledge of the language, he was far from an expert. It was not the sort of challenge he was looking for then, or now.
"I made that offer because I thought you might want to avoid the pressure of teaching after the unfortunate events of the summer."
"I know you did."
Pencroft crossed his arms. "Well, I'm going to give you another chance to work with the manuscripts. I'm sure I can come up with funding for you through the summer. After that we'll examine the progress you're making and decide about the fall."
"I appreciate your offer, Dr. Pencroft. But like I said before, I think there are better people for the job. You see, I was thinking of fieldwork. I need to get away for a while."
"Translating is not always a scholarly task," Pencroft said in an admonishing tone. "Look at Sir Henry Rawlinson. He had to hang over the side of a cliff by one hand and copy the Babylonian cuneiform letters with the other. If his grip had failed, he would've fallen to his death."
"But the Goidelic text you're talking about is in the library down the hall."
"Are you turning down my offer?"
Indy thought a moment. He realized what the consequences might be if he said yes. "I think I am. I need to get away."
Pencroft nodded. "Then I think you understand that your association with the university will terminate with the end of classes."
2
Lookout
During the days of Chaucer, London had been a one-square-mile village surrounded by a Roman wall. Soon, villages took root around the old city with names such as Chelsea, Mayfair, Marylebone, Soho, and Bloomsbury, and gradually the city became a patchwork of these villages. Hampstead was the village with the most open spaces and the highest point of land in London, known as Parliament Hill.
Indy had headed directly for Hampstead Heath, as the village's vast park was called, after he left Pencroft's office. He passed through open fields and clusters of pines, drinking in his surrounding, relieved that he was away from classrooms, students, and colleagues, and when Parliament Hill rose in front of him, he started climbing. The hike was a way of dealing with his frustrations and clearing his mind. He would attain a view of the city, and maybe an overview of his life.
When he reached the crest, he gazed down at the network of winding streets lined by mansions and terraced cottages. Some were redbrick, others white stucco, and most were garnished with ivy and holly. He spotted Wentworth Place, where John Keats had written "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
"Ode to Psyche,"
"To Autumn," and other poems. He lifted his gaze to the distant spires and buildings and realized that London looked different to him now. He was not only looking at the city from above, but thinking of it in the past tense. His time in England was drawing to an end like the closing chapter of a book. He would miss the characters and the setting, but he was ready to move on. He would leave here this summer, and he wouldn't return in the fall.
As he sat down to rest he slipped Shannon's letter from his back pocket. Jack had moved back to Chicago a year and a half ago, after his father had died. Indy didn't know the details, but he guessed from the little that Shannon had said that his
father's death was neither natural nor an accident. Shannon's family was involved in gangster affairs, and death by a bullet was an occupational hazard.
Indy had written Shannon several times, but he'd only received a couple of letters from him. This one was the first he'd gotten since Shannon had written him expressing his sorrow at Deirdre's death. Shannon had said little about his life in Chicago, except that he was playing regularly in a jazz band in a South Side nightclub.
He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter, which was dated May 2, and quickly read it.
Dear Indy,
Sorry I'm so bad at writing. I got no excuses. I'm just too wrapped up in my music and other things. I'm playing now five nights a week at the Nest on Thirty-fifth and State. You ought to see Chicago now. The ole town has really taken to jazz and the blues. You could almost say it's respectable. Well, that's going a bit too far.
Like I said, you should see it. The trouble is that the families are getting ruthless. Since Dad was killed, there's been a shaky truce. I've done my best to stay clear of it, but it's tougher now that Dad is gone. I'm one of the Shannon brothers and the Shannons are in the Business.
I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. Maybe it's a confession. It's a tough line I'm walking and I've had to seek Higher help, if you know what I mean. If things don't work out, I may have to get out of here fast. Maybe I'll show up at your door one of these days. This is your warning. Ha-ha.
Jack
Not unless I show up at your door first, Indy thought. Arid that wasn't such a bad idea. Going back to Chicago was definitely a possibility.
Last winter he'd attended a conference on Celtic archaeology in Dublin and had presented a paper on Celtic influences in New England. He had focused on stone inscriptions found mainly in Massachusetts and Vermont and compared them to Celtic ones in Great Britain. He'd stopped short of drawing a definite conclusion. His intent had been simply to get Celtic scholars to look at evidence they'd previously ignored. One of the other presenters at the conference had been Angus O'Malley, chairman of the archaeology department at the University of Chicago. He'd been impressed by Indy's paper and had told him that if he was ever interested in returning to Chicago to teach Celtic archaeology, he would find a position for him.
Indiana Jones and the Genesis Deluge Page 2
