‘Yes. It’s going to be exciting to find out.’
With that strength of character which I am able occasionally to conjure up, I firmly thrust aside the temptation to open a trench within the temple enclosure, and instead I chose a spot upon the foundations of the outer wall where I hoped I would do minimum damage.
With Sally watching avidly, and volunteering more than her share of advice, I marked out with tapes torn from my sheets the outline of the intended excavation. A narrow trench three foot wide and twenty foot long, set at a right-angle to the run of the foundations so as to open a cross-section of the horizon.
We numbered the tapes at intervals of one foot, and Sally cross-referenced her notebook to the markings on the tapes. I fetched the cameras, tools and tarpaulin from the Land-Rover. Our trench was only thirty yards from the tents. We had camped almost on top of the ancient wall.
I spread the tarpaulin ready to receive the earth removed from the trench, and then I pulled off my shirt and threw it aside. I was no longer ashamed to expose my body in front of Sally. I spat on the palms of my hands, straddled the tapes, hefted the pick, and glanced at Sally, sitting attentively on the tarpaulin with a big floppy- brimmed hat on her head.
‘Okay?’ I grinned at her.
‘All the way, partner?’ she said, and I was startled. The words jarred, they were Louren’s and mine. We didn’t say them to other people. Then suddenly I thought, what the hell! I love her also.
‘All the way, girl!’ I agreed and swung the pick. It was good to fed the pick feather-light in my hands, and the head clunking deep into the sandy earth. I worked steadily, swinging pick and shovel easily, but soon the sweat was running in rivulets down my body and soaking my breeches. As I shovelled the earth from the trench and piled it on the tarpaulin, Sally began sifting it carefully. She chattered away happily as she worked, but my only reply was the grunt at each swing of pick.
By noon I had opened the trench along its full length to a depth of three feet. The sandy soil gave way at a depth of eighteen inches to a dark reddish loam which still held the damp of the recent rains. We rested and I ate a mess of canned food and drank a bottle of Windhoek to replace some of my lost moisture.
‘You know,’ Sally looked me over thoughtfully, ‘once you get used to it, your body has a strange sort of beauty,’ she said, and I blushed until my eyes watered.
I worked for another hour, and then suddenly the bite of the pick turned up black. I swung again - still black. I dropped the pick, and knelt in the trench.
‘What is it?’ Sally was there immediately.
‘Ash!’ I said. ‘Charcoal!’
‘An ancient hearth,’ she guessed.
‘Perhaps.’ I didn’t commit myself, luckily, so that later I could chide her for her presumption. ‘Let’s take some samples for dating.’
I worked more carefully now, trying to expose the layer of ash without disturbing it. We sampled it and found that it varied between a quarter of an inch and two inches deep across the full horizon of the trench. Sally noted the depth from surface, and the position of each of the carbon samples we took, while I photographed the trench and tapes.
Then we straightened up and looked at each other.
‘Too big for a hearth,’ she said, and I nodded. ‘We shouldn’t go deeper, Ben. Not like this, crashing in with pick and shovel.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We will stop on half the trench, leave the layer of ash undisturbed - I’ll make that concession to the rules - but I am sure as hell going down on the rest of it, to bedrock, if I can!’
‘I’m glad you said that,’ Sally applauded my decision. ‘It’s exactly what I feel as well.’
‘You begin at the far end. I’ll start here and we will work towards each other,’ I instructed, and we began lifting the layer of ash from half the trench. I found that immediately below it was a floor of hard clay and, though I didn’t say so, I guessed it was a building filler. A transported layer, not occurring naturally.
‘Go carefully,’ I cautioned Sally.
‘Quoth the pick-and-shovel man,’ she muttered sarcastically without looking up, and almost immediately she made the first discovery from the ruins of the City of the Moon.
As I write I have her notebook in front of me, with her grubby, earthy fingerprints upon the pages and her big schoolgirlish handwriting filling it.
Trench 1. Reference AC. 6. II.4. Depth 4’2?“.
Item. One glass bead. Oval. Blue. Circum
Pierced. Slightly heat-distorted.
Remarks: Found in layer of ash at Level I
Index No CM. 1
This laconic notation can give no idea of our jubilation, the way we hugged each other and laughed in the sun. It was a typical blue Phoenician trade bead, and I cupped the tiny pellet of glass in my one hand.
‘I’m going to take it and stick it up their backsides.’ I threatened, referring of course to my critics.
‘If that end is as narrow as their minds, Ben dear, then it will be a pretty tight fit.’
I started using a small pick and fifteen minutes later I made the next discovery. A charred fragment of bone.
‘Human?’ Sally asked.
‘Possibly.’ I said. ‘Head of a human femur - the shaft has been burned away’
‘Cannibalism? Cremation?’ Sally hazarded.
