My four new assistants arrived on the commercial flight from Cape Town the following morning and we drove directly to the Sturvesant hangar where the Dakota transport was waiting for us.
The flight in was noisy and gay. Peter had his accordion along, and I never travel without my old guitar. We hit a couple of easy ones like ‘Abdul Abulbul Emir’, and ‘Green grow the rushes, oh!’, and I discovered with delight that Ral Davidson whistled with a clarity and purity that was truly beautiful, and that Leslie had a sweet little soprano.
‘When we’ve finished this dig, I’m going to take you lot on tour,’ I told them, and began teaching them some of my own compositions.
It was three weeks since I had left the Hills of Blood, and as we circled it I could see that changes had taken place in my absence. The landing-strip, complete with wind-sock, had been gouged out of the dusty plain. Near it stood a cluster of prefabricated buildings. One long central bungalow with the residential quarters grouped around it. A skeletal metal tower supported a 2,000-gallon galvanized iron water-tank, and beyond that was the encampment which housed the African labour force.
Sally was waiting for us at the landing-strip, and we piled our luggage into the Land-Rover and went to look at our new home. I expected Louren to be there but Sally told me he had gone the previous day after a stay of a few days.
Proudly Sally showed us over the camp. The central air-conditioned bungalow was divided into a small common room and lounge at the one end, in the centre was a large office and beyond that a storage warehouse. There were four residential huts, air-conditioned, but sparsely furnished. Sally had allotted one to the Willcoxes, one for Leslie and herself, one for Ral and me, and the fourth for Louren or other visitors, pilots, and overnight guests.
‘I could think of a few improvements in the sleeping arrangements,’ I muttered bitterly.
‘Poor Ben.’ Sally smiled cruelly. ‘Civilization has caught up with you. By the way, I hope you remembered to bring your bathing costume, no skinny dips in the pool any more.’
And perversely I regretted all that Louren had done for me.
The Hills of Blood were no longer a lonely, mysterious place in the wilderness, but a bustling little community, with aircraft landing regularly, Land-Rovers kicking up the dust and even the clatter of an electric water-pump shattering the dreaming silence of the cavern and disturbing the still green waters of the emerald pool.
Quickly my group settled into their allotted tasks. Sally worked on at the cavern, with a single young African assistant. Each of the other four was placed in charge of a team of ten labourers and assigned an area in which to work.
Peter and Heather shrewdly elected to work outside the main walls, in the ruins of the lower city. It was here that the ancients would have disposed of their rubbish, broken pottery, old weapons, discarded beads and the fascinating debris of a vanished civilization.
Ral and Leslie with dreams of gold and treasure jumped at the chance of excavating within the enclosure, an area which the ancients would have kept swept and scrupulously clean, and therefore much less likely to yield finds of interest. That is the difference between experience and inexperience, between the impetuosity of youth and the cool calculations of an older head.
I kept myself free, on a supervisory and advisory capacity, spending my time at those places where it could do the most good. Anxiously I watched Ral and Leslie to assure myself that their approach and technique was satisfactory, then I relaxed as Peter Willcox’s recommendation proved correct. They were clever, enthusiastic youngsters and, more important, they knew their way around an archaeological dig.
The four teams shook themselves out as the dullards amongst the African labourers were sorted from the bright ones. In a shorter time than I had hoped for, the firm of Kazin and Company was breaking ground and doing good business.
It was slow, painstaking and thoroughly satisfying work. Each evening, before the nightly singsong in the common room, the day’s work was discussed and any discoveries evaluated and related to their place in the general picture of the site.
The first conclusive discovery we made was that the ash layer at Level I persisted throughout the site, even in the lower city. It was by no means evenly distributed, but showed up in patches of varying thickness. Carbon- dating, however, gave a fairly constant result, and we settled at a date of AD 450. This date seemed to be concurrent or to slightly pre-date the oldest bushman painting in the cavern.
We were agreed that bushman occupation of the cavern would have followed immediately after the departure or disappearance of the ancients from the city. Scrupulously we referred to the first occupations as ‘ancients’, considering the term ‘Phoenician’ as yet unproven. A condition which it was my most dearly-held hope would soon be altered.
Associated with the ash layer were haunting scraps of human remains. Ral uncovered an incisor in the ash against the base of the main tower, Peter a complete humerus together with many other unidentifiable bone fragments. These unburied human remains went a long way to ensuring a general acceptance of my theory of a violent end to the City of the Moon.
This was reinforced by the baffling disappearance of walls and towers, which we could reasonably accept once stood on these bases of clay, with their vestigial stone foundations which occurred spasmodically along the outline of the temple enclosure.
Ral hesitantly suggested an enemy so crazed with hatred, that he had set out to obliterate all trace of the ancients from the earth. We could all accept this.
‘Fair enough. But what happened to thousands of tons of massive masonry?’ Sally spoke for all of us.
‘They scattered it out across the plain,’ Ral hazarded.
‘A Herculean task, besides the plain was a lake in those days. To get rid of it they would have scattered it along the area between cliff and lake. There is no sign of it.’
Apologetically Peter Willcox reminded us of the account in Credo Mutwa’s book
‘This is red sandstone,’ Sally cut in brusquely. ‘Zimbabwe is granite, quarried from the rock on which it stands. Zimbabwe is 275 miles east of here. The labour involved is unthinkable. I will accept that the building skills and
