circumference. Only one of them was relatively undamaged, the other two had been mutilated so as to be hardly recognizable. The carving on top of each pillar had obviously originally depicted a vulturine bird shape with heavy beak, hunched shoulders, and predatory claws. They were similar in design and execution to those recovered from Zimbabwe by Hall, Maclver, and others.
‘Not Zimbabwe birds,’ I corrected Louren.
‘No,’ Sally affirmed. ‘These are the ones from which the Zimbabwe birds were copied.’
‘Where did you find them?’ Louren asked as he moved in for a closer scrutiny of the green soapstone figures.
‘In the temple,’ I smiled at Ral and Leslie, who looked suitably modest, ‘within the inner enclosure. They are probably religious objects - you see the sun symbols around the collar of the column - clearly they are associated with the worship of Baal as the sun god.’
‘We have named them the sunbirds,’ Sally explained, ‘as Ben felt a name like the birds of Ophir was a bit too pretentious.’
‘Why have they been damaged like this?’ Louren indicated where deliberate blows had shattered the brittle green stone.
‘That’s anybody’s guess.’ I shrugged away the question. ‘But we know that they had been toppled and were lying without design or direction in the layer of ash at Level I.’
‘That’s very interesting, Ben.’ Louren’s eyes were drawn to the final screen at the end of the warehouse. ‘Now come on, you secretive old bastard, what have you got behind there?’
‘What the whole city and colonization was based on—’ I opened the screen,‘—gold!’
There is something about that beautiful buttery metal that holds the imagination captive. A hush came over the party as we stared at it. The objects had been carefully cleaned, and the surfaces shone with the special soft radiance which is unmistakably gold.
To coldly itemize the collection detracts in some way from its excitement and mystery. The gross weight of the pieces was 683 fine ounces. There were fifteen rods of native gold as thick and as long as a man’s finger. There were forty-eight pieces of crudely wrought jewellery, pins, brooches and combs. There was a statuette of a female figure four and a half inches tall—
‘Astarte - Tanith,’ Sally whispered as she stroked it, ‘Goddess of the moon and the earth.’
In addition there were a handful of gold beads with the string long ago disintegrated, dozens of sun discs and many chips, tacks and flakes and buttons of no definite shape or discernible purpose.
‘And then,’ I said, ‘there is this,’ picking up the heavy chalice of solid gold. It had been crushed and flattened, but the base was undamaged. ‘Look,’ I said, pointing to the design worked into it with uncommon delicacy of line.
‘Ankh? The Egyptian sign of eternal life?’ Louren looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded.
‘For the Christians and heathens amongst you. We know that the Pharaohs on occasions used the Phoenicians to supply treasure for their empire. Was this,’ and I turned the chalice in my hands, ‘a gift from a Pharaoh to the King of Ophir?’
‘And do you remember the cup in the right hand of the White Lady of the Brandberg?’ Sally asked.
It was enough to keep us arguing and locked in discussion into the early hours, and the next day Sally, helped by Heather Willcox, presented her drawings and paintings from the cavern. When she showed the tracing of the white king, that frown of concentration again creased Louren’s brow, and he stood up and went to examine it more closely. We waited for a long time in silence, before he looked up at Sally.
‘I would like you to make a copy of this, for my own personal collection. Would you mind?’
‘With the greatest of pleasure.’ Sally smiled happily at him.
The mood of sparkle and smile was still strong upon her and she was enjoying the sensation that the display of her work was causing. Sally, like most beautiful women, is not completely averse to standing in the limelight. She knew her work was damned good, and she liked the plaudits.
‘Now I haven’t been able to decide what these are.’ Sally smiled as she hung a new sheet on the common-room board. ‘There are seventeen symbols similar to this which I have so far isolated. Heather calls them the walking cucumbers, or the double walking cucumbers. Have you any ideas?’
‘Tadpoles?’ Ral tried.
‘Centipedes?’ Leslie was a bit more feasible.
That was the end of our imagination, and we were silent.
‘No more offers?’ Sally asked. ‘I thought that with the formidable collection of academic qualification and worldly wisdom we have assembled here we could do better—’
‘A bireme!’ Louren said softly. ‘And a trireme.’
‘By Jove.’ I saw it immediately. ‘You’re right!’
‘ “Quinquereme of Nineveh, from distant Ophir,”’ Peter quoted joyously.
‘The shape of a ship’s hull, and the banks of oars,’ I enlarged upon it. ‘Of course - if we are right then vessels like that must have plied regularly across the lakes.’
We could accept it, but others certainly would not.
After lunch we went for a tour of the excavations, and Louren again distinguished himself with an inspired guess. A series of large regular cell-like rooms had been uncovered by Peter’s team in the angle formed by the cliff and the enclosure wall. They were joined by a long corridor, and there was evidence of paved floors and a system of drainage. Each room was approximately twenty-five feet square, and it seemed that these were the only buildings outside the enclosure which had been made of stone blocks and not adobe clay.
