The closest we could come to a purpose for these cells was to call them ‘the prison’.
‘Do I have to do all the work around here?’ Louren sighed. ‘When you’ve just shown me pictures of the war elephants?’
‘Elephant stables?’ I asked.
‘Very quick, lad!’ Louren clapped me on the shoulder and I blushed. ‘But I believe they are called elephant lines in India.’
After dinner I worked for an hour in my dark room, developing three rolls of film, and when I was finished I went to look for Louren. He was leaving again early the following morning and there was much for us to discuss.
He wasn’t in the guest room, nor in the lounge, and when I asked for him, Ral told me, ‘I think he has gone up to the cavern, Doctor. He borrowed a torch from me.’
Leslie looked at him in a way which was clearly meant to be highly significant, a frown and a quick little shake of the head, but it meant as much to him as it did to me. I went to fetch my own torch, and set off through the silent grove, picking my way carefully around the open excavations. No light showed from the entrance of the tunnel beyond the great wild fig tree.
‘Louren!’ I called. ‘Are you there?’ And my voice bounced hollowly from cliff and rock. There was silence once the echoes died, and I went forward into the tunnel. Flashing my torch into the darkness ahead, ducking my head under the zooming flight of the bats, and hearing my own footsteps magnified in the silence.
I could see no light, and I stopped and called again.
‘Louren!’ My voice boomed around the cavern. There was no reply, and I went on down the passage.
As I stepped out from the mouth of the tunnel, suddenly the beam of a powerful torch flashed from across the cavern shining full in my eyes.
‘Louren?’ I asked. ‘It that you?’
‘What do you want, Ben?’ he demanded from the darkness behind the torch. He sounded irritable, angry even.
‘I want to talk to you about the plans for the next step.’ I shielded my eyes from the beam.
‘It can wait until tomorrow.’
‘You are leaving early - let’s talk now.’
I started to cross the cavern towards him, averting my eyes from the dazzling beam.
‘Point that light somewhere else, won’t you,’ I protested mildly.
‘Are you deaf!’ Louren’s voice rasped, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. ‘I said tomorrow, damn you.’
I stopped dead, stunned, confused. He had never spoken to me like that in my life before.
‘Lo, are you all right?’ I asked anxiously. There was something wrong here in the cavern. I could sense it.
‘Ben,’ his voice crackled, ‘just turn around and walk out of here, will you. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’
I hesitated a moment longer. Then I turned and walked back down the passage. I hadn’t even had a glimpse of Louren in the darkness beyond the torch.
In the morning Louren was as charming as only he can be. He apologized handsomely for the previous evening. ‘I just wanted to be alone, Ben. I’m sorry. I get like that sometimes.’
‘I know, Lo. I am the same.’
In ten minutes we had agreed that although the circumstantial evidence of a Phoenician occupation of the city was most encouraging, it was not conclusive. We would not make any public announcement yet, but in the meantime Louren gave me complete
He flew out with the dawn, and I knew he would be in London for breakfast the following morning.
The weeks that followed Louren’s departure were dissatisfying for me. Although the work on the ruins went forward steadily, and my assistants never faltered in their enthusiasm and industry - yet the results were uniformly disappointing.
There were other finds, many of them, but they were repetitive. Pottery, beads, even the occasional gold fragment or ornament no longer thrilled me as it had before. There was nothing that added a scrap of knowledge to the store we had accumulated already. I roved the site restlessly, anxiously hovering over a new trench or exposed level, praying that the next spadeful of earth turned would expose an inscribed pallet or the headstone to a burial vault. Somewhere here was the key to the ancient mystery, but it was well hidden.
Apart from the lack of progress on the excavation, my relationship with Sally had deteriorated in some subtle fashion which I was at a loss to explain. Naturally there had been no opportunity for any physical intimacy since the arrival of the others at the City of the Moon. Sally was adamant in her determination not to allow our affair to become common knowledge. My amateurish manoeuvrings to get her alone were deftly countered. The nearest I came to success was when I visited her at the cavern during the day. Even here she had her assistant with her, and often Heather Willcox as well.
She seemed withdrawn, taciturn, even surly. She worked over her easel with a fierce concentration during the day, and she usually slipped away to her hut immediately after dinner. Once I followed her, knocking softly on the door of her hut, then hesitantly pushing the door open when there was no reply. She was not there. I waited in the shadows, feeling like a peeping Tom, and it was after midnight before she returned, slipping out of the silent grove like a ghost and going directly to her room where Leslie had long ago switched out the light.
It was distressing for me to see my laughing Sally so withdrawn, and finally I visited her at the cavern.
‘I want to talk to you, Sal.’
‘What about?’ She looked at me with mild surprise, as though it were the first time in days that she had noticed
