His voice died but his lips moved as he read on. Then he began speaking again, and his voice quavered with excitement.
‘Punic in the style of the second century BC, do you see the use of ligatures to join the median “m”, still using the hang of the characters from the line, that’s definitely pre-first century EC. Here, Sally, do you see the archaic crossing of the “A”?’
‘We have over a thousand of these scrolls, preserved in chronological order - Levy is very excited,’ I interrupted this flow of technicalities with a gentle untruth. Levy didn’t know they existed.
‘Levy,’ Eldridge snorted, and his spectacles flashed with outrage. ‘Levy! Take him outside Hebrew and Egyptian and he’s a babe in the bloody woods!’ He had hold of my wrist now.
‘Ben. I insist, I absolutely insist on doing this work!’
‘What about Wilfred Snell’s criticism of my theories? You seemed to find it amusing.’ I had him by the ackers now, and I could afford to be a little cocky. ‘How do you feel about working with somebody whose views are so suspect?’
‘Wilfred Snell,’ said Eldridge earnestly, ‘is a monumental jackass. Where did he ever find a thousand Punic scrolls?’
‘Waiter,’ I called, ‘please bring us two large Cordon Argent brandies.’
‘Make that three,’ said Sally.
As the brandy diffused a gentle warmth through my body, I listened to Eldridge Hamilton effusing about the scrolls and demanding of Sally information as to exactly where, when and how we had discovered them. I found myself beginning to like the man. It was true that he had teeth like the stumps of a pine forest devastated by fire, but then I am not a perfect physical specimen myself. It was also true that he had a weakness for Gilbey’s gin and pretty girls - but then he differed from me only in his choice of liquor, and who am I to hold that Glen Grant is in any way superior?
No, I decided, despite my prejudices, I would be able to work with him, just as long as he kept his bony little claws off Sally.
Eldridge followed us out a week after our return to the City of the Moon, and we met him at the airstrip. I was concerned that he might find the transition from a northern winter to our 110°F summer impaired his abilities. I need not have worried. He was one of those Englishmen who, solar topee cocked, go out in the midday sun without raising a sweat. His luggage consisted of a single small valise which contained his personal effects and a dozen large packing-cases filled with chemicals and equipment.
I gave him the Grade ‘A’ tour of the site, trying without success to fan his interest in the city and the cavern. Eldridge was a single-minded specialist.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Jolly interesting - now where are the scrolls?’ I think even then he had doubts, but I took him into the archives and he purred like an angular old tomcat as he moved down the burdened stone shelves.
‘Ben,’ he said, ‘there’s just one thing still to settle. I write the paper on the actual scrolls, agreed?’ We are a strange breed, we work not for the gold but for the glory. Eldridge was making certain of his share.
‘Agreed.’ We shook hands.
‘Well then there is nothing to stop me beginning right away,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘there isn’t, is there.’
The treatment of the scrolls was an art form more than an exact science. For each of them the treatment varied, depending on their state of preservation, the quality of the leather, the composition of the ink and other inter-related factors. Sally admitted to me in a weak moment that she would not have been able to handle the task, it required a fund of acquired experience which she did not have at her command.
Eldridge worked like a medieval alchemist, steaming and soaking and spraying and painting. His domain stank of chemicals and other weird smells, and his and Sally’s fingers were stained. Sally reported that his absorption with the task had reduced his animal instincts to the level where he made only spasmodic and half-hearted clutches at the protruding parts of her anatomy.
As each scroll was unrolled, its contents were evaluated and the detailed translation begun. One after the other they proved to be either books of account on the city’s trade, or proclamations made by the Gry-Lion and the council of the nine families. The authors were nameless clerks, and their style was brisk and economical with little time for poetic flights or unnecessary descriptive passages. This starkly utilitarian outlook echoed the life style which we had so far reconstructed from our finds on the site. We discussed it at the nightly talk sessions.
‘It’s typically Punic,’ Eldridge agreed. ‘They had little taste in the visual arts, their pottery was coarse and mass-produced. In my opinion their sculpture, what little there was, was downright hideous.’
It requires wealth and leisure and security to produce art,‘ I suggested.
‘That’s true - Rome and Greece are examples of that. Carthage and, earlier, Phoenicia were often threatened, on occasion struggling for survival - they were the bustlers and hustlers. Traders and warriors, more concerned with wealth and the acquisition of power than the niceties of living.’
‘You don’t have to go back that far, modern art comes from the great wealthy and secure nations.’
‘And we white Africans are like the old Carthaginians,’ Sally said, ‘when there’s gold in them thar hills who gives a hoot about painting pictures.’
The scrolls reinforced the theory. Gold from Zimbao and Punt, ivory from the southern plains of grass or from the forests along the great river, hides and dried meat, salted fish from the lakes, wine and oil from the terraced gardens of Zeng, copper from the hills of Tuya, and salt from pans along the west shores of the lakes, tin from the juncture of the two rivers, corn from the middle kingdom in baskets of woven cane, sun stones from the southern river of the crocodile, iron bars from the mines of Sala - and slaves, thousands upon thousands of human beings treated as domestic animals.
The chronicle was dated from some undisclosed point in time, we suspected this as the date of the founding of the city, and each entry was prefaced by such dating as, ‘In year 169 the month of the elephant’. From these we deduced a ten-month year based on a calendar of 365 days.
Once the nature of the scrolls had been established, I suggested to Eldridge that rather than work systematically through the collection from beginning to end, we sample them and try to establish the overall history
