Leslie prompting him when he faltered. ‘So you see, Doctor, we don’t feel it’s right to marry until at least one of us has a steady job. So, well, we thought we’d sort of ask your advice. I mean we love it here, both of us. We’d like to stay on, but we’d also like to get married. It’s just that, well, we’ve got such a high opinion of you, Doctor. We wouldn’t like to miss the rest of the investigation, but—’
I spoke to Louren that evening and then called them from the supper table.
‘The job is worth three and a half thousand, and Leslie will get two. Of course, there is a free flat at the Institute and I’ll help you with the furnishing, as a wedding present.’
Leslie kissed Ral, and then me. A novel way in which to accept the offer of employment, I felt.
Ral threw himself into the search of the cliffs with renewed energy, but I spent little time with him. Instead, I began to prepare my address to the Royal Geographical Society. This should have been a labour of love and excitement, but I found myself floundering. There was so much detail in the scrolls, but all of it seemed irrelevant to those unanswerable questions: where did they come from and when, where did they go to, and why?
Each time, my efforts became so long-winded and convoluted that they bored even me. Then I would rip the sheets from my typewriter, ball them and hurl them at the wall. There is no more lonely place in the world than a blank sheet of paper, and it frightened me that my unruly emotions should intrude and prevent me marshalling my thoughts and facts in orderly ranks. I told myself that it was reaction from the horrors of our journey to the north, that Sally’s enigmatic behaviour was worrying me deeply, that it was merely the fear of the imminent confrontation with my enemies.
I tried all the tricks, forcing myself to sit at the typewriter until I had completed 10,000 words or rising at midnight to try and shake loose a flow of words from my stalled brain.
The address remained unwritten, and I found myself mooning about my office polishing the great battle-axe until it gleamed and glittered, painful to the eye, or strumming fitfully on my guitar and composing new songs which all seemed sad and mournful. At other times I would sit for hours before the painting of the white king, dreaming and withdrawn, or I would wander all day along the cliffs, oblivious of the sun and the heat, and it seemed that often a little bird-like presence was near me, moving like a mischievous brown sprite just beyond the fringe of my vision. Or again, 1 would sit alone in the dim depths of the archives, deep in a trance of despair as I remembered the hatred in Timothy’s smoky eyes as he glared at me across the water-course where the dead men lay. Neither Timothy nor I were all of what we seemed to be, there were dark and ugly depths in both of us. I remembered the savagely mauled bodies of the tiny bushmen left lying for the birds, and my own screaming madness as I cut down the running men on the white sand of the river-bed. I do not know how long my despondency might have lasted except for the discovery which uncovered the answer to so many of the mysteries that still shrouded our city.
Eldridge’s team had been countering my apathy by an accelerated advance through the scrolls. Practice had sharpened Sally’s grasp of the language, until she was as quick and as fluent as Eldridge himself. Even Leslie was now able to make an appreciable contribution to the work, while Eldridge had arrived by a process of trial and error at the most suitable method of unrolling and preserving our scrolls and he was now saving a great deal of time in this procedure.
At breakfast, which seemed to be the only time we spent together these days, Eldridge asked me to resume the work of removing the pottery jars from the archives. To be truthful I welcomed the excuse not to have to face the blank accusing stare of the sheet of paper in my typewriter, and Ral seemed as pleased to have a change from his fruitless search of the cliffs.
In the cool, peaceful gloom of the archives we worked in our established routine, photographing and marking the position of each jar after we had labelled it and entered it in the master notebook. The work was unexacting, and Ral did most of the talking for my mood of lethargy still persisted. Ral lifted down another of the jars from its slab, and then he peered curiously into the space beyond where the wall opened into a square stone cupboard.
‘Hello,’ Ral exclaimed. ‘What’s this?’ And I felt my lethargy fall away like a discarded article of clothing. I hurried across to him and I had a feeling of pre-knowledge as I stared at the row of smaller, squatter jars of the same pottery which had been hidden away in this carefully prepared recess. I knew that we had made another major advance, a significant step forward in our search for the ancient secrets. This idea came into my mind fully formed, it was as though I had simply mislaid these small jars and now I had rediscovered them.
Ral moved the arc-light to obtain a better lighting of the recess, and immediately we noticed another unusual feature. Each of the jars that we could see was sealed - a loop of plaited gold wire linked lid and body of the jar, and a clay seal bore the imprinted figure of a bird. I leaned forward and gently blew away the dust that obscured the impression on the seal. It was the crouching vulture, the classical soapstone bird of the Zimbabwe culture with its base of sun discs and rays. It came as a distinct shock to find this emblem of modern Rhodesia upon a seal of indisputably Punic origin 2,000 years old, as it would be to find the lion and unicorn of the British coat of arms in an Egyptian tomb of the twentieth dynasty.
We worked as quickly as was reconcilable with accuracy; labelling and photographing the large jars which obscured the recess, and when we lifted them down we discovered that there were five of the smaller jars concealed behind them. All this time my excitement had been increasing, my hope of a major discovery becoming more certain. The concealment of the jars, and the seals indicated their importance. It was as though I had been marking time, waiting for these jars, and my spirits surged. When finally we were ready to remove them from the recess, I reserved this honour for myself despite Ral’s protests of, ‘But I found them!’
Balancing on the top rungs of the step-ladder, I reached in and attempted to lift the first of them.
‘It’s stuck,’ I said, as the jar sat immovably on its slab of stone. ‘They must have bolted it down.’ And I leaned farther into the recess and carefully groped behind the jar for the fixings which held it in place. I was surprised to find that there were none.
‘Try one of the others,’ Ral suggested, breathing heavily on the back of my neck from his lofty perch atop those lanky legs. ‘Can I give you a hand?’
‘Look, Ral, if you don’t give me a bit of room you’re going to suffocate me.’
‘Sorry, Doc,’ he muttered, moving back a full quarter of an inch.
I tried the next jar and found that it was also solidly anchored to the shelf, as were the next three.
‘That’s very odd,’ Ral understated the position, and I returned to the first jar, and bracing my elbows on the edge of the shelf I began to twist it in an anti-clockwise direction. It required my full strength, and the muscles bulged and knotted in my forearms before the jar moved. It slid towards me an inch, and immediately I realized that the jar was held down on the slab not by bolts but by its own immense weight. It was fifty times heavier than the jars twice its size.
‘Ral,’ I said. ‘You are going to have to give me a hand, after all.’
