The Sunbird Page 11

  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 Indaba My Children of how an ancient city was carried by its people, block by block, out of the west, and how the city was rebuilt at Zimbabwe.

  ‘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 techniques were transported, but not the material itself.’

  There were no more ideas forthcoming and we could turn from theories to facts. At the end of six weeks Louren Sturvesant visited us for the first time. All digging and other work was suspended as for two days we held a seminar, with myself as chairman, in which we presented Louren with all our accomplishments and conclusions to date.

  These were very impressive. To begin with, the list of artefacts, pottery sherds, and other relics filled 127 typewritten foolscap pages. Peter and Heather were responsible for most of these and they opened the seminar.

  ‘So far all excavation without the enclosure has been confined to the area north of it, and lying within 1,000 feet of the outer perimeter. In the main it seems to have been a complex of small rooms and buildings built from adobe clay and roofed with poles and thatch—’

  Peter described the area in detail, giving the average size of the rooms and the exact position of each object discovered. Louren started thrashing around in his chair, and fiddling with his cigar. Peter is meticulous, almost old-maidish, in his approach to his work. Finally he reached his conclusions. ‘It seems, therefore, that this area was an extensive bazaar and market.’ And he led us through into the warehouse to examine the finds from this area. There were fragments of badly rusted iron, a bronze comb, the handle of a knife fashioned in the shape of a woman’s body, fourteen rosettes of bronze that we guessed had embossed a leather shield, twenty-five pounds’ weight of bronze discs, and stars and sun objects which were clearly ornaments, sixteen shaped and beaten bronze plates that we hoped might comprise part of a suit of body armour, a magnificent bronze dish twenty-four inches in diameter chased with a sun image and set around with an intricate border pattern, and another forty pounds’ weight of bronze scraps and fragments so badly battered and damaged as to be unidentifiable.

  ‘These
are all the bronze objects so far recovered,’ Peter told Louren. ‘The workmanship is crude, but not recognizably Bantu in conception and execution. It would relate more closely to what we know of Phoenician craftsmanship. Unlike the Romans and Greeks, they placed little value on the arts. Their artefacts, like their buildings, were massive and roughly executed. One other fact that emerges is the veneration of the sun. It was clearly a generally polytheistic community but one in which sun-worship predominated. In this settlement, it appears that Baal, the Phoenician male deity, was personified by the sun.’

  I thought Peter was verging on the mistake of special pleading but I let him continue without interruption. After discussing each item separately, Peter led us to the next row of tables that carried all the glass and pottery.

  ‘One hundred and twenty-five pounds’ weight of glass beads - the colours are predominantly blue and red. Phoenician colours, with greens and whites and yellows recovered only in Levels I and II. In other words, later than AD 50 which coincides approximately with the final phase of absorption of Phoenician civilization by the Romans in the Mediterranean area, and its gradual disappearance.’

  I interrupted. ‘The Romans were so thorough in their absorption of Phoenicia and all her works, that we know very little of them…’

  My attention wandered to Sally. She was in a sparkling mood, a complete change from the previous six weeks when she had been moody and withdrawn. She had washed her hair and it was shiny and springing with soft lights. Her skin also shone with golden hues where the sun had touched it, and she had coloured her lips and dramatized her eyes. Her beauty squeezed my heart. I forced my mind back to the row of tables.

  ‘… A case in point is this recovery of pottery,’ Peter was saying. He indicated the huge display of fragments, portions, and a very few complete pieces. ‘On all of this, with one exception, there is not a single inscription. This is the exception.’ He picked up a sherd which was set out in a place of honour, and passed it to Louren. Although we had all gloated over it before, we crowded around Louren as he examined it. There was a symbol cut into the baked clay.

  ‘A chip from the lip of a cup, or vase. The symbol could conceivably be a Punic T.’

  Louren burst in impulsively, turning to me and laying a hand on my shoulder, ‘Conclusive, Ben. They must accept that, surely?’

  ‘By no means, Lo.’ I shook my head regretfully. ‘They will cry, “Imported”. The old trick of discrediting anything you can’t explain, or which doesn’t support your theories, by saying that it was brought in during the course of trade.’

  ‘Looks as though you can’t win, Ben,’ Louren sympathized, and I grinned.

  ‘At least we haven’t uncovered any fourteenth-century Nanking pottery - or a chamber pot with Queen Victoria’s portrait on it!’

  Laughing we moved on to the next display of copper and copperware. There were bangles and brooches, green-encrusted and eaten away. Bales of copper wire and, significantly, ingots cast into the shape of a St Andrew’s Cross each weighing twelve pounds.

  ‘Those aren’t something new,’ Louren remarked.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘They turn up all over central and southern Africa, And yet the shape is exactly that of the ingots taken from the tin mines of Cornwall by the Phoenicians - or the copper ingots from the ancient mines on Cyprus.’

  ‘Still not conclusive?’ Louren looked at me and I shook my head, leading him on to see the iron work we had recovered. All of it was so badly rusted and damaged that the original shape was a matter of conjecture and guesswork. There were hundreds of arrow-heads, mostly associated with Levels I and II, spear-heads and sword-blades, axe-heads and knives.

  ‘Judging by the quantities of weapons, or what we take to be weapons, the ancients were a warlike people. Alternatively they were a people fearful of attack and well armed against it,’ I suggested, and there was a general murmur of agreement. From the iron section we went on to a display of my photographs, showing each stage of the excavations, views of the lower city, the temple, the acropolis and the cavern.

  ‘Pretty good, Ben,’ Louren admitted. ‘Is that all you have for me?’

  ‘The best comes last.’ I couldn’t help a little showmanship in my presentation, and I had screened off the end of the warehouse. I led him beyond the first screen with all my team hovering anxiously to judge his reaction. It was gratifying.

  ‘Good God!’ Louren stopped short and stared at the phallic columns with their ornamental tops. ‘Zimbabwe birds!’

  There were three of them. Although incomplete, they stood about five foot high, and were thirty inches in 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.