Sunbird (17 page)

'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.

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 carte blanche to proceed with a full-scale excavation and investigation.

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 me. I sent the young African assistant away and prevailed on Sally to join me on the rocks beside the emerald pool, hoping that its beauty and associations would soften her mood.

'Is something wrong, Sal?'

'Good Lord, should there be?' It was an awkward unsatisfying conversation. Sally seemed to feel I was prying into affairs that did not concern me. I felt my anger rising, and I wanted to shout at her, 'I am your lover, damn you, and everything you do concerns me!'

But good sense prevailed, for I am sure presumption of that magnitude from me would have severed the last tenuous threads of our relationship. Instead I took her hand and, hating myself for the blush that burned my cheeks, I told her softly, 'I love you, Sally. Just remember that - if there is ever anything I can do--'

I think it was probably the best thing I could have said, for immediately her hand tightened on mine and her face softened, her eyes went slightly misty.

'Ben, you are a sweet dear person. Don't take any notice of me for a while. I've just got the blues, there is nothing anybody can do about it. They will go on their own, if you don't fuss.'

For a moment she was my old girl again, a smile quivering precariously on the corners of her mouth, and in those great green eyes.

'Let me know when it's over, won't you?' I stood up.

'That I will, Doctor. You'll be the first to know.'

The following week I flew back to Johannesburg. There was the Annual General Meeting of the trustees of the Institute which I could not avoid, and I was committed to a series of lectures for the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand.

I was scheduled to be away from the site for eleven days. I left it all in Peter Willcox's safe hands, after extracting from him a promise that he would cable me immediately if any new development broke.

The three girls fussed around me, packing my case, making a picnic lunch for me to eat on the plane, and lining up to kiss me goodbye at the airstrip. I must admit that I rather enjoyed all the attention.

I have often found that living too close to any problem narrows one's view of the whole. Three hours after leaving the City of the Moon, I made a minor breakthrough. If there had been walls and towers standing on the ruined foundations, then the rock must have been brought from nearby. The obvious place was from the cliffs themselves. Somewhere in those cliffs, close to the city, there was a quarry.

I would find it, and from its extent I would calculate the actual size of the city.

For the first time in weeks I felt good, and the days that followed were gratifying and solidly enjoyable. The meeting of the trustees was the type of festive affair which can be expected when funds are unlimited and prospects are favourable. From the Chair Louren was most complimentary when he renewed my contract as Director of the Institute for a further twelve months. To celebrate the thirty per cent rise in my remuneration, he invited me to a dinner at his home where forty people sat down at the yellow wood table in the huge dining-room, and I was the guest of honour.

Hilary Sturvesant, in a gown of yellow brocade silk and wearing the fabled Sturvesant diamonds, gave me her almost undivided attention during the meal. I have a weakness for beautiful things, particularly if they are women. There were twenty of them there that night, and in the drawing-room afterwards I held court like royalty. The wine had loosened my tongue, and washed away my confounded shyness. No matter that Hilary and Louren had probably primed the other guests to make a fuss of me, for when at two o'clock in the morning I went down to the Mercedes with Hilary and Louren escorting me I swaggered along seven feet tall.

This new-found confidence carried me through the series of four lectures at the University of Witwatersrand, the first of which was attended by twenty-five students and faculty members, the latter outnumbering the former two to one. The word got out, however, and my final venue was changed to one of the main lecture theatres to handle the audience of 600 that turned up. I was an unqualified success. I was prevailed upon to return at an early date - and there was an unsubtle hint from the Vice-Chancellor of the University that the Archaeology Chair would fall vacant the following year.