Sunbird (26 page)

^{After supervising the cataloguing, packing and dispatch to the Institute of all these finds, I returned to the City of the Moon, and I went immediately to the cavern. As I had hoped, Sally was hard at work there. I do not think her pleasure was affected as she came to meet me and kissed me.}

^{'Oh, Ben. I've missed you.' Then she launched immediately into a technical discussion, and while I made the right answers my thoughts were far from bushman paintings.}

^{I watched the way she crinkled her nose as she spoke, and the way she kept pushing her hair back from her cheek with the back of her hand, and my whole being throbbed with love of her. Down in my stomach I felt a squirming of dread. Our work at the City of the Moon was almost finished, soon we would be returning to Johannesburg and the hushed halls of the Institute. I wondered how this would affect Sally and me.}

^{'We'll be leaving soon, Sal.' I gave expression to my thoughts.}

^{'Yes,' she agreed, immediately sobered. 'The thought saddens me. I've been so happy here, I'm going to miss it.'}

^{We sat in silence for a while, then Sally stood up and went to stand before the portrait of the white king. She stared at it moodily, her arms folded tightly across her breast. - 'We've learned so much here,' she paused for a moment, and then went on, 'and yet there was so much that was denied us. It was like chasing clouds, often I felt we were so close to having it in our hands.' She shook her head, angrily. 'There are so many secrets still locked away from us, Ben. Things we will never know.'}

^{She turned and came back to where I sat; she knelt in front of me with her hands on her knees, staring into my face.}

^{'Do you know that we haven't got proof, Ben! Do you realize there is nothing we have found here that can't be discredited by the old arguments.' She leaned closer towards me. 'We have a symbol on a scrap of pottery. Imported in the course of trade, they will say. We have the golden chalice, the work of native goldsmiths using the Ankh motif by chance, they will say. We have the paintings - heresay is not evidence, they will say.'}

^{She sat back on her haunches and stared at me.}

^{'Do you know what we've got, Ben, after it's all been sifted and sorted? We've got a big fat
nothing
.'}

^{'I know,' I said miserably.}

^{'We haven't even a single fact to knock them off their smug little perch. Our City of the Moon - our beautiful city -will be simply another culture of obscure Bantu origin, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. We will never know what happened to the great walls and towers, and we will never know where our white king lies buried.'}

^{I planned to shut down the dig on the 1st of August, and we spent the last weeks of July tidying it all, leaving the foundations exposed for others who might follow us, packing our treasures with loving care, making the last entries in the piles of notebooks, typing the long lists of catalogues and attending to the hundreds of other finicky details.}

^{The field investigation was over, but ahead of me lay months of work, filing and correlating everything we had discovered, fitting each fact into its niche and comparing it with evidence gathered by others at other sites and finally there would be the summation and the book. Months before, I had hoped I might be able to entitle my book
The Phoenicians in Southern Africa
. Now I would have to find another title.}

^{The Dakota arrived to take away the first load of crates, and with it went Peter and Heather Willcox. They would still have two or three months of their European holiday, but we were sorry to see them go, for we had been a happy group.}

^{That evening Louren spoke to me over the radio.}

^{'We have got hold of Cousteau at last, Ben. He's been cruising in the Pacific but my office in San Francisco spoke with him. He thinks he may be able to help, but there is no chance that he will be able to come before next year. He has a full schedule for the next eight months.'}

^{That was my last excuse for staying on at the City of the Moon, and I began packing my own private papers. Sally offered to help me. We worked late, sorting through the thousands of photographs. Now and then we would pause to examine a print of particular interest, or laugh over one that had been taken in fun, remembering the good times we had spent together over the months.}

^{Finally we came to the file of prints of the white king.}

^{'My beautiful mysterious king,' Sally sighed. 'Isn't there anything more you can tell us? Where did you come from? Who did you love? Into what battles did you carry your war shield, and who wept over your wounds when they carried you home from the field?'}

^{We went slowly through the thick pile of prints. They were taken from every angle, with every type of variation in lighting, exposure and printing technique.}

^{A detail of one of the prints caught my eye. I suppose that subconsciously I was alerted to pick it up. I stared at it, with eyes that began to see for the first time. I felt something fluttering inside of me like a trapped bird, felt the electric tickle run up my arms.}

^{'Sal,' I said and then stopped.}

^{'What is it. Ben?' She picked up the quaver of suppressed excitement in my voice.}

^{'The light!' I said. 'Do you remember how we found the city in the moonlight? The angle and the intensity of the light?'}

^{'Yes,' she nodded eagerly.}

^{'Do you see it, Sal?' I touched the white king's face. 'Do you remember the print I gave to Lo? Do you remember the mark on it?'}

^{She stared at the photograph. It was fainter than on Louren's print, but it was there, the same shadowy cross shape superimposed upon the death-white face.}

^{'What is it?' Sally puzzled, turning the photograph in her hands to catch the light.}

^{'I don't know.' I said as I hurried across the room
to
the equipment cupboard, and began scratching around in it, 'but I'm damned well going to find out.'}

^{I came out of the cupboard and handed her one of the four-cell torches. 'Take this and follow me, Watson.'}

^{'We always seem to do our best work at night,' Sally began, and then realized what she had said. 'I didn't mean it that way!' She forestalled any ribald comment.}

^{The cavern was as still as an ancient tomb, and our footsteps echoed loudly off the paving as we skirted the pool and went to the portrait of the white king. The beams of our torches danced upon him and he stared down at us, regal and aloof.}

^{'There's no mark on his face,' Sally said, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice.}

^{'Wait.' I took my handkerchief from my pocket. Folding it in half, and in half again, I masked the glass of my torch. The bright beam was reduced to a steady glow through the cloth. I climbed up onto the timber framework that had been left in position.}

^{'Switch yours off,' I ordered Sally, and in the semi-darkness I stepped up to the portrait and began examining the face with the dimmer light.}

^{The cheek was white, flawless. Slowly I moved the light, lifting higher, lowering it, moving it in a wide circle around the king's head.}

^{'There!' we cried together, as suddenly the hazy mark of the cross appeared over the pale features. I steadied the light in its correct position and examined the mark.}

^{'It's a shadow, Sal,' I said. 'I think there must be an irregularity beneath the paint. A sort of groove, or rather two grooves intersecting each other at right angles to form a cross.'}

^{'Cracks in the rock?' Sally asked.}

^{'Perhaps,' I said. 'But they seem to be too straight, the angles too precise to be natural.'}

^{I unmasked my torch, and turned to her.}

^{'Sal, have you an article of silk with you?'}

^{'Silk?' She looked stunned, but recovered quickly, 'My scarf.' Her ringers went to her throat.}

^{'Lend it to me, please.'}

^{'What are you going to do with it?' she demanded, holding her hand protectively over the scrap of pretty cloth that showed in the neck of her blouse. 'It's genuine Cardin. Cost me a ruddy king's ransom.'}

^{'I won't spoil it,' I promised.}

^{'You'll buy me a new one if you do,' she warned me, as she unknotted the scarf and passed it up to me.}

^{'Give a light,' I requested and she directed her torch onto the king. I spread the scarf over the king's head, holding it in position with the fingers of my left hand.}

^{'What on earth are you doing?' she demanded.}

^{'If you are ever buying a second-hand car, and you want to be sure it has never been in a smash, then this is the way you feel for blemishes that the eye can't see.'}

^{With the fingertips of my right hand I began feeling the surface of the painting through the silk. The cloth allowed my fingertips to slip easily over the rock, and seemed to magnify the feel of the texture. I found a faint groove, followed it to a crossroads, moved down the south axis to another crossroads, moved east, north, and back to my starting point. My finger-tips had traced a regular oblong shape, measuring about nine by six inches.}

^{'Do you feel anything?' Sally could not contain her impatience. I did not answer her for my heart was in my mouth, and my fingers were busy, running all over the rock beneath the silk, moving well away from the portrait, down almost to floor level, and up as high as I could reach.}

^{'Oh, Ben. Do tell me! What is it?'}

^{'Wait!' My heart was drumming like the flight of a startled pheasant, and the track of my fingertips trembled with excitement.}

^{'I will not wait, damn you,' she shouted. 'Tell me!'}

^{I jumped down off the framework and grabbed her hand. 'Come on.'}

^{'Where are we going?' she demanded as I dragged her across the cavern.}

^{'To get the camera.'}

^{'What on earth for?'}

^{'We are going to take some photographs.'}

^{I had two rolls of Kodak Ektachrome Aero-film type 8443 in the small refrigerated cabinet which housed my stock of films. I had ordered this infra-red film to experiment with photographing the unexcavated foundations of the city from the top of the cliffs, but the results had not been encouraging. There were too many rock strata and too much vegetation confusing the prints.}

^{I filled my Rolleiflex with a roll of the infra-red film, and I fitted a Kodak No 12 Wratten filter over the lens. Sally pestered me while I worked, but I replied to all her queries with, 'Wait and see!'}

^{I took up two arc-lights, and we arrived back at the cavern a little alter midnight.}

^{I used a direct frontal lighting, plugging the arc-lights into the switchboard of the electric water-pump beside the pool. I set the Rolleiflex on a tripod and made twenty exposures at varying speeds and aperture-settings. By this time Sally was on the point of expiring with curiosity, and I took mercy on her.}

^{'This is the technique they use for photographing canvases and picking out the signatures and details overlaid by layers of other paints, for aerial photography through cloud, for photographing the currents of the sea, things which are invisible to the human eye.'}