"Who-the old man?"
"Dr. Gilmore."
"He'd marked it, had he?"
"I suppose so."
"Why did he give it to you?"
She hesitated, frowning. "I don't quite know. He bought it for me especially at a bookshop in Amsterdam. I knew all about Dart, of course. But I hadn't read this book. He said it might interest me. That was all. I don't know why."
"You've read it, have you?"
"Yes, of course. I read it straight away. And then again in the plane coming over."
"And you still don't know why?"
"No."
"This chapter on the antiquity of murder," I said. "I was just reading it when you arrived. How far back do our instincts go? I mean how deep are they?"
She didn't answer that, and when I looked up at her, she seemed to have stiffened as though she were holding her breath.
"What this man seems to be saying is that as soon as the man-ape came down from the trees he was a killer. In fact, that that was the reason he was able to leave the trees. When he found he could stand upright, then he could see above the tall grass and had his hands free to use weapons to assist him in killing much larger animals than himself. He became a flesh-eater. Why does Dart use the word murder?"
"To emphasize his point-that's all."
"About man being a killer?"
"Yes."
"And that's a million years ago-a long time."
I think she knew very well what I was driving at. "There isn't much known about man's deep-buried, instinctive urges. They've only just started a proper study of the brain."
"And the instincts may not be in the brain. They may be in our nerves, our tissues, our blood cells. Is that what my father was after in his Journal?"
"I haven't read it," she said quickly.
"No, but Dr. Gilmore has. Didn't he say anything to you about it?"
"A little. Not much." She turned away. "I can't stay talking. The others will be here soon and there's a meal to be got ready." She went over to the stone fireplace, leaning down and blowing on the embers. Then she put on some more wood. "Will you get some water, please? I'll need water for the tea." She gave me a blackened iron kettle and I took it down to the river. I was feeling disturbed, confused. Dart's categorical statement, my own satisfaction at seeing that man fall back over the edge of the oil terminal pier, the old man's attack on Cartwright-it all seemed to add up, and it worried me.
Dusk was falling fast, and by the time I got back she had lit a pressure lamp and flames were leaping between the stones of the fireplace. "I should have come down earlier," she said. "I had to use paraffin. But it's exciting up there. Sifting each shovelful of soil, wondering what you're going to turn up, I've never been on a dig before." She went to get something from the mess tent and then Cartwright and her brother came into camp. Hans went down to the river immediately, stripped to the waist, his towel over his shoulder. Cartwright busied himself lighting the second pressure lamp.
The meal did not take long to prepare-tinned stew, followed by tinned pears. Only the bread and a rather acid sheep cheese was local. We washed it down with a lot of dark, sweet tea. Hans had found a coin that afternoon. It was of no value, an Augustan bronze coin, but it proved that the cave-shelter had been occupied, or at least visited, by somebody in the first century a.d.- a shepherd, probably, who had taken his sheep to the market in Mikopolis. They were speculating as to why he had dropped it there, and I sat listening, not asking any questions. I thought if I let them get used to my presence in the camp. . "Care to see it?" Hans asked. He dredged in the pocket of his shorts and flipped the coin across to me. "I was widening the trench and that was just over a metre down — one hundred twelve centimetres to be exact. So that's the amount of dirt and turd dropping that have accumulated there during two thousand years."
It was the only thing they had found that could be given an exact dating. The rest had been animal bones and broken pieces of pottery-sherds of simple country work. At the lowest point they had reached Cartwright reckoned they were only back to the Homeric period. "We've a lot of digging to do before we get down to a depth that's of any interest to us. And it's all so slow-the soil to be sifted, everything catalogued so that we have a complete picture of man's occupation century by century." He spoke slowly, staring at me all the time, the firelight reflected in his glasses, as though he were explaining something to a child. But he sounded depressed all the same, and when I asked why they didn't drive a pilot trench straight down to the depth that did interest them, he answered me quite sharply: "That's not the way we do things. We might miss something vital. And anyway, without a steady build-up of the picture, we can't be sure what depth we are interested in. We need a complete stratified picture, all the layers of occupation. It wouldn't make sense otherwise."
We had finished supper by then, and as soon as we had washed up, Cartwright went off to his tent to write up his notes and Hans took the other pressure lamp. "I have some books I must study." Sonia had disappeared with a torch and a towel to the river. I got my suitcase and moved into the old man's tent, setting my things out by the light of a candle. And then I picked up Dart's book again and re-read that chapter on the age-old instinct of man to kill, lying stretched out on the bed roll, the candle in its bottle on the ground beside me.
I had just started on the next chapter when Sonia pulled back the entrance flap. "I feel like a drink," she said.
I put the book down and sat up. She meant the taverna up in the village, for she had put on a skirt and was wearing an anorak against the growing chill of the evening. "What about your brother?"
"He's working. He works most evenings. And Alec doesn't drink."
She had a torch and as we left I saw Cartwright sitting on his camp bed, the interior of his tent bright with the light of the pressure lamp. He looked up as we passed the dying embers of the fire, staring at us, the papers on his knee momen-
Man the Seeker loi
tarily forgotten. He half rose as though to say something, or perhaps to join us, but then he seemed to change his mind and a moment later we were alone together in the darkness of the olive trees. The moon had not yet risen. The only light was the stars and the pencil gleam of her torch.
She seemed to be waiting on me, for she didn't say anything and we walked for a time in silence, the only sound the growing murmur of water ahead. And then she stopped. "Well, now that you've come, what do you intend to do?" She was facing me, suddenly very tense, the way she had been when we had first met.
"Stick around for a day or two, I suppose." I wasn't sure myself.
"Is that all?"
"What else? You've been here four days-you tell me what I ought to be doing."
She stared at me, biting her lip. "Why did you come here?"
I laughed. "If I knew that, I'd know a lot more about myself than I do at the moment."
"But you came here with that man Kotiadis. I don't understand."
I told her how it had happened and she said, "Oh, that explains it. I wondered." She seemed relieved and I realized that this was why she had been avoiding me.
As we walked on, she said, "You know about this Congress, don't you? There's a Pan-European Prehistoric Congress being held at Cambridge at the end of May. That's why Alec is in such a hurry to get this dig opened up." And when I asked her what that had to do with it, she said, "I don't know whether Professor Holroyd initiated it, but he's certainly been closely involved in organizing it. All the leading academics of Western Europe will be there, possibly some from Russia and Eastern Europe as well. And he has the chance of reading one of the papers. That's why Dr. Van der Voort was given a grant."
"Who told you that? Cartwright?"
"No. Hans. Alec, as you've probably guessed, is Holroyd's