Nothing much of the villa was left standing, only a single arch and a broken wall. (It was in a cavity below this arch, if you remember, Excellency, that he claimed to have found the objects he showed to Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet.) However, the ground plan was still there to be seen, and he had begun a methodical examination of the site, noting the details. 'I could hear the lizards,' he said, 'slithering about among the stones while I was working.'
Straightening up from his measurements he had seen, in the face of the rock behind the villa, small rectangular niches, obviously cut by hand, blackened inside, presumably by the flames of devotional lamps. 'I have seen the same sort of thing in wayside shrines,' he said. Generations of people had come here to light lamps or candles. Prayers and promises uttered in that remote place, from lips long dead. 'I noted it,' he said. 'It was evidence, of a kind. Popular beliefs have to be taken into account, you know.' Also, he had thought it the kind of personal detail that goes down well in a book.
Behind the villa the terrain was very irregular, strewn with masonry half-overgrown, mounded with heaps of reddish earth. It was clear, he said, that there had been considerable subsidence of the land here, though not very recently. He had made his way over this, seeking to trace signs of outbuildings, and he had come eventually to the edge of a roughly circular declivity, steep-sided, scattered with rocks and scrub. 'I don't really know why I went down there,' he said. It wasn't as if there were any visible signs of habitation. 'There was nothing there,' he said. 'It was impulse, pure impulse.'
There was in his manner now a new, and disturbing, quality of intensity. It was clear that he was in the grip of his own story. His eyes no longer regarded me closely, but looked at some point midway between us, with a great effort of concentration. It was as if he was in fear of being swamped, rendered incoherent, by the sheer marvellousness of what he was relating.
The cicadas shrilled with what seemed increasing volume all round him, but not, somehow, he said, in the hollow itself, once he began the descent – they seemed to stop on the edge of the slope, so that the afternoon was both loud and silent. He looked around a bit down there, saw nothing of interest, and was about to leave when, again on impulse, pure impulse – he stressed this, Excellency – he had walked over and forced a way through the tangle of scrub that grew against the foot of the slope. Nothing there but the same reddish earth and grey limestone -or such at least was his first impression-and he was in the act of turning away, when something glimpsed there, some intimation only half-conscious, registered as it were on the retinue of the mind, caused him to look again, more closely.
Then he saw what he had seen before, but now with full awareness.
It was at first like a curiously curved spur of rock embedded in the hillside, outer edge of some much greater mass. He might have assumed it to be no more that this. He said, 'I might have left it, even then,' and his eyes were stark at the thought of that appalling possibility. However, something more than accidental about that curving line had come home to him – it was, after all, what had made him look again: the impossibility of the shape being a merely random formation. 'There was something necessary about it,' he said. He looked at me anxiously, for understanding, for the charity of understanding. 'In the last analysis,' he said, 'there is no resemblance between the forms in nature and the human form, none at all.' I mentioned the gnarled shapes olive trees sometimes assume, the way the sea will sculpt human-seeming reclinations in the rocks of the shore. 'No, no,' he said impatiently. 'There is no necessity about any of these things. That is my whole point. That is what I saw. Those other things you mention, rocks and trees and so forth, they are… obedient. What I saw in that line was something urgent. It is quite different, you see.' He was excited at the force of the distinction he was making. He did not want me to discuss it with him, only to understand his feelings, see the wonder.
So he had stepped closer, taking care not to damage the screening bushes – you see, he was already thinking of concealment, Excellency. He looked closely at it, touched it: it was rounded, smooth beneath the flaking clay. It came to him then that this was a human arm.
He shivered, he told me, in spite of the heat in that enclosure. There was something deeply disturbing, unnerving almost, in the discovery that something in the human image might be trapped there. This passed, and a feeling of excitement rose in him. He moved his fingers slowly along the curve. More clay flaked away, allowing him to feel the rounded solidity beneath. There was not enough of the arm exposed yet to establish the dimensions, so he tried removing some of the earth at the sides, but it was packed hard, too hard for his fingers. He climbed out of the enclosure and returned to the area of the ruins, where he found a sharp fragment of marble. Armed with this he returned, and there, in that screened and secret hollow, he set to work, scraping slowly at the earth, carefully prising it away from the form beneath.
After a while he stood back. He was looking at the shape of a naked human forearm, life-size, fashioned in metal-bronze it could only be. From the angle of this, he judged that the body to which it was attached was half-turned inward, into the hillside.
'Amazing,' Mister Bowles said. 'You have no idea how strange it was, seeing it there like that. It was as if it was struggling, itself, to get out.'
He had been obliged to leave it at this point, though he did not say why. He could not stay any longer, he said – there was no time. He had made no attempt to conceal things. In any case, he said, it was not visible, so far at least, from the floor of the hollow. Only someone who did as he had done, forced through the scrub, would have been able to see it. 'That's the whole point, you see,' he said. 'No one would normally… I myself… I was led to it.' So he had left it and clambered up again, out of that charmed place.
He had been surprised, he said, momentarily, when he got out into the open and could see the sea again, to find that everything looked unchanged. 'I tell you,' he said, 'I expected the sea or the hills or something in the landscape to be different, changed, after that. You probably think that's funny…'
'No,' I said, 'I understand it very well.'
'It was such a wonderful experience, you see. The way I was directed to it, you know. I haven't been able to describe it properly. I went back again today – you saw me there. But it is slow work. I am afraid of damaging him.'
'So you knew,' I said, 'that same evening – when you sent the note?'
'Oh, yes. That's why I mentioned the soldiers. They were there, you know, two of them, actually on the site, just a bit higher up from the villa.'
'Well, they are still not very far away,' I said. 'You didn't think they would remove them altogether, did you?'
'There are two more, lower down,' he said, 'but it doesn't really matter. All I need is a bit more time. And that's where you come in.'
'How is that?' I said. I got up, for no particular reason, and walked a few paces across the floor. The movement brought me a view of the sky through Mister Bowles's window, and I saw the full moon hanging there, improbably large, dilated-looking as if resting on liquid.
'If you would go back to them,' he said, 'ask them for just a day or two more. Until the day after tomorrow. That's all the time I need. That would give me a chance to clean it up, have a good look at it. Have some sketches made, you know.'