One of the men below was Mister Bowles, I recognised the angular figure, the smooth hair – he was bareheaded, curiously boyish looking. The other with him was much shorter and slighter. They were holding the statue steady as it hung there. Three of the men above were at the rope, some dozen feet to the right, along the crest of the hollow. The fourth, who was facing us, I knew at once for Mister Smith. They had rigged up a scaffold by means of three oars lashed together, and he was standing against this, using his weight as a wedge.
We could hear and see everything. The creak of the ropes, the winching sound of the pulley wheels below the scaffold, the scrape and setting of the men's feet and their grunts of exertion as they heaved together on the rope, the glinting fibres of the rope itself as it descended from the oar overhanging the slope to the slings at the statue's shoulders-they had fashioned a rope harness for him. Everything was as clear as if it had been daylight-I could even see the brass buckle on Mister Smith's belt. The statue gazed serenely across the moonwashed spaces between us, walking on air now.
So for the space of perhaps five or six minutes we crouched there and watched: watched as the statue rose foot by foot with the pulls on the rope, beyond the reaching hands of those below, slowly upwards until he was clear of the bankside, hanging free. I could see nothing of Mister Bowles except his back, but I could imagine the anxiety on his face as he watched his darling's progress upward. His helper below had stepped back from the bank and stood behind him a little.
There was a dreadful fascination in the spectacle, in this purposeful, doomed activity, in their absorption and helplessness, Mister Bowles and his helper trapped like flies in that bowl of light, the others outlined there, only the exposed slope below to escape by. Dramatic, Excellency. But it was the bronze youth himself, as they hauled him clear, that held my attention, and aroused my superstitious awe. He hung there, his head just below the top of the slope, swaying very slightly. And his ropes creaked. Excellency, I was looking at the crucified man of my childhood, but transformed it seemed, ecstatic – that raised face, that dreaming smile – triumphant in the hands of his persecutors. The moon threw his brows into prominence, shadowed the sockets of his eyes. He held out his hand towards us.
Then, abruptly, the tableau was broken by Mister Bowles. He bent down, took up a length of rope lying beside him, began to clamber up towards the statue's feet. I think he was going to rope the feet, Excellency, so that the others could draw him in horizontally the rest of the way, bring him flat on to the crest of the slope. But he was given no time. It was now, with the statue suspended there, the men above taking the strain, Mister Bowles climbing awkwardly, hampered by the rope, it was now that Mahmoud whispered the firing order, left of him to those above, right of him to those below. If the men before us heard the click of the bolts, they had no time to move, barely time to look up, even. Perhaps they saw the glimmer of a face, the glint of a gun barrel. But the shots crashed out, and continued without pause, for what seemed long enough to destroy the world. Mister Smith dropped at once, straight down into the hollow, diving past the statue, to end quite still at the foot of the slope. He was killed outright, I think. My eye went from him to Mister Bowles's assistant, who had turned to face the shots. It was Lydia. She ran three steps forward, then fell, but she was still moving. The statue, released, dropped with a rattle of wheels, like clockwork, feet first, straight on to Mister Bowles who made or seemed to make, at the last moment, some embracing or protective gesture towards it, before it struck him on head and chest and bore him beneath it down to the floor of the hollow, where the shots masked the crash of its fall. Lydia, on one knee, the other leg trailing, crawled a little way towards the statue and the inert form lying half under it. She was shot again, lowered herself on to her face, writhed briefly as if trying to turn over on to her side, to a more comfortable position. But she couldn't manage this, and after a moment lay still.
Mahmoud shouted and the firing stopped. A series of appalling groans came from somewhere at the top of the slope. We listened to these sounds in silence for some time, then Mahmoud sent the soldiers down to recover the bodies. I went with them, Excellency, a sort of dogged self-punishing urge to completeness impelling me. I saw Lydia and Mister Smith lifted, quite tenderly now, by the sober-faced soldiers, carried to the top. Lydia 's hair had come down and hung behind her as she was carried up. Her face was unmarked, a white oval in the moonlight, eyes staring. It took six men to raise the statue sufficiently for Mister Bowles to be extricated from it. I looked at him once and then no more. He had no eyes, no nose, no mouth: only a glistening mask of blood. Mercifully, at this point I was released from further attention by an attack of vomiting. Spasm after spasm kept me there, while they made litters for the bodies with the oars and spars Mister Smith's men had brought up. Still retching, I crawled into the bushes, out of sight. No one looked for me or called my name. I lay there motionless, until the steps and voices and groans had gone, until long after they had gone.
Gradually, with the restored calm of night around me, the warm air enfolding me, I began to feel comforted. My loneliness and sickness were compounded with that of the world, diffused to the furthest spaces I could imagine. I knew that my limbs would not carry me down again. After a while, I slept, Excellency. Slept through the crossing of the moon and waning of the stars, through the first light. When I awoke I was cold and hungry, but my mind was clear. I stepped out from the bushes, looked briefly across the floor of the hollow. The statue was still there, lying face down, his back leg raised a little from the ground. The fall had broken off his right arm at the elbow, so that he was prostrate against the earth, his face pressed into it. I could not see the arm anywhere, and I did not look for it.
I climbed out of the hollow, along behind the remains of the villa. I came to the one arch left standing and the angle of the ruined wall. There was the cavity below it just as Mister Bowles had described – he had taken great care, I remembered suddenly, to describe the precise location of his 'finds'. Acting on impulse, I made my way up there, knelt above the cavity, put in my hand. At about the extent of my arm, my fingers touched something. I strained further and my hand closed over an object cold, smooth, shaped. I was excited, Excellency. I drew it out: it was a doll, made of some hard, whitish, rubberised material, resembling congealed fat; a grotesquely, offensively, ugly doll, with protruberant eyes and thick blubbery lips; bald, but otherwise quite sexless and ageless. In the morning sunshine I stood there, turning the obscene thing over in my hands. On its nude left buttock, stamped in faint blue ink, Potsdam 1896. I knew now why Mister Bowles had returned to the site that afternoon, the afternoon he had been 'led' to the statue: not to complete his researches, as he had given out, but to plant this outrageous dolclass="underline" he had intended Mahmoud and Izzet to find it after he had gone. It was his last trick, Excellency, quite gratuitous, designed to give aesthetic shape to his whole transaction. Did I not say he was an artist? Also, of course, it was part of his 'mission', part of what he had been sent to do. He had wanted to show them the error of their ways.
After a moment more, I knelt again, carefully replaced the monstrous thing. They will look there, if they retain any belief in his truthfulness. I hope they find it – perhaps they already have, they have been busy on the site these last few days.
All that is more than a week ago, eight, perhaps nine days – I do not keep count of the days, Excellency. There were nine deaths altogether: Mahmoud's four soldiers – the two above were also killed, and in the same way, stabbed as they lay there; and five of Mister Bowles's party – the wounded man died two days afterwards, he had been shot in the abdomen. The sixth, who was thought to be a Pole but turned out to be Lithuanian, was unhurt. He was found next day in the foothills near the shore. He is at present in the military prison and it is probable, with that leniency the Turks show after bloodshed, that he will be released.