He struggled to his feet and squinted up, the mud dripping off him. Aysha had evidently satisfied herself that he was all right and had climbed back up to the ledge they had cut in the side of the trench as a platform to oversee the excavation. “Rien, rien,” he shouted to the workmen, making a sideways chopping motion with his hand, the third time he had done so since they had begun work just after dawn that morning. Each time the digger had revealed an air space in the side of the trench, a crack or a fissure or a hole, he had gone down to investigate, hoping to find masonry structure that might reveal the shape of the harbor entrance. It was not really what he had come to Carthage hoping to find, but it would be a significant addition to the work Jack had done here years before with a student diving team, recording the foundations of the outer harbor wall that had been inundated by the sea-level rise since antiquity.
The workmen finished their cigarettes, the digger driver got back into his cab, ready to start again, and Hiebermeyer made his way up the ladder to Aysha, who was waiting with a large bottle of water. “Thanks,” he said, dumping the water over his head, blinking and spluttering as his face emerged from its mask of mud. Too late he realized that his shorts were flying somewhere below half-mast, and he yanked them up again. They had been a present from Jack years ago at the outset of their careers, a pair of Second World War Afrika Korps shorts Jack had found in a bazaar in Cairo. The mud would harden in the sun and solidify them, keeping them from falling down again. Nothing would induce him to wear anything else, and Aysha had given up trying long ago.
“I’m off,” she said, making as if to embrace him but then looking at the mud and stopping herself. “They’re only opening the museum conservation rooms during the mornings this week, and I’ve got to make the most of it. Call Jack, all right? You may not think that ooze is very exciting, but he’ll be very interested if you’ve hit the harbor entrance channel. It’s good for you to touch base with him anyway. Remember, he was the one who set this project up for us.”
“He’s probably out of touch at the moment. He and Costas are diving off West Africa on a Second World War merchantman, monitoring a salvage company. I’m actually slightly worried about him. The operation’s run by Anatoly Landor.”
“You mean your old school friend?”
“Hardly a friend. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s intervention, Landor would have made mincemeat of me. He’s held a grudge against Jack ever since I arrived at the school and we started going off excavating together. Normally Rebecca keeps me up to date with what Jack’s up to, but she’s been a little off the grid herself in Kyrgyzstan.”
“I’m sure Jack can look after himself. He’s got Costas with him. That always seems to work.”
“I just want to find something a bit more exciting for him. He’s used to getting calls from me only when it’s the big time, right? I don’t want to disappoint.”
“Nothing from you would ever disappoint Jack. He thinks very highly of you, you know. You may not be a diver, but you’re still his oldest friend.”
“I feel as if I’ve got to prove myself all over again since we had to leave Egypt, as if I’ve got to start from scratch. I hardly know my way around this place.”
“Remember what Rebecca told you when she came to us on Seaquest six months ago. It was the extremists who forced us out, not anything you did. And remember those of my own family still trapped in Cairo, my brother in the resistance. They’re the ones we should be thinking about.”
“I know. I only wish I could do something.”
“You are. You’re doing what you were born to do. Remember what Jack said, too. He said you were a bloody good archaeologist, the best. He wouldn’t have pulled strings to set you up on a site as important as this if he thought otherwise.”
Hiebermeyer gave her a tired smile. “When are we Skyping Michael in London?”
“Two P.M. My sister will have brought him in from nursery school. We’re doing it from the museum, so you’ll have to leave here half an hour before that at the latest to get there in time. Where’s our newly arrived IMU nanotechnology and computer simulation expert, by the way?”
“Lanowski? At the Roman water cisterns. He’s become fascinated by the water supply system of the ancient city, thinks it hasn’t been properly understood. Typical of Jacob, finding something mathematical to solve. He really got the fieldwork bug during our final days in Egypt last year, applying his quirky genius to Akhenaten’s map of the City of Light. Jack is going to have a real problem keeping him glued to the screen from now on. Jacob thinks the established idea that Punic houses relied on rainwater cisterns and it was the Romans who put in the first aqueduct is wrong, that the Punic city also had some kind of communal supply. I think he could be right.”
“Did he have guards with him? The cisterns are a bit off the beaten track.”
“Two of them went with him in the van. We’ve got a bigger police presence here after the bombing in Tunis last night, mainly for the benefit of the government officials living in the compound, but it increases our security too. You’ve still got yours?”
“Waiting in the car. Don’t go down any more holes without telling me. I only came to check up on you because something told me Jacob might not be here to watch over you. And Maurice, please don’t hang your hat on that thing. Sometimes I really do worry about you. See you later.”
He waved, wiped his face on a towel, and put his spectacles on, but left his hat where it was, hanging from a protuberance in the exposed section of the trench, while he waited for his head to dry. He watched Aysha walk off across the overgrown tennis court toward the car waiting at the entrance to the compound, past the two soldiers with automatic rifles at the checkpoint. For a week prior to opening up this trench, he and Aysha had been digging only a few hundred meters away at the Tophet, the sanctuary filled with infant cremation burials where the Carthaginians had practiced child sacrifice. Many scholars had insisted that the Roman accounts must be exaggerated, but osteological analysis at the IMU lab had shown beyond doubt that the burials were of healthy infants, not stillbirths and natural infant deaths as had been imagined. The discovery had made him think of their own son, Michael, and how distant they were from a world in which parents would contemplate such an act.
In the lowest layers, dating to the seventh and sixth centuries BC, they had found inscriptions scratched and painted on potsherds giving thanks to the god Ba’al Hammon for accepting the offerings. The inscriptions were similar in date and style to those being found by Jack’s team on the Phoenician shipwreck off Cornwall, and had meant that Aysha had been collaborating closely with their colleagues Jeremy Haverstock and Maria de Montijo at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford to develop a better lexicon for the Punic language at that date. It had been an exciting project for Aysha, and she had been working overtime to finish photographing the inscriptions before they were due to close down the excavation and return to England to be with Michael again at the end of the week.
He wiped his face once more, and watched the guards close the gate behind Aysha’s car and resume their patrol of the perimeter. He remembered the mummy excavation in the Fayum oasis in Egypt almost ten years previously where he and Aysha had first met, after she had bombarded him with emails to get on his project. Her trauma at having to leave Egypt six months ago had been even greater than his, with members of her family still trapped there under the extremist regime, some of them joining the guerrilla army to fight back. Egypt was not the only place in the Arab world where archaeology had shut down. Tunisia was heading that way too, with extremist slogans already desecrating ancient sites and museum walls. Gone were the days when archaeologists had come to Carthage in droves under the banner of a UNESCO program that made the site one of the largest and most exciting excavations in the Mediterranean. It was only intensive negotiations by Jack that had made this project possible, under the stipulation from the IMU board of directors that the security arrangements would have to pass their own strict standards. It had helped that much of the suburb of Tunis that covered ancient Carthage was already a high-security military and diplomatic compound, but even so the police presence had been enhanced and extra vetting had been put in place for the local workmen they had employed to clear the spoil and operate the digger at the site.