The sun was burning through the morning haze, and he felt the sweat trickle down his forehead. Soon it would be like a furnace, and the excavation would have to halt until the evening. He picked up his tool belt, a present from Costas before he had flown out. Costas had not been the only one offering to help; everyone had been very kind. He knew they were concerned about his state of mind after having to leave Egypt, but they need not have worried. Carthage had begun to grip him, despite the frustrations. For too long, perhaps, he had been used to the certainties of Egypt, where a tomb was a tomb and a pyramid a pyramid, where so much of the archaeology fell into a predictable framework. Here at Carthage, by comparison, the early history was elusive, disrupted by successive phases of destruction: by the Romans when they leveled the city in 146 BC, by Julius Caesar a hundred years later when he swept away the ruins and rebuilt Carthage as a Roman city, by the Vandals in the early fifth century and the Byzantines a century later, and finally by the Arabs in the seventh century when they built their new capital of Tunis nearby, using the ruins of Carthage as a quarry and never reoccupying it.
At first he had despaired of finding any intact stratigraphy from the earliest Phoenician settlement at Carthage, where he had hoped to discover evidence of Egyptian influence; pottery from that period was more likely to be swept up in destruction debris or used by the Romans as a strengthener in concrete. But then he had begun to see the challenge of it, to see that being an archaeologist at a site like this was as much an act of imagination as of discovery, that his role in being here was to absorb everything he could about the place and then see where his flair for reconstructing the past would take him. After years of rivalry with Jack in which Hiebermeyer’s excavations in Egypt had so often produced the bigger artifacts, the show-stoppers and the headline-grabbers, he had begun to think like Jack, to see archaeology in terms of probabilities and hypotheses rather than the certainties that emptying tombs and digging up mummies had brought. And to his even greater disbelief, he had begun to enjoy it. At Carthage, he felt like a novelist trying to tease a story out of the past, using the disparate evidence to create a canvas that could be populated by the people who had made this one of the greatest cities of the ancient world.
It was Jack who had brought Carthage alive for him, standing here on this patch of waste ground beside the tennis court six months ago when they had been negotiating for the excavation permit. Jack had agreed with him that before the founding of the city there may well have been a trade outpost here, one established by the Canaanite predecessors of the Phoenicians that might have included Mycenaean Greek and Egyptian merchants. That much fitted with what was known about international maritime trade in the late Bronze Age, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. But Jack had steered him away from any hope of finding Bronze Age remains, and instead toward the later Punic city and its links with the eastern Mediterranean world, asking him to imagine the site as it had been in the nineteenth century, before Tunis began to encroach on the ruins, when the clearest evidence of the ancient city had been the landlocked harbors entered by the channel they were trying to find now.
Those harbors owed their design to Tire, the mother city of Carthage in ancient Phoenicia. Another link was child sacrifice, something that associated Carthage with the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. Jack believed that sacrifices may have taken place on a ceremonial platform at the harbor entrance, a place where the terrifying bronze furnace described by the Romans could have been seen from far out at sea, its belching flames propitiating great voyages of discovery and trade. It was here, too, that those voyages would surely have been commemorated, by trophies and inscriptions set up by navigators such as Hanno and Himilco and others who followed them. An excavation at this spot might not only reveal the channel itself, literally the portal to those great voyages of discovery, but also find evidence of rituals that linked the Carthaginians back to the world from which they had come, to the peoples of Phoenicia and the Holy Land who had once been their kin and cousins.
Hiebermeyer picked up another water bottle from the table and took a deep swig from it. Aysha had been right: he really should call Jack. Having found the channel, he owed it to him. He stared at the mudbank where Jack believed the ceremonial platform to have been, and narrowed his eyes. He would give it another day, just one more. He reached over and took his battered straw hat from the protuberance in the wall, revealing it to be the partly exposed tibia of a human skeleton. They had found it on the first day of the dig, and had decided to leave it in situ, to be reburied once the excavation was over. The numerous healed slash wounds on the bones and a Castilian ring showed the skeleton to be that of a Spanish soldier who had probably died during a siege of Tunis in the sixteenth century. Hiebermeyer had christened him Miguel, and had taken to brushing the bones down and watering them every morning to keep them from drying. He had become increasingly concerned about Miguel, about the bleaching of the bones, over the many hours he had spent here alone, sweltering over the trench while Aysha was busy elsewhere and before Lanowski had arrived. He had asked the workmen to build a small awning and to lay on a hose, so that the skeleton could be kept under a constant fine spray, enough also to moisten the sprigs of bougainvillea that he had planted on either side.
He leaned toward the skull, looking around furtively. “Rien, rien,” he whispered, wagging his finger, repeating what he had said to the workmen, watching the splayed jaw as if for a response. He sat up, suddenly feeling self-conscious. Perhaps Miguel was not the only one who had become unhinged. He laughed at the pun, slapping his knee, wishing that Costas had been here. It was good German humor, something that Costas appreciated.
Seeing the digger operator watching him, he quickly got up, straightened his hat, and stared into the trench, seeing where the hole had disappeared under the mud. He made a whirling motion with his hand, still staring. Nothing happened, and he glanced at the digger operator, who was looking at him as if waiting for the next bout of odd behavior. Hiebermeyer repeated the gesture, in some agitation. The operator shrugged, tossed away his cigarette, and the machine roared to life. Hiebermeyer glanced back at Miguel, and then stopped himself. “He’s dead,” he whispered. “Miguel is dead.” He was suddenly looking forward to Lanowski returning, to the mathematical digressions, the floppy hair, the lopsided grin. That in itself was serious. He really did need someone to talk to.