Twenty minutes later, the excavation of the harbor channel was in full swing again, the backhoe of the digger steadily revealing more gray-black ooze and the workmen clearing the waste ground ahead so that the trench could be extended toward the modern seafront. Hiebermeyer watched the water seep in after each scoop and clumps of desiccated soil fall in from above, coloring the water light brown. Everything here was either extremely wet or extremely dry. The dryness at least was like digging in Egypt. Miguel still had clumps of hair attached to the back of his skull, and mummified skin around his pelvis. Hiebermeyer emptied most of his water bottle on the bones, and then poured the remainder over the back of his own neck. He looked up just as Lanowski dropped down the side of the cut and strode over, clapping him on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Maurice. I’ve just seen the gray mud, proving you’ve found the channel. That about wraps it up here?”
Hiebermeyer gestured at the opposite side of the trench. “I just want to test Jack’s hypothesis about the ceremonial platform. If we get nothing today, then I’ll assume it was destroyed by the Romans or robbed of its stone after the city was abandoned. It’s good to see you back. I was beginning to talk to myself. How were the cisterns?”
Lanowski beamed back at him, nodding. “Good. Very good.”
Hiebermeyer passed him another water bottle, and then reached into his shorts, remembering the sandwich Aysha had given him that morning. Or was it the morning before? He found it, pulled it out, took off the wrapping and handed half to Lanowski, who took the squashed offering gratefully and wolfed it down. The two had become close friends after Lanowski had revealed his passion for Egyptology the year before, a bond that had been further cemented when he had been instrumental in their escape from the Nile during the extremist takeover.
Hiebermeyer looked approvingly at the other man’s gear. Lanowski wore mountain boots, multi-pocketed hiking shorts, and a pair of old army-surplus khaki bags crossed over from each shoulder, like a camel. He had tied his long hair back and was covered from head to foot in dust, a thin film even coating his spectacles. Now he swallowed the last of the sandwich, reached into one of the bags and pulled out a linked belt of a dozen or so 20 mm rounds, the brass ends green with corrosion. “Found these. Pretty cool, eh?”
“Mein Gott. You’re as bad as Costas.”
“As good as Costas, you mean. The Roman cisterns were used as tank berms by the British Eighth Army at the end of the North African campaign in 1943, and the collapsed end of one of them contained an ammunition store. It looks as if the berm might have been destroyed by a bomb and then abandoned.”
“Leave it for the Tunisian army to deal with,” Hiebermeyer said. “I’ve lost enough people close to me in this place.”
Lanowski pushed up his glasses. “Of course. Your grandfather. Insensitive of me. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Hiebermeyer put a muddy hand on Lanowski’s shoulder. “It’s part of the archaeology of this place. It can’t be ignored.” He had another motive for coming here, one that arose from a chapter in his family history more than seventy years ago. His grandfather, a schoolteacher before the war, had been an officer in the German Army engineers under Rommel and had been killed in the final days of the campaign in June 1943, the same month that one of his uncles had gone down with his U-boat in the North Atlantic. His grandfather had no known grave, but Jack had accompanied Maurice during their earlier visit to Carthage to the German memorial and ossuary to the south of Tunis. The juxtaposition of stark gray slabs set against the azure Mediterranean made it difficult to comprehend how somewhere so beautiful could also be a place of war and death that had devastated so many families.
Lanowski bagged the ammunition belt and pointed at the trench. “Got any good stratigraphy yet?”
Hiebermeyer snorted. “Are you kidding? This is Carthage. In Egypt, you can dig through the Ottoman stuff and the Roman stuff to find the real archaeology, everything in nice neat layers. The conquerors there didn’t flatten the pyramids and build their own things on top. Here,” he said, raising a finger as the analogy came to him, “here, it’s as if you’re in biology class at school dissecting a frog and some joker of a lab partner has scooped out the entrails and dumped them on the bench for you to sift through, with everything all jumbled up.”
“An experience you’ve had?” Lanowski said.
“That was my introduction to Jack Howard, the day after I arrived at our boarding school. He apologized when he saw that he’d upset me, and said he was only trying it on with the world’s most boring biology teacher, not with me. He made it up to me in detention afterward by promising to take me out that weekend to his secret excavation at a nearby Roman site. That nearly got us expelled, but I was hooked.”
“Amazing you both made it to Cambridge.”
“By then that biology teacher was the headmaster, and he wrote us both shining references. To study archaeology, that is, not biology.”
“And now you’re both star alumni of the school, highlighted on their website as if you were model pupils.”
“That’s always the way.”
Hiebermeyer heaved himself upward, nearly losing his shorts in the process and quickly grabbing them before they descended to his knees. He pulled them up and tightened his tool belt, checking that everything was there: his trusty trowel, one of the pair that he and Jack had bought with their pocket money at a local hardware shop while they were at school; a geological hammer and a headlamp; various brushes and chisels; and some oddments that Costas had added, items he had found indispensable underwater that he had thought Hiebermeyer might like to have, one of them looking suspiciously like a Costas-designed multi-tool for opening bottles and stirring drinks. He shifted the weight until it was comfortable and then put his hands on his hips, surveying the excavation like a general inspecting a battlefield.
A few moments later, there was a clunking noise from the digger, and the engine revved down. Hiebermeyer and Lanowski hurried to the edge of the trench and peered in. The backhoe had hit something hard, metallic-sounding rather than masonry, not in the trench walls but in the muddy ooze. At that location inside the channel it could not be foundations, but rather something that had fallen or been thrown in, conceivably part of the harbor-front platform that Jack had postulated for the opposite bank. Maurice waved at the digger operator to cut the engine, and felt his excitement rise. This could be it.
“My turn,” Lanowski said, unslinging the bags over his shoulders. “You promised I’d get the chance when I returned.”
“We’ll both go.”
Lanowski took the lead and Hiebermeyer followed him down the ladder into the trench, past the arm of the backhoe. There was only space for one of them at a time to squeeze between the bucket and the side of the trench, and Lanowski went first, his boots slurping in the ooze that was becoming more liquid as the trench slowly filled up. Whatever it was that had stopped the digger had fallen from the dry soil above, and was covered in clumps of it. Lanowski had made his way in front of the bucket and crouched down out of sight.
“Well?” Hiebermeyer said, forcing his girth through the narrow gap. “Metal or stone?”
Lanowski remained stock still, staring. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“I’m all ears.”
“On the flight here, I boned up on Punic Carthage, and I memorized that famous Roman account of child sacrifice. ‘There was in their city a bronze image of Ba’al Hammon, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.’”