“Diodorus Siculus,” Hiebermeyer said, straining forward. “Usually thought of as negative propaganda. Child sacrifice, yes, we know from the osteological analysis that it happened, but a giant bronze furnace shaped like a god?”
“Look what the digger just found.”
Lanowski moved as far as he could to one side, heaving his feet out of the ooze that was beginning to grip them like quicksand. Hiebermeyer pulled himself out beyond the bucket and lurched forward, falling on his knees where Lanowski had been standing and splattering them both with mud. He stared at the object in front of him. It was about two meters wide, circular in shape and slightly convex, and clearly made of copper alloy. At first he thought it was a great bronze cauldron, crumpled and misshapen. Then he saw what Lanowski had seen and staggered to his feet.
“Gott im Himmel,” he said, astonished. It was not a cauldron but the distorted face of a giant statue, more beast than man, broken off at the upper jaw where a line of jagged teeth, each as big as Hiebermeyer’s hand, extended in an arc from the mud. He slid down again, pulling the torch out of his tool belt and shining it inside. “It gets even better,” he exclaimed. “It’s blackened inside, charred. This was a furnace, no doubt about it.”
Lanowski was squatting beside him, staring. “Incredible. So it was true. Fathers like you and me gave up their infant children to be burned alive in this thing.”
Hiebermeyer carried on peering inside, flashing the torch beneath the bronze. “There’s something else in here. Help me get it out.”
Lanowski slumped down in the mud and reached under the bronze teeth beside Hiebermeyer. “The upper part feels dry, desiccated, but where it’s become soaked by the water it’s almost supple, like leather,” he said. “I swear it’s hairy.”
“It is hairy,” Hiebermeyer said, poking at it. “It’s a dead animal, a skin. It could be very old, if it’s been protected beneath the bronze and mummified.”
He put his torch between his teeth and they both heaved, pulling the mass out and flopping it on top of the bronze. Large sections of it appeared denuded and leathery, but elsewhere there were patches of dense black hair matted together. Hiebermeyer heaved at a football-sized clump attached to one end and slipped down with it into the mud, staring at one of the most extraordinary things he had ever uncovered in his archaeological career.
He struggled up on his elbows, the clump on his chest, and cleared his throat, seeing that Lanowski was looking in the other direction, still folding down the other sides of the skin. “You said you’d been reading up on Punic Carthage. For Jacob Lanowski, that means reading everything. In the original languages. What does your photographic memory have on Pliny and Hanno?” he said.
Lanowski stopped what he had been doing and stared into space. “Well, there are two passages in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. The first is the controversial one in which he implies that Hanno sailed from Gibraltar to Arabia, circumnavigating Africa.”
“I mean the other one. Book six.”
“Ah yes.” Lanowski pushed his spectacles up his nose, dropped the hide and slipped back against the side of the trench. “‘Duarumque Gorgadum cutes argumenti et miraculi gratia in Iunonis templo posuit, spectates usque ad Carthaginem captam.’ I think I’ve got that right. Pliny had clearly read the Greek translation of Hanno’s Periplus, where the creatures he translates as Gorgons are called gorillae. He says that after capturing these gorillae, Hanno brought two of the skins back to Carthage, where they were displayed in the temple of Chronos until the Romans captured the city. For Chronos read Ba’al Hammon, the nearest Punic equivalent.”
Hiebermeyer heaved the mass on his chest around until it was facing Lanowski. “Well, as our friend Costas would say, get a hold of this.”
Lanowski stared, raised his spectacles and squinted, and then gave a high-pitched laugh. “Yep. That would be it. That would be a gorilla. I don’t believe it.”
Hiebermeyer rolled the head off his chest and quickly extracted himself from the animal’s front limbs, which were threatening to wrap themselves around him and push him back into the ooze. Lanowski leaped up and heaved it back, in the process folding over part of the skin so that the interior was exposed. He stopped for a moment, peering, and then turned the rest of the skin over so that the flayed interior was fully revealed, the head lolling backward into the water. “Maurice, check this out.”
Hiebermeyer pulled himself forward in the ooze, and stared. In the center of the skin was a rectilinear outline in flecks of gold, with further lines extending out from each corner. He leaned in, peering closely. “Gold leaf or gilding, no doubt about it. I’d say this skin had once been used as a covering for a golden box, a fairly large one, about the size of the Anubis shrine in Tut’s tomb. Probably carried outdoors where it was very hot, causing the gold to melt slightly and adhere to the skin. Interesting. Pliny doesn’t say anything about that in his account.”
“Something Hanno brought back from his travels, perhaps?” Lanowski said.
Hiebermeyer felt the ooze creep up above his boots and toward his knees. “Time we got out of here. This is getting a bit too much like maritime archaeology.”
“Speaking of which, Aysha called and told me to remind you. Could be time you gave Jack a ring?”
Hiebermeyer wiped the back of his hand across his face, smearing on more mud. “Do you think we’ve found enough? I don’t want to let him down.”
“Um, given that we’re probably looking at the cover of the next National Geographic magazine, not to speak of front-page news around the world, I’d say a big yes. I think Jack would say you’ve earned your Carthage credentials.” Lanowski leaned over, and they shook muddy hands.
“You spotted it for what it was,” Hiebermeyer said.
“You stuck with the excavation. It was your perseverance that paid off.”
“All right.” Hiebermeyer cracked a broad grin, the first for a long time. “We’ve got to get the digger to raise this whole clump as one mass, and then get it to the conservation lab pronto. Before that, I want to take about a thousand photos.”
“Roger that.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, just something I’ve heard Costas say.”
Hiebermeyer grunted, heaved himself on to the edge of the bucket, and then sprang up to the top of the trench, grabbing it and pulling himself on to the platform, his shorts miraculously in place. He stomped across to the table, the mud splattering off his boots, and poured a bottle of water over his face. Then he took off his hat and tossed it on to the outstretched tibia, watching it spin as if Miguel were giving it a twirl. He nearly said something, but then stopped himself. It was time to leave Miguel to the past, and to start communicating again properly with the land of the living. He glanced back down at Lanowski and the skin, seeing the strange golden outline. It rang a distant bell, but he could not quite put his finger on it. He would see if it meant anything to Jack.
He picked up his phone, tapping the screen with a muddy finger. Aysha first, and then they would Skype their son Michael. After that, he would call Jack. The adrenalin was coursing through him, the thrill of discovery that had fueled his life since he and Jack had first peered down that rabbit hole, had first reached in and pulled out those ancient sherds. Suddenly he felt on top of the world again.
7