"I have an idea for tomorrow, boss. To try to keep us going while we get the scanner fixed," Hedi said to Briars, as the other two kept watch.
"Let's hear it," Briars said.
"Why don't we use a tow rope? I think I could rig something up that would work. We can send three divers down instead of two, to about sixty feet, put them about twenty feet apart, and just tow them slowly through the zone we want covered. It's shallow enough in here that they could see the bottom, at least well enough to see if there's something we might want to take a closer look at. We could cover a lot more ground that way."
"Not bad," Briars said. "Let's see what you can come up with. Hedi's terrific," he added, after the young man had moved out of range. "Very careful, doesn't let the divers take any chances. Meticulous about the equipment. I was lucky to find him. He's Berber, you know, not Arab. His family still lives out in the desert, way south of here. In tents, if you can imagine. Can't think why you'd take up scuba diving when you've grown up in the desert, but what do I know? I didn't think I'd ever take it up either, and I grew up in California."
"Did you say Groves?" I asked. "Sandy Groves?"
"You noticed," he said. "Sandy is Peter's daughter. She turned up here a few months ago, and has been with us every since. A little family feud, I expect. I don't ask questions about it. She's a solid, experienced diver. Khmais is Zoubeeir's grandson, by the way. We've got the whole original gang represented in some form or another."
"You mentioned that you got some funding from a foundation. I'm surprised a foundation would put money into something so . . . speculative," I said. "Couldn't this be an elaborate hoax? A little joke on the part of Zoubeeir, to tease the students in his charge?"
"Sure it could. But Zoubeeir never struck me as that kind of person. He took a fair amount of razzing about it from everybody, but he stuck with his story. I'm not convinced myself about the statue, by the way. It would be covered with centuries of silt, if it existed at all. But I'd be very happy to find the ship even without it. But I see you remain unconvinced. You really should meet my ex-wife. I'm sure the two of you would get along," he said with a smile. "Come, I'll see what I can dig up in the mess. You sit," he said, positioning a chair outside the entrance to the wheelhouse. "And I'll look.
"Okay, it must be here somewhere. One reason to believe Zoubeeir is that the old man was very specific about what he saw. He described it in some detaiclass="underline" how he'd found the amphorae--which are unquestionably one of the things that indicate the presence of a wreck. He said there was a mound in the middle of the amphorae, and he'd cleared the silt off it over the course of several dives, until he realized that what he had was a golden god. He was frightened by this, and stopped working on the wreck, for fear of angering the god. But he, too, was obsessed by it. He sketched it over and over, from memory, and his daughter had kept drawings: We've got the sketches, which I'd show you if I could find them in here, of both the amphorae and the statue. Here they are!" he exclaimed triumphantly. "A copy of the old man's drawings. What do you think?"
I looked at rather crude but surprisingly powerful sketches. They showed the outline of what I suppose were the tops and sides of several large jars. The dominant feature, though, was a man's, or, I suppose, a god's, head, in an elongated cone-shaped headdress. He was buried from about mid-chest, so that all you could see was the head, and part of one arm. He did, in a way, look as if he were guarding the amphorae, the right arm raised as if to ward off any attacker.
"I agree with you that these are interesting drawings, and I'll take your word for it that Zoubeeir was sincere, but how do we get to a two-thousand-year-old ship from this?"
"Good question. Do you know what I mean by transport amphorae? They are clay vessels, and can be very large, maybe four or five feet high, cylindrical in shape. They were used much the way we would use shipping containers now. They were used to carry olives, olive oil, wine, that kind of thing, and even glass beads and small objects like that. The merchant seamen stacked them on their sides with the handle of one at right angles to the handle of the one above or below it. That locked them in place so they wouldn't roll about and destabilize the ship. A large merchant ship would have hundreds and hundreds of these onboard. Now, does the term Dressel amphora form mean anything to you?"
I shook my head. "I'm afraid not," I said.
"Well, there's no particular reason it should. Heinrich Dressel was a nineteenth-century German scholar who developed a way for us to date amphorae based on their design--whether they were long and thin or round and more squat, what the tops looked like, the shape of the handles, and so on. He published a chart with Mediterranean amphorae listed in chronological order. All of them are numbered. So Dressel 1 forms, for example, were manufactured in Italy and used from the middle of the second century B.C.E. to the beginning of the first, often to hold Italian wine. A lot of them show up in wrecks in the French part of the Mediterranean. The Dressel forms are a wonderful tool for dating wrecks, because amphorae were used all through antiquity in shipping; they tend to hold up well over time on the bottom, unlike wood, for example; and they are relatively easy to spot."
"You're going to tell me these amphorae in Zoubeeir's drawings date the wreck to that time period, aren't you?"
"I am," he replied. "They do. If we believe the legends, Carthage was founded in 814 B.C.E. The archaeological evidence doesn't go back quite that far, but it's close enough to lend some credence to the myth. The city fell to the Romans in the spring of 146 B.C.E. The wife of the city's leader threw herself into the flames rather than be taken by the Romans."
"I hope you're not going to tell Chastity that story again," I said. "She seems to be rather impressionable, especially on the subject of romantic notions about death by fire, or maybe it's dying for love. But anyway, you're saying the amphorae date to within that time period."
"Yes, they do. We can date them a little more closely than that. Something like the fourth century B.C.E., in fact. There are a couple of other clues as well. See here," he said placing a photograph in front of me. "It's a wine jug, terra cotta. Zoubeeir brought it up from the site. He brought up a few objects, I think, before he found the god and stopped looting the wreck. It's a beauty, isn't it? Not perfect. You can see there's a piece out of the rim. But this jar--you see it's shaped a little like a horse laden with amphorae--would probably date to the third and fourth centuries B.C.E. Given that it is associated with the ship, and not just something dropped at another time, it would help to date the ship."
"It looks very interesting," I said. "Where is it now?"
"Gone. Vanished. Zoubeeir's daughter had it, but it went missing shortly after Peter and I saw it. I figure Peter stole it, but that may be because I can't think of a positive thing to say about the man. Luckily I photographed it when I was there."
"Okay, but there were a lot of nations shipping cargo all over the Mediterranean at that time. Why couldn't this ship you're looking for be Greek or Roman, for example? Have I got the time period about right?"
"Yes. The amphorae, again, would say that this is more likely to be Carthaginian."
"And the statue?"
"Ah, the statue. Well, here it gets a little more complicated, and it's one of the reasons I try to view this all with some healthy skepticism. Assuming Zoubeeir really saw it, and as I've already mentioned, I personally am not sure about that part; I mean I know he believed it, but working at those depths does affect you sometimes. But, if we allow for a moment that he did see the statue, I think this would most likely be a much earlier artifact, older than the amphorae by maybe five or six hundred years. It looks to me to be a version of what we call a smiting god--the upraised right arm attests to that. Striking gods come out of an earlier Phoenician tradition, pre-Carthage. It could be Melqart, the city god of Tyre, or even a Baal, who much later, in a slightly different form, together with his consort Tanit, became the city god of Carthage."