—I want to offer you—to offer you—
Sputter. Hiss. Static on the line. Then silence.
“Come on, damn you, finish your sentence!”
Nothing. Nothing. Halvorsen feels like weeping. He finds a pill. Looks for the water pitcher, finds the raki bottle instead. What the hell. He washes the pill down with a shot of straight raki. Getting suicidal now? he asks himself. The Turkish whiskey burns his throat. Almost at once he feels groggy. He wonders, as the drug and the raki hit him simultaneously, whether he will live to see morning.
But of course he does. After breakfast everyone assembles, Jane Sparmann calls the roll of workmen, a new day’s toil begins. Sweat, dust, sunscreen, bug repellent. And the tools of the trade: picks, shovels, sifting screens, brushes, tape-measures, envelopes, tags, dust-goggles, sketch-pads, cameras. Jane continues to work in the Greek-era trench; Bruce and Martin will be photographing the Minoan level, this season’s central focus, which now has begun to emerge from its overburden; the other two have projects of their own in the Byzantine strata. And Halvorsen painfully ascends the hill for another attempt at unearthing some trace of his long-sought prehistoric civilization.
Business as usual, yes. Another day under the dazzling sun. That fierce light bleaches all color out of everything. Nor is there much in the way of sound: even the surf makes merely a faint snuffling noise here. Two dark puffs of dust to the east are the only blemishes on the brilliant dome of the sky. A stork appears from somewhere and hovers for a long while, wings scarcely moving, surveying the busy archaeologists skeptically from aloft.
Halvorsen, down on his knees, nose to the ground, reaches the end of the brick wall, jabs a probing-fork into the soil, feels the change in texture. It was around here somewhere that the handful of scraggly, badly eroded artifacts of apparent Neolithic origin that had lured him into this project in the first place had been exposed by the storm: a crude bull’s-head in baked clay, a fragment of a double-axe amulet of distinctly un-Minoan style, a painted snippet of what he is convinced was a mother-goddess amulet. Year after year he has cut his way toward this point—delayed for two whole seasons by the discovery of the Hittite wall—and now, almost afraid of the answers he is about to get, he is ready to strike downward into the hill to see what lies five or ten meters beneath the surface. He will need the workmen to do that for him, he realizes. But he will be over them like a hawk, watching every shovelful they lift.
This afternoon—maybe tomorrow—
An unexpected interruption comes just then. From the east, a throbbing sputtering sound, a cloud of dust, a dirt-bike chugging down the rough little road that leads to the site. The workmen wave at him from below, calling out, “Mudur Bey! Mudur Bey!” A messenger has arrived, bringing him a letter from Ankara. Perturbed, Halvorsen makes his way uneasily down from his hilltop. The envelope, soiled and creased, bears the insignia of the Ministry of Education. His fingers quiver a little as he opens it: the Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Education has jurisdiction over all archaeological digs. Some change must have occurred; and in Turkey all change involving the bureaucracy is change for the worse.
There’s been a change, yes. But perhaps not a problem. Halvorsen scans the letter, purple typescript on manila stock, translating quickly. Hikmet Aytul, the Department of Antiquities official who has charge of all archaeological work in this part of the country—Hikmet Pasha, Halvorsen calls him, because he is so vast and self-important—has resigned. The new superintendent of excavations is a certain Selim Erbek, an assistant curator of a provincial museum further north along the coast. He is making the rounds of his new responsibilities and intends to pay a visit to Halvorsen’s dig in the next two or three days.
“Trouble?” Bruce Feld asks.
Halvorsen shrugs. “I’m not sure. Bureaucratic reshuffling. Hikmet Pasha’s out, somebody named Selim Erbek’s in. He’ll be dropping in to get acquainted with us later in the week.”
“Should we take any special action?” Jane Sparmann wants to know.
“You mean, hide yesterday’s coins?” Halvorsen laughs. “No, no, we play by the rules here. When Selim Bey gets here, we show him everything we’ve found. Such as it is.” He has already debated, briefly and silently, whether he ought to get started on his own penetration of the hill before the new man arrives. Significant finds might produce unpredictable reactions; it might be wiser to take a reading on this Selim Erbek before plunging in. But Halvorsen rejects the idea. He is here to dig and, if possible, find. No sense wasting time trying to outguess the inscrutable bureaucrats.
After lunch he picks Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki as his workmen and finally begins peeling back the hill, after years of anticipation. Halvorsen has worked with these three men over many seasons and trusts them totally, though he watches them closely all the same. They dig carefully and well, using their picks with surgical delicacy, running their fingers through the clods of earth in search of tiny overlooked artifacts before letting the wheelbarrow man carry the sifted dirt away. But there is nothing to find. This part of the hill, despite the fact that a few anomalous artifacts had been found in one corner of it after that monster storm, seems in general never to have felt the imprint of human use. Wherever you dig, around this site, you turn up something, be it Turkish, Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Minoan, whatever. Except here. Halvorsen has magically located the one corner of the place that nobody in the last ten thousand years has seen fit to occupy. It is the utter opposite of his expectations.
Still, there’s always tomorrow.
“Paydos! Paydos!” comes the call, finally, at dusk. Another day gone, less than nothing to show for it.
Lying in the darkness of his tent, Halvorsen waits for the voice to come, and soon enough it is with him.
—I will show you more, if you allow it.
“Go on. Anything you like.”
Halvorsen strives to be calm. He wants to attain numbness in the face of this absurdity. He knows that he must accept the fact of his own unfolding insanity the way he accepts the fact that his left leg will never function properly again.
—These are the ruins of Costa Stambool.
Into Halvorsen’s mind springs the horrific sight of vast destruction seen at a great distance, an enormous field of horror, a barren and gritty tumble of dreary gray fragments and drab threadbare shards that would make a trash-midden look like a meadow, and all of it strewn incoherently about in a willy-nilly chaotic way. He has spent his life among ruins, but this one is a ruin among ruins, the omega of omegas. Some terrible catastrophe has taken place here.
But then the focus shifts. He is able to see the zone of devastation at closer range, and suddenly it appears far from hideous. Even at its perimeter, flickers of magic and wonder dance over the porous, limy soil of its surface: sprites and visitations, singing wordlessly to him of Earth’s immense history and of futures already past, drift upward from the broken edge-tilted slabs and caper temptingly about him. A shimmer of delicate golden green iridescence that had not been visible a moment ago rises above everything and surrounds it.
—This was the City of Cities.
The broken shards are coming to life. The city of Costa Stambool begins to rise into view like a whale breaching the surface of the sea, or like a missile climbing out of an underground silo, or like a vast subterranean tower emerging from its hiding-place in the bowels of the earth. It is an irresistible force as it heaves itself out of the rubble and climbs with a roaring rush to a height Halvorsen can barely calculate.