The Realms of Gold Read online

  The triumph had been natural. All alone she had worked it out, putting bits together from here and there—the tablets at Carthage, the strangely Meroitic lion in Kano, the curiously Noklike face on the tablet in Kush. A phrase or two from Athenaeus, who said that the Carthaginians had crossed the Sahara eating barley. A sentence from Herodotus, a remark by Heinrich Barth, a visit with the children to the Ethnological Museum, a conversation about negritude with Joe Ayida, a vague memory of a heap of ruins, glimpsed like so many heaps from a passing landrover, in mountainous country near the Chad-Libyan border, going north. And then, one night, sitting at Rome airport waiting for a delayed flight home (she’d promised to see the children by breakfast, those poor children, they’d been dragged to some strange sites in their time till they grew so old that they had to stay at home to be educated)—sitting there, worn out by a two-day dispute with her one-time professor, a man so fixed in his views of classical antiquity that nothing south of Leptis Magna could be taken seriously in his presence, sitting there, idly staring at a map of the Sahara, wondering if there was any possible reason for her sense of certainty about her own arbitrary interpretation of the evidence, wondering if she were not, as her one-time professor had suggested, suffering from womanly intuition: sitting there, gazing at the relief of the mountains, suddenly she knew exactly where to look. She knew with such conviction that it was like a revelation—the evidence was all there, it was simply that she alone had produced the correct interpretation of it, and being correct, of course it had fitted. It was as simple as that. But why, there on the airport, had she been allowed to know? This is what puzzled her slightly. If her flight had been on time, she might never have hit on it. Or she might have hit on it two days later in the bath. Who can tell? It was so arbitrary, it had frightened her terribly. She had known that the city was there, she had gone out to dig for it, and she had found it. But all because of one flash of knowledge. Where had it come from, and why had she been allowed to have it, that revelation on which so much else depended?

  Digging in the cold dawn, her city rising from its burial in the sand, a building in reverse. Walls, buildings. Stacked. Pots, beads, figurines. Gold bars even, though they had not been the greatest wealth. Each afternoon they had retired to their tents to lie and inspect their discoveries—match boxes and fag packets and little plastic bags full of relics, dried and preserved and hidden by the sand for millennia. They had waited for her, quiet and obedient. Silently they had waited, to provide her with this unique delight.

  It had all been too much. She had suffered dreadfully, afterwards, from anxiety—not from guilt, exactly, for after all she had taken nothing from anyone, she had not even pillaged the dead, on the contrary she had made them live again, and she had loved them, her traders, her merchants, her agents, she had loved and defended them, with their caravans and their date palms, their peaceful negotiations. Men of peace, not war, they had been exchanging useful commodities and works of art. But she suffered from anxiety at the narrowness of her triumph, and its seeming inevitability. I must be mad, she thought to her self. I imagine a city, and it exists. If I hadn’t imagined it, it wouldn’t have existed. All her life, things had been like that. She had imagined herself doing well at school, and had done well. Marrying, and had married. Bearing children, and had borne them. Being rich, and had become rich. Being free, and was free. Finding true love, and had found it. Losing it, and had lost it. What next should she imagine? What terrifying enormity should she next conjure forth? Should she dig again in the desert and uncover gold? Should she plant down her foot and let water spring from the dry land? Should she wave her arm and let the rocks blossom? She had been as arid as a rock, but she had learned to flow. Or should she conceive of desolation? Defoliateforests? Slaughter innocent children and bury them in little jars with Punic inscriptions? Their small bones had made her weep, but her own children had stared coldly with no sense of kinship.

  Sometimes she thought that it was all an elaborate mistake, and that she would wake up one morning and discover that the city was not there, and had never been there. Just as she imagined that she would wake up and find that Karel had deceived her, that he had never loved her. Faith and certainty, bricks and mortar. Once she had rung up the Archaeological Institute and asked to speak to her professor (this was just after her return from Tizouk): she was expecting his sincere if jealous approbation. Instead, she was told he did not exist. Instead of thinking, I have the wrong number, she thought, Oh God, I have gone mad, I have been suffering from a lengthy delusion and I never went to Tizouk, never studied under Bryers, never went to Oxford, never had the things I have had. (In fact, she had a wrong number.)

  It was difficult to know what to imagine next, when one had had so much. And with such alarming powers, it was so important to imagine the right things. As she talked, about the pots in Tizouk, and subsequent confirmatory discoveries near Kano, she felt some vague stirring of aspiration. She had been quiet for too long, living in the past and on her laurels for too long. Time for some new excursion. She would be home soon, there might be something new waiting in the post. No wonder she got morbid and depressed late at night; it was years since she had really got moving. It was there, something was waiting, something must be waiting. But she must imagine it well. She must get it right. She had too much force to be able to afford even minor errors.

  She concluded her lecture on a note of expectation, fed back from her own thinking. Scholarly expectation, it is true—who can tell, she said, what rich finds await us, all we need is the finance. She said a few words about preserving what we have (Carthage, for example) and a few more about finding what we haven’t found. Then she sat down.

  The applause was gratifying, the questions confused. As so often these days, she found herself warming more to the lay questions than to the professional ones: perhaps that was her alleged lust for domination manifesting itself, along with her alleged fear of serious competition, or perhaps it was simply that she and all the professionals there knew perfectly well that nothing very precise or interesting could be asked or answered in a lecture. She often wondered why the lecture was still so popular as a form. Why did all these people still come to them, when they could read her views far more comfortably at home, or watch her on the box, or cut her photograph out of the National Geographic, if that was what they wanted? Still, she rather liked the elderly lady who asked about the heat. Yes, she agreed, it was indeed hot in the Sahara, and digging there was at times not much fun.

  She told an anecdote or two about others who had suffered in the heat: they liked the story of poor Father Julian, who had gone off to convert the Nubians in the sixth century and had found the climate so appalling that he had to sit from nine until four every day in caves full of water, undressed save for a damp linen garment. ‘Presumably,’ said Frances, ‘he accomplished his conversion before nine in the morning, when we used to dig. But he was better off than us in one respect—he could go on converting in the evening, but nobody can dig in the dark.’

  (As she spoke, a vision of herself, Derek Palmer, Bruce Wyatt and John Sinclair-Davies flashed across her mind, lying prostrate in their tent, in their underpants, drinking tepid coke and irritably playing poker. It had indeed been hot. Bruce had won fifteen pounds off them and Derek hadn’t been amused.)

  She also liked a man who asked about mining in the desert: he obviously knew what he was talking about, a geologist or engineer she thought, for he’d seen the Tassili rock paintings, and had visited the tin mines in Nigeria where some of the Nok terracottas had been found. Did she think, he asked, that the intensive geological surveys of the Sahara that were now being undertaken (he must have been on one himself, she thought) would unearth new archaeological treasures? Or make it, at least, easier for the archaeologists to unearth them? Or might there be a conflict between the two interests? It was a question too interesting to suggest an immediate answer: the desert’s a large place, she said, as I’m sure you know, and I don’t suppose anyo
ne’s very likely to sink an oil well through my next Saharan emporium, she said, playing for time, but you’re right, she said, as communications improved, for commercial reasons, as roads and vehicles improved, perhaps it would become easier for the archaeologist to explore possibilities that would previously have been too expensive to touch. Too expensive, and too hot, she said, smiling at the old lady who had inquired about the heat. The old lady nodded and smiled, glad that the relevance of her question had been so fully appreciated.

  One last question, said Professor Andersson, but flatteringly, there were two. One was a question from a professional, about the quality of her Arab diggers, and her relations with them, as a woman employer, which enabled her to give her usual chivalrous praise for the chivalry and courtesy of the Arabs who inhabited her particular area—well-known, they were, for the emancipation if not the domination of their women, and they had taken Frances, unveiled and bare legged, as a natural commander. In that area, the men it was that wore the veils. She was also able to praise, in a comic vignette, the brave and tireless Amos, of the tribe of the well-diggers, most of whom were now employed in oil-fields, who had been so loyal, so interested, so foolhardy, so inexhaustible. She often thought of Amos, who had tramped off one day, when the dig was nearing its end, with a nonchalant and gallant smile, and a few photographs of the site in his pocket. The Arabs had despised him, and treated him like a dog, which was a fact she never mentioned in lectures: he had accepted his role, and was puzzled to find himself as well paid as the others. She wondered what had become of him. She liked to pay her tribute at least.

  The final question was one that she could have done without, in a sense, for it was a question to which she always over-reacted. She was asked if she agreed with the conventional historical and archaeological estimate of the Phoenicians: was it true that they were ‘a reactionary, mercenary, cruel, inartistic and unsympathetic people, whose disappearance from history was a boon to mankind,’ as at least one eminent historian had stated? Frances always found this question alarming, because of the confusion of her own response. It was a fact that she had first been drawn to the Phoenicians because of their bad reputation: no race could be as bad as that, she had decided while still at Oxford, and had set off for Carthage in her early twenties to prove it. But alas, she had found it difficult to do so. They had been, notoriously, destroyed: all their graces and little domestic ways had gone, leaving only pots of sacrifice and Roman legends. It was with relief that she had moved further south, to peaceful trading outposts. So what could she do now, but say that we do not know enough about the Phoenicians to condemn them wholesale, as the Romans slaughtered them wholesale? She defended them by attacking the Romans, what else could one do? And they had left some good things. A dove, a lamp, a mask. The pink baths on the rocky point at Kerkouane. She had bathed naked there from the rocks. We must remember that there were Phoenicians and Phoenicians, she said. Some perhaps slaughtered their children: others perhaps refused. As some denounced their families in the last war, and some refused. As some collaborated, and some refused. (An inspired point, that, in this city.) And then she moved to her last defence, of her own men, the men of Tizouk, the men who passed through Tizouk. ‘What is wrong with trade?’ she inquired rhetorically. ‘Why should men not be merchants? Which is more civilized, a Roman legion, or a caravan of merchandise?’

  She sat down quickly, before anyone spoke of slaves. There were still slaves in the Sahara. One couldn’t really pretend her men had traded only in salt and pots and iron ware. But she tried to, just the same.

  She looked at her watch. Just after twelve. Drinks time. She could do with a drink. Her tooth had begun to throb again, slightly, now that the false excitement of lecturing had passed away. She remembered, suddenly, that horrible dream bathroom. Better not have any more visions of that nature, she told herself.

  The drinks were in the room behind the lecture hall, and people came up and shook her hand, and she downed a gin and tonic or two. She had hoped that the geologist would come and speak to her, as she would have liked to make some comparison between the excitement of finding ruins, and the excitement of finding oil, and to ask him if there also was an element of the accidental. Did one sometimes, with all that expensive equipment, blow up the wrong bit of desert? And how, anyway, did one know what was underneath? She would have liked to talk about these things to him, but he wasn’t there, clearly he hadn’t been invited for drinks, and she had to make do with a librarian, a representative of the British Council, a diplomat or two, and Galletti, who didn’t leave her elbow, and who in fact was making himself quite useful at her elbow, replenishing her glass, whenever it seemed to be empty. She was feeling quite euphoric. Now she would get a good lunch, then she could have a rest in the hotel after it, and then she could catch the six o’clock overnight train to Paris. Only two more lectures, and she’d be home. It was all perfectly satisfactory and she did rather like the way everyone kept telling her how marvellous she was.

  She was feeling slightly light headed by the time they set off for lunch, and did not at all object to the suggestion that they should repair to the restaurant on foot. It’s very near, Galletti assured her, firmly grabbing her arm and her brief-case. She let him have both. Why not? It was a pleasant walk, though steep, with winding circular streets sharply ascending, glimpses of churches and washing lines, and finally a narrow yellow stone staircase, with shallow steps, and vines drooping from the walls. It was a short cut but nevertheless, by the time they reached the top of it, the others had already arrived: there they were, Andersson and his wife, a couple of archaeologists, the Director of the Institute, and two or three others whom she didn’t recognize, and whose names, as they sat down at the long table overlooking the bay, flowed over her without leaving any mark. Either the invitations had been highly selective, or the average age of archaeologists in this country was very much lower than it was in her own, she thought, looking round the table: she was usually one of the youngest in any professional gathering, and here this was not noticeably so.

  She sat between Galletti and a British archaeologist called Hunter Wisbech who knew a lot of people she knew; opposite sat Andersson, and behind him was the window and the sea. They were high up, she now realized: it was always the case in these steep naval cities, a short steep walk and one was on the top. There were the boats again, and the white light, one of the most famous views in Europe. She thought of leafy Putney and the Thames. The table cloth was white, and there was a large quantity of glasses and cutlery, and some olives and radishes and things in little dishes. She began to nibble them. She was ravenously hungry. She liked all this kind of thing. Some people pretended not to; perhaps some people were so good that they really didn’t. (Karel, for instance, would hardly eat at all, and would certainly never be got into a place like this.) Galletti poured her a glass of wine, and asked what she thought of the view, which wasn’t what he meant. I like it, she said, happily. What a pity you have to leave this evening, why don’t you fly up tomorrow, he said. I quite like trains, she protested, and they talked about trains and journeys, and the terrible heat in Luxor. His subject was Egypt. They talked about Egypt, but not very seriously. He was an easygoing man, he wasn’t going to take her seriously or talk to her about work because he couldn’t believe in her because she was a woman. He thought she was a freak and would prefer a few silly jokes. He was right. He was an amusing little fellow with a face like an ageing elf, and pointed ears sticking through his short crinkly hair. He told her about an amusing quarrel with a driver in Cairo.

  Hunter, on the other side, turned out to be an old friend of Derek Palmer, and had talked about her much with Derek in her absence. He seemed to know quite a lot about her, rather accurately, and in other circumstances she might have felt rather uneasy at the knowledge that Derek had clearly recounted in some detail the night he and she had spent with the BBC man in Tunis, and the day when she had been so violently and embarrassingly ill in the back of the landrover.
But at the moment, with the wine flowing, and with delightful little morsels of shell fish and salad and mayonnaise and so forth following one another quickly upon her plate—it seemed to be her favourite kind of meal, a meal of endless hors d’oeuvres, or would she suddenly be called upon to tackle a huge steak or a whole chicken?—at the moment she didn’t much care, and even launched upon her own description of that famous illness. It was a real break-through in human relations for me, she said, for after all, after that, what worse could life hold, in what worse a light could one possibly appear? If people can take that, they can take anything. Derek was wonderful, she said warmly, absolutely wonderful, he held my hand right through and never once looked disgusted, and I kept explaining that we couldn’t stop because we were behind schedule and had to get there before the sun came up, but oh lord, I thought I was dying.

  But it was a good trip, after that, said Hunter.

  Yes, it had been a good trip. She’d recovered the next day—it hadn’t been typhoid at all, that time. I’m incredibly resilient, she said; yes, so Derek said, said Hunter. They had started work on good terms, her momentary illnesS had reinforced her authority, and they had become close, the four of them, sharing everything, sleeping in the same tent, hiding nothing. It had been companionable. Karel would have hated it, for he was a modest man; she sometimes wondered how he could ever have liked an immodest person like herself. She had become more and more immodest over the years; perhaps it was something to do with tent life and the curious kind of non-sexual group feeling that always evolved in a shared enterprise of that nature. She’d often argued with Karel (who inclined to be jealous, even of the past) that there was no sex at all in her feelings for Derek and John and Bruce, though there was evidently something that was physical—it’s friendship, or comradeliness, she would say lamely, but she’d never been able to make it sound very convincing, there weren’t any good words for what she was trying to describe—companionship, comradeship, fellowship, the very words made one wince, as did the stupid word ‘dig,’ which she avoided whenever possible. It wasn’t always possible. A friend of her who had read Classics with her at University, and who was possessed of an even greater semantic squeamishness, had abandoned a career in archaeology because of this problem, and had stuck to book-bound Ancient History instead. Frances herself was not such an extremist. Unlike pedantic Karel, she recognized the existence of things that lacked good words to describe them. And she was not easily deterred.