Sacred Ilios, built upon the plain …
Philip would never tire of the view of what, to him, was nothing short of a holy place. Hills erupted from the landscape in the far-off distance, but it was the plains in the valley of Scamander that fired his imagination. Dörpfeld felt confident that the level on which they were currently focused—Troy VI—housed the city of Homer’s epic, and Philip could not have agreed with more fervent enthusiasm. The experience of being there, of touching the walls beneath which Achilles had fought, nearly overwhelmed the Englishman. On rest days, he would hike the distance between the ruins and the sea and try to imagine how it had looked, all those centuries ago, with camps teeming with tens of thousands of Greek soldiers filling the now-empty space. Occasionally, he would dig on his own, no longer afraid menacing individuals would jump him should he find anything of import.
His confidence proved unwise. Two weeks before the end of the season, he received a visitor in his tent, long after everyone in the camp had succumbed to slumber. Hakan, tall and lanky in the robes of a nomad, a turban wrapped around his head, crouched over him, brandishing a long knife and holding it close to Philip’s throat.
“I know what you have,” he said. “And I will not rest until I have retrieved it for Demir.”