V

Tombs and Ancient Mariners

BREAKFAST WAS AT 07.30 and work at the dig started at 08.30. Marryat, interested in contemporary man as well as in the past, thought how alike were the groups assembled for an archaeological dig, whatever part of the world they might be in. Some individuals would get up, appear for the start of breakfast shaved and tidy and enjoy a leisurely meal before starting the day. Others would stay in bed to the last possible moment, throw on some clothes, gulp down a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal and go off to work in a rush. Whatever the matutinal habits of individuals, however, time-keeping for work was usually good.

Dr Arbolent had gone off to London overnight to prepare for his Press conference, and the circus of reporters, photographers and TV crews had, for the moment, departed with him. There was an air of slight relaxation about the camp.

Marryat himself belonged to the decently-and-in-order breakfast school. Armitage, he suspected, was by nature a last minute getter-up, but that morning, in deference to his new colleague, he was ready with Marryat for breakfast at 07.30. After breakfast they walked to the Great Barrow. Juliet, having done her stint of canteen duty, came with them, for her first day of actual work on the site.

It was a beautiful morning. The barrow was on the crest of a rise overlooking the Vale of Pewsey, and the view as they walked to it was breathtaking: the Downs, dotted here and there with clumps of trees, rolling away into the Vale, the whole landscape set in a great arc of sky.

‘I’ve read the newspapers, of course,’ Marryat said, ‘but, as I told you, I’ve been away in Greece. I really know very little about the actual discoveries here. What, exactly, has turned up?’

‘Well, my own field is Post-Roman,’ said Armitage, ‘so I’m no sort of expert on the Megalithic period. And I don’t know a lot anyway, because before his announcement in the Sunday Examiner, Dr Arbolent was curiously secretive about things. We’ve been digging a hitherto unexcavated section of the barrow, and come across a number of unsuspected burial chambers, very much older than those previously known. The barrow lies roughly east and west. The west end, with an impressive entrance portico, is well known, and is in all the reference books. It gives onto what I understand to be a typical series of passage graves, the passage ending in a blank wall of apparently solid earth. Dr Arbolent began working on this wall last year, and found that behind the earth bank was a piece of dry-stone walling. We have cut through this wall and found another passage, leading to a whole new series of burial chambers. They seem to have been disturbed or robbed in antiquity, for apart from some rather jumbled skeletal remains, they were mostly empty, with next to nothing in the way of grave-goods. Dr Arbolent thinks that the wall was erected in antiquity to seal off the older tombs from the western graves, perhaps when some new dynasty succeeded whatever group had used the eastern burial chambers.

‘The most important finds are some inscriptions and shallow carvings on some of the stones in the tomb walls. It is staggering to think of writing in Britain early in the second millennium, or even, Dr Arbolent thinks, belonging to some period in the third. I can’t pretend to read the script, but Dr Arbolent has identified it as proto-Phoenician, suggesting that instead of the Phoenicians giving an alphabet to the western world, some race here in Britain gave it to the Phoenicians. There are four tomb-carvings so far discovered, representational outlines of some kind of seagoing boat. But you can see them for yourself in a few minutes.’

The barrow site was roped off, with a watchman on duty in a little wooden hut. He recognised Armitage and let him through the barrier, but before Marryat and Juliet could go in they had to sign a declaration, endorsed by Armitage, that they were there for the purposes of bona fide private study and would not attempt to photograph anything without permission. ‘All this is a very great nuisance,’ Armitage said, ‘but it’s been forced on us by the hordes of sightseers we’re having.’

*

The barrow was lit by electricity from a generator, and as they were ahead of the work party from the camp, Armitage had to start the generator before they went in. It was a high-grade outfit, and Marryat was impressed by the quality of the lighting. The way to the eastern tombs was clear of rubble and Armitage led them to the newly excavated chambers. The farthest was still half-full of earth. ‘Dr Arbolent thinks that there are still more tombs beyond this one,’ Armitage explained. ‘We’re cutting into that wall now – the team will be on clearing out this mess this morning.’

They left the work-in-progress and went into one of the now tidily cleared chambers. The entrance, through the passage wall, was barely three feet high, and they had to crawl through it. Inside was a little, narrow room, about four feet wide by seven feet long, and just under six feet in height. Marryat, who was about five feet ten inches could just stand upright, but Armitage, who was six feet, had to stoop. Juliet, at five feet seven inches, was more comfortable, but the little room was fairly crowded by the three of them.

‘There’s one of the inscriptions,’ Armitage said, ‘and there’s one of the boat carvings on the facing wall.’

Marryat studied the inscription first. It was cut in letters about one inch high, on a single slab of sarsen forming part of the dry-stone walling. The characters were sharp, and remarkably clear. ‘It’s certainly not unlike an early Northern Semitic script – say Lebanon-Phoenician,’ he said, ‘but it has curious traces of Italian-Greek. I would say Umbrian rather than Etruscan. You can see that it must be read from right to left, like modern Arabic, which is a characteristic of early Umbrian. But it’s a very odd mixture, and the suggested date is, as you say, staggering.’

‘Can you read it?’ Armitage asked.

‘After a fashion. There are two words, Lauchme, although it appears to be written here as Lauchmis, which is Etruscan for “king”, and Thefars, which appears to be a name. There is a well-known Etruscan name Thefarie, which occurs in an inscription near Lake Trasimene, but here, like the first word, it seems to end in a sibilant. The occurrence of these sibilants is interesting, for early Phoenician was full of sibilants, most of which were abandoned when the alphabet was adapted for Greek. The puzzle here is that the letters are not any normal Phoenician-Greek but seem to be an admixture of much later Italian scripts.’

‘Is this writing really 4,000 years old, Mr Marryat?’ Juliet asked.

‘Dr Marryat,’ Armitage corrected her.

‘Gee, I’m sorry. I just didn’t know.’

Marryat patted her shoulder. ‘Continue not to know,’ he said. ‘Most people call me Tony, anyway. As for your question, I can’t possibly say without making a long comparative study of the inscriptions.’

‘How would you date this burial chamber?’ Armitage asked.

‘That’s certainly more my line. I’d say early, very early – I wouldn’t quarrel with a date well back in the second millennium. It’s a pity there are no grave-goods. But you say there were skeletal remains?’

‘Yes, there was a considerable heap of bones, and, I think, at least four skulls. They’ve been sent for radio-carbon analysis.’

‘Well, that should help. Of course, what you can never tell is how long after the construction of the tomb burials took place – they may have been spread over centuries. From the method of walling, and general design of the chamber, I’d say it was not later than around 2000–1800 BC – at least 1,000 years older than the burials at the western entrance. It’s a most interesting and important find.’

‘What do you make of the picture?’

Marryat studied the shallow carving for some time before replying. It was an outline drawing, with the primitive simplicity of a child’s work, of a single-masted sailing boat. It had no touch of perspective, and it was hard to make out whether the sail, attached to some sort of yard, was hung square-rigged across the mast, or set fore-and-aft. On looking at the picture closely, the apparent simplicity disappeared, to reveal a sureness of touch, both in drawing and in stone-cutting, that betokened artistry of a high order. Three slightly wavy lines beneath the boat gave a wonderful impression of the sea, with a stark economy of drawing. The hull had something of the lines of an Arab dhow, and there seemed to be a steering oar. Marryat, who had done a fair amount of sailing, thought that it looked remarkably seaworthy. ‘It’s extraordinarily effective,’ he said at last, ‘but the period is utterly baffling. The drawing has a touch of primitive cave-painting, of a period long before mankind was capable of building a tomb like this, or a boat like that. It also has a touch of almost modern impressionism – with the absence of perspective employed deliberately for effect. The craftsmanship is superb.’

‘This is probably the best picture of a boat as a boat,’ Armitage said, ‘but it doesn’t show much detail. Dr Arbolent thinks that one of the other pictures suggests clinker-construction with overlapping planks. The other two boat pictures seem to me fairly rough as boats, but Dr Arbolent regards them as the most important of the lot because they show a curious superstructure rising above the deck. He thinks that this represents a cargo of great stones being brought by sea for megalith-building. You’ll see them in the next tombs.’

‘It’s standing prehistory on its head all right,’ said Marryat, ‘but the correlations at the moment seem to me grotesque. The script is bewildering, and the picture even more so. But it’s astonishingly interesting, and I’m immensely grateful to you for showing it all to me.’

*

The work party had arrived. Armitage took Marryat and Juliet briefly into the other fully excavated chambers, and then they went to the workface. ‘I’m in charge of things here, and it’s rather tricky work, so you must excuse me,’ Armitage said. He had things well organised. Two of the party were carefully attacking the wall with small picks. Others were shovelling earth and rubble into barrows, labelling each barrow with a card, numbered and dated, and filled in with a note of the precise location in the chamber from which the barrow-load came. ‘The barrows are wheeled outside for sifting,’ Armitage explained. ‘Everything that isn’t earth is labelled and kept for examination later. Dr Arbolent does this himself.’

The pickaxe crew were cutting a narrow opening in the wall. As the work advanced, timber baulks were brought in to support the roof around the opening, each baulk painted with a code number. ‘We prepare them beforehand in the workshop at the camp,’ Armitage explained. ‘We measure approximately the length of timber required for each job, cut it, and give it a code number. Then, when it’s needed, it can be erected quickly, without having to have much packing.’

Marryat and Juliet, having no definite jobs allotted to them, joined the barrow team, wheeling filled and labelled barrows from the chamber to the sifting party outside. It was hard work, and they were not sorry when knocking-off time came. Armitage congratulated both of them – he was clearly pleased by Marryat’s readiness to abandon status and undertake a purely manual job. ‘Dr Marryat knows his way about a dig better than any of us,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to find another job for you, Juliet. As a matter of fact, we’re one short in the workshop today. I wonder if you’d report there after dinner and give a hand?’

As they walked back to the camp, Marryat said to Armitage, ‘Would you mind if I didn’t come back to the dig this afternoon? I’d rather like to go to Avebury to see the place where Paul died.’

‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. But I can’t very well come with you, because I’m needed at the dig. And you won’t be able to see much, because the site is still under strict police guard.’

‘I understand that. And I’m sure that you will understand that I’d really rather be alone. Paul was an old friend, and I feel I’m making a sort of pilgrimage.’

*

At the camp they separated to wash and clean themselves up. Marryat went to the telephone box and arranged to meet Revers at Avebury at three o’clock.

*

After the work party had gone back to the dig, Marryat gave the young man on Mess duty a hand with the washing up – he was glad to see that it was a man today, and that there was no sex discrimination about putting women in the Mess, a principle of fair shares that he practised scrupulously in his own digs. With the washing up out of the way, he got his car and drove to Avebury. There were archaeological maps in the Mess hut of various sites in the vicinity, and he’d already located on the map the stone that fell on Paul – it was numbered Stone 29. He left his car in the village car park and walked to the stone. Revers was there before him and came to meet him as he walked up.

‘So you managed everything all right?’ Revers said.

‘Yes. It wasn’t difficult, and I got away quite naturally. But it was necessary to put in a morning at the dig first. I’m glad I did that – and it’s given me a lot to think about.’

‘Well, come and think about some more.’

They walked round the fallen stone. Revers said nothing, and Marryat found himself near to tears. ‘Where, exactly, was Paul found?’ he asked.

‘He was almost completely covered by the stone, with his head lying inwards, towards the base of the stone.’

‘I’ve seen megaliths fall from time to time – and helped to re-erect them. They don’t, as a rule, fall suddenly: they overbalance, teeter for a moment or so, and then subside, the earth at the base acting as a brake. Paul was quick-witted, and fit. It seems extraordinary that he didn’t jump out of the way. But, of course, you can’t generalise. I suppose this stone did collapse suddenly, though I don’t see why it should. And how on earth would Paul come to have his head lying towards the stone? I should have thought it would have knocked him over backwards.’

Revers did not reply directly. They walked to the back of the stone, and he indicated the pit. ‘This is the shaft leading to the underground chamber,’ he said. ‘The excavation is not as Paul Clayton left it – his work had not gone far. Most of the digging was our work afterwards.’

‘May I go down the shaft?’

‘Of course. It’s quite shallow. We went down by a ladder belonging to Dr Arbolent’s expedition. The wooden ladder there now was fixed by the police. You’ll need a torch.’

Revers had brought a powerful lantern torch. He gave this to Marryat, and Marryat climbed down. The removal of the urn and the little pile of loose stone plaques found with it had left the chamber empty. Marryat shone the torch over the walling, and studied an inscription cut on the face of one of the wall stones. It was in a script similar to that in the Great Barrow tombs, and also seemed to indicate a name and title. The title here appeared to be ‘Zilats’ and the name ‘Porsna’. There was nothing else to see, and he climbed up again.

‘What do you make of it?’ Revers asked.

‘At the moment, nothing. Burials under or near a megalith are not uncommon – they were sacred stones, and it was like burying somebody in a cathedral. But walled tombs underneath a stone like this are rare. The inscription is quite baffling – so are those at Wansdyke. I was looking at one there this morning, which appeared to commemorate a certain Lauchmis, near enough to the Etruscan word Lauchme which means king. This inscription commemorates a Zilats, again nearly similar to the Etruscan Zilath, who was roughly similar to the Roman consul, or chief officer of state. The similarity, of course, may be deceptive, though Dr Arbolent obviously attaches much importance to it as indicating a proto-Etruscan background to the people of this culture. I find the clash of periods simply bewildering. If you were not a policeman I’d say I don’t believe it. As it is, I say only that I can make no comment.’

‘Perhaps I don’t believe it either,’ Revers said slowly. ‘But I have only instinct to go on. You have knowledge and training.’

‘Better leave it at instinct for the moment. Ah, here’s the famous nine-spoked wheel!’ Standing on the lip of the shaft, Marryat leaned over the heel of the fallen stone. Like the inscriptions and other carvings, the outline of the wheel was cut fairly shallowly in the stone. ‘Is it as significant as Dr Arbolent says?’ Revers asked.

‘It certainly signifies something, but just what I don’t know yet. Because a wheel is circular, and can be used to symbolise so much of human life, there’s always been a lot of folklore about wheels. Some of it is nonsense. For instance, it’s popularly supposed that wheels should always have an even number of spokes, but odd numbers are not uncommon, even in antiquity. Nine spokes are unusual, and Arbolent is quite right in saying that the best-known nine-spoked wheel is from an Etruscan chariot of the sixth century BC. I’m less sure if the nine-spoked wheel was really a general symbol of Etruscan culture. And again, the periods are baffling. This stone was erected not later than 1600 BC, perhaps some centuries earlier, and since the carving is near the base of the stone and buried with it, presumably it was cut before the stone was set up – incidentally, it’s worn remarkably well for something buried for near 4,000 years. You have a gap of at least 1,000 years between this wheel symbol and the known Etruscan wheel. Arbolent is entitled to his views, but it seems to me that he is using facts to fit his theories rather than devising theories from the facts. But that’s his business. Hullo, what’s this?’ Marryat pointed to the hole that perforated the heel of the stone a little below the outline of the wheel.

‘It’s just a hole,’ said Revers. ‘It goes right through the stone – I’ve pushed a bit of wire through.’

‘It’s very puzzling indeed. If it’s natural, it’s most unusual, for, as I’ve said, these megaliths were sacred stones, and a stone with a hole through it would be considered defaced or deformed in some way, and would almost certainly not have been erected in a stone circle. It’s possible that it’s an artificial boring, made to take a rope during the process of erection, but again, that would be most unusual. And it would be a formidable job to bore through a stone of this thickness without a modern drill.’ He peered at the hole, and shone Revers’s torch into it. ‘Yet it is remarkably even for a natural hole.’

Revers had not given any thought to the hole since finding it. Now he, too, studied it closely. It was still half-full of earth, and this made it look smaller than it was. Cleaned out, it would be somewhat over an inch in diameter. It seemed to run straight through the stone, which rather suggested human boring: water-worn holes, where some core of softer material than the surrounding stone has gradually been washed away, tend to be erratic, following the vein of soluble matter and not a straight path.

‘May I make a suggestion?’ Marryat said. ‘I take it that the police are still in charge here – that the site hasn’t been handed back to Arbolent?’

Revers nodded.

‘Then I think you should cover the exposed base of the stone with tarpaulin to protect it from rain, and have a very thorough scientific examination made of the hole, its edges, and the earth inside it. Look particularly for traces of tungsten on the walls. If you take scrapings, the presence of tungsten can sometimes be determined spectroscopically –that would show whether a tungsten-steel bit has been used to bore it. I strongly suspect the antiquity of that hole. What it’s there for, I haven’t the least idea, but it’s alien to the rest of its surroundings, and I feel that we should find out what we can about it. What happened to the cremation urn?’

‘Dr Arbolent took it away with him – it was photographed for the newspaper, as you probably saw. I had no reason to connect it with Paul Clayton’s death in any way, and I’d been instructed not to interfere with archaeological investigations.’

‘Quite. I’d be interested to see it though. What did you yourself think about it?’

‘I didn’t think anything very much. It was rather like a big, two-handled flowerpot, with one handle broken. Dr Arbolent said –’ Revers referred to his notebook – ‘that it related to an early Villanovan culture.’

‘Yes. Villanovan is the term used for a pre-Etruscan culture in Tuscany. The burial of cremated ashes in earthenware jars was a customary Villanovan practice, and one handle of the jar seems frequently to have been broken, apparently deliberately, presumably to symbolise some aspect of death. But the periods don’t fit. Villanovan funeral rites were practised in Italy around 900–750 BC. This was a burial apparently 1,000 years earlier in England. It’s a weird mixture of cultures. If you say that one was the prototype of the other, it’s extraordinary to find the later practices cropping up in the earlier culture in almost their final form. I don’t begin to understand it.’

*

The Sunday Examiner believed in exploiting success. Having profited magnificently from a not very large – by its standards – investment in Dr Arbolent’s dig, its management wanted to move on quickly to the next phase of the adventure. This was Dr Arbolent’s projected voyage in a reconstructed proto-Phoenician ship to show how the blue stones from the Prescelly Mountains in Wales could have been shipped across the Bristol Channel for Stonehenge. When Dr Arbolent had first suggested this the editor had been cautious: shipbuilding was likely to be much more expensive than financing a dig with most of the work done by unpaid students. But that was before the brilliant discoveries at Wansdyke and Avebury. Now everything was different. Dr Arbolent had proved himself worth backing, and the whole world was reading about the Sunday Examiner’s triumph in helping to bring to light a wholly unsuspected ancient civilisation in Britain. No expense need now be spared: the ship must be built and the voyage made, as soon as possible, while the public was still avid for news of Britain’s extraordinary prehistoric achievements. Dr Arbolent’s press conference was called to announce his plans.

‘We are here,’ he told the large gathering assembled in the conference room of London’s newest and most glittering hotel, ‘to discuss what may be called Phase Two in vindicating my belief that most of the major arts of civilisation originated in the west. Through the far-sighted generosity of the Sunday Examiner I have been able to show conclusively that alphabet-writing was being used in England at least 1,000 years before its appearance in the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, that writing is fundamentally the same as the alphabetical script hitherto attributed to the Phoenicians, and later adapted for the Greek and Latin alphabets. It is my belief – I think I can say that it is now proved – that the mystery of the origins of the Etruscan people has been solved. They came into Italy neither from the east, nor from the north: they came from England, being a branch of the same race that went also to Tyre to teach seafaring to the people there who became known to history as the Phoenicians.

‘Too many archaeologists, ladies and gentlemen, have ignored the sea. Early in my own career I decided to add the study of naval architecture to the subjects more customarily associated with archaeology, and it is this study which has enabled me to interpret the discoveries I have made. I have shown that the arts of civilisation did come from the west: that was Phase One. It is now necessary to show how they were transported from the west to the world of the Middle East. The answer is the sea.

‘Much ingenuity has been put into trying to solve the problem of how the blue stones at Stonehenge, which originate in the Prescelly Mountains of West Wales, could have been brought to Salisbury Plain. We have been assured that they must have been taken overland to the South Wales shore of the Bristol Channel and then shipped across the Channel on rafts. Ladies and gentlemen, all this is nonsense. In the tomb-carvings of Wansdyke Great Barrow I have found pictures showing how they were brought from Wales. The natural clue is in the River Gwaun, which offers a good, river valley route of less than ten miles from the hills to Fishguard Bay. There was no need to haul them to South Wales at all. From the place that is now called Fishguard they were shipped by sea – in ships, not rafts – right around the coast of West Wales, round Strumble Head and St David’s Head, to the tidal limits of the Avon, where Bristol now is. Thence they may well have been rafted up the Avon. You may ask how I know this. Ladies and gentleman, the tomb pictures have shown it to me! There, you can see ships as advanced as anything the Phoenicians ever had – almost as advanced as the Arab dhow – actually loaded with great stones! There can be no possible doubt of this.

‘I have the authority of the Sunday Examiner to tell you that, in the furtherance of knowledge, that newspaper has acquired a boatbuilding yard near Fishguard, and that the whole resources of this yard are now devoted to building a boat, to my design, that is a replica of the boats shown in the tomb pictures. The vessel will be ready before the end of this summer. When she is launched, I shall load her with a cargo of blue stones and sail her from Fishguard to Bristol. That, surely, must satisfy any doubts that old-fashioned archaeologists may still have about the interpretation of my discoveries. I am happy to add that I have obtained the permission of Lady Penelope Cawprint, the wife of the distinguished chairman of the Sunday Examiner, to give the boat her name. She will be called Lady Penelope.’

Dr Arbolent sat down to a degree of applause quite unusual at press conferences. His story really had touched people’s imaginations, and the newspaper-reading public had their minds taken off current problems by the comforting reflection that although Britain might have lost an empire she had found – or rather, Dr Arbolent had found for her – an unexpectedly magnificent past. He answered a number of questions with – for him – exceptional affability, and the journalists were then supplied with a useful handout, prepared by the Features Staff of the Sunday Examiner, containing a summary of Dr Arbolent’s theories, and drawings of the Lady Penelope. She was to be some sixty feet on the waterline, with a beam of twenty feet, giving her a displacement (Thames Measurement) of about eighty-five tons. She was to have a single mast, rigged with a lateen sail.