He kept cool by counting the forward movements of his right hand and by the time the skull frowned down on him he reckoned he had come about twenty-five feet. More clearly than ever he saw how dramatic would be a photograph of that angry frown and moved his head and angled the light until he got what he considered the perfect elevation for the camera. He knew he was playing with time, playing with his own precious discoveries and even did a little more reassuring research in the central chamber, before he stepped into the east chamber and flashed his torch on its east wall. There they were, waiting for him in a row, with that remarkable head in its pelvic girdle like a collapsed Buddha. Was it this conjunction of brain and pelvis, soul and sex that had induced the notion of a smile, of ineffable, final irony? With the ultimate grey bone saying, Behold! The notion no more than flicked him, but it had its heightening effect. It was that which was not seen that lived on! But he was moving forward and the beam was searching the wall behind; it steadied, went slowly from stone to overlapping stone, up to the top of the curve, and down the other side. There was no doubt about it: here was a corbelled arch which had been filled in with carefully built-up stones! Subsequently filled in, of course, by a later hand . . . . Why?
His excitement bewildered him and his breath panted. It’s enough! Wait till tomorrow! . . . but he could not wait. Take a photograph of it or they won’t believe you! He got down on his knees, laid the torch on the ground, and tried to insert his hands under the girdle at opposing sides in order to lift the lot away without disturbing the arrangement. But the bones underneath tilted and slipped and the skull rocked in the girdle, first to one side with a hollow nok! then back again nok! then more quickly nok! nok! nok! in a laughter so surprisingly loud that he all but dropped the lot. At the same moment his conscience attacked him, for he was destroying the original disposition of the bones without having made even a note. On his knees he stilled the hollow laughter and regrouped the bones, his fingers slippery with sweat. My God, that laughter had been terrific! He refused to glance at his audience as his hands went flying through his pockets, but all they found was an envelope. Slitting it at either end, he opened it out into a fair-sized rectangle of clean paper, and with the spare stub of pencil which he always carried in a waistcoat pocket he began making a drunken sketch . . . .
Rough but ‘twill serve! he decided, gathering reassurance as he folded the envelope and put it in his inside breast pocket. Then he lifted the skull out of the girdle and put it to one side, before also removing the girdle and the bones, and stood back a pace to consider his method of attack.
There were no uprights facing him in this back wall. The two huge uprights, which helped to support the immense lintel directly overhead, were flush with the opposing walls and came up to the corners of the back wall. But the tops of the uprights were not nicely squared off, they were visibly peaked, and the lintel also rested on this built-up back wall. If the corbelled arch retained still its original strength, then he could knock out the stones which had been subsequently built into it without any fear of a general collapse; but if it hadn’t, then “flat as a pancake” would be a modest simile for anyone upon whom the lintel dived.
Every stone was stuck fast and immovable. With the hammer-stone upon which he had stumbled, he was about to tap the top stone under the apex of the arch when the light, close up, showed that it was chipped. After careful examination, he decided that this very hammer-stone had been used to drive home the final stone and had chipped it in the process.
It shook time together. It telescoped it into a phantasy that was yet as real as the sharp taps with which a new human hand now tried to loosen the chipped stone by alternate blows at either side.
In and on that wall nothing moved except his own shadow, which sometimes magnified the close-cropped pointed beard to a warring pertinacity of the age of Fionn and Cuchulain, that last Heroic Age before the coming of the news of Christ. With the sharp acrid of brimstone in his nostrils, he but toiled the harder; sweat rolled from his brows as he swayed and struck, swayed and struck. Sometimes he staggered back and cast a look at the bulging lintel so short a space from his bared head; but the sight did no more than exhilarate him, drive him on. His eyes were beginning to smart, his ears to buzz, when just perceptibly the struck stone moved. Nothing more happened; the chamber waited. Within two minutes, he drew the stone out and the arch held, the lintel moved not. He stood panting like one who had run a long race.
Stone after stone he withdrew, dropping them on the floor behind him. The arch was little more than three feet in height and less in width, and in no time the opening gaped. Picking up the torch from the side of the wall whither he had shifted it for safety, he turned its beam on the dark cavity, and in an instant the darkness vanished and the cavity became a magical cabinet holding plumb in its centre a shapely urn.
Had he at last stumbled on that dish or vessel called the Holy Grail it could not have taken his breath from him more. His eyes drew nearer; it was a cinerary urn, an urn for the ashes or burnt bones left after a cremation, like that urn into which the Trojans had gathered the bones of glorious Hector, tamer of horses. But it was not made of gold, nor yet, more wonderful, of clay. It was carven in one solid piece out of stone. He touched it: steatite. But the nearest place for steatite, as he knew, was the Shetland Islands or County Donegal.
And what was a burial urn doing here? Neolithic man of the chambered cairns was not in the habit of cremating his dead. Cremation came later. Nor was the urn inverted; it sat upright and uncovered. Fully eighteen inches high and over a foot wide at the lip; without panel or overhanging collar, it had a clean elegance; from the lip its outline curved gently in and out again to a shoulder some three inches down, then sheered finely to a six-inch base. He brought the torch to the rim and looked in. But what he saw was not the grey of burnt bones. Straightening himself to come better at the matter, his head hit the top of the arch so sharply that for a little time he swayed, dizzy and sick, and with the extraordinary delusion that a figure had moved somewhere within the chamber or within his head. But he never took his eyes off the urn, and when his vision cleared he got to his knees and lifted a hand up and in.
The hand drew forth a thin metal collar or gorget of what was, to him, the lunula type, for it had exactly the crescentic shape of the jet necklace which he had found in the cist.
But the metal was pure gold.
It was not a unique find; five—perhaps six—of these had been found in all Scotland, but, with its engraved patterns, he could see that it was a distinguished, a lovely specimen.
His shaking hand went in again and brought forth a thin gold disc, like a miniature shield, several inches across, and patterned finely within concentric rings.
The next dip brought to the beam an earring some four inches long, curved like a scoop or miniature flower-basket, with the handle in the middle. It, too, was of gold.
As his hand went in once more, he could hear the trampling surge of blood in his ears, for he knew now that he had found a hoard of gold, that he was not only discovering treasure trove but creating archaeological history in his own land. Hoards of bronze had been found, but never a hoard of gold. His hand brought forth a penannular gold bracelet—with a second bracelet dangling from it, swinging, swinging towards the opening and just about to slip through when he made a grab at it and caught it, but the lunula slipped from the fingers of his other hand and for a moment he was entangled and confused; as the torch fell to the floor he cried out and was hoarsely echoed. But the light did not vanish. In a mad urgency, as though the spirits of the cairn like fiends were about to jump on him, he began dropping the ornaments, clasped against his breast, back into the urn, so that he could lift the urn out, the whole urn; which he should have done at first, in order to have the chamber in front of him, in order to have time to examine the incredible riches, this colossal find, and to defeat what might spring at his throat. Unaware of the knocks and thrusts of the stones, he got his arms round it. Staggering he turned—and faced the figure which had walked out of the monolith.
It stood beyond the beam of the torch, a solid darkness, on the sway, with dark-brown face and a glint of eyes. Sounds came from it of breath passing harshly in the throat. “Get out!” Grant yelled, for now he felt it coming upon him to envelop and crush; saw the wing-like lift of the arms. “Get out!” he screamed with all the fighting wrath that was in him.
As the claw-hands came into the shaft of light, he side stepped and staggered. The arms followed the hands, the shoulders, the face. It was Foolish Andie!
Dizzied he yelled out of a face that was a sheer flame of intolerant wrath.
But the hands came on, came at the urn; the eyes gleamed red, the mouth frothed and jabbered, and the features moved in an idiot’s smile.
Because of the urn he could not use his head to butt, but he did his wild mad best. Andie grunted and doubled over him, but his hands kept going round the urn. In a tearing effort at a side step, the archaeologist’s feet hit the loose stones and he went over backwards, with urn and Andie on top of him. His head encountered stone with a sickening whack and life went out like light from a smashed bulb.