DIGGING.
The search for ancient things below ground appeals to most minds, but
especially to those of women, who are moved even more than men by
curiosity and the passion of hazard. But few whose interest it excites
seem to understand how rare are the high lights of success and how
many the low lights of failure in a faithful picture of a digger’s
life. When I have been presented by a vague hostess as a “digger in
the Levant,” and we are between fish and flesh, my neighbour, glancing
at my hands, will usually ask if my calling is a painful one in
those climes. I reply that I dig _per alios_, and (with some shame)
that, myself, I could not ply pick or spade anywhere for half a day.
Incontinently she protests she could wish for nothing better than
to lead such a life as mine. Whereupon, as best I may, I change the
subject, not in fear she be as good as her word, but despair of giving
her or any other inexpert person in that company and amid dinner table
talk an understanding of the real nature of the digger’s trade.
Indeed it is of such infinite variety, according to where, when, and
why it happens to be followed, that generalities, even hedged about by
all the caution of a leisured writer, are vanity: and the best I can
do for you, my dinner partner, and for others who have felicitated
me on the fascinating holidays which I spend in the Near East, is to
describe briefly and, if I can, faithfully, the course of my two latest
excavations. They were both typical of the digger’s life, the first
carried out among the foundations of a great Hellenic shrine, the
second in a cemetery of Egypt; and both were fortunate and fruitful
beyond common measure. The one began in the summer during whose early
days I had been at Cyrene (brief respite I had that year!), the other
fell eighteen months later, and to each I was commissioned by the
British Museum.
* * * * *
Wood, the discoverer of the site of the great Artemisium at Ephesus,
achieved the all but impossible in lighting on its pavement, which
had been buried under twenty feet of silt, and performed a feat not
less to his credit in opening out thereafter an area as large as the
floor-space of a great cathedral. But when he left the site in 1874,
he had manifestly not found all that remained of the most famous of
ancient temples; nor of what he did indeed find would he ever compose
a sufficient record. For thirty years doubts remained which the first
Museum in the world, owner of the site, could not well refuse to
resolve; and to resolve them I was sent to Ephesus in the last days of
September, 1904.
The site looked then as hopeless as an ancient site can look--an
immense water-logged pit choked with a tangled brake of thorns and
reeds; and when axe and billhook and fire had cleared the jungle, it
looked, if possible, more hopeless still. The shallow surface waters,
however, when no longer sheltered by leafy canopies, dried quickly
under the early October sun, and I got to work with little delay on
the platform of the temple which King Croesus had helped to build.
A hundred men were enrolled, and every local means of carriage was
pressed into their service. I got mule-carts and horse-carts, asses
with panniers and asses with sacks, barrows and close-woven country
baskets to be borne by boys. A central way was cut through the hillocks
of marble, and from right and left of it broken stuff was sent up the
ramps to dumping-grounds on the plain. But we were only reopening an
earlier explorer’s clearance, and could hope for little strange or
new among his leavings. Not twice in a ten hour day did a scrap of
carved or written stone, unseen or unsaved by Wood, reward our painful
levering of tumbled blocks and sifting of stony soil. A common ganger
with a hundred unskilled navvies could have served science as well as
we.
As the polyglot labourers--half a dozen races chattered in the
gangs--learned the ways of their taskmaster and became handy with their
tools, the daily round grew ever more same, and each hour longer and
emptier than the last. The beginning of an ambitious excavation is
inspirited by an interest independent of results achieved or hoped.
There are the local nature of the soil and the local peculiarities
of the ancient remains to be learned: you have new and unhandy human
instruments to temper, sharpen, and set: confidence must be gained and
community of hope engendered. The days will go briskly for a week, two
weeks, three weeks, according to the difficulties to be overcome. Then,
if the instinct of the gamester be your mainstay in the digging trade,
you will begin to crave winnings or, at least, the fair chance of them.
Should there be some well-guarded kernel of the site, some presumed
lode of antiquarian ore, you will endure still, performing hopefully
the monotonous tasks of the digger’s duty, while pick and shovel and
knife are cutting onwards or downwards towards the hidden treasure;
and if you can make your men comprehend and share your hope, the work
will go forward well enough, with a fillip now and again from trifling
loot found by the way. But if hope is deferred overlong, yet more if
you have never held it confidently or never held it at all, your lot
will insensibly become one of the dreariest that can fall to man. The
germ of your hopelessness, infecting your labourers, will be developed
more virulently in them. Their toil will lack life, and their tasks be
scamped and vamped; their eyes will see not or their hands will not
spare the evanescent relics of the past, while tired voices of their
taskmasters rise and fall over their listless labour.
Many excavations I have seen--most indeed--go forward thus for a
longer or a shorter time: and, since sometimes they cannot go forward
otherwise, I have almost envied that sort of scientific excavator,
generally Teuton, who seems to feel little or nothing of the gamester’s
goad, and plods on content to all appearance with his maps or his plans
or his notes or nothing in particular, that might not be done better in
his German study; while his labourers, clearing monuments that could
not be missed in the dark by the worst trained observer in the world,
shovel earth and stones like machines day in and day out for months
together, and send them down a tramway under an overseer’s eye. I say
I have almost envied his content; but I always remember in time that,
in digging, you only find if you care to find, and according to the
measure of your caring; or, as a famous and fortunate explorer once
put it, you find what you go out to find; and reckoning the momentary
joy of success against the slow sorrow of failure, I rate the quality
of the first so immeasurably more worth than the quantity of the last,
that I am consoled. If lack of luck vexes the gamester’s soul, it is to
him that the rare prizes of hazard most often fall.
October passed away thus, and November was on the wane; but no prize
had appeared to lighten our weary days. Already we had pierced the
platform at several points to meet with nothing better below it than
sand and water. What, in reason, was to be hoped above it, where
diggers from Justinian’s day to Wood’s had rummaged and robbed? We
cajoled despair with the most insignificant discoveries--with patches
of bare pavement, with scraps of Roman inscriptions chipped out of
masses of Byzantine concrete, with a few sherds of Greek vases and
broken terra-cottas sifted out of the bedding of the temple-steps built
in Alexander’s day. In a world where the absolute is never attained,
the relative, thank heaven! can always please, and Nature, of her
pity, with a little of your contributory good will, will blind you to
relativity.
No other antiquarian work could be done elsewhere to fill the days.
The rest of the site of Ephesus, city, suburbs, and district, had been
conceded to an Austrian Mission which was even then present in full
force, exploring the great market-place and its southern approach,
as well as the famous double Church of Mary Mother of God. Its
distinguished leaders, greatly though they had desired the Artemisium
site for their own, treated me from the first with all sympathy and
courtesy, and the least return I could make was to respect all their
wide preserves. Now and then I visited their work, which was proceeding
almost as uneventfully as my own, and rode an aimless round on the
Cayster plain and the dusty hills. Rarely I received visitors who were
politely contemptuous of my sodden pit, and every day I watched the
slow fall of the leaf in the fig orchards of Ayassolúk.
The last days of November came. The platform of Wood’s “earliest
temple” was almost cleared, and several shafts had been sunk
fruitlessly through its massive foundations. To go on with such work in
a second season would be to waste time and money, and it seemed best
to make an end in one campaign by keeping the men through December
into January. The gang, which was clearing the central sanctuary, had
reached its midway point and begun to lay open the meagre remains of
a small oblong structure, which Wood had named the “Great Altar,” and
left undisturbed. I noted that it had only an outer skin of marble, and
was filled in solid with small limestone slabs. So far we had sunk no
pits through the pavement of the sanctuary itself, though many in the
peristyle; and where better might we probe than in the heart of this
“Altar,” where no massive foundations would have to be broken through?
Moreover, we might hope to learn whether the structure were indeed a
“Great Altar” or not rather the pedestal of the divine image which was
set up in the Holy of Holies.
The topmost slabs were lifted easily out of their beds: and not less
easily those of a second layer. Gazing dully at their prints on the
mud-mortar I noticed some bright specks, and stooping, picked out two
or three. They were flakes of leaf-gold, fallen from some gilded object
which had perished, whatever it was. But no sooner was the first slab
of a third layer raised than something better than a flake of foil
shone on its bed, namely a little plate of impure gold, stamped with a
geometric Ionian pattern, and pierced at the corners. I thought of the
goddess who had stood in effigy on this pedestal, of her plated diadem
and gold-encrusted robe, and sent for sieves.
For the rest of that day hours passed as minutes. Every handful of
mud mortar washed through the meshes left treasure behind--women’s
gauds for the most part, earrings of all patterns and weights, beads
of sundered necklace-strings, pins for the hair, and brooches for the
shoulder or throat, some of these last fashioned after the likeness of
hawks in the finest granular work of Ionian smiths. With them appeared
primitive electrum coins, fresh from the mint. I was as puzzled
as pleased. How had delicate jewels come to lurk there, fresh and
unspoiled? When the first specimens appeared, I thought them accidents
of ruin--precious trappings of the statue carried down by water through
chinks of its pedestal, or, perhaps, contents of some perished casket.
But such possibilities became impossible as the jewels continued to
be found in each successive bed of mortar. It grew clear that we had
chanced on some sort of foundation deposit--on objects hidden with a
purpose when the first builders were laying course on course of the
pedestal, and that we had the most desired of treasures, fine work of
the Ionian spring-time of Greece. Perhaps also we had solved at last
the mystery of Greek foundation-deposits. Under Egyptian temples
Petrie has found many such deposits, whether beneath corner stones, or
the main threshold, or in the central axis of a building; but under
Greek shrines the hiding place of foundation records had never yet
been divined. Yet what spot more fitting than the pedestal of the most
sacred statue at the very heart of the sacred plan?
We had dug out only a small part of our vein of treasure when dark
came down with a rising gale, whose fierce squalls brought up the long
expected rains. On and off, at some hour of every day and night, it
would rain for a week and more, sometimes with lightning and cyclonic
winds, sometimes in sodden calm. The storms which had begun in
unnatural warmth continued, after the third day, in cruel cold, which
coated the pools with ice, and froze the very marrow of the men who had
to grope for jewels waist-deep in water and slime; but we dared not
pause for even a day. The fame of our find had gone abroad, and others
would have dredged had we not. The blue fingers of the men cracked and
swelled with washing sharp shingle in the sieves till they could hardly
pick out jewels, and I knew what it was to be wet through and chilled
through for a week on end.
During a momentary brightening of the sky we sank pits outside the
pedestal, and there too found foundations of walls earlier than our
predecessors had found, and fragments of fine Ionian things lying among
them. Then down again came the deluge to flood the pits. For eight
days we fought the weather, replacing the worn-out and sick with eager
volunteers. Each morning the water had risen above its morning level of
the day before, and at last it began to well up faster than we could
bale. The rains of winter had come in earnest, and we must await
spring. The hole which we had made in the pedestal was choked again
with blocks too heavy for furtive marauders to drag out, so long as
water lay deep around, and before the middle of December I had gone to
Constantinople carrying more than half a thousand jewels. Whatsoever of
the goddess’s treasure might be buried still was left to the keeping of
watchmen and the flood.
The waters guarded their trust. That winter is yet remembered in
Anatolia for its rains and the fevers which followed. When I returned
to the site near the end of March, I looked out over a lake below whose
unruffled surface the pedestal lay drowned too deep for anyone but a
diver to rob its core, and its upper stones, said the Ephesians, would
not emerge till late summer. What was to be done? The water could not
be drained out of that great hollow, which lies many feet below the
general level of the plain and hardly higher than the surface of the
distant sea, except by the help of a very powerful steam pump. I left a
contractor to clear away the upper part of Wood’s great rubbish heaps,
which still blocked the two ends of the site, and went back to Smyrna.
[Illustration: RIGGING THE GREAT PUMP AT EPHESUS.]
[Illustration: THE TREASURE SPOT AND PUMPS.]
To make a long story short, an engine and pump were lent by the Ottoman
Railway Company and dragged to the edge of our pit three weeks later;
and after we had cut a passage seaward for the strong stream which
its twelve-inch pipe would disgorge, it was set to work to lower the
lake. But we were only at the beginning of difficulties. The upper
waters were sucked up in a few hours; but the drainage of the lower
levels, which were dammed by deep and massive foundation walls, could
not be collected fast enough to keep the great pipe free of air,
and unchoked by mud. If the engine stopped, the waters ceased to flow
towards it, and in the lapse of a night the pond would rise nearly as
high again as at the first. There was nothing for it but to spend many
days in cutting a network of channels through the foundations and in
deepening the pool below the pipe by hauling out great rubble blocks
which had been bedded down by the builders of the latest temple. The
men, who had to wade to their middles under a hot sun, fell sick of
fevers, and I myself began to feel none too well. On the last day
of April I took to my bed, and after fighting my malady for a week,
went down to Smyrna in high fever and was put to bed in the Seamen’s
Hospital for other ten days. Thus it was not till May was half gone
that, with drainage channels dug, the central area of the temple
fenced against inflow, and a second and smaller pump rigged over the
treasure-spot, we could hunt again for jewels.
They appeared one after another in the sieves just as they had done
five months before; and when the clean bottom sand had been scraped out
of the four corners of the pedestal, we had added nearly five hundred
trinkets. But now I cared for none of these things. The fever had left
me unstrung, and I longed for nothing but the moment when I might
scrape Diana’s mud off my feet for the last time. Every evening I hoped
against hope that the lode would be exhausted next day. I have never
struck such a vein of luck, and never liked my luck less. The site, it
must be allowed, was no place for a hardly convalescent man. The end of
May approached. Each noon the sun beat more fiercely into our windless
hollow, and the flood, which was sucked out by the great pump each
morning, left tracts of slowly drying slime and stranded water-beasts
withering and stinking among rotten weeds. One could not watch the
workmen without wading and mud-larking and groping in that fetid ooze.
Every page of my diary breathes utter disgust of it and yearning for a
cleaner, sweeter life. For all I cared, Science and Duty might go to
the wall; and thither I had sent them and myself as well but for shame
of old Gregóri and his cold, unsleeping eye. He had dug a dozen sites
with me, and never yet stopped short of the bottom or refused to follow
a likely lead. Was I going to tempt him now?
I did not. I held out, even to the dog days. Before the pedestal was
exhausted we had begun to probe the mud about it, and there find ruins
of three small shrines, one below the other, and many precious broken
things in the slimy bottom of the lowest and earliest. These were
rarely jewels and articles of personal wear like those that made up the
Pedestal Treasure, but chiefly things used in worship, and fragments
of votive offerings. These had not been hidden of set purpose where we
found them, but were lost and forgotten things, sucked into the bottom
ooze, or trodden under foot in some wild hour of ruin or sack. Since
the earliest shrine on the site must be supposed founded not later than
700 B.C., it may well be we dredged from its nether slime treasures
unseen since the sanctuary was violated by a rude Cimmerian horde in
the reign of Ardys II. of Lydia. That these objects belonged to much
the same period as the Pedestal Treasure, the artistic character of
many bore witness: that, like that Treasure, they were of earlier
date than the second of the three primitive shrines was proved by our
finding certain of them bedded under its surviving foundations. In one
case only did we seem to light on anything buried with intention. This
was a little jar, set upright in an angle of the lowest foundations
and once sealed with a covering, whose binding-cord still clung to the
clay. My men were no longer in their first innocence, and dealers in
contraband waited at noon and night to tempt them. He who first sighted
this jar, as he was scraping slime into his basket, looked stealthily
about him; but I was at his back, poor fellow, ready to lift his prize
myself, and I see his sad eyes still as nineteen electrum coins of the
earliest mintage of Lydia fell out of his pot.
We got statuettes, whole or broken, by the score, whether in
ivory--priceless treasures these of early Ionian art--or in bronze, or
in terra-cotta, or even in wood. We got vessels in ivory and vessels in
clay. We got much gold and electrum, which had been used for casing or
adorning things decayed: we got some silver, and, best prize of all,
a plate engraved on both faces, in the oldest Ionic character, with
a record of contributions towards a rebuilding of the shrine. We got
many another object, broken or imperfect, but not less precious, in
crystal and paste and amber and bronze. In sum, when all the ground had
been searched, we had recovered from the treasures of the first House
of Artemis in the Ephesian plain hard on three thousand objects, one
with another and greater with less. I took them all to Constantinople,
as in honour bound, for we had subscribed to the Ottoman Law and made
no bargain with the Turk. But in return for our good faith, all the
objects were suffered to go for a season to England to be ordered and
studied. I wanted nothing less than to see them again when I left
Stambul, and nothing more than to keep them for ever in London, when, a
year later, they had to return.
* * * * *
The other excavation to be described was of that body-snatching
sort, which Science approves and will doubtless justify to the Angel
of the Resurrection by pleading a statute of limitations. To rob a
tomb appears, in fact, to be held dastardly or laudable according as
the tenancy of the corpse has been long or short. I once explored a
Graeco-Roman cemetery near Alexandria with as willing a Moslem gang as
heart could desire. But one of my men ate apart from his companions
and had no fellowship with them. He was by far the best digger of them
all; none so light of hand as he, so deft to extricate fragile objects
from one grave, and to find his way into another. I foresaw a useful
_reis_, and said so to the overseer. He listened in silence, and at
evening asked leave to speak. The rest, he said, would leave me sooner
than take orders from this man. He was a good tomb-digger; but where
had he learned his trade? In the modern cemeteries of the town. He
stole grave-clothes. I did not make him a _reis_, but paid him off next
day--why or with what right I hardly know.
[Illustration: A SEALED GRAVE-DOOR.]
I was bidden to search the tombs in part of the hill behind Siut,
whose soft calcareous cliffs are honeycombed with graves of every age.
The vast cemetery, lying near a large town, has been ransacked over
and over again, chiefly for wooden statuettes and models, which seem
to have been carved more often and more cleverly at the Wolf Town
than anywhere else in old Egypt; and I was warned I must hope for no
untouched burials, but content myself with raking over the leavings
of hastier robbers. The event belied the warning. First and last we
had the fortune to find nearly thirty sealed graves, many poor enough,
and some re-used for second and humble burials, but a few of the Old
Empire period, whose furniture adorns even the rich collections in
Bloomsbury. But it was with all the pain in the world, amid recurring
failures, and after weeks of fruitless toil, that we found those. For
every profitable tomb at least twenty profitless had to be opened and,
moreover, examined scrupulously, since it was hardly ever possible to
be sure if the dead man had been wholly robbed till we reached his
chamber itself, ten to thirty feet below the surface. The deep shaft of
entry would often seem as the masons had left it in the distant days
of the Twelfth Dynasty, filled to its brim with their clean limestone
chips; but none the less the coffins would be found at the last smashed
or removed, the best of the furniture withdrawn, and the rest heaped
pell-mell in utter ruin, after the chamber had been entered from below
by a passage rudely hewn from a neighbour grot. Yet even then it could
not be abandoned unsearched; and for other and many days the men must
turn over the piles of earth and bones and scraps in faint hope that
something of value had been overlooked or despised by earlier robbers.
Doing this slow, blind work, they must needs be watched by the dim
light of smoky candles in the choking dust-laden air of a narrow cell,
which reeked of mummy clothes and the foul rags of _fellahin_. Had I
been an annual digger in Egypt, able to call a trained and trusted crew
to Siut, and had the scene not lain so near a large town notorious for
its illicit traffic in antiques, that penance might have been avoided.
And even in performing it one was robbed. Dealers waited for my men
at sunset below the hill and beset them all the way to the town, and
one digger, a youth of brighter wit and face than most--he was half a
Bedawi--gained so much in the few weeks before I turned him off that he
bought him a camel, a donkey and a wife. The order of his purchases was
always stated thus, whoever told the tale.
The most bitter disappointment was caused by a great collapsed grotto
through whose choked portal we had quarried our way to find the central
grave-pit still covered with its lid of ancient palm-trunks. We lifted
these and dug into the clean chips below with ever brighter hopes;
for the shaft was so virgin that the white dust made by the original
chiselling hung still on its walls. Down and down the men delved, keen
as their masters, and for five-and-twenty feet into the depths of the
hill the filling was pure of all sign of disturbance. Then at last the
chamber appeared, doorless, pure and empty as the shaft. The tomb had
never been used for burial at all.
So success seemed to flee before us, and to pursue it was dangerous,
where rock was rotten and screes of loose chips, thrown out from
plundered tombs above, might slip at any moment over the only channels
of air and escape, and condemn us to the death of trapped rats in
a most unworthy cause and most unpleasant company. Crawling on all
fours in the dark, one often found the passage barred by a heap of dim
swaddled mummies turned out of their coffins by some earlier snatcher
of bodies; and over these one had to go, feeling their breast-bones
crack under one’s knees and their swathed heads shift horribly this
way or that under one’s hands. And having found nothing to loot in a
thrice plundered charnel-house, one crawled back by the same grisly
path to the sunlight, choked with mummy dust and redolent of more
rotten grave-clothes than the balms of Arabia could sweeten. Partner of
the scented dinner-table, is that the trade you desire?
And how would our evening hours have seemed to you? They were spent
in a huge grotto with storied walls, because the lower Nile valley is
a thoroughfare of furious winds all the winter long, and tent life, a
constant misery in Egypt, would have been most miserable on the face of
the Siut bluff, which stands out into the winds’ track, and is buffeted
by all their storms. Not that our wide-mouthed grotto, however, proved
much better than a tent. The north wind struck its farther wall, and
was sucked round the other two in an unceasing, unsparing draught which
dropped dust by the way on everything we ate or drank or kept. Warmth
after the day’s toil we never felt from December to February, even when
sitting closest to the fire which we kindled nightly with unpainted
slats of ancient coffins on a hearth of Old Empire bricks. The dead
wood, seasoned by four thousand years of drought, threw off an ancient
and corpse-like smell, which left its faint savour on the toast which
we scorched at the embers; and a clear smokeless light fell fitfully on
serried coffins, each hiding a gaunt tenant swathed and bound, to whose
quiet presence we grew so little sensitive that we ranged our stores
and bottles, our pans and our spare garments on his convenient lid.
None the less--I will avow it, dear lady, even if I wake after all
your desire to dig--I used to put all these ills, the disappointments
and discomforts of the work and life, to the account of things that
matter not at all every time that I watched the clearance of a sealed
tomb-door. I have dug for twenty years and set next foot after the
sexton’s in very many ancient sepulchres; but I still feel, as at
first, the flutter of poignant hope that the tomb may be virgin, and an
indescribable thrill at the sight of grave furniture undisturbed since
thousands of years. There lie the dead man’s bow and arrows in their
place on his coffin-lid, string snapped and plumes in dust, and there
his stout staff and his boomerang: the little Nile boats are propped
fully manned by his side; the wooden servants who answer his call in
the underworld are at their several businesses: and his effigy, with
his wife’s, stands at his head. I know well that, in Egypt at least,
one hardly ever opens a perfectly virgin sepulchre. Someone robbed
it on the night of the burial ere the door was sealed. Some malign
intruder has rumpled those grave clothes down to the waist in quest of
the jewels on neck and breast, and has trampled or overturned in his
guilty haste the furniture beside the coffin. But since he withdrew
with his accomplices and sealed the door, all has been silence and fine
rain of dust from the roof, until, after four thousand years, _you_
come. You may talk of science and think of loot, while the chattering
diggers are working like fiends to lift the last of the filling from
the shaft; but the first look into the dimness of the sepulchre itself
will silence them, hardened robbers though they be, and will silence
you. Science and your own glory and the lust of loot are all forgotten
in the awe which falls as in fairy tales on adventurers in underground
chambers where kings of old time sit asleep. Yet next day, or maybe
the day after, when that coffin has been packed with twenty others in
the magazine, you will play cards of an evening on its head, if it
happens to be handy.
[Illustration: MODELS OF SERVANTS AT THEIR WORK BESIDE A COFFIN.]
Not too nice a trade, you see, dear lady. Best let it be!