Testament

by David Gibbins

  He ducked under the flap of the operations tent and put his notebook on the trestle table in the center. A tall, tousle-haired young man with glasses was arranging his papers and laptop at the other end of the table, having brought them in from his car a few moments before. Jack smiled at him and shook hands. “I saw you arriving from the café, but thought you’d probably want to go and say hello to Rebecca first.”

  He looked slightly flustered, and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Haven’t really had the chance yet. I wanted to get everything ready here first.”

  “Are we going to see you in the water this time?”

  “That’s the plan. What’s the temperature like?”

  “Warm. Barely need a wetsuit.”

  “That’s Jack Howard for ‘cold.’ You’re as bad as your daughter. She barely feels anything. I think I made a mistake in having Costas teach me to dive in the Red Sea. It’s completely spoiled me.”

  Jack grinned at him. Jeremy Haverstock had become an integral part of the IMU team since he had first arrived from Stanford as a Rhodes Scholar almost eight years before, to work with Maria at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. Since then he had completed his doctorate, published the first volumes of material from their two greatest manuscript discoveries—the secret medieval library in Hereford Cathedral and the lost library of the Emperor Claudius in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum—and had recently become assistant director of the Institute. He had also become interestingly close to Rebecca, something that had slowly developed as Rebecca had grown into a woman and that Jack pretended to watch with bemused indifference.

  The flap opened and Rebecca came in, finishing off an apple. She tossed the core into a bin and wiped her mouth. “Is Costas here yet?”

  “Half an hour away,” Jack said. “He called to say he was caught in traffic.”

  “Hello, by the way,” she said to Jeremy. “Nice of you to call.”

  Jeremy coughed, glancing at Jack. “Surprise. Sorry. Been really busy with this translation.”

  “Right. I only hope it’s good. We’ll talk later.” She turned to Jack. “We really need Costas here to find that inscribed sherd. There are more than two hundred buckets next door containing amphora sherds with painted inscriptions on them, and the conservation people have their hands full now with everything else that’s coming up.”

  “He says he can find it straight away.”

  “Costas is pretty important, isn’t he? He always seems to have the key to unlock things, even if he doesn’t realize it himself.”

  “I’ve been coming to that conclusion myself.”

  “I hadn’t realized it was Costas who actually discovered the plaque on Clan Macpherson last week. I’d say he counts as a fully fledged archaeologist by now.”

  “Not sure if he’d be pleased to hear you say that. The tough-guy engineer, you know. The Greek immigrant brought up on the mean streets of New York. The practical man who leaves the ideas stuff to wishy-washy people like us.”

  “I think he’d be pleased, even though he might not show it,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, getting a PhD from MIT does actually involve a few ideas. In fact he’s probably the smartest of all of us. And as for the tough-guy stuff, take it from me, he’s a softy underneath. It’s a toss-up whether Uncle Costas or Uncle Hiemy will be reduced to tears the quickest when small children are around.”

  “Speaking of Uncle Hiemy, how’s he getting on?”

  “I spoke to Aysha in Carthage again over lunch. She’s been pressing Maurice to call you. He’s found something interesting in the harbor excavation, but he’s decided not to disturb you until you’re settled back here following the Deep Explorer trip. She says it’s going to need your full attention.”

  “I can’t wait,” Jack said. “Maurice only ever calls me when it’s good.”

  “Leave it for him to get in touch with you. Remember, this is his comeback after Egypt, and he should be allowed to drive things at his own speed. When he’s ready, he’ll do it.”

  “You’re probably right. You’ve spent more time with him recently than I have, so you know his state of mind.”

  “They’ve been excavating at Carthage for almost a month now. It took a long time to pull him out of his frustration and shock after they had to leave Egypt last year. Everything that’s happened since then with the extremists makes it even less likely that he’ll ever be able to return.”

  “Do you think he’s going to find evidence of Egyptians at Carthage?” Jeremy said, looking up from his laptop. “It was the Phoenicians who founded it, early ninth century BC, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what the Roman historians tell us, and the archaeology so far doesn’t contradict it,” said Jack. “If there was some kind of earlier Egyptian presence, it’s more likely to have been merchants or trade representatives in an outpost run by the Canaanites, proto-Phoenicians. They seem to have been the ones in charge of maritime trade in the late Bronze Age, just as their descendants were at the time of our wreck here. If Maurice does find Egyptian artifacts, it doesn’t necessarily signify an Egyptian settlement.”

  “Aysha says that he’s like you: when he has a gut feeling, he won’t be happy until he’s dug a hole right down to bedrock,” Rebecca said.

  “I remember it well from when we were at boarding school together, sneaking out at weekends to dig up part of the local Roman villa. We shouldn’t have done it, but we did record everything meticulously and eventually published it. Watching out for the landowner while Maurice’s rear end was sticking out of a hole in the ground is one of my abiding memories of those days. I called him the human mole.”

  “He surely couldn’t have found anything Egyptian there,” Jeremy said.

  “Oh yes, he did. It turned out that the villa had been built in the second century for a retired centurion who was a follower of the cult of Isis, a favorite among Roman soldiers. I can still remember the look of indescribable joy on his face when he emerged from his hole clutching a little faience statue of Anubis. That was how he caught the Egyptian bug. That summer he absconded using some money an aunt in Germany had left him and was next heard of in the Valley of the Kings, having been taken on by an American director who had never come across an eighteen-year-old with such an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Egypt. In fact, he was sixteen, not eighteen, and getting him home nearly caused an international incident. But after that, he never looked back.”

  “The question with his idea about Egyptians at Carthage is whether it’s gut instinct or wishful thinking,” Jeremy said. “For a man designed to be down a hole, imagining you might have to spend the rest of your career studying artifacts in museums would be pretty devastating. I can see why he might want to find Egyptians everywhere he digs.”

  “At least he’s got Jacob with him,” Rebecca said.

  Jeremy peered at her. “Lanowski? You must be kidding. I thought he was at some big nanotechnology conference in California. Giving the keynote lecture, about pressure-resistant polymers used in diving suits or something. He and Costas were burning the midnight oil over it a few weeks ago.”

  “He canceled that as soon as Aysha invited him out,” Rebecca said. “I think she thought he’d be good for Maurice. Ever since Maurice learned about Jacob’s passion for Egyptology, the two of them have got on like a house on fire. And they’re both recent fathers, so they can share the trials and tribulations of having small children.”

  “Nothing like the trials of having an older child,” Jack said.

  Rebecca narrowed her eyes at him, and he turned to Jeremy. “Speaking of the plaque, what have you got?”

  Rebecca coughed, and put up a hand. “Before that, there’s something I want to show you. Something from my part of the excavation that came up yesterday. I’ve been saving it to tell you in person, Dad.”

  Jack smiled at her. For a moment he saw her mother Elizabeth sitting in front of him, the dark eyes and hair, the olive skin of her Neapolitan background, taking him back to the time when he
had last seen Elizabeth almost eight years earlier, at the ancient site of Herculaneum shortly before her murder by the Mafia. But he also saw in Rebecca’s eyes a steely determination that he knew was Howard through and through, a resolve to see things to the end whatever the odds, to follow a trail she was set on as far as she could, to never give up. He leaned forward, picked up a pencil, and tapped it on the table, nodding at her. “Okay. What have you got?”

  She went to a rack behind her and carefully lifted a large finds tray with a cloth cover from one shelf, putting it on the table in front of her chair. “Those elephant tusks you found were cool, Dad, really cool. Congratulations, by the way. So I just thought you might be interested in what I found. I took this out of the fresh-water tank in the conservation tent just to show you, but it’ll be back in there pronto when we’re done.”

  She lifted the cloth and picked up a bubble-wrapped object about half a meter long. Jack could see the end of a tusk poking out of one end. Her sector of the excavation was on the opposite side of the ship’s hold to his own, and this showed that there was even more ivory than he had imagined stowed beneath the amphoras, an incredibly valuable cargo. She unwrapped it, leaned over, and handed it to him, a long, straight tusk with a twist in it. “The tusk must have been broken during the wrecking,” she said. “The lower part’s still in situ. Altogether it’s more than two meters long, more than your height. And there’s another one on the site next to where I found this.”

  Jack stared in astonishment. It was not quite what he had imagined. “Well I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “That’s not elephant ivory. It’s narwhal.”

  “I sent pictures to the marine biology department at IMU, and they confirmed it. And they said that another broken fragment I found next to it was walrus.”

  “Narwhal and walrus,” Jeremy said. “Not exactly African creatures, are they?”

  “There’s something else.” She took back the tusk, carefully replaced it on the tray, and handed Jack a smaller bubble-wrapped package. “Open it.”

  Jack did so, and gasped. Inside was a lump of translucent honey-colored material the size of his fist. He lifted it to the light, seeing the bodies of insects trapped within. “Amber,” he said, turning it slowly. “That’s one of the largest pieces I’ve ever seen. Amazing.”

  “It’s from the Baltic, probably the eastern shore. There are other pieces, probably originally a basketful, and I sent a sample to the lab for analysis. There’s a lot of excitement over the potential of those mosquitoes for DNA analysis, especially if they contain the blood of extinct megafauna. But what was most fascinating to me was what these finds, narwhal and walrus and amber, might say about the voyage of our ship.”

  “They could have been high-value trade goods, acquired by the Phoenician merchant in Cornwall and destined for the Mediterranean,” Jeremy said.

  Jack’s mind was racing. “Undoubtedly there would have been a market for this kind of exotica in the Mediterranean, and it’s possible that these were trophies to take back to Carthage, proof that they had reached further north than anyone from the Mediterranean had ever gone before. But there may be another explanation. Think of the rest of the cargo; there’s nothing of British origin. We’re looking at a cargo ready to trade with the tin merchants, not the result of that trade. If she’d been outward-bound after trading then I might not even have spotted the wreck at all, as most of the goods we’ve found would have been traded and the only visible cargo might have been lumps of tin ore, real treasure to the Phoenicians but barely recognizable on the seabed.”

  “These finds show that she hadn’t arrived here direct from the Mediterranean,” Rebecca said.

  Jack weighed up the amber in his hand, staring at it. “I think this shows that the ship had sailed first to the Baltic and then somewhere far to the north, where they obtained the narwhal and walrus ivory. I think it shows that she circumnavigated the British Isles before putting into Mount’s Bay and coming to grief on her way to the tin traders. This ship was wrecked as she was heading into Mount’s Bay, to the shore marts where the British miners would have brought their tin ore, not as she was sailing away.”

  “The ship not just of a merchant, but of an explorer,” Rebecca suggested.

  “Yet with trade never far from his mind,” Jack added. “If I were a good Phoenician, still with my Mediterranean goods on board and looking for tin, I’d see the amber and tusks I was offered by sea peoples in the north as potential items for barter as well. Down here among the Britons of Cornwall, these goods from forbidding lands hundreds of miles away might have been as exotic as they were to people in the Mediterranean, and as desirable.”

  “You always tell me that history is driven by powerful individuals, Dad, that prehistorians dealing with large expanses of time often lose sight of the effect that charismatic and motivated individuals can have on technological innovation, on colonization, on exploration. When I saw this ivory and thought about the fantastic voyage they must have undertaken, I thought immediately of Himilco and Hanno.”

  Jack handed back the amber, and watched as she carefully wrapped it and then submerged the package in the tray with the ivory, replacing it on the rack. She sat down again and turned to Jeremy. “You’ve been quiet. What do you think?”

  Jeremy spun his laptop round so the other two could see it. “I can only add my assessment of the literary evidence. You’ll recognize this page from Codex Palatinus Graecus 386 in Heidelberg University Library. It’s the oldest extant text of Hanno’s Periplus, bound together with the Periplus Maris Erythraei, the Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean of the first century AD. Some Byzantine monk in the tenth century AD decided to make a compendium of all ancient voyages of exploration that he’d come across, copying the bits that interested him from original manuscripts that are now lost. Hanno’s Periplus is usually dated to the sixth or fifth century BC, and in my estimation is within the earlier part of that range, the first half of the sixth century BC. It was originally written in Punic Phoenician, but the Heidelberg version is a Greek translation. Hanno’s voyage, and that of his brother Himilco to the north, is mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History of the first century AD and by several later authors, confirming that the Periplus was not just made up by a medieval monk. It purports to be a first-hand account of Hanno’s voyage down the west coast of Africa, but ends abruptly when he turns back before reaching the Cape.”

  “It’s as if an editor has slashed a red line across a text without actually considering the flow of the narrative,” Jack said. “It doesn’t ring true.”

  “Maybe there was a complete account, but it never made it into the official version,” Rebecca said.

  “What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.

  “Trade secrets. If you’ve found something good and want to put people off discovering it themselves, you write an account that does just that.”

  “Pliny mentions that Hanno made it round to Arabia,” Jack said. “He’s a pretty reliable source, and may himself have seen that fuller account.”

  “And Himilco?” Rebecca asked.

  “Much less clear,” Jeremy said. “The first mention of him is by Pliny, who says that when Hanno went around Africa, Himilco was dispatched north to explore the outer coasts of Europe. A number of historians have speculated that they were brothers. He crops up again in Avienus, a Roman author of the fourth century AD, who mentions him as having made a voyage to the Oestrumnides, the Western Isles, his term for a land known to the early Greek and Phoenician explorers as the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles. The voyage was fraught with dangers, full of sea monsters and fog. Avienus has us believe that his source is a lost account by Himilco himself, something also implied by Pliny. But there’s no indication of tablets with that account having been set up in Carthage as well, odd because circumnavigating the British Isles would have been just as noteworthy an achievement as Hanno’s.”

  “Maybe the trade secret was too valuable for any of the voyage to be made
widely known, with British tin being in such high demand,” Rebecca suggested.

  “Or maybe Himilco never lived to trumpet his success,” Jack said. “A sparse account, maybe only half believed, may have come down through others in his fleet who did survive, assuming that his was not the only vessel to set out. But without the great man to sell his story, without the Columbus or the Cabot or the Vasco da Gama, even the most compelling claims of exploration could fall flat.”

  “So it could be that Himilco perished in a shipwreck,” Rebecca said, eyeing Jack. “A shipwreck off Cornwall.”

  “The thought has crossed my mind.”

  A familiar voice shouted greetings to the divers outside, and a few moments later Costas appeared at the tent flap, clutching a huge sandwich and wearing a battered straw sombrero, his signature Hawaiian shirt, and baggy technicolor shorts. He waved, took an enormous bite of the sandwich, and made his way round the table. He had the rolling gait that Jack had seen among his cousins on the Greek island where he had been born, bred into them over the generations from working on small boats as fishermen and sponge divers. He pulled up a plastic chair between Jeremy and Rebecca and sat down. He looked particularly grizzled today, Jack thought, with at least a week’s worth of stubble, but he had the contented look he always had after a few uninterrupted days in the engineering lab at IMU. He took another bite and inspected the oily stains on his forearms. “Sorry,” he said between mouthfuls. “Changed into my beach gear, but forgot to wash.”

  “Nice sandwich,” Rebecca said. “New York deli in Cornwall. Always good to sample the local cuisine.”

  “She always does them for me at the café,” he said, swallowing. “I call ahead the day before, she gets the stuff in. I spear her fresh fish from the steamship wreck as payment. It works.”

  “Better watch out for the shark,” Jack said.