David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘James!’ The shout came from down the passageway ahead, where the side walls were still largely concealed beneath earth and rubble. Rebecca and Jeremy glanced at each other, then followed Dillen back down the way he had come. Jack was squatting down panning a torch over the unexcavated face of rubble at the end of the passageway. He glanced up at Jeremy and Rebecca. ‘You two finished for the day?’

Jeremy cleared his throat. ‘You need to come and see what we’ve found. You and Maurice, together. Something sticking out of the wall.’

Jack shone his torch. ‘You mean like that?’

Rebecca and Jeremy knelt beside him and peered ahead. Where the sides of the passageway disappeared into the unexcavated mound, there was a freshly exposed face of earth and rubble, shored up with timber planks put in place by the excavation team. Jack aimed his torch at the base of the rubble. They could see a hole about a metre high, dug back into the jagged edges of the rubble. In the centre, virtually filling the hole, was a large, shiny protrusion, as if a boulder were wedged in. Jack kept his torch resolutely aimed below it. ‘You may not want to look too closely,’ he said.

The boulder had legs with scuffed desert books sticking out of the bottom. The boulder was in fact a familiar pair of khaki shorts streaked brown and stretched taut, flying somewhere well below half-mast.

‘Oh my God,’ Rebecca said, grinning. ‘I see what you mean.’

There was a rumbling noise from somewhere inside the tunnel, and then a pause. ‘ Sheisse,’ a distant voice exclaimed.

‘What is he doing?’ Rebecca demanded.

‘He thinks we’re only about five metres from the end of the passageway,’ Jack replied. ‘The ground-penetrating radar revealed a pocket of space against the left wall of the passageway, close to the end. It’s deeply buried, but the compacted rubble may have prevented soil from filling the gaps. He’s burrowed in to take a look.’

‘That sounds safe,’ Rebecca said, looking dubious.

‘Maurice has had pyramids fall on him and has crawled out unscathed.’ Jack cracked a smile, then aimed his beam at the top of the hole. ‘There’s a stone wedged above him that acts like a lintel. I told him to go no further than that.’

‘You mean you told him to keep his butt in view?’ Rebecca peered mischievously at Jack.

‘Not exactly the words I used, but yes.’

There was a sound of intense digging and scrabbling, intermingled with grunts and curses. Hiebermeyer’s rear end shifted several inches further into the hole, plugging it completely, accompanied by a discharge of dust that completely shrouded his legs. He suddenly went still. ‘My God.’ The words were muffled, but excited. ‘ Mein Gott.’

Jack knelt down and peered in, waving away the dust. ‘Maurice! What is it?’

‘Unbelievable.’ Hiebermeyer coughed violently, a rumble that sounded like a small earthquake. ‘I can see the wall. Only a few square centimetres. But there’s an inscription on it. I’m sure of it, Jack.’ He coughed loudly. ‘An inscription at Troy. The first one ever .’

The ground shook and there was a violent discharge of dust from the hole. Hiebermeyer’s body dropped down, apparently flattened. Jack gestured quickly to Jeremy. ‘I knew this would happen. I knew it. Quick. Take the other leg.’ He passed the torch to Rebecca and grabbed Hiebermeyer’s left leg, pulling hard. ‘Maurice! Are you all right?’ he shouted. ‘Can you hear me?’

A sound of coughing and cursing came from the hole. ‘I’m fine. Let me have another go. I was nearly there.’

‘Not a chance.’ They heaved, and Jack grimaced. ‘Now, where have I done this before? At Stonehenge, on a school trip. Maurice got stuck head-first down a hole, just like this. He thought he’d seen an Egyptian mummified cat. Actually it was a very old dead rabbit. Everything,’ Jack heaved again, panting, ‘ everything was Egyptian with Maurice.’ They heaved one last time and Hiebermeyer’s head appeared, covered in dust. They dragged him clear, and he rolled over and coughed hard, then got up on his knees, shaking and patting himself. He took off his glasses and peered at Jack, his eyes burning with fervour. ‘In there.’ He coughed again, pointing. ‘ In there.’

‘What?’

‘A carved stone inscription. I only saw a few centimetres of it, but I’m absolutely sure of it. Sure of it.’

‘You’ve already said,’ Jack replied. ‘Sure of it. An inscription.’ He stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘What do you mean? Sure of what?’

‘Hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics, Jack. An ankh symbol. Egyptian.’

‘No way,’ Rebecca exclaimed. ‘ Egyptian. You should hear what we found.’

Jack put his hand up, staring at Hiebermeyer. ‘In a moment.’ Hiebermeyer staggered to his feet, patted the dust off his shorts and hitched them up, then gave Jack a triumphant look. He coughed violently again, and the stone over the hole he had been in suddenly collapsed. He turned and looked at it, swore under his breath, then raised his hands as if appealing to the gods. He let them fall again. ‘This is going to take days to excavate. Days. We’ve only got a week until the end of the permit.’

Jack patted him on the back, releasing another cloud of dust. ‘You’d better get cracking, then.’ He paused. ‘ Hieroglyphs? You sure? This isn’t, you know, another mummified rabbit?’

Hiebermeyer glared at him, his nostrils flared. Jack put up a hand. ‘Okay. Okay.’ He stared back at the rubble. His mind was racing. Hieroglyphics? Maurice had given him a quick rundown of the excavation after he and Costas had arrived by helicopter half an hour before, straight from a mercifully brief stint in the recompression chamber after their dive. Jack had been astonished to see the walls of the passageway now revealed for some fifteen metres of their length, increasing in height as the passageway cut into the centre of the citadel mound. The walls were of typical late Bronze Age Trojan form, slanting inwards towards the top. That was exciting enough. But it was the design of the passageway that was so extraordinary. It was remarkably similar to the entranceway to the great tomb outside the citadel of Mycenae, the so-called Treasury of Atreus. Was that what Maurice had found? Would there be a cavernous domed burial chamber at the end? A great royal burial chamber beneath Troy? But it didn’t make sense. If this was a tomb, how could a Trojan king, a Trojan dynasty, be buried with Egyptian inscriptions?

Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘I’m thinking,’ Jack replied, ‘that I’ve got a shipwreck to excavate, and you’ve got something fantastic here as well.’

‘Paydirt,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s what Costas calls it. We’ve hit paydirt.’

‘I know what you’re really thinking,’ Hiebermeyer persisted.

‘I just wonder whether Schliemann got here first. How he could have missed something like this.’

Hiebermeyer nodded pensively. He stared at the rubble, wiping the grime from his face. ‘With all this collapsed earth and masonry, it’s very difficult to tell. It seems to be one massive destruction layer. Late Bronze Age, no doubt about that. Very soon after the fall of Troy. As if somebody had this deliberately done, perhaps to create a platform for a building above.’

‘Or to hide whatever lies at the end of this passageway,’ Rebecca said.

Hiebermeyer narrowed his eyes, then sneezed. ‘There could have been a nineteenth-century excavation. If this were a layer cake of stratigraphy, we could easily tell. But because of the single destruction deposit, it’s hard to see evidence of disturbance. It’s odd, though. If it was disturbed, it was deliberately concealed again.’