Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

THE DESPOILED HARPY TOMB.

The ruins, far seen on a sunlit slope since the first hour of our ride, lie on the first shelf of the mountains, high above the river at the point where it issues into the plain. Little seemed changed since Fellows’ day, and the stakes, with which he propped the roof of the “Harpy Tomb” after stripping the frieze, still uphold it. If you feel a momentary pang of shame before the mutilated pillar, look round at the poisonous marsh and the wild hills and wilder men and you will not blame Fellows. How many artists of two generations would have seen the Harpy reliefs in their place? The Theatre, whose curve is so oddly broken to avoid a pillar-tomb, is one tangle of brushwood; but the great four-square stela, inscribed in the strange Lycian character, on all its marble faces, stands yet clear and unhurt; and you may walk eastwards from it all the length of the main street to a wide paved area, from which lesser flagged ways run right and left. The whole ground-plan of the city is there, and more of it evidently survives from the earliest days than on any other Anatolian site. Some day a digger will get a rich booty at Xanthus, and gather his first-fruits, I dare wager, on that jutting shelf shored up by cyclopean walling behind the Theatre, where a temple of the Xanthian Apollo or of Sarpedon stood as an outpost towards the sea, and struggling barley reveals, by the variety of its growth, the outline of a great oblong building. But the day of digging Xanthus seems no nearer. First Crete, and then Sparta have drawn off our explorers, and Lycia must still wait.

The ride round the eastern side of the swamp to Kalamáki I have endured twice since that day, and I know it for one of the most painful in Anatolia, so rough and broken is the paved path, and so dank the air. I shall not revive its memory. No sumptuous yacht was ever a more welcome sight than Antóni’s little craft rocking in the evening light under the cliffs of Kalamáki. The south-wester had lulled at last, and we ran out before a light land breeze. We had no mind to go back to Castellórizo, unless we could do no better; for what with blockade-running in Crete, and waiting on the chance of a Turkish war, the Greek coasters could no longer be trusted to call. A week or so even in that fortunate isle would hang too heavy on our hands. So we lay to off the western point, Antóni promising to run to Rhodes, for the first time in his little boat’s history, should a fair wind spring up by the next noon. As luck would have it, a north-easter began to blow at dawn, and he kept his word, as always. We woke to find the boat heeling over at racing pace with the mouth of the Xanthus astern and the bluffs of the Seven Capes sliding forward one behind another. As we hissed through the white-caps of the open gulf, I liked Antóni better than ever. He cuddled the tiller of his little boat like a lover, talking of the fame which should be hers in Castellórizo if she could run the eighty miles to Rhodes before sundown. And she did her best. The harbour was well in sight when the wind died away, leaving a light night-air to waft us, after some hours of calm, to the windmills, which have stood on the mole of Rhodes since the Hospitallers came.

In the first of the morning we heard the news—the Greeks had crossed the Thessalian border, and it was war. Some Jewish loafer on the quay must have reported that we were speaking Greek aboard; for the port authority roundly refused to accept our British passports, and set a watch over us at our inn. At the same time Antóni and his boat found themselves under arrest. It mattered little, however; for our acting consul knew me, and the Governor General of the Isles, who when vali of Adana had furthered my party some years before, was then in Rhodes, and had not forgotten. The embargo was lifted with a genial counsel to us not to run about the sea with Greeks till better times; and Antóni, paid as we loved him, which was well, picked up a cargo, and spread his sail for Castellórizo to tell the tale of the cruise.

CHAPTER III.
CRETE.

I returned to Athens towards the end of the same year to take up the direction of the British School of Archaeology, but that task can hardly be counted among the accidents of an antiquary’s life. Nor will I describe the uneventful excavation, which it fell to me to conduct in Melos, while waiting the day to put spade into a richer Aegean soil, the soil of Crete. The day came with the year 1900. The massacre of Candia forced a Great Power to rid the island for ever of the Turk; and in the spring of 1899 I accompanied the future explorer of Cnossus on my fourth visit to Crete. Arthur Evans had long laid his plans, and, with the forethought of genius, cast his bread on troubled waters by buying a Bey’s part share of the site of the Palace of Minos. He seemed to waste labour and money; for under the Ottoman law his title could not be made secure, and in the end his ownership lapsed to a partner. But when others, who coveted Cnossus, put forward moral rights, he alone could urge the convincing claim of sacrifice, and the Cretans, for whom he had done much in their hour of danger, upheld his cause in the hour of freedom. We journeyed, that spring, all round the eastern half of the island, pegging out claims for future digging. Known to the islanders as we both were (though I the less), we were made welcome everywhere. The land still showed ghastly wounds of its late long fight. Many villages lay gaunt skeletons of ruin; and where olive groves had been, blackened stumps and pits bore witness to the ethnicidal fury of religious war in the Near East, which ever uproots the staple of a foeman’s life, after it has killed the mother and her babe.

BLACKENED STUMPS AND PITS.

In the East of the island the French were still guiding the new rulers with the ready sympathy of Latin for Latin, and nearer to Candia the government had been committed for the moment to the honest but ruder hands of British subalterns. I spent a day or so with one of these. He knew no word of Greek, and it was told of him that when he arrived on a polo pony to be a father to some twenty villages, the local Bishop called in state, bringing, as the ingratiating custom is, a turkey or two and a clutch of eggs. Our young law-giver, nosing a bribe, put him into the street, eggs, turkey, and all. I sat one morning in his court-house to hear justice done to the people. The judge presided in knickerbockers and a cricket shirt—for the day was warm—and smoked his best loved briar. A peasant, whose sheep had been driven off, had heard, after many days, a tinkling by night on a distant hillside, and claimed he knew his bells again. Did then one sheep-bell so differ from another? Solomon put it to the test. He sent his soldier servant to collect bells from the village shepherds, and on his return locked him in an inner room, while they waited in court. After a jangle behind the door, the judge asked whose bell had tinkled, and, on the witness of the servant, the shepherds were right every time. The peasant got back his sheep. Then a woman stood forth to accuse a man of trying her door by night with foul intent; but since he had neither prevailed nor spoken with her, and it was black dark, how had she known what man he was? It came out in evidence that this had not been his first visit, nor had he been used to find the door barred and the lady all unkind. Promptly he was fined a few piastres for disturbing the village peace, while the coy accuser was sent to hoe the Bishop’s potato-field for a fortnight of working days. “Ah! this is Justice,” said the delighted Headman to me. “We have not known it before in Crete!”

For us, then, and no others, in the following year Minos was waiting when we rode out from Candia. Over the very site of his buried Throne a desolate donkey drooped, the one living thing in view. He was driven off, and the digging of Cnossus began. All men who care for these things know by now what was revealed in the next few weeks; and it is another’s right to retell the tale. I did something to help my colleague to start, for in digging, as in most ventures, the first steps are most difficult: and I did more in the following months to define the limits of his vast field, of which much still waits the spade. But it grew clearer every day that the central hillock, which in all reason was his peculiar preserve, held the key of the town’s early history, and almost all its riches, and that exploration were better left undone in the outskirts until the centre had all been laid bare. Therefore I quitted Cnossus in early May, and with Gregóri of Cyprus, who was still following my fortunes after a dozen years, set out eastwards for the second of our claims, a Cave which was suspected to be the mythic birthplace of the Father God of Crete.