Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

By this time more than half the workfolk were splashing in the nether pool, eager for the special rewards promised to lucky finders; and the tale of bronzes had already been doubled. But Chance had reserved her crowning grace. A zealous groper, wishful to put both hands to his work, happened to wedge his guttering candle in the fluting of a stalactite column, and by its light espied in the slit the green edge of a bronze blade. I passed the word to leave mud-larking in the pool and search the colonnades. Men and girls dispersed themselves along the dark aisles, and perching above the black waters on natural crockets of the pillars, peered into the flutings. They found at once—found blades, pins, tweezers, brooches, and here and there a votive axe, and in some niches as many as ten votive things together. Most were picked out easily enough by the slim fingers of the girls; but to possess ourselves of others, which the lights revealed, it was necessary to smash stalactite lips that had almost closed in long ages. For about four hours we discovered at least an object a minute, chiefly on the columns at the head of the pool: but above the stature of a man nothing was anywhere found.

When nothing more could be seen in the crevices, which had been scrutinised twice and thrice, and we had dredged the pool’s bed as far as wading men could reach, I called off the workers, who were falling sick of the damp and chill; and two days later we left silent and solitary the violated shrine of the God of Dicte. The digger’s life is a surfeit of surprises, but his imagination has seldom been provoked so sharply as in that dim chasm. One seemed to come very near indeed to men who lived before history. As we saw those pillared isles, so with little change had the last worshipper, who offered a token to Zeus, seen them three thousand years ago. No later life had obliterated his tracks; and we could follow them back into the primaeval world with such stirring of fancy as one feels in the Desert, which is the same to-day as it was yesterday, and has been since the beginning of things.

I have never struck tents with sharper regret, for there could be no pleasanter abode than a camp on that rocky shelf of Dicte. All day handsome folk went and came, who dealt as honourably with the stranger as he wished to deal with them, showing neither distrust nor presumption, but a frank highland gentility; and as evening fell, they would turn merrily down the hill, only lingering to exchange a word or to load a mule with soil for the gardens below. By night we were alone, free and irresponsible as Bedawis, and far safer; for in that distressful isle of Crete, where every peasant had his tale of rapine and murder in his own or his father’s time, there was no suspicion of fear. Sometimes the scourge of the Cretan spring, a hot Libyan gust, would swoop unheralded from the higher gullies, and set the cook’s coals scurrying towards the big powder canister and himself in frantic chase, calling on the Virgin Mother; and half a dozen times it seemed our tents must go by the sheer way to the village, whose lights twinkled five hundred feet below. But poles and ropes held out against the worst of the wind, and soon the moon rode in cloudless heaven once more, and the flags drooped motionless on their standards. So the night would pass, and with the dawn the chatter be heard again, coming round the shoulder of the hill.

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SPONGE BOATS IN ZAKRO BAY.

A year later I was camped still further east on the uttermost Cretan coast which looks towards the Levant sea. Broken pieces of painted vases had been found some time before about the mouth of a large pit near a little natural harbour, now known as the Bay of Zakro; and the vineyards of a little hamlet on the lower slopes were embanked with walls of primaeval masonry. The bay was much frequented. Often one waked to find a dozen or so of small craft at anchor, whose sailors would land in the morning to draw water, seek the blessing of a priest, and be gone after noon. Some came to talk with me, and declared themselves strangers, sponge-divers, gathered from many coasts, but chiefly from the Isle of Symi. They were men of swarthy skin, somewhat boisterous and given to drinking and dicing,—bent on a merry life, because in their trade it is short. Zakro, said they, was their last customary port of call before they adventured over the broad strait to the Libyan fishing grounds. As they do now, so Cretans must have done in the days of Minos; and by trade Zakro grew so rich nearly four thousand years ago that it possessed some of the finest vases in the Aegean, and became cosmopolitan enough to use the products of Syria and inner Asia.

I began to search my ground and reached the fourteenth of May by our reckoning, the second in the older style. The weather had been boisterous for a fortnight past, and under some unseasonable influence shifting gales, lowering skies, and frequent rains had succeeded the serenity of April. A heavier fall than usual began in the afternoon, and during the windless early hours of night grew to a tropical deluge. I was encamped in front of a large magazine, the only building upon the beach, about a quarter of a mile from the mouth of a river which comes down from the upland shelves of Sitía. The noble gorge of its middle course, cleft sheer as a Pacific cañon, was set so thick with old trees and tangled undergrowth, when I saw it first, that a man could scarcely pass along its floor; in the broad upper valley above high-water mark, complots, orchards, and terraced gardens flourished abundantly, and the deltaic plain about the mouth was even more fertile still.

Presently I had to abandon the tent, though it had been proof against former rains, and seek sleep in the rat-ridden magazine. Its mud roof was leaking apace, and the four dripping walls dismally reflected the lamplight; but, thankful for even such shelter, I fell asleep. I woke to hear fierce hissing of wind and rain driven on the sea-front of the building, and by the roaring of breakers knew that an onshore gale had risen during the night. It was grey-dark, and, striking a light to see how long it might still be to sunrise, I wondered to find the hour past already, and day dismally come.

For lack of anything better to do, I tried to sleep again; but my Greek servants, moving restlessly about the building, infected me with their uneasiness. Though the magazine was built on shingle and sand, it lay so far out of the course in which the river had flowed for centuries, that there could hardly be danger where we were, however damp our discomfort. But that untimely gloom, riven by the fitful shimmer of lightning, that steady splash of rain, reinforced by cascades of driven sea-spray, and that intermittent thunder, which could be heard even above the ceaseless roar of breakers rolling to my threshold, were not heartening. Water stood deep on the plain behind; but it was finding its own outlets to the sea, and I took more heed of the deluge overhead, which so thoroughly penetrated the mud roof, that there was nothing for it but to disturb the careful order of stores and baggage, and the results of my digging, and collect all under waterproof sheets in the middle of the magazine.