Gaze on another scene thousands of years later. Absolute desolation on the hill of Kephala. No sound of music nor pitter-patter of pink feet on naked stones, only the song of the breeze; no sign of palaces, conquered and conquerors alike swept into the gulf of Time; only the same blue sea a mile or two away singing its eternal song on the same rocky coast.
Men are swinging picks into the bosom of the earth, making great gashes and gaps in the hill, picking over the loosened rubbish, throwing it into baskets and carrying it away. An easy movement of the arm sends the contents of the basket sliding down the face of the dump, and the black-haired labourer turns back for another load.
Suddenly a digger glimpses something amid the heap of rubbish loosened by the point of the pick. He stoops like a hawk to its prey and brushes aside the soil with his fingers, scrapes carefully about the object, and in a minute has it free.
It is merely a piece of yellow pottery with red decorations. Almost before the finder has had time to look at the fragment, a man scrambles down to him and, taking the fragment, carefully removes all traces of soil.
Keen eyes scrutinize the little piece of pottery, and thoughts go crowding through the brain. Visions of Egypt leap up, of a similar fragment found in a tomb far over the blue sea to the south, past the age-old Pyramids and the modern wonder of Assouan. Back and back thoughts fly through the ages, back to the earliest kings who swayed the earliest communities in the Nile Valley, all because of a fragment of burnt earth, bits of pottery, links in the Eternal Chain of Time, binding together in some unknown way Egypt and Crete. Most of the links are missing, but who knows how and when the pick and shovel of the seeker after truth may come across them?
By courtesy of the British School at Athens
ONE OF THE MAGAZINES UNCOVERED BY SIR ARTHUR EVANS AT KNOSSOS IN CRETE. THE MIGHTY STORE JARS, BIG ENOUGH TO CONTAIN A MAN, ARE SEEN IN THEIR ORIGINAL POSITIONS AND THE SIDE OF THE TRENCH INDICATES HOW DEBRIS COMPLETELY COVERED THEM IN THE COURSE OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS
Once more let us glimpse that hill in Crete. The diggers are gesticulating, running about. Carefully they dig and loosen the soil about another object. A band of carved stone comes to light; it is a curved band, and as they work about it ever so carefully, they find it is part of a cylinder buried deep in the earth. They work excitedly, removing the earth, digging down until they reveal a mighty stone jar, a jar big enough for a man to stand upright in, a jar which the ancients used as a store. It is the giant forerunner of those tiny canisters to be found in the modern pantry, canisters for storing tea and coffee and sugar and rice.
Deeper yet dug Sir Arthur Evans, until he had penetrated to nearly twice the depth of the floor of the Palace of Knossos, until he was nearly 40 feet below the surface. Here were stone implements, the scrapers and knives of the unknown people who first dwelt in this island in the Mediterranean. And through all the different strata he found relics of man, relics by which it was possible to trace the rise of civilization in Crete, from stone to copper, and copper to bronze and bronze to iron.