overlooking the river, to the bottles of schnapps drunk in my room at two in the morning? Something about it all bothered me, some faint, indefinable anxiety, of the kind that had made me ring Karel’s Hampstead house at midnight. But now there was nothing I could do about it; so I preferred to forget it. I was in the Hebrides at the time of my friend’s funeral—I had been called to examine the neolithic remains so remarkably preserved on Harris—and upon my return I found several filing cabinets of material on the landing outside my flat. My head was full of thoughts of neolithic man; I glanced into the first drawer, looked into a folder entitled: ‘The Perception of Colour in Emotionally Starved Animals’, and hastily slammed the drawer. Then I went into my flat and opened the Archaeological Journal, and came upon Reich’s article on the electronic dating of the basalt figurines of the Boghazköy temple. My excitement was intense; I rang Spence at the British Museum, and rushed over to see him. For the next forty-eight hours I thought and ate and breathed nothing but Boghazköy figurines and the distinguishing features of Hittite sculpture.
This, of course, saved my life. There can be no possible doubt that the Tsathogguans were awaiting my return, waiting to see what I did. And luckily, my head was full of archaeology. My mind was floating gently in the immense seas of the past, lulled in the currents of history. Psychology was repellent to it. If I had eagerly studied my friend’s material, searching for a clue to his suicide, my own mind would have been possessed and then destroyed within hours.
When I think of it now, I shudder. I was surrounded by evil, alien minds. I was like some diver at the bottom of the sea, so absorbed in contemplating the treasure of a sunken ship that I failed to notice the cold eyes of the octopus that lay in wait behind me. In other moods, I might have noticed them, as I did later at Karatepe. But Reich’s discoveries occupied all my attention. It pushed out of my head all sense of duty to the memory of my dead friend.
I conclude that I was under fairly constant observation from the Tsathogguans for several weeks. It was during this time that I realized I must return to Asia Minor if I was to clear up the problems raised by Reich’s criticisms of my own dating. Again, I can only feel that this decision was providential. It must have confirmed the Tsathogguans in the feeling that they had absolutely nothing to fear from me. Obviously, Karel had made a mistake; he could hardly have chosen a less suitable executor. In fact, I felt twinges of conscience about those filing cabinets during my remaining weeks in England, and once or twice forced myself to glance into them. On each occasion, I felt the same distaste for these matters of psychology, and closed them again. On the last occasion on which I did so, I remember wondering whether it would not be simpler to ask the caretaker to burn all this stuff in the basement furnace. The idea instantly struck me as utterly immoral, and I rejected it—a little surprised, to be honest, to find myself entertaining it. I had no idea that it was not ‘I’ who thought the thought.
I have often wondered since then how far the choice of myself as executor was a part of my friend’s design, and how far it was a last minute decision made in despair. Obviously, he can have given little thought to it, or they would have known. Was it, then, a sudden inspired decision, the last lightning flash of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century? Or was I chosen faute de mieux? We may know the answer one day if we can obtain access to the Tsathogguans’ archives. I like to think that the choice was intentional, a masterstroke of cunning. For if providence was on his side in making the choice, it was certainly on mine during the next six months, when I thought of anything but Karel Weissman’s papers.
When I left for Turkey, I instructed my landlord that Baumgart was to be allowed into my flat during my absence. He had agreed to attempt a preliminary sorting of the papers. I had also opened negotiations with two American publishers of textbooks of psychology, who showed themselves interested in Karel Weissman’s papers. Then, for some months, I thought no more about psychology, for the problems involved in the dating of the basalt figurines absorbed my full attention. Reich had established himself in the laboratories of the Turkish Uranium Company at Diyarbakir. His main concern so far, of course, had been the dating of human and animal remains by the argon method, and in this technique he had become the foremost world authority. In turning his attention from the ages of prehistory to the reign of the Hittites, he was exploring a relatively new field as far as his own work was concerned. Man is a million years old; the Hittite invasion of Asia Minor occurred in 1,900 BC. For this reason, he was delighted to see me in Diyarbakir, for my own book on the civilization of the Hittites had been the standard work since its publication in 1980.
For my own part, I found Reich a fascinating man. My own mind is at home in any period from 2,500 BC to the end of the tenth century AD. Reich’s mind was at home in any period from the Carboniferous age onward, and he could speak of the Pleistocene—a mere million years ago—as if it were recent history. I was present once when he examined a dinosaur tooth, and he remarked casually that it could not possibly be as recent as the Cretaceous age—that he would place it in the late Triassic—about fifty million years earlier. I was also present when a Geiger counter verified his guess. His instinct for this kind of thing was quite uncanny.
Since Reich will play a considerable part in this story, I should say something about him. Like myself, he was a big man; but unlike myself, his bigness owed nothing to surplus fat. He had the shoulders of a wrestler, and an enormous, prognathous jaw. His voice always gave surprise, for it was gentle and rather high—the result, I believe, of a throat infection in childhood.
But the main difference between myself and Reich lay in our emotional attitude towards the past. Reich was a scientist through and through. For him, figures and measurements were everything; he could derive enormous pleasure from reading through a column of Geiger readings that extended over ten pages. His favourite assertion was that history should be a science. Now I have never tried to hide the powerful element of the romantic in my composition. I became an archaeologist through an almost mystical experience. I had been reading a volume on the civilization of Nineveh by Layard, which I had picked up casually in the bedroom of the farm at which I was staying. Some of my clothes were drying on a line in the yard, and a burst of thunder made me hurry outside to get them in. Just inside the farmyard there was a large pool of grey water, rather muddy. As I was taking the clothes from the line, my mind still in Nineveh, I happened to notice this pool, and forgot, for a moment, where I was or what I was doing there. As I looked at it, the puddle lost all familiarity and became as alien as a sea on Mars. I stood staring at it, and the first drops of rain fell from the sky, and wrinkled its surface. At that moment I experienced a sensation of happiness and of insight such as I had never known before. Nineveh and all history suddenly became as real and as alien as that pool. History became such a reality that I felt a kind of contempt for my own existence, standing there with my arms full of clothes. For the remainder of that evening I walked around like one in a dream. From then on, I knew I had to devote my life to ‘digging up the past’, and to trying to reconstitute that vision of reality.
It will be seen, in a moment, that all this has great relevance to my story. It meant that Reich and I had totally dissimilar attitudes towards the past, and constantly amused one another by minor revelations of our individual temperaments. For Reich, science contained all the poetry of life, and the past merely happened to be the field in which he exercised his ability. As to myself, science was a servant of poetry. My earliest mentor, Sir Charles Myers, had strengthened this attitude in me, for he had the most total contempt for all that was modern. To see him working on a digging was to see a man who had ceased to exist in the twentieth century, and who looked down on history like a golden eagle from some mountain peak. He had a shuddering distaste for most human beings; he once complained to me that most of them seemed ‘so unfinished and shabby’. Myers made me feel that the true historian is a poet rather than a scientist. He once said that the contemplation of individual men made him dream of suicide, and that he could reconcile himself to being human only by considering the rise and fall of civilizations.
During those first weeks at Diyarbakir, when the rainy season made it impossible for us to do field work on the Karatepe diggings, we had many long discussions during the evenings, while Reich drank beer by the pint and I drank a most
