Читать книгу The Mind Parasites - Colin Wilson - Страница 12

(THIS SECTION IS TRANSCRIBED FROM A TAPE RECORDING MADE BY DR. AUSTIN A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HIS DISAPPEARANCE. IT HAS BEEN EDITED BY H. F. SPENCER.³ )

A STORY AS COMPLEX AS THIS has no obvious starting point; neither am I able to follow Colonel Spencer’s suggestion of ‘beginning at the beginning and going on to the end’, since history has a habit of meandering. The best plan is probably to tell my personal story of the battle against the mind parasites, and to leave the rest of the picture to the historians.

My own story, then, begins on the 20th of December 1994, when I returned home from a meeting of the Middlesex Archaeological Society, before whom I had delivered a lecture on the ancient civilizations of Asia Minor. It had been a most lively and stimulating evening; there is no pleasure more satisfying than discoursing on a subject that is close to your heart in front of a completely attentive audience. Add to this that our dinner had finished with an excellent claret of the 1980’s, and it will be understood that I was in a most cheerful and agreeable frame of mind when I inserted my key in the front door of my flat in Covent Garden.

My telescreen was ringing as I came in, but it stopped before I reached it. I glanced into the recording slot; it registered a Hampstead number that I recognized as that of Karel Weissman. It was a quarter to twelve, and I was sleepy; I decided to ring him back in the morning. But somehow, I felt uncomfortable as I undressed for bed. We were very old friends, and he frequently rang me up late at night to ask me to look something up in the British Museum (where I spent most mornings). Yet this time, some faint psychic alarm bell made me uncomfortable; I went to the screen in my dressing gown and dialled his number. It rang for a long time; I was about to hang up when the face of his secretary appeared on the screen. He said: ‘You have heard the news?’ ‘What news?’ I asked. ‘Dr. Weissman is dead.’ I was so stunned that I had to sit down. I finally mustered the wit to ask: ‘How should I have known?’ ‘It is in the evening papers.’ I told him I had only just come in. He said: ‘Ah, I see. I’ve been trying to ring you all evening. Could you possibly come up here right away?’

‘But why? Is there anything I can do? Is Mrs. Weissman well?’

‘She is in a state of shock.’

‘But how did he die?’

Baumgart said, without changing his expression: ‘He committed suicide.’

I remember staring at him blankly for several seconds, then shouting:

‘What the devil are you talking about? That’s impossible.’

‘There can be no possible doubt. Please come here as soon as you can.’

He started to remove the plug; I screamed:

‘Do you want to drive me mad? Tell me what happened!’

‘He took poison. There is almost nothing else I can tell you. But his letter says we should contact you immediately. So please come. We are all very tired.’

I called a helicab, and then dressed in a state of mental numbness, telling myself that this was impossible. I had known Karel Weissman for thirty years, ever since we were students at Uppsala. He was in every way a remarkable man: brilliant, perceptive, patient, and of immense drive and energy. It was impossible. Such a man could never commit suicide. Oh, I was fully aware that the world suicide rate had multiplied by fifty since the mid-century, and that sometimes the most unexpected people kill themselves. But to tell me that Karel Weissman had committed suicide was like telling me that one and one made three. He had not an atom of self-destruction in his composition. In every way, he was one of the least neurotic, best integrated men I had ever known.

Could it, I wondered, have been murder? Had he, perhaps, been assassinated by an agent of the Central Asiatic Powers? I had heard of stranger things; political assassination had become an exact science in the second part of the eighties, and the deaths of Hammelmann and Fuller had taught us that even a scientist working under high security conditions is not safe. But Karel was a psychologist, and he had, as far as I knew, no connection of any kind with the government. His main income came from a large industrial corporation, who paid him to devise ways of combating dyno-neuroses and generally increasing productivity.

Baumgart was waiting for me when the taxi landed on the roof. The moment we were alone, I asked him: ‘Could it be murder?’ He replied: ‘It is not impossible, of course, but there is no reason to think so. He retired to his room at three this afternoon to write a paper, telling me that he was not to be disturbed. His window was locked, and I was sitting at a desk in the anteroom during the next two hours. At five, his wife brought tea, and found him dead. He left a letter in his own handwriting, and had washed down the poison with a glass of water from the toilet.’

Half an hour later, I was convinced that my friend had indeed committed suicide. The only alternative was that Baumgart had killed him; yet I could not believe this. Baumgart had the control and impassiveness of a Swiss, but I could tell that he was deeply shaken, and on the point of an emotional breakdown; no man is a good enough actor to simulate these things. Besides, there was the letter in Karel’s handwriting. Since Pomeroy produced the electro-comparison machine, forgery had become the rarest of crimes.

I left that house of gloom at two in the morning, having spoken to no one but Baumgart. I had not seen my dead friend, and neither did I want to, for I am told that the face of one who dies from cyanide is horrible. The tablets he had used had been taken from a psycho-neurotic patient only that morning.

The letter in itself was strange. It offered no word of regret for the act of self-destruction. The handwriting was shaky, but the wording was precise. It stated which of his possessions was to be left to his son, and which to his wife. It asked that I should be called as soon as possible to take charge of his scientific papers, and mentioned a sum of money that was to be paid to me, and a further sum that was to be used, if necessary, in their publication. I saw a photostat of the letter—the police had taken the original—and I knew that it was almost certainly genuine. Electronic analysis confirmed my view the following morning.

Yes, a most strange letter. Three pages long, and written with apparent calm. But why had he suggested that I should be contacted immediately? Could it be that his papers contained the clue? Baumgart had already considered the possibility, and had spent the evening examining them. He had found nothing there to justify Karel’s demand for haste. A large proportion of the papers concerned the Anglo-Indian Computers Corporation, his employer; these would naturally be made available to the firm’s other research officers. The remainder were various papers on existential psychology, Maslovian transac-tionism and the rest. An almost completed book dealt with the uses of psychedelic drugs.

Now, in the last named work, it seemed to me that I had found a clue. When Karel and I were at Uppsala, we spent a great deal of time discussing problems of the meaning of death, the limits of human consciousness, and so on. I was writing a thesis on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, whose actual title, Ru nu pert em hru, means ‘the book of coming forth by day’. I was concerned only with the symbolism of this ‘dark night of the soul’, of the perils encountered by the disembodied spirit on its nightlong journey to Amentet. But Karel had insisted that I should study the Tibetan Book of the Dead—an entirely different cup of tea—and compare the two. Now, as any student of these works knows, the Tibetan book is a Buddhist document whose religious background bears no resemblance whatever to that of the ancient Egyptians. I felt that to compare the two would be a waste of time, a mere exercise in pedantry. However, Karel succeeded in stimulating in me a certain interest in the Tibetan book for its own sake, with the consequence that we spent many a long evening discussing it. Psychedelic drugs were at the time almost unobtainable, since Aldous Huxley’s book on mescalin had made them fashionable among addicts. However, we discovered an article by René Daumal describing how he had once made similar experiments with ether. Daumal had soaked a handkerchief in ether, which he then held to his nose. When he lost consciousness, his hand dropped, and he would quickly recover. Daumal attempted to describe his visions under ether, and they impressed and excited us. His main point was the same as that made by so many mystics: that although he was ‘unconscious’ under ether, he had a sense that what he experienced was far realler than his everyday experience of the world. Now, both Karel and I agreed on one thing—no matter how dissimilar our temperaments might be in others—that our everyday lives had a quality of unreality. We could so well understand Chuang Tzu, who said that he had dreamed he was a butterfly, and felt in every respect exactly like a butterfly; and that he was not certain whether he was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

For a month or so, Karel Weissman and I tried to ‘experiment with consciousness’. Over the Christmas holiday, we tried the experiment of staying awake for three days on black coffee and cigars. The result was certainly a remarkable intensity of intellectual perception. I remember saying: ‘If I could live like this all the time, poetry would become worthless, because I can see so much further than any poet’. We also tried experiments with ether and carbon tetrachloride. In my own case, these were altogether less interesting. I certainly experienced some enormous feeling of insight—of the kind that one occasionally gets on the point of sleep—but it was very brief, and I could not remember it afterwards. The ether gave me a headache for days, so after two experiments I decided to give it up. Karel claimed that his own results corresponded to those of Daumal, with certain differences; I seem to remember he found the idea of rows of black dots extremely significant. But he also found the physical aftereffects unsettling, and gave it up. Later, when he became an experimental psychologist, he was able to get mescalin and lysergic acid for the asking, and suggested several times that I should try them. But by this time I had other interests, and refused. I shall speak of these ‘other interests’ presently.

This long parenthesis has been necessary to explain why I thought I understood Karel Weissman’s last request to me. I am an archaeologist, not a psychologist. But I was his oldest friend, and I had once shared his interest in the problems of the outer limits of human consciousness. In his last moments, surely his thoughts had returned to our long nights of talk at Uppsala, to the endless lagers we had consumed in the little restaurant 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 excellent local brandy. (Even here the differences in our temperaments revealed themselves!)

Now it happened that one evening, I received a letter from Baumgart. It was very brief. He stated simply that he had discovered certain papers in Weissman’s filing cabinets that convinced him that Weissman had been insane for some time before his suicide: that Weissman had believed that ‘they’ were aware of his efforts, and would try to destroy him. Baumgart said that it was clear from the context that ‘they’ did not refer to human beings. He had therefore decided not to go ahead with his negotiations for the publication of Weissman’s psychological papers; he would leave it for my return.

Naturally, I was puzzled and intrigued. It happened that Reich and I had reached a certain point in our work where we felt we had a right to rest and congratulate ourselves; so our talk that evening was concerned entirely with Weissman’s ‘madness’ and suicide. During the early part of the discussion, there were also present two of Reich’s Turkish colleagues from Izmir, and one of them mentioned the curious fact that the suicide rate in the rural areas of Turkey had risen in the past ten years. This surprised me; for while the urban suicide rate had increased steadily in most countries, the country populations, on the whole, seemed immune from the virus.

This led one of our guests, Dr. Omer Fu’ad, to tell us about the researches that his department had been conducting into the suicide rate of the ancient Egyptians and Hittites. The later Arzawa tablets mention an epidemic of suicide in the reign of King Mursilis the Second (1334-4306 BC), and give the figures for Hattusas. Strangely enough, the Menetho papyri, discovered in 1990 in the monastery at Es Suweida, also mention an epidemic of suicide in Egypt in the reign of Haremhab and Sethos the First, covering approximately the same period (1350-1292 BC). His companion, Dr. Muhammed Darga, was an admirer of that strange piece of historical charlatanism, Spengler’s Decline of the West, and proceeded to argue that such epidemics of suicide could be predicted accurately according to the age of the civilization and its degree of urbanization. He went on to evolve some far-fetched metaphor about biological cells and their tendency to ‘die voluntarily’ when the body has lost its ability to be stimulated by the environment.

Now all this struck me as nonsense, since the civilization of the Hittites was barely 700 years old in 1350 B.C., while that of the Egyptians was at least twice as old. And Dr. Darga had a rather dogmatic manner of stating his ‘facts’ that annoyed me. I became rather heated—the brandy may have had something to do with it—and challenged our guests to produce facts and figures. They said, very well, they would—and would submit them to the judgment of Wolfgang Reich. And, having to fly back to Izmir, they took their leave fairly early.

Now Reich and I engaged in a discussion that sticks in my mind as the true beginning of the story of the fight against the mind parasites. Reich, with his clear, scientific intelligence, quickly summarized the pros and cons of our earlier arguments, and allowed that Dr. Darga seemed to have little gift for scientific detachment. Reich then went on:

‘Consider the facts and figures that are available to us about our own civilization. How much do they actually tell us? These suicide figures, for example. In 1960, a hundred and ten people of every million committed suicide in England—a doubling of the rate since a century earlier. By 1970, this rate had doubled again, and by 1980, it had multiplied by six…’

Reich had an astonishing mind; he seemed to have stored all the important statistics of the century in it. Now usually, I detest figures. But as I listened to him, something happened to me. I felt a touch of coldness inside me, as if I had suddenly become aware of the eyes of some dangerous creature. It passed in a moment, but I found myself shuddering. Reich asked: ‘Cold?’ I shook my head. And when Reich stopped talking for a while, to stare out of the window at the lighted street below us, I found myself saying:

‘When all’s been said, we know almost nothing about human life.’

He said cheerfully: ‘We know enough to be getting on with, and that’s all you can expect.’

But I could not forget that feeling of coldness. I said:

‘After all, civilization is a kind of dream. Supposing a man suddenly woke up from that dream? Wouldn’t it be enough to make him commit suicide?’

I was thinking about Karel Weissman, and he knew it. He said:

‘But what about these delusions about monsters?’

I had to agree that this failed to fit my theory. But I could not shake off the cold touch of depression that had settled on me. What is more, I was now definitely afraid. I felt that I had seen something that I could not forget—to which I would have to return. And I felt that I could easily slide downhill into a state of nervous terror. I had drunk half a bottle of brandy, yet now I felt horribly sober, coldly aware that my body was slightly drunk, yet unable to identify with it. The idea that came to me was terrible. It was that the suicide rate was increasing because thousands of human beings were ‘awakening’ , like me, to the absurdity of human life, and simply refused to go on. The dream of history was coming to an end. Mankind was already starting to wake up; one day it would wake up properly, and there would be mass suicide.

These thoughts were so awful that I was tempted to go back to my room and brood on them. Yet I forced myself, against my will, to express them to Reich. I don’t think he fully understood me, but he saw that I was in a dangerous condition, and with inspired insight, he said the exact words that were necessary to restore my peace of mind. What he began to talk about was the strange part that coincidence had played in archaeology; coincidence that would be too wild to use in fiction. He talked of how George Smith had journeyed from London with the absurd hope of finding the clay tablets that would complete the epic of Gilgamesh, and how he had, in fact, found them. He talked of the equally ‘impossible’ story of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy, of Layard’s finding of Nimrud—as if some invisible thread of destiny had pulled them towards their discovery. I had to admit that, more than any other science, archaeology inclines one to believe in miracles.

He followed it up swiftly. ‘But if you can agree with that, then surely you must see that you’re mistaken in thinking that civilization is a kind of dream—or a nightmare? A dream appears to be logical while it lasts, but when we wake up we see that it had no logic. You are suggesting that our illusions impose a similar logic on life. Well, the stories of Layard, Schliemann, Smith, Champollion, Rawlinson, Bossert, contradict you flatly. They really happened. They are real life stories that make use of outrageous coincidence in a way that no novelist would risk…’

He was right, and I had to agree. And when I thought of that strange destiny that had guided Schliemann to Troy, Layard to Nimrud, I recollected similar examples from my own life—for example, of my first major ‘find’—of the parallel texts in Phoenician, proto-Hattian and Kanisic at Kadesh. I can still remember my overwhelming sense of destiny, of some ‘divinity that shapes our ends’—or at least, in some mysterious law of chance—that came over me as I scraped the earth from those clay tablets. For I knew, at least half an hour before I found those texts, that I was going to make a remarkable discovery that day; and when I stuck in my spade in a casually chosen spot, I had no fear that it would prove to be a waste of time.

In less than ten minutes, Reich had talked me back into a state of optimism and sanity.

I did not know it, but I had won my first battle against the Tsathogguans.

(Editor’s note: from this point onward, the tape recording has been supplemented by Professor Austin’s Autobiographical Notes, by kind permission of the Librarian of Texas University. These notes have been published separately by the University in Professor Austin’s Miscellanies. I have attempted to use the notes only to expand material mentioned in the tape recording, which continues for another ten thousand words or so.)

The luck of the god of Archaeology was certainly with me that spring. Reich and I worked together so well that I decided to take a flat in Diyarbakir and remain there for at least a year. And in April, a few days before we set out for the Black Mountain of Karatepe, I received a letter from Standard Motors and Engineering, Karel Weissman’s former employers, saying that they would like to return a great many of Weissman’s papers to me, and enquiring as to my present whereabouts. I replied that letters would reach me care of the Anglo-Indian Uranium Company at Diyarbakir, and that I would be grateful if they would return Weissman’s papers to my London address, or to Baumgart, who was still in Hampstead.

When Professor Helmuth Bossert first approached Kadirli, the nearest ‘town’ to the Black Mountain of the Hittites, in 1946, he had a difficult journey over muddy roads. In those days, Kadirli was a tiny provincial town with no electricity. Today it is a comfortable but quiet little town with two excellent hotels, and within an hour’s reach of London by rocket plane. The trip from there to the Black Mountain, Karatepe, cost Bossert another arduous day’s travel over shepherds’ paths overgrown with prickly broom. We, in our own helicopter, reached Kadirli in an hour from Diyarbakir, and Karatepe in a further twenty minutes. Reich’s electronic equipment had already been brought by transport plane forty-eight hours earlier.

I should, at this point, say something about the purpose of our expedition. There are many mysteries attached to the ‘Black Mountain’ , which is part of the Anti-Taurus mountain range. The so-called Hittite Empire collapsed in about 1200 BC, overcome by hordes of barbarians, prominent among whom were the Assyrians. Yet the Karatepe remains date from five hundred years later, as do those at Carchemish and Zinjirli. What happened in those five hundred years? How did the Hittites succeed in preserving so much of their culture through such a turbulent time, when its northern capital—Hattusas—was in the hands of the Assyrians? This was the problem to which I had devoted ten years of my life.

I had always believed that further clues might lie deep under the ground, in the heart of the Black Mountain—just as deep excavations into a mound at Boghazköy had revealed tombs of a highly civilized people a thousand years older than the Hittites. My excavations in 1987 had, in fact, turned up a number of strange basalt figurines, whose carving differed strikingly from the Hittite sculptures found on the surface—the famous bulls, lions and winged sphinxes. They were flat and angular; there was something barbaric about them—and yet not in the manner of African sculptures, with which they have occasionally been compared. The cuneiform symbols on these figures were distinctively Hittite, rather than Phoenician or Assyrian, yet, if it had not been for these, I would have guessed that the figures came from a completely different culture. The hieroglyphs in themselves presented another problem. Our knowledge of the Hittite language has been fairly comprehensive since the researches of Hrozny, yet there are still many lacunae. These tend to occur in texts dealing with religious ritual. (We could imagine, for example, some archaeologist of a future civilization being baffled by a copy of the Catholic mass, with its sign of the cross and odd abbreviations.) In that case, we surmised, the symbols on the basalt figures must deal almost entirely with religious ritual, for about seventy-five per cent of them were unknown to us. One of the few statements we could read was: ‘Before (or below) Pitkhanas dwelt the great old ones’. Another read: ‘Tudaliyas paid homage to Abhoth the Dark’. The Hittite symbols for ‘dark’ may also signify ‘black’, ‘unclean’ or ‘untouchable’ in the Hindu sense.

My finds had excited considerable comment in the world of archaeology. My own first view was that the figurines belonged to another proto-Hattian culture (i.e. the forerunners of the Hittites), that differed considerably from the one discovered at Boghazköy, and from which the Hittites took over their cuneiform. Pitkhanas was an early Hittite ruler of about 1900 BC. If my surmise was correct, then the inscription meant that before Pitkhanas there lived the great proto-Hattians from whom the Hittites derived their script. (‘Below’ could also signify that their tombs were below those of the Hittites, as at Boghazköy.) As to the reference to Tudaliyas, another Hittite ruler of about 1700 BC, it again seemed likely that the Hittites had derived some of their religious ritual from the proto-Hattians, of whom ‘Abhoth the Dark’ (or unclean) was a god.

This, I say, was my original interpretation: that the Hittites had taken over parts of the religion of their predecessors at Karatepe, and had made inscriptions upon Hattian figurines to this effect. But the more I considered the evidence (which is too complex to detail here), the more I was inclined to believe that the figurines helped to explain how Karatepe remained an island of culture long after the fall of the Hittite empire. What force will keep invaders at bay over a long period? Not, in this case, the force of arms; the evidence at Karatepe reveals an artistic, not a military culture. Sheer indifference? Why should they be indifferent? Through Karatepe, Zinjirli and Carchemish lay the road to the south, to Syria and Arabia. No; it seemed to me there was only one force strong enough to hold back an ambitious and warlike nation: superstitious fear. Surely the power of Karatepe and its neighbours was the power of some mighty religion—some religion of magic? Possibly Karatepe was a recognized centre of magical culture, like Delphi. Hence those strange reliefs of bird-headed men, of strange, beetle-like creatures, of winged bulls and lions?

Reich disagreed with me, and his disagreement was based upon his dating of the figurines. He claimed that, in spite of their excellent state of preservation, they were many thousands of years older than the proto-Hattian culture. He later verified this beyond all doubt with the use of his ‘neutron dater’. Well, I was willing to be corrected; I was not entirely happy with my own provisional dating of the figurines. But an immense problem remained. As far as we know, there was no civilization whatever in Asia Minor before 3000 BC Further south, civilization dates back to 5000 BC; but not in Turkey. So who made the figurines, if not the proto-Hattians? Did they come from further south? If so, where?

During the first two months that I spent with him, Reich continued to work on his ‘neutron dater’, and used my figurines as basic testing material. But here absurd difficulties arose. The dater showed itself remarkably accurate with samples of potsherd from Sumer and Babylon, where we had means of cross-checking its results. But they had little success with the figurines. At least, their results were so extra-ordinary as to be obviously inaccurate. The neutron beam was directed at minute fragments of stone dust in the cracks and hollows of the figurines. From the ‘weathering’ and decay of these fragments, the dater should have been able to give us a rough estimate of how long ago the basalt was carved. It failed completely; the needle of the indicator swung to its furthest limit—about 10,000 BC! Reich talked about increasing the range of the indicator, simply out of curiosity, to see what date it would finally arrive at. In fact, he actually doubled its range, by some fairly simple adjustments. The needle still swung to its limit with the same unhesitating speed. It was becoming insane, and Reich began to wonder if he had made some elementary error. Perhaps the dust had not been produced by carving?—in which case, the dater was attempting to give us the age of the basalt itself! At all events, Reich left his assistants the task of constructing a dial that would show anything up to a million years—an immense task that would take most of the summer. And then we made our expedition to Karatepe, to try to investigate the problem at its source.

Yes…the source of the problem. How incredible it now seems as I tell the story! How is it possible to believe in simple ‘coincidence’ in the light of these facts? For my two ‘problems’ were converging: the problem of my friend’s suicide, and the problem of the basalt figurines. When I think back upon that summer, it is impossible to believe in a materialistic historical determinism.

Let me try to place the events in their order. We arrived at Kadirli on April 16th. On the 17th, we established a camp at Karatepe. Admittedly, there was nothing to stop us from commuting between Karatepe and our comfortable hotel at Kadirli. But our workmen had to stay in the nearest village, and we decided that it might be better if we spent most of our time at the site of the excavation. Besides, all the romantic in me revolted at the idea of leaving the second millennium BC and plunging back into the late twentieth century every evening. So we set up our tents on a level space of ground near the top of the mound. From below us came the perpetual roar of the Pyramus river, with its swirling yellow waters. The electronic probe was set up on top of the mound.

I should say a word about this instrument: Reich’s invention, that has since revolutionized the science of archaeology. Fundamentally it is no more than an X-ray, whose principle is similar to that of the mine detector. But a mine detector is only able to detect metal, and an X-ray will only be stopped by some hard, opaque body. Since the earth itself is hard and opaque, the old X-ray principle was of no use in archaeology. Moreover, the things that interest archaeologists—stones, earthenware and the rest—have more or less the same molecular structure as the surrounding earth, so they would hardly show up on an X-ray plate.

Reich’s modification of the electronic laser would penetrate to a depth of three miles, and its principle of ‘neutron feed-back’ meant that it immediately indicated any object of regular shape—a stone slab, for example. The only problem then was to dig down to the object, and this could be done fairly easily with our robot ‘moles’.

It should not be difficult to imagine my state of excitement on the day we set out for Karatepe. Fifteen years of hard digging had failed to reveal any more basalt figurines, or to yield any clue to their source. The sheer volume of earth to be excavated made the problem apparently insoluble. Reich’s invention solved it with a beautiful simplicity.

And yet, for the first three days, the results were disappointing. A probe taken directly below the old diggings revealed nothing. A further half day was occupied in moving the probe to another site a hundred yards away. This time I was certain that something would be revealed—and I was mistaken. Reich and I looked gloomily at the plain below us, then at the enormous bulk of the electronic probe, and wondered how many times it would have to be moved before we made a ‘find’.

On the third evening, we received a visit from our two Turkish colleagues, Fu’ad and Darga. We decided to fly back into Kadirli for a meal at the hotel. Our feelings of irritability—due to our suspicion that they were there to spy on us for the Turkish government—soon vanished, for they were both full of warmth, sympathy and eager questionings. After an excellent meal and some good claret, the day’s disappointments seemed less important. Afterwards, we retired to the visitors’ lounge, which we had to ourselves, and drank Turkish coffee and brandy. It was at this point that Dr. Muhammed Darga revived the topic of suicide. He had come armed with facts and figures this time. I shall not attempt to detail the discussion that followed—it went on until well after midnight—but it certainly seemed to indicate that Darga’s theories about ‘biological decay’ were not as wild as they sounded. How, said Darga, could we account for this tremendous rise in the world suicide rate if we stuck to our view that it was simply a matter of ‘civilization neurosis’? Too much security, lack of real purpose? But there was still plenty of ‘challenge’ in the modern world, and psychology had made tremendous advances in the past fifty years. The crime rate was far below what we might expect from the world’s overcrowding. In the first half of the twentieth century, the crime rate and the suicide rate had risen together. So why had the crime rate dropped while the suicide rate had increased so dramatically? It wasn’t good sense. Suicide and crime had always been connected in the past. In the first half of the twentieth century, the high suicide rate was partly due to crime, since one third of all murderers committed suicide. No, said Darga, this was a matter of some strange law of historical decay that only Spengler had suspected. Individual men are merely the cells in the great body of civilization; and, as with the human body, the rate of decay increases steeply with age…

I had to admit that he had me more than half convinced. At half past midnight, the four of us parted on the best of terms, and our two helicopters separated in the moonlight above Kadirli. We were back at the excavation by one o’clock.

It was a beautiful night. The air was full of the scent of asphodel, which the Greeks called the flower of the underworld, and of the distinctive odour of the shrubs that grew over the hill. The only sound was the churning of the river. The mountain peaks reminded me of my first trip to the moon; they had the same detached, dead beauty.

Reich went into his tent; he was still brooding on Darga’s statistics. I walked up the hill, and into one of the chambers of the upper gate. Then I climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and stood there looking out over the moonlit plain. I admit that my mood was romantic, and that I experienced a need to intensify it. So I stood there, hardly breathing, thinking of the dead sentries who had stood where I now stood, and of the days when only the Assyrians lay on the other side of those mountains.

All at once, my thoughts took a gloomy turn. I felt totally insignificant, meaningless, standing there. My life was the tiniest ripple on the sea of time. I felt the alienness of the world around me, the indifference of the universe, and a kind of wonder at the absurd persistency of human beings whose delusions of grandeur are incurable. Suddenly it seemed that life was no more than a dream. For human beings, it never became a reality.

The loneliness was unbearable. I wanted to go and talk to Reich, but the light in his tent had gone out. I felt in my upper pocket for a handkerchief, and my hand encountered a cigar that I had accepted from Dr. Fu’ad. I had taken it as a ritual gesture of friendliness, for I am almost a non-smoker. Now its smell seemed to take me back to the human world, and I decided to light it. I cut off its end with a penknife, and pierced the other end. As soon as I took the first mouthful of smoke, I regretted it. It tasted foul. I placed it on the wall beside me, and continued to stare out over the valley. After a few minutes, its pleasant smell led me to take it up again. This time I took several more deep pulls at it, swallowing the smoke. My forehead felt damp, and I had to lean on the wall. For a while I was afraid I was about to vomit and waste my excellent supper. Then the nausea passed, but the feeling of disembodiment persisted.

At this point, I looked at the moon again—and was suddenly overwhelmed with an inexpressible fear. I felt like a sleepwalker who wakes up and finds himself balancing on a ledge a thousand feet above the ground. The fear was so immense that I felt as if my mind would dissolve; it seemed impossible to bear. I tried hard to fight it, to understand its cause. It was connected with this world I was looking at—with the realization that I was a mere object in a landscape. This is extremely difficult to make clear. But I suddenly seemed to see that men manage to stay sane because they see the world from their own tiny, intensely personal view-point, from their worm’s eye view. Things impress them or frighten them, but they still see them from behind this wind-shield of personality. Fear makes them feel less important, but it does not negate them completely; in a strange way, it has the opposite effect, for it intensifies their feeling of personal existence. I suddenly seemed to be taken out of my personality, to see myself as a mere item in a universal landscape, as unimportant as a rock or fly.

This led to the second stage of the experience. I said to myself… ‘But you are far more than a rock or a fly. You are not a mere object. Whether it is an illusion or not, your mind contains knowledge of all the ages. Inside you, as you stand here, there is more knowledge than in the whole of the British Museum, with its thousand miles of bookshelves’.

This thought, in a sense, was new to me. It led me to forget the landscape, and to turn my eyes inside myself. And a question presented itself. If space is infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the centre of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.

It was a moment of revelation, of overwhelming insight. But as I stood there, totally oblivious of the outside world, straining all my powers to stare into those inner spaces, something happened that terrified me. This is almost impossible to describe. But it seemed that, out of the corner of my eye—the eye of attention that was turned inward—I caught a movement of some alien creature. It was a strange shock, the feeling you would get if you were relaxed in a warm bath, and you suddenly felt a slimy movement against your leg.

In a moment, the insight had passed. And as I looked at the mountain peaks above me, and at the moon sailing over them, I felt a thrill of pleasure, as if I had just returned home from the other end of the universe. I felt dizzy and very tired. All this had taken less than five minutes. I turned and walked back to my tent, and tried to look inside myself again. For a moment, I succeeded.

This time, I felt nothing.

But when I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, I found that I no longer wanted to sleep. I would have preferred to talk to Reich, or to anyone. I had to express what I had suddenly realized. Man assumes that his inner world is private. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place’ said Marvell, and we have the same feeling about the mind. In the real world, our freedom is limited; in imagination, we can do anything we like; what is more, we can defy the world to penetrate the secret; the mind is the most private place in the universe—sometimes, perhaps, too private. ‘We each think of the key, each in his prison’. And the whole difficulty of treating madmen is to break into that prison.

Yet I could not forget that feeling of something alien inside my mind. Now I thought back on it, it did not seem so terrifying. After all, if you walk into your own room, expecting it to be empty, and you find someone there, your first response is fear: it could be a burglar. But this soon passes. Even if it is a burglar, you confront him as a reality, and that original flash of fear passes away. What was so alarming was that feeling of something—or someone—inside my own head, so to speak.

As my mind lost its fear, and became simply interested in the problem, I felt sleepy. One of my last thoughts before I fell asleep was to wonder if this was some kind of hallucination due to the Turkish coffee and the cigar.

When I woke at seven the next morning, I knew it wasn’t. The memory of that sensation was curiously clear. And yet, let me confess, it now aroused a kind of excitement in me rather than terror. This should be easy enough to understand. The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from ‘sinking into ourselves’. As a romantic, I have always resented this; I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.

At breakfast, I was tempted to talk to Reich about it all. Something withheld me—the fear, I suppose, that he would simply fail to understand. He remarked that I seemed abstracted, and I said that I’d made the mistake of smoking Darga’s cigar—and that was all.

That morning, I supervised the moving of the electronic probe to a place further down the mound. Reich went back to his tent to try to devise some easier method for moving the thing—a cushion of air underneath, for example, on the hovercraft principle. The workmen shifted the probe to a position halfway down the mound, below the lower gate. Then, when it was ready, I took my seat, adjusted the controls on the screen, and pulled the starter.

Almost instantly, I knew I had struck something. The white line that ran from the top to the bottom of the screen showed a distinct bulge halfway down. When I cut the power, increasing the feedback, this immediately spread into parallel horizontal lines. I sent the foreman to fetch Reich, and proceeded to move the control cautiously, probing around the regular object in all directions. The screen showed that there were more of these objects to the left and right of it.

This, of course, was my first experience of discovering anything with the probe, so I had no idea of the size of the object I had found, or of its depth below the ground. But when Reich came running over a moment later, he took one look at the dial, another at the controls, and said: ‘Oh Christ, the bloody thing’s gone wrong.’

‘In what way?’

‘You must have twisted the control too far, and disconnected something. According to this, the object you’ve located is two miles below the ground and seventy feet high!’

I climbed off the seat rather ruefully. It is true that I have no ability to deal with mechanical appliances. New cars break down within hours when I drive them; machines that have never given the slightest trouble blow a fuse as soon as I approach. In this case, I had no consciousness of having done anything wrong, but I felt guilty all the same.

Reich unscrewed a plate and looked inside. He said there was nothing obviously wrong, and that he would have to test all the circuits after lunch. When I apologized, he slapped me on the shoulder.

‘Never mind. We’ve found something anyway. Now all we’ve got to discover is how deep it lies.’

We ate a good cold lunch. Then Reich rushed off to his machine. I took an air mattress, and went and lay down in the shadow of the lion gate, to make up for lost sleep. And I slept deeply and peacefully for two hours.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Reich standing beside me, staring out across the river. I looked at my watch, and sat up hastily.

‘Why on earth didn’t you wake me?’

He sat down on the ground beside me. His manner struck me as subdued.

‘What is it? Can’t you trace the fault?’

He looked at me thoughtfully.

‘There is no fault.’

I failed to understand.

‘You mean it’s repaired?’

‘No. There never was any fault.’

‘Well, that’s cheering. What went wrong then?’

‘That’s what bothers me. Nothing went wrong.’

‘No? In that case, you know how deep this thing is?’

‘Yes. It’s as deep as the gauge showed. Two miles.’

I restrained my excitement; stranger things had happened.

‘Two miles,’ I said. ‘But that’s quite a distance below the foundations of this hill. I mean… that kind of depth ought to take us down to archaeozoic rocks.’

‘That depends. But I’m inclined to agree with you.’

‘Besides, if it’s accurate about the depth, it’s presumably accurate about the size of the blocks—seventy feet high. That sounds a trifle unlikely. Even the building blocks of the great pyramid aren’t that size.’

Reich said good-humouredly: ‘My dear Austin, I agree with you completely. The thing is impossible. But I have checked every circuit in the machine. I don’t see how I could be mistaken.’

‘There’s only one way to find out—send a mole down.’

‘Which is what I was about to suggest. However, if it’s really two miles down, the mole is of no use.’

‘Why?’

‘To begin with, because it was never intended to cut through rock—only through earth or clay. It’s bound to en-counter rock at that depth. Second, because even if there’s no rock at that depth, the pressure of the earth would destroy the mole—it would be like being two miles under the sea. The pressure would be thousands of pounds to the square inch. And since the temperature rises by a hundred degrees to a mile, it could also be too hot for its electrical equipment.

The sheer size of the problem now struck me. If Reich was correct, we could never hope to unearth the ‘objects’ down there—objects that were obviously part of a wall of a city, or of a temple. With all our modern engineering efficiency, we had no machines capable of working at that temperature and pressure, and raising enormous blocks for two miles.

Reich and I returned to the probe, discussing this problem. If the probe was correct—and Reich seemed to think it was—then it set archaeology an extraordinary problem. How on earth could remains sink to this depth? Perhaps the whole tract of land had subsided in some eruption—collapsed into an abyss underneath? Then perhaps the hollow had been filled with water and mud… But mud to a depth of two miles! How many thousands of years would that take? We both felt as if we were going insane. It was a temptation to rush to the telephone and consult colleagues, but the fear of having made some absurd mistake held us back.

By five o’clock, we had the mole ready to launch, its nose pointing straight downwards. Reich operated the remote control panel, and its bullet-like nose began to revolve. Earth sprayed, then settled into a small, loose pile. For a few moments, the pile quivered. Then there was no sign of the mole.

I went across to the radar screen. At its top, a brilliant white dot seemed to tremble. As we watched, it moved down slowly—very slowly, slower than the minute hand of a watch. Next to the radar screen, a kind of television screen showed only wavy lines that looked as if they were made of smoke. Occasionally, these lines became thinner in places, or vanished altogether; this was when the mole encountered a rock. If it encountered any object that was more than ten feet across, it would stop automatically, and the electronic laser would scan its surface.

An hour later, the white dot had moved halfway down the screen—a depth of about a mile. It was now moving slower. Reich went to the probe, and set it going. Its screen registered the mole—at a mile down. And still in the same position, further down the screen showed the enormous blocks. The probe was accurate.

Now we all felt the tension. The workmen were standing in a group, their eyes fixed on the radar screen. Reich had switched off the probe, since its beam could damage the mole. We were risking damaging an expensive piece of equipment—yet we could see no alternative. We had checked and rechecked the probe. It indicated unmistakably that the immense blocks were of a more or less regular shape, and were resting side by side. It was impossible that they could be natural rocks.

Neither was it inevitable that we should lose the mole. Its electronically fortified metal would withstand a temperature of two thousand degrees; its makers had assumed that it might encounter veins of volcanic lava. The strength of its shell was enormous; the makers guaranteed that it could stand a pressure of two and a half tons to the square inch. But if it reached the blocks at a depth of two miles, it would be supporting about twice that weight, or very nearly. Besides, its transmitting equipment might not stand the temperature. And then there was always the possibility that it might pass beyond the range of the remote control, or sustain damage to its receiver.

By half past eight, night was falling, and the mole had traversed another half of the distance. The blocks were only half a mile below it. We had told the workmen to go home, but many of them stayed. Our cook prepared us a meal from tins; he was obviously in no condition to cook anything elaborate. When the night came down, we sat there in the dark, listening to the faint hum of the radar equipment, and watching the brilliant white dot. Sometimes, I became convinced that it had stopped. Reich, whose eyes were better than mine, assured me that it hadn’t.

By half past ten, the last of the workmen had gone home. I had wrapped myself up in a dozen blankets, for the wind had risen. Reich chain-smoked; even I smoked two cigarettes. Suddenly, the humming stopped. Reich leapt to his feet. He said: ‘It’s there.’

‘Are you sure?’ I found that my voice had become a croak.

‘Absolutely. The position’s right. It’s now directly over the blocks.’

‘What now?’

‘Now we activate the scanner.’

He started the machine again. Now our eyes were fixed on the television screen. It was blank, indicating that the scanner was trained on a massive and hard object. Reich adjusted the controls. The wavy lines began to reappear, but they were now thinner and straighter. Reich made some adjustment that brought them closer together, until the whole surface of the screen became a pattern of fine white and black lines, like a pair of pinstriped trousers. And showing very clearly against this pattern of lines there were a number of black scars, indentations in the rock. The excitement of the past few hours had been so great that I was able to look at these without strong emotion. It was impossible to doubt what they were. I had seen them many times before—on the basalt figurines. I was looking at the symbols that represented the name of Abhoth the Dark.

There was nothing more to be done. We photographed the screen, then went back to Reich’s tent to radio Darga at Izmir. Within five minutes, Reich was speaking to him. He explained the situation, apologized for the risk we had taken with the mole—which belonged to the Turkish government—and told him that we had definitely established that these blocks belonged to the culture of the ‘great old ones’ mentioned on one of the figurines.

Darga, I suspect, was a little drunk. The situation had to be explained to him at length before he understood. Then he proposed fetching Fu’ad and flying over to join us immediately. We convinced him there would be no point, as we were about to go to bed. He said that we should move the mole along to scan the next blocks. Reich pointed out that this was impossible. It could not move sideways, only forwards and backwards; it would have to be withdrawn a hundred feet or so, and redirected. This would take several hours.

Finally, we convinced Darga, and broke the connection. We were both appallingly tired, yet neither of us felt like sleep. The cook had left equipment for making coffee. Against our better judgement, we used it, and opened a bottle of brandy.

It was there, sitting in Reich’s tent at midnight, on the 21st of April, 1997, that I told Reich about my experience of the night before. I started to tell him, I think, to distract our minds from the problem of those seventy-foot blocks below the ground. In this, I succeeded. For, to my surprise, Reich found nothing strange in what I had to say. At university, he had studied the psychology of Jung, and was familiar with the idea of a ‘racial unconscious’. If there was a racial unconscious, then human minds are not separate islands, but are all part of some great continent of mind. He had read a great deal more psychology than I had. He cited the work of Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescalin sometime in the 1940’s, and had also reached my own conclusion that the mind stretches for infinity inside us. Huxley, apparently, had gone further, in a way, and spoken of the mind as a world of its own, like the world we live on—a planet with its own jungles and deserts and oceans. And on this planet—as one would expect—there live all kinds of strange creatures.

At this point, I objected. Surely Huxley’s talk about strange creatures was only a metaphor, a piece of poetic licence? The ‘inhabitants’ of the mind are memories and ideas, not monsters.

At this, Reich shrugged.

‘How do we know?’

‘I agree, we don’t. But it seems common sense.’

I thought about my experience of the night before, and felt less sure of myself. Was it ‘common sense’? Or have we got into a habit of thinking about the human mind in a certain way—as our ancestors thought of the earth as the centre of the universe? I speak of ‘my mind’ as I speak of ‘my back garden’. But in what sense is my back garden really ‘mine’ ? It is full of worms and insects who do not ask my permission to live there. It will continue to exist after I am dead…

Oddly enough this train of thought had the effect of making me feel better. It explained my anxiety—or seemed to. If individuality is an illusion, and mind is actually a kind of ocean, why should it not contain alien creatures? Before falling asleep, I made a note to send for Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. Reich’s thoughts had taken a more practical turn. Ten minutes after we separated, he called to me from his tent: ‘You know, I think we might be justified in asking Darga to lend us a large hovercraft for shifting the probe. It’d certainly make life easier…’

It now seems absurd that neither of us anticipated the consequences of our discovery. We expected, of course, to produce some excitement in archaeological circles. Both of us had conveniently forgotten the kind of thing that happened when Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamen, or when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered at Qumran. Archaeologists are inclined to discount the world of mass communications and the hysteria of journalists.

Fu’ad and Darga woke us up at half past six, before the workmen arrived. They had with them four officials of the Turkish government, and a couple of American film stars who happened to be sightseeing. Reich was inclined to resent this unannounced intrusion, but I pointed out to him that the Turkish government was within its rights—except, perhaps, where the film stars were concerned.

First of all, they wanted to be convinced that the blocks were really two miles deep. Reich started the probe, and showed them the outline of the ‘Abhoth block’ (as we came to refer to it), and the mole next to it. Darga expressed doubts that the mole could have penetrated to a depth of two miles. Patiently, Reich went over to the mole’s transmission panel, and switched it on.

The result was discomforting. The screen remained blank. He tried the digging control; it produced no result. There could be only one conclusion: that the temperature—or possibly the pressure—had damaged the mole’s equipment.

It was a setback, but not as serious as it might have been. A mole was expensive, but it could be replaced. But Darga and Fu’ad still wanted to be convinced that there was not some fault in the mechanism of the probe. Reich spent the morning demonstrating that every circuit was in order, and that there could be no room for doubt that the blocks were really two miles down. We developed the radar photograph of the Abhoth block, and compared its cuneiform with that of the basalt figurines. It was impossible to doubt that the two came from the same culture.

There was, of course, only one possible answer to the problem: a full scale tunnel down to the blocks. I should point out that, at this point, we had no idea of the size of individual blocks. We presumed that the height indicated on the probe’s screen could be the height of a wall or a whole building. Admittedly, the radar photograph posed an interesting problem, for it had been taken from above—which meant, presumably, that the wall, or building, was lying on its side. No past civilization has ever been known to write inscriptions on the top of walls or on the roof of buildings.

Our visitors were baffled but impressed. Unless this turned out to be some kind of a freak, it would undoubtedly prove to be the greatest find in archaeological history. So far, the oldest civilization known to man is that of the Masma Indians of the Marcahuasi plateau in the Andes—9,000 years old. But we now recalled the results of our tests on the basalt figurines with the neutron dater, which we had assumed to be inaccurate. They tended to support our assumption that we were now dealing with the remains of a civilization at least twice as old as that of the Marcahuasi.

Fu’ad and his colleagues stayed to lunch, and left at about two o’clock. By now, their excitement was affecting me, although I had an obscure feeling of irritation at allowing myself to be affected. Fu’ad promised to send us a hovercraft as quickly as possible, but mentioned that it might take several days. Until this arrived, we felt reluctant to move the probe by hand. It was obvious that we were going to receive a great deal more governmental support than we had expected, and there was no sense in wasting energy. We had a second mole, but it seemed pointless to risk it. So at half past two, we sat in the shadow of the lower gate, drank orange squash, and felt at a loose end.

Half an hour later, the first of the journalists arrived—the Ankara correspondent of the New York Times. Reich was furious. He assumed—incorrectly—that the Turkish government was seizing this opportunity for publicity. (We later discovered that the two film stars were responsible for informing the press.) Reich vanished into his tent, and I was left to entertain the journalist, a pleasant enough man who had read my book on the Hittites. I showed him the photograph, and explained the working of the probe. When he asked me what had happened to the mole, I said I had no idea. For all I knew, it had been sabotaged by troglodytes. This, I am afraid, was the first of my mistakes. I made the second when he asked me about the size of the Abhoth block. I pointed out that we had no evidence that it was a single block, even though there appeared to be similar blocks on either side of it. It could be a religious monument in the shape of an enormous block, or perhaps a construction like the ziggurat at Ur. If it was a single block, then it would indicate that we were dealing with a civilization of giants.

To my surprise, he took me seriously. Did I subscribe to the theory that the world had once been inhabited by giants who had been destroyed by some great lunar catastrophe? I said that, as a scientist, it was my business to keep an open mind until definite evidence was produced. But was this evidence? he persisted. I replied that it was too early to say. He then asked me whether I would agree that such immense building blocks could have been moved by ordinary men—as in the case of the Gizeh pyramid or the Toltec sun pyramid at Teotihuacan. Still unsuspecting, I pointed out that the largest blocks of the Gizeh pyramid weigh twelve tons; a seventy foot block could weigh a thousand tons. But I agreed that we still had no real knowledge of how the stones of the Cheops pyramid—or those at Stonehenge, for that matter—had been moved; these ancient people may have possessed a far greater knowledge than we realize…

Before I had finished talking to the New York Times man, three more helicopters appeared. More journalists. By four o’clock, Reich had been persuaded to emerge from his tent, and was demonstrating the mechanism of the probe—with a bad grace. By six o’clock, we were both hoarse and weary. We escaped back to the hotel in Kadirli, and managed to eat a quiet supper. The manager had been told to refuse all telephone calls. But at nine o’clock, Fu’ad got through to us. He was waving a copy of the New York Times. The whole front page was devoted to the story of the ‘World’s Biggest Discovery Ever’. I was quoted as endorsing the theory that we had discovered the city of a race of giants. I was made to hint that these giants had also been magicians who had raised their thousand ton building blocks by some strange art that has now been forgotten. A well known colleague of mine gave his opinion that the pyramids of Egypt and ancient Peru could never have been built by any known method of engineering, and that this new discovery would surely prove it beyond all doubt. On the inside page of the newspaper, a popular writer on archaeology contributed an article called ‘The Giants of Atlantis’.

I assured Fu’ad that I had never said anything about giants—at least, not in the context quoted. He promised to ring the New York Times and correct their account. Then I crept off to Reich’s room to drink a final glass of brandy, leaving instructions that I was at home to no one—not even the Sultan of Turkey.

I think I have said enough to indicate why we were unable to return to the site for another week. The Turkish government supplied soldiers to guard our equipment; but they had no orders to keep visitors at bay, and the air above Karatepe swarmed with helicopters like wasps around jam. The hotels in Kadirli were jammed for the first time since they had been built. Reich and I had to stay in our rooms, or risk being accosted a hundred times an hour by cranks and sensation seekers. The Turkish government granted us the hovercraft within twelve hours, but it was impossible to use it. On the following day, the Carnegie Foundation granted us two million dollars for starting the tunnel, and the World Finance Committee produced another two million. Finally, the Turkish government agreed to build a forty foot wire enclosure around the Black Mountain, and they did this in less than a week, with some help from American and Russian Foundations. We were then able to return to work.