Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 26

sleeping among the field walls in the midst of the ruins, with their donkeys tethered nearby.

That first night I arrived at Knidos I was assigned to a tent and I was immediately warned about scorpions. ‘Never mind the big ones, it’s the little flesh coloured ones you have to worry about’, I was told. I imagined being infested with these predatory arthropods. Unfailingly every morning I banged my desert boots on the ground to see if one had inadvertently climbed in during the night. They never had. I also made sure that I didn’t turn over rocks inadvertently either; I pushed them first before putting my fingers underneath, though it has to be said that throughout the whole time I was there I never saw a scorpion alive.

But we did have some scorpion visitations. I remember one morning a young lad from the village was brought to the dig house by his father. He was in intense pain, having been bitten on the neck by one of these dreaded arachnids. He had been sleeping alongside the field walls with all the other men when a scorpion had fallen onto him and he had inadvertently swatted it in his sleep, and bang! It had inflicted the bite. The boy had the remains of this arachnid in a screw of newspaper to show anyone who might be interested. But there was nothing we could do, and indeed his dad was quite happy to leave him sitting at the house. He said it was good that the poor chap was getting the experience; it would harden him for later life! This seemed a bit harsh to me, but what could I do. So the lad sat there silently holding a cold compress to his neck all day long without a murmur until in the evening he got up and calmly walked away, apparently none the worse for his experience.

However, on one occasion, in the pitch dark in the middle of the night, one of our dig staff did get bitten and all hell was let loose. It was our very own English rose, Harriet, very well bred and very public school. Our tents were equipped with camp beds and sleeping bags, which

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