Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 50

shoulder, he disappeared into the admiring crowd. The pronouncement was over. God had spoken.

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Two years later, resting on an upturned marble frieze which protruded from the scrub oak and pistachio bushes high above the excavations at Knidos I was confronted with that very dilemma – the people of the past. It was a fine summer morning and the sun was already high, the Mediterranean a silvered, reflective calmness to the far horizon, its symmetry disturbed only by the dark masses of the islands of the southern Dodecanese. Below me, lower down the slope, I could see puffs of dust rising from the various diggings - shovelfuls of earth being thrown into wheel barrows. One hundred men, like insects, were picking and scraping their way into the entrails of the long dead city. The remains of the temple facades and the street junctions they were uncovering were real enough. But where were Wheeler’s people? Surely they had faded into oblivion long since. I squinted into the distance, but no Hector or Lysander, no Helen or Herodotus, no Hadrian in greaves or Socrates deep in thought walked up through the prickly undergrowth to where I sat. This was my first overseas appointment as an archaeologist and here I was unable to connect the ancient rubble with any ancient reality. I was failing at the first hurdle.

But though it didn’t happen quite as I expected that day, or for many days and maybe months to come, it did happen. Not in the way or at the time I thought it might. But happen it did, on many occasions, so that in a moment of time I was able to touch the past, ever so briefly, ever so fleetingly, and in so doing I was able to feel a part of the great warp and weft of humanity rather than being isolated in my own cubical of twentieth century existence.

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