Shadows of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

little cove of sparkling white sand dotted with black rocks. I saw what looked like hundreds of birds, gulls and others I didn’t know. And: ‘Look, Alan! Seals, as I live and breathe!’
    There were dozens of them, sunning sleekly on the rocks or surfacing briefly out of the water before diving again. ‘I suppose they’re fishing,’ I said to Andrew, ‘but they look like they’re just playing.’
    ‘P’raps they are playing,’ said Andrew. ‘P’raps they’re selkies.’ I had never heard of selkies, so Andrew had to explain to me, straight-faced, about the seals that could transform themselves into humans and back again. ‘They like to play.’
    Andrew had been taking the boat around a corner to a landing place where there was a rudimentary dock. ‘There’s better mooring on the other side of the island,’ he said as he was making her fast to a post, ‘but it’s closer to the dig, so it’s needed by the workers. She’ll be safe here for a bit, till low tide. I’m sorry, but we’ll have to leave Watson on board. Dogs aren’t allowed at the dig. Can you climb a bit, Dorothy?’
    We left our disconsolate dog behind, and with Alan’s help I had no trouble scrambling up the gentle slope to the grassy plain above. There I stopped, struck motionless in sheer amazement.
    As far as I could see, the surface of the island had been transformed into a series of excavations. The effect was of the top layer being scraped away to reveal what lay just below. And what lay below was astounding.
    ‘It’s a long way from being open to the public, you’ll understand,’ Andrew was saying. ‘But they know me. It’ll be all right so long as you mind how you go. Can’t have you falling in a five-thousand-year-old pit, now can we?’
    But I was paying little attention, caught up in the sheer wonder of it.
    Once, back home in Indiana, I’d been doing some gardening and turned up an oddly shaped stone. I realized after a time that it had been shaped by a long-dead hand, notches cut out at one end to allow for fastening the thing to a stick or whatever, for use as a tool or weapon. I wasn’t sure when the native peoples inhabited my part of the state, but I knew the Europeans had come in the late seventeenth century, so this stone had lain there under my chrysanthemum bed for many hundreds of years. I was thrilled.
    Now I was looking at structures, houses or temples or workshops or whatever they might have been, that had been fashioned by human hands not just hundreds, but thousands of years ago. They were below ground level now, and perhaps they always had been. I didn’t know enough even to guess. The roofs were long gone, so one could look directly down into them, and what a sight they were.
    To my dazzled eye, there seemed to be dozens of them, separate structures, all of roughly the same size and shape. They were more or less rectangular, the corners somewhat rounded. The walls, butting up against the supporting earth, were of carefully worked stones, thinnish and flat, laid atop one another like bricks, but without mortar, at least so far as I could tell. Many of the structures were still being excavated, but the ones that were nearly completed showed one main room, with an entrance area and one or two small rooms. In the centre of the main room was what looked very much like a hearth, and there were box-like constructions along the side walls, with sides one stone thick and nearly perfect right angles. At one end, consistently, there was a construction that looked, astoundingly, rather like a bookshelf.
    ‘Andrew,’ I said when I could catch my breath, ‘what
is
all this?’
    He grinned. ‘A village. Almost, in Neolithic terms, a city. The largest such find in history. So far they’ve found twenty houses, far more than there are modern ones on the island, and five other structures, one very large.’
    ‘So these are houses?’ I gestured at the buildings closest to us. ‘How do they know?’
    ‘Well, for