INTRODUCTORY.APOLOGY OF AN APPRENTICE.
And ta’en the—Antiquarian tradeI think they call it.Burns.
And ta’en the—Antiquarian tradeI think they call it.Burns.
And ta’en the—Antiquarian tradeI think they call it.
And ta’en the—Antiquarian trade
I think they call it.
Burns.
I will not take the name of Antiquary without apology, and hereby,liberandi animam meam causa, make it in an Introductory, to be passed over if the reader pleases. Your true Antiquary is born, not made. Sometimes an infirmity or awkwardness of body, which has disposed a boy to shun the pursuits of his fellows, may help to detach the man for the study of forgotten far off things; but it is essential that there be inborn in him the type of mind which is more curious of the past than the present, loves detail for its own sake, and cares less for ends than means.
Nevertheless, accident may make an Antiquary, as good as another, out of anybody whose boyish education has given him, willy nilly, some knowledge of the elder world. Let him be thrown, for example, in early manhood, much into lands whose ancient monuments conspicuously exalt the past at the expense of the present. The necessary curiosity can grow within him, disposing his mind to study antiquarian detail as a duty, and, in time, a pleasure; and through apprenticeship he may learn and love the trade to which he was not born.
I claim to be no better than this Antiquary made, and made none too soon. Nothing disposed me to thetrade in early years. If I was taken as a child to minsters and abbeys, I endured their chill aisles in lively hope of a pastrycook to come, and at our oldest Public School had no feeling for the grey Gothic austerities among which live the Foundationers, of whose number I was not. Nor was it until half my Oxford course had been run that I discovered curiosity about any ancient thing, and that curiosity was far from antiquarian. Scholar of my College though I was, I had been better known as a freshman for a gamester in a small way than for anything else; but some study was forced upon me, and in the course of it I happened on Mommsen’s panegyric of Caesar. The charm of guessing ancient motives from the records of ancient deeds fascinated me—there is much in the pursuit to appeal to a gambler—and I resolved to attempt a speculative biography of some great man. Looking about me for another imperial figure, I fixed, greatly daring, on Alexander the Great, foreswore cards and the course, and stepped out of the strict lists of the schools into the field of Macedonian history. The spacious world over which Alexander moved fired my imagination and stirred a lust for discovery. As a child my keenest joy was to announce the finding of an untrodden way in the outskirts of a Lincolnshire townlet, and my best remembered grief was to learn that it was already known and named.
I could write a good deal about Macedonians when I went into the Schools, but barely enough on other matters to win salvation; and if I was made presently a tutor and fellow of my College, it was less for my actual scholarship than for hope of its future. I found academic life not greatly to my liking at that age, and when an endowment for scholarly travel abroad was set for competition,I entered in forlorn hope of escape. To the equal surprise of others, I was chosen among better scholars, and found myself in a quandary. If I was to research abroad as a classical scholar, I wished to explore Alexander’s steps; but to go up alone into Asia was beyond my means. A friend, who knew my difficulty, told me that William Martin Ramsay, the well-known traveller in Asia Minor, needed an apprentice. Asia Minor was not Persia, but it was Asia, and fair field for a pioneer. I offered myself, and was accepted, but on the sole condition, that I made some preliminary study at the newly-founded Archaeological School in Athens. I knew nothing of Greek archaeology, having never during six years entered the Museum of my own Oxford; and thus, at an age when most archaeologists are past masters of some branch of their trade, I had to begin apprenticeship. Perhaps it may interest some to hear by what accidents an antiquary of a sort was made out of a wandering scholar.
* * * * *
I went to Athens early in 1887, as raw a neophyte as ever entered Academe. The British School, then in its first youth, was not yet assured of its place in the local republic of science, and held little converse with other Schools. The famous Antiquary who directed it could have guided better, though not more gladly, a student of Attic architecture than a would-be explorer of Asia, and the library held few books, though, heaven knows, enough that I had not read. My one fellow-student helped me much, and would have helped me more, had I been in the temper to learn. But I had come to Athens as a man should not, if he is to love her—come without trained taste for the ancient art,which is her only wealth, and without instinctive reverence for her soil. I gaped at her monuments like any other tourist, though with less than the common understanding, fled from German lectures on her topography, and took refuge in studying her inscriptions as students of history will who are brought unworthy into the presence of her art. For pastime, beside visiting a few neighbouring spots of which I knew not enough to find them interesting, I roamed mean streets and dusty suburbs, regretting the world I had left, and longing for another in the east, with a prospect of Asiatic travel for my sole comfort.
Two months passed drearily, and I escaped to Macedonia. The rickety vessel broke down for the third time at the second sunrise, and, wakened by the stoppage, I climbed sleepily on deck to find myself in a world of fog. A sudden gleam pierced the mist: I turned to see a patch of heaven, and in it, immeasurably high, one hard rose-red cloud. “Olympe!” said a deck hand. The peak stood revealed a moment only; but I had seen the seat of the Gods.
Salonica,sale unique, as the skipper punned, received me for ten days, and, with its camel-trains and Jews, black-bearded and cruel-eyed as men that kill prophets offered a foretaste of the East. It was in days before the railway had come down the Vardar valley and before the Great Fire, and the town, packed more close than now into its frame of white wall, was more odorous, less Italianized, less passable. Under the aegis of a Turk-loving Consul I hunted inscriptions in alleys and courts and stone-cutters’ yards and the purlieus of an unreformedkonak, and, beginning to feel the explorer’s itch, would go up to Vodhena to find what might be left of Aegae;but Consul and Pasha forbade lest another Briton be captured by the bands that had taken Synge and Souttar. I was too innocent then to discount official fears, still believing, indeed, that one should walk, revolver on hip, even in Salonica streets; and in the end I proposed no more than to drive to the site of Pella. I went off with a young consular assistant and a guard, rumbling along, gensdarmes to right and gensdarmes to left, as I should never journey again in Turkey. There were soldiers at the coffee-halts, soldiers at thekhans, soldiers guarding the bridge which crossed the slow-turning eddies of the Vardar, and soldiers holding Yenije, where astute bugs, who found saucers of water barring their usual access, painfully climbed the leprous walls and dropped from ceiling to pillow. The Yenije gravestones are mostly blocks brought from Pella, and on the site of the ancient city itself lie others, with two fragments of fluted Doric shafts, near a fountain still called Pel. For the rest, Pella has vanished as though it had never been. Out of dusty undulating fields; out of half a dozen barrows; out of a low marshy plain to west and south; out of a glorious horseshoe of hills with the snowy saddle of Olympus at one horn—out of these you must conjure your vision of Philip’s home.
It was the middle of May when I was free of Athens, and, passing over to Smyrna, found Ramsay about to start. A third member of the party arrived two days later, an adventurous fellow who had spent part of his youth in Albania and Montenegro, and, knowing little of ancient things, cared less, so he had a good horse to ride and an unknown track to follow. The apparatus of travel, which we gathered at Smyrna, was of the simplest,—a single tent and a few pots and pans, butno canned stores; and two simple villagers were hired to serve us. The qualifications of the one chosen to cook became manifest on the second night in camp. We had left railhead at Seraikeuy, and ridden up the Lycus valley to the foot of the white cliffs of Hierapolis. Mehmet bought a turkey of the peasants of Pambuk Kalessi, and was bidden to have it ready for the next night’s supper. Early on the morrow we went up to the site, and all that day, under a broiling sun and among some of the best preserved Roman tombs in Asia Minor, I entered on an arduous apprenticeship to the best epigraphist in Europe. Sharpset at nightfall we hurried down expectant of our turkey. Mehmet sat placid, the bird at his feet. It was a corpse, indeed, but no more, not even a plucked one. “What am I to do with this?” said Mehmet.
He learned better as time went on; but throughout that journey we had little except sodden messes to eat, faring worse than any traveller need fare. It was partly because our leader cared little what he ate, but more because, like his followers, he journeyed on a slender purse. Ramsay had made to himself a European reputation as an explorer of Asia Minor at a cost which another man would think scarcely sufficient for the tour of Germany; and it had become his principle, as, for similar reasons it has become Petrie’s, to suffer none but the barest means to his end. If both have pushed their practice to exceeding discomfort, both have taught several young Britons how little is necessity and how much superfluity: and it is not the least of my many debts to Ramsay that I gained in my first tour of exploration the will and the capacity to go farther at less cost than perhaps anyone but my master.
THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS.
THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS.
This part of my education had begun at once: for while we were still in Smyrna, Ramsay, wanting information about two sites lying north of the Aidin railway, had suggested that I should visit them alone, all raw as I was, and rejoin him at railhead. Feeling like a boy packed off to his first school, I agreed, and took the train to Nazli. I knew very little Greek, and less Turkish, but the Nazli stationmaster, christened Achilles, was reported to speak my tongue. He so far justified his fame as to greet me, stranded forlorn on the tracks, with “How you do, my boy?” When my Oxford manner had readjusted itself, we conversed sufficiently in French; and he found me a dancing stallion and sent me off astride a deep and angular military saddle with my knees level with my hips, the centre of a curvetting escort of the youth of Nazli. My first site proved to be a large hillock once surrounded by walls, and still bearing ruins of Roman baths, towards which an aqueduct straggled across the valley. It certainly looked like the ancient Mastaura which I had come out to see; and all doubt was soon settled by an inscription of that town which, on my return, I found built into a church wall at Nazli, and copied as best I might. After a sleepless night, stiff, sore, and with less skin than had left Smyrna, I went to the second site, and thence, proud but thankful, took train to railhead.
When our modest caravan had left Hierapolis, it wandered awhile on either bank of the upper Maeander, sometimes dropping a thousand feet to the stream, but for the most part keeping the high ground. The land flowed with milk and honey if not much else, and I learned the grave courtesy of the Anatolian peasant.Twice we were called to shelter from the noonday sun in the portico of a mosque, and whatever theayan, patron of strangers in that ordered village society, could procure of the best, was set before us. Our main purpose was to find inscriptions, and I was taught by precept and example how a villager may be induced to guide an inquisitivegiaurinto the recesses of hisharemlik, or grub up the headstone of his forefather, or even saw away the floor of his mosque. But it was not always plain sailing; and how we used the wisdom of the serpent, and what reward was ours at one Maeander village, Badinlar, I have told already in another book.
I soon became interested in the simple arts of antiquarian travel, the seeking, the copying, the noting, the measuring, and the mapping, but it was some time before I could practise them in any comfort. The food or the climate, or both, caused at the first severe saddle-boils, for whose easing there were no long halts. To a rider in such plight it means much if his horse trip on stony tracks, lash out at his fellow, plunge and burst his girths in a bog, incontinently roll on a chance sandpatch, or calmly sit down in a ford to cool his haunches. A sorry steed, bought in my innocence at eight pounds English, and dear at two, introduced me to each and all of these packhorse tricks. But the spacious landscapes, the dry warm airs, the novelty of man, beast, bird and flower, kept me going; and was I not in the land where I would be?
A chance visit to Sandukli brought me into my earliest collision with Ottoman authority. It was in the hungry month of Ramazan, and two of us had ridden in from camp to buy what supplies we might in the early hoursof morning. As we were about remounting, the police accosted us, and roughly bade us wait on the governor. Led to thekonak, we were told his beyship was abed, and we must stay till he had eaten at sundown. To spend a whole day in dusty Sandukli was bad, but worse to spend it waiting on a Bey’s pleasure. We sent word that we gave him half an hour to appear, and, admired by all the loafers of thebazar, stalked up and down, watch in hand, in all the insolence of Britain abroad. The governor came not, but on the call of time sent a deputy, nervously offering excuse, and begging us go in peace. Ours is not a gracious race, but it usually gets what it wants.
Passing north-eastward through Afium Kara Hissar in mid June, we went up to our goal in the Phrygian Monument country, and for all the rest of the month were busied in exploring its pleasant shaggy valleys and carven cliffs. I have seen since no region so thickly set with strange memorials of the past, and none to which I would more joyfully return. Some day when diggers uncover the relics of that Midaean monarchy which seemed to the early Greeks of Asia the eldest and most god-like of powers, may I be there to see! The haunted valley of Ayazin, where we grubbed mole-like under the face of a fallen tomb, and, prone in the shallow pit we had made, sketched the most curious of Phrygian reliefs: the sheer acropolis of Kumbet, where we planned a mysterious rock-house which may be of any antiquity; the gorges of Bakshish and Yapuldak, whose sculptured tombs, fashioned like houses of the living, are seen suddenly through the pines: that stupendous curtain of carved and written stone hung before the gate of death by which Midasthe King passed to the Great Mother; all his desolate, impregnable city above it, with inscribed altars and rock-reliefs—of these is woven my “féerie du premier voyage.” I was the photographer of the expedition, equipped with a camera which I had borrowed of an amateur in Smyrna and manipulated for the space of one afternoon under his patient eye—so unready was I for my trade; and I was an assistant surveyor, who having plotted painfully and with many lapses my half of the fortifications of the Midas City, was well enough satisfied with my botched work to question my master’s survey of the other half. He has long forgiven me.
A strenuous and somewhat nervous week we spent there under the Midaean crags. Unwarned of modern tenants, we found a new settlement of Circassians, who in those days had a bad name all over Asia Minor for a certain lawless truculence, born of pride of race, and fostered by the official perfidy with which they were often treated. But Mehmet Bey, the chief, received us cordially withsamovarand smooth words. On the morrow he followed our operations among the monuments with very lively interest, and at evening came down to the camp and roundly proposed to share profits. We told him once and again there was no gold in our hopes; but we talked to deaf ears, and at last, to be rid of him, said we would halve such treasure as we might find. This, we well knew, was to sow trouble for early reaping, in a land where all believe that the Frank spirits bullion out of earth and rocks, though one see it ever so little; and we were not comforted by our muleteers’ tales of a recent killing, for which the Ottoman government was holding Mehmet Bey to account. But the local police, who had kept track of us, summonedthe Bey to Karahissar on the third day, and thus nothing worse befell than a cooling of cordiality between camp and village as the days went by without our doing anything but draw lines on paper and squint through sights.
When, at last, we had done what we came to do, we thought it well to ride fast and far, almost to Karahissar again. Thereafter we became two bands, Ramsay making for home, and his two scholars setting forth for the Cilician shore with no more baggage than might be carried on their saddle-horses and a third bestridden by a single servant. How first one of us and then the other fell ill, but neither so ill as he thought; what in our ignorance and inexperience we did and saw; how we came over Taurus in a waggon and took ship, I have already told elsewhere.
I did not return to Asia for three years, though within a twelvemonth I was wandering within sight of her snows. I had gone to Cyprus as one of four to dig, and I stayed alone to travel during the torrid summer of 1888, visiting almost every village of the island, and trying to do, with not half his science, what I had seen my master do on my prentice journey. What indeed I did do I wrote in a book, little known and less read, whose title,Devia Cypria, has deceived more than once, I am told, sanguine buyers of Erotica. Of the part I bore in the excavation of Paphos I will say little. I knew nothing of the digger’s art at the beginning, and very little at the end. Our leader had studied in the Egyptian school of Petrie, but the rest of us were so raw as not to know if there were any science of the spade at all. We had for mentor Gregori of Larnaca, who has become more famous since, and I doubt ifwe did much harm. But I doubt too if we found nearly all we ought to have found on that immemorial site. Some experience in handling unskilled Greeks, a fluent use of their rustic tongue, an inkling of how much I had to learn—this, however, I took away from Paphos.
Less than two years later I was with Ramsay in Asia again. The railhead of the Aidin line had been pushed in the meantime to Dineir, and we could make our start from far inland. It is often disputed which of two courses be best, to buy transport or to hire. The hirer must wrangle morning and night with muleteers, who use every trick of their trade to shorten and ease the day’s work. The buyer will be cheated when he buys, cheated when he feeds, cheated when he sells again, and he takes all risk of horse thieves. Our lot on this journey was rare and happy. The animals we had were none of ours; but their owner, unwilling to take the road, sent a Greek hireling in his stead. A month later, after many bickerings and a final fight with his Moslem fellows, the Christian took to his heels, leaving his master’s horses on our hands. Quit of responsibility we rode them another three months from one end of Asia Minor to the other, and though the two best were lifted by Circassians at a late stage of the journey, the owner, advised long ago of his hireling’s flight, was so amazed to see any beasts of his again, that, as we told their hire into his hand, he refrained himself from cursing and blessed us for honest men.
We rode off into the hills of Pisidia to pick up inscriptions here and there, but more often to revise texts that Ramsay had seen in earlier years. There were few or no adventures to vary the daily round ofa copyist, cynosure of an adhesive crowd in graveyards, or desired of raging dogs in the houses and courts. One noon the sun was eclipsed, and, at the moment of deepest shadow, we rode nervously into a remote village to find ourselves neither incensed for gods nor stoned for devils, but wholly neglected for the heavenly phenomenon, which was being calmly observed through smoked glass.
By the lovely lake of Egerdir came a fever-fiend to try the first of many bouts with me. It was a malign freak of fortune. Our waggon, with all baggage and medical comforts, had been sent by ferry across the lake to a point where, by riding round the southern bight, we might meet it on the second day; but failing to pass a rocky ridge, it fetched a wide compass to the north and made for another goal beyond the mountains. My fever began on the first afternoon, and sitting like a sack on a tired horse, with a sense of dull blows falling on the nape of my neck, I followed the pack-train till dusk up a wild valley where was said to be a hamlet. It proved ruinous and void, and almost supperless we had to pass the chill night in the open, lying on the soil with saddles under our heads. It sounds a romantic bivouac; but in sober fact a saddle that has clung to a hot and ill-groomed horse for a summer’s day makes a very sorry pillow: and lift stones as you may from the bosom of mother earth, she will privily thrust up as many more against your salient parts all the uneasy night.
Next morning we were away betimes, but doomed to wander for many hours behind ignorant or knavish guides in tangles of the Pisidian hills, I slaking an insatiate thirst at every torrent and spring. It was nightfall when we reached the bourne of our journey, the site of Adadaat Kara Baulo, whose modern name must survive from some church of Paul the Apostle, built perhaps in commemoration of a halt made by the first mission to the Gentiles on its way from Perga of Pamphylia to Pisidian Antioch. There I slept once more on mother earth under the stars, having supped, loathing, on broth in which floated shell-less unborn eggs. On the morrow I could do little but lie in the shade, while the rest explored the forest-girt ruins: but by noon their work was done, and I had to mount and follow to a hamlet in a low pass above the Eurymedon gorge. We lodged in a shed, and I read in my diary “cold and very lumpy lying.” The fourth stage, over nine hours long, took us across Eurymedon and up towards the snow-streaked crest of Anamás Dagh; for on we had to press for fear our waggoners should give us up for lost and trundle back to Dineir. Night found us lying on naked rock within a low circle of rough stones near an Alpineyailaor summer camp. We had been fed by the hospitable shepherds and given screens of felt against the bitter wind; but fever and its ague pains shooting through loins and legs banished sleep, and I sat up or paced till dawn.
At sunrise a peasant offered to show a painted cave, and hearing it was but a step along the hillside I offered to visit it. On we trudged; farther fled the cave; and not until the best part of an hour had passed were we halted before the mouth of a mean little Byzantine shrine. The sun was already high, and the morning windless. Bathed in sweat I scarcely dragged myself back over the rough path, and reached camp with a livid face. My companions lifted me into the saddle and hurried me across the pass, doubting, as they told me later, if I should liveto taste quinine again. But as the day wore on, the fever began to abate. The sweat under the early sun had broken it, and I was in a fair way to be cured, not killed, when we found the waggon awaiting us at the edge of the eastern plain.
I remained weak, however, and altogether indifferent to the work I had to do. Two years before, while alone in Cyprus, I had thought myself an antiquary, who explored ancient things for the love of science. Now I found them infinitely tedious, and moodily confessed I was no antiquary yet, not even a wandering scholar, but just a hunter at hazard. I did what my master wished of me: but my interest was in matters outside his work, in the incidents of the camp, in the means of travel, in the wildness of nature and man about us, in the beauty of the Beysheher lake seen through mist from a hill-top one morning, in the old boar, whom I flushed, as I was scrambling down again, and blessed that he did not charge. We went down from Konia into Cilicia, and in the hot valley of the Calycadnus and hotter coastlands near the Corycian Cave, where we were fain to sit in the pungent smoke of dung to escape worse torture of mosquitoes, my ill humour grew and I hated life until we doubled back to the heights, and the last memory of fever left me on the table-land of Kaisariyeh.
One of the party tarried with the American missionaries at Talas to recover of a worse Job’s plague than had vexed me three years before, while Ramsay took me over Anti-Taurus to copy the Hittite inscriptions of Gurun. Some of the incidents of this journey I have told already, especially the buying of the Bor Stone and its sequel; and other incidentsmust remain untold here if I am to make an end of these early wanderings. Sufficient to say that after we had recrossed Anti-Taurus, where boars came grunting one night almost to the camp-fires, which shone on their watering-place, and after we had discovered the Hittite relief of Fraktin, I left Ramsay to go home with the waggon, and, joined by the sick man from Kaisariyeh half cured but wholly undeterred, passed beneath the mighty wall of Ala Dagh to the foothills of Taurus. With the Hittite inscription of Bulgar Maden (how ill I copied it!) and the lower half of the Bor Stone to our credit, we set our faces homeward over the great Plains. On Dindymus I took a second fever of the kind that swells the limbs, and was brought by my comrade very sick to the railway and Dineir again.
This was to be the end of my apprenticeship in archaeological travel to the man who has made it a science. I was to have met Ramsay again in Cilicia the following year; but it was late in June before, scarcely recovered from another fever caught in Salonica, I landed at Mersina to find he had fled the coming heat. So I had to organize my own train and go up across the steaming Aleian plain to the Taurus with one companion, a traveller of infinite patience, as he had need to be that year. For little but mishap and delay was in store for us.
The first fortnight went well enough. We passed the mountains by way of the robber town of Hajin, where we spent a pleasant evening with two American mission ladies, who were to be caught by Kurds a week later, robbed, stripped, and lashed to trees: and near Comana we set ourselves to our first serious task, thetracing of the great military road which Severus made under the northward face of Taurus from Caesarea Mazaca to the standing camp of the “Thundering” Legion at Melitene. By the ruin of its embankment lie milestones of some ten Emperors, in groups of five or six, which Gregori, whom I had picked up in Cyprus, taught the peasants to lever over so we might read their inscriptions. Missing at every mile Ramsay’s skill in decipherment and his knowledge of things Roman, we did what we could to unravel the tangled epigraphs—a rude week’s work which left us little to learn about Roman milestones, and able to write a report which would win the heart of Mommsen.
The task was done at last at Arabissus, and we could turn off to Albistan to see a Hittite obelisk, and thence strike southward through Taurus, by way of stubborn Zeitun, to Marash in Commagene, where misfortune lay in wait. The Hittite stones which we had come down to see had been spirited away (I was not to see them till many years later in New York), and before we could fly the July heat of Syria, I was badly hurt by a fall, and laid on my back in a kindly missionary’s house for two long weeks—a martyrdom of idleness for my luckless comrade. Then came cholera, raiding north from Aleppo, and thinking we might yet escape the quarantine cordon on the northern frontier of the province, we bolted through Taurus again, though I was still unable to walk. I had a nightmare ride up and down the rock ladders of the Pyramus gorge, my throbbing ankle supported on an improvised crutch; nor did time pass more gratefully for the companionship of an ill-looking Armenian doctor, whom we had been begged to take under our wing. Accused(falsely, we were told) of illicit commerce with a patient, he went in fear of his life from two Circassian bravos set by her brothers on his track, and we could not refuse to shield him; but I have heard since that he deserved whatever fate he escaped. And after all the cordon caught us and bade us camp on a bare hillside a few miles south of Derendeh for six torrid days till our captors’ eyes could be opened (or closed) by practical but gentle methods of suasion. Not that the delay was time all lost; we passed on with my ankle almost sound, and another Hittite inscription added to our bag.
In Sivas it was my companion’s turn to fall sick, and summer was far gone before we could enter on the last stage. We rode up the Halys valley to Zara and the scene of Pompey’s victory at Nicopolis, and having turned thence down the course of the Pontic Lycus, through a pleasant Swiss region of pine forests and pine huts, inhabited by Shiahs, kindly to thegiaurbecause despised by Sunnis for “red-head” heretics, came to the Black Sea by way of Neocaesarea and Comana Pontica and the Iris valley and Amasia and the baths of Phazemon. By the way we picked up some unconsidered trifles of Roman milestones and landmarks of Imperial Estates and the like, which we put on record long ago in a publication of the Royal Geographical Society; and from first to last, when not on the track of Hittites, we seemed to be following the footsteps of Rome. What has happened to the records of Persian and Greek dominion in Cappadocia? The Hittite and the Roman alone have set their marks on the rocks.
THE VALLEY OF THE PONTIC LYCUS AT SUNRISE.
THE VALLEY OF THE PONTIC LYCUS AT SUNRISE.
When I went back to Oxford I had some claim tobe a wandering scholar, but less to be an archaeological digger than was credited by those who asked me two years later to take charge of excavations promoted by the Egypt Exploration Fund. I ought not to have agreed, but, having so agreed, because the call of the East compelled me, I should have begun humbly at the bottom of the long ladder of Egyptology. But I was a young man in a great hurry, unwilling to enter fresh indentures, and finding myself not needed on the confused site of Hatshepsut’s temple at Der el-Bahri, I evaded the obligation by making work among such Greek things as are in Egypt. I had no great success, and it was the best result of my Egyptian years that two Oxford scholars, who searched with me for papyrus scraps in the Fayûm desert one winter, were encouraged thereafter by my patrons to embark on a course which has led them to European fame. Clinging still to my old love Asia, I diverted my interest from Nile to Euphrates by making between seasons a journey which I have related in myWandering Scholar; and, sure at last that my heart would never be in Egyptian work, I broke with my patrons after three years.
If, however, I had done little for them, I had done much for myself. In those three seasons, largely through becoming known to Petrie, and living with men who had served apprenticeship to him, I had learned to dig. When I set foot first in Egypt, I had no method in such search, nor any understanding that the common labourer’s eyes and hands and purpose must be extensions of one’s own. If an excavator, deaf to the first and greatest commandment of his calling, take no care to make his labourers better than unskilled navvies, what should he find except the things that anavvy could not miss in the dark? No strengthening of his European staff, no unwearied watching of native fools and knaves, will secure to the excavator the half of the precious things which lie in his soil. If the labourer, who is a fool, cannot see what is being turned over under his eyes, you at his side will see it no better, because you are not turning it over. The labourer who is a knave will see, but take good care you do not. Unless your men be seeking consciously and with intelligence in an interest which is theirs as well as yours, better leave the hiding places of ancient things alone. For every digger, who turns over a site without finding what is in it, destroys great part of what he should have found.
Moreover, in handling remains of imperishable antiquity in the Nile land, I learned to observe as an antiquary must. And some of his spirit was breathed into me; for when I went back to Egypt for a few weeks in 1897, I found myself regarding her ancient life more than her modern. But I was not to be won to Egyptian studies at the eleventh hour. Already designated Director, where I had been an unworthy student ten years before, I sailed for Athens, intending to take stock of the duties which were to be mine in the coming autumn, and to follow my proper trade by exploring a coast of Greek Asia. But temptation met me, and turned me out of the Antiquary’s path.