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 It could not move sideways, only forwards and backwards; it would have to be withdrawn a hundred feet or so, and redirected.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