have often wondered since then how far the choice of myself as executor was a part of my friend’s design, and how far it was a last minute decision made in despair. Obviously, he can have given little thought to it, or they would have known. Was it, then, a sudden inspired decision, the last lightning flash of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century? Or was I chosen faute de mieux? We may know the answer one day if we can obtain access to the Tsathogguans’ archives. I like to think that the choice was intentional, a masterstroke of cunning. For if providence was on his side in making the choice, it was certainly on mine during the next six months, when I thought of anything but Karel Weissman’s papers.
When I left for Turkey, I instructed my landlord that Baumgart was to be allowed into my flat during my absence. He had agreed to attempt a preliminary sorting of the papers. I had also opened negotiations with two American publishers of textbooks of psychology, who showed themselves interested in Karel Weissman’s papers. Then, for some months, I thought no more about psychology, for the problems involved in the dating of the basalt figurines absorbed my full attention. Reich had established himself in the laboratories of the Turkish Uranium Company at Diyarbakir. His main concern so far, of course, had been the dating of human and animal remains by the argon method, and in this technique he had become the foremost world authority. In turning his attention from the ages of prehistory to the reign of the Hittites, he was exploring a relatively new field as far as his own work was concerned. Man is a million years old; the Hittite invasion of Asia Minor occurred in 1,900 BC. For this reason, he was delighted to see me in Diyarbakir, for my own book on the civilization of the Hittites had been the standard work since its publication in 1980.
For my own part, I found Reich a fascinating man. My own mind is at home in any period from 2,500 BC to the end of the tenth century AD. Reich’s mind was at home in any period from the Carboniferous age onward, and he could speak of the Pleistocene—a mere million years ago—as if it were recent history. I was present once when he examined a dinosaur tooth, and he remarked casually that it could not possibly be as recent as the Cretaceous age—that he would place it in the late Triassic—about fifty million years earlier. I was also present when a Geiger counter verified his guess. His instinct for this kind of thing was quite uncanny.
Since Reich will play a considerable part in this story, I should say something about him. Like myself, he was a big man; but unlike myself, his bigness owed nothing to surplus fat. He had the shoulders of a wrestler, and an enormous, prognathous jaw. His voice always gave surprise, for it was gentle and rather high—the result, I believe, of a throat infection in childhood.
But the main difference between myself and Reich lay in our emotional attitude towards the past. Reich was a scientist through and through. For him, figures and measurements were everything; he could derive enormous pleasure from reading through a column of Geiger readings that extended over ten pages. His favourite assertion was that history should be a science. Now I have never tried to hide the powerful element of the romantic in my composition. I became an archaeologist through an almost mystical experience. I had been reading a volume on the civilization of Nineveh by Layard, which I had picked up casually in the bedroom of the farm at which I was staying. Some of my clothes were drying on a line in the yard, and a burst of thunder made me hurry outside to get them in. Just inside the farmyard there was a large pool of grey water, rather muddy. As I was taking the clothes from the line, my mind still in Nineveh, I happened to notice this pool, and forgot, for a moment, where I was or what I was doing there. As I looked at it, the puddle lost all familiarity and became as alien as a sea on Mars. I stood staring at it, and the first drops of rain fell from the sky, and wrinkled its surface. At that moment I experienced a sensation of happiness and of insight such as I had never known before. Nineveh and all history suddenly became as real and as alien as that pool. History became such a reality that I felt a kind of contempt for my own existence, standing there with my arms full of clothes. For the remainder of that evening I walked around like one in a dream. From then on, I knew I had to devote my life to ‘digging up the past’, and to trying to reconstitute that vision of reality.
It will be seen, in a moment, that all this has great relevance to my story. It meant that Reich and I had totally dissimilar attitudes towards the past, and constantly amused one another by minor revelations of our individual temperaments. For Reich, science contained all the poetry of life, and the past merely happened to be the field in which he exercised his ability. As to myself, science was a servant of poetry. My earliest mentor, Sir Charles Myers, had strengthened this attitude in me, for he had the most total contempt for all that was modern. To see him working on a digging was to see a man who had ceased to exist in the twentieth century, and who looked down on history like a golden eagle from some mountain peak. He had a shuddering distaste for most human beings; he once complained to me that most of them seemed ‘so unfinished and shabby’. Myers made me feel that the true historian is a poet rather than a scientist. He once said that the contemplation of individual men made him dream of suicide, and that he could reconcile himself to being human only by considering the rise and fall of civilizations.
During those first weeks at Diyarbakir, when the rainy season made it impossible for us to do field work on the Karatepe diggings, we had many long discussions during the evenings, while Reich drank beer by the pint and I drank a most excellent local brandy. (Even here the differences in our temperaments revealed themselves!)
Now it happened that one evening, I received a letter from Baumgart. It was very brief. He stated simply that he had discovered certain papers in Weissman’s filing cabinets that convinced him that Weissman had been insane for some time before his suicide: that Weissman had believed that ‘they’ were aware of his efforts, and would try to destroy him. Baumgart said that it was clear from the context that ‘they’ did not refer to human beings. He had therefore decided not to go ahead with his negotiations for the publication of Weissman’s psychological papers; he would leave it for my return.
Naturally, I was puzzled and intrigued. It happened that Reich and I had reached a certain point in our work where we felt we had a right to rest and congratulate ourselves; so our talk that evening was concerned entirely with Weissman’s ‘madness’ and suicide. During the early part of the discussion, there were also present two of Reich’s Turkish colleagues from Izmir, and one of them mentioned the curious fact that the suicide rate in the rural areas of Turkey had risen in the past ten years. This surprised me; for while the urban suicide rate had increased steadily in most countries, the country populations, on the whole, seemed immune from the virus.
This led one of our guests, Dr. Omer Fu’ad, to tell us about the researches that his department had been conducting into the suicide rate of the ancient Egyptians and Hittites. The later Arzawa tablets mention an epidemic of suicide in the reign of King Mursilis the Second (1334-4306 BC), and give the figures for Hattusas. Strangely enough, the Menetho papyri, discovered in 1990 in the monastery at Es Suweida, also mention an epidemic of suicide in Egypt in the reign of Haremhab and Sethos the First, covering approximately the same period (1350-1292 BC). His companion, Dr. Muhammed Darga, was an admirer of that strange piece of historical charlatanism, Spengler’s Decline of the West, and proceeded to argue that such epidemics of suicide could be predicted accurately according to the age of the civilization and its degree of urbanization. He went on to evolve some far-fetched metaphor about biological cells and their tendency to ‘die voluntarily’ when the body has lost its ability to be stimulated by the environment.
Now all this struck me as nonsense, since the civilization of the Hittites was barely 700 years old in 1350 B.C., while that of the Egyptians was at least twice as old. And Dr. Darga had a rather dogmatic manner of stating his ‘facts’ that annoyed me. I became rather heated—the brandy may have had something to do with it—and challenged our guests to produce facts and figures. They said, very well, they would—and would submit them to the judgment of Wolfgang Reich. And, having to fly back to Izmir, they took their leave fairly early.
Now Reich and I engaged in a discussion that sticks in my mind as the true beginning of the story of the fight against the mind parasites. Reich, with his clear, scientific intelligence, quickly summarized the pros and cons of our earlier arguments, and allowed that Dr. Darga seemed to have little gift for scientific detachment. Reich then went on:
‘Consider the facts and figures