a hundred and ten people of every million committed suicide in England—a doubling of the rate since a century earlier. By 1970, this rate had doubled again, and by 1980, it had multiplied by six…’
Reich had an astonishing mind; he seemed to have stored all the important statistics of the century in it. Now usually, I detest figures. But as I listened to him, something happened to me. I felt a touch of coldness inside me, as if I had suddenly become aware of the eyes of some dangerous creature. It passed in a moment, but I found myself shuddering. Reich asked: ‘Cold?’ I shook my head. And when Reich stopped talking for a while, to stare out of the window at the lighted street below us, I found myself saying:
‘When all’s been said, we know almost nothing about human life.’
He said cheerfully: ‘We know enough to be getting on with, and that’s all you can expect.’
But I could not forget that feeling of coldness. I said:
‘After all, civilization is a kind of dream. Supposing a man suddenly woke up from that dream? Wouldn’t it be enough to make him commit suicide?’
I was thinking about Karel Weissman, and he knew it. He said:
‘But what about these delusions about monsters?’
I had to agree that this failed to fit my theory. But I could not shake off the cold touch of depression that had settled on me. What is more, I was now definitely afraid. I felt that I had seen something that I could not forget—to which I would have to return. And I felt that I could easily slide downhill into a state of nervous terror. I had drunk half a bottle of brandy, yet now I felt horribly sober, coldly aware that my body was slightly drunk, yet unable to identify with it. The idea that came to me was terrible. It was that the suicide rate was increasing because thousands of human beings were ‘awakening’ , like me, to the absurdity of human life, and simply refused to go on. The dream of history was coming to an end. Mankind was already starting to wake up; one day it would wake up properly, and there would be mass suicide.
These thoughts were so awful that I was tempted to go back to my room and brood on them. Yet I forced myself, against my will, to express them to Reich. I don’t think he fully understood me, but he saw that I was in a dangerous condition, and with inspired insight, he said the exact words that were necessary to restore my peace of mind. What he began to talk about was the strange part that coincidence had played in archaeology; coincidence that would be too wild to use in fiction. He talked of how George Smith had journeyed from London with the absurd hope of finding the clay tablets that would complete the epic of Gilgamesh, and how he had, in fact, found them. He talked of the equally ‘impossible’ story of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy, of Layard’s finding of Nimrud—as if some invisible thread of destiny had pulled them towards their discovery. I had to admit that, more than any other science, archaeology inclines one to believe in miracles.
He followed it up swiftly. ‘But if you can agree with that, then surely you must see that you’re mistaken in thinking that civilization is a kind of dream—or a nightmare? A dream appears to be logical while it lasts, but when we wake up we see that it had no logic. You are suggesting that our illusions impose a similar logic on life. Well, the stories of Layard, Schliemann, Smith, Champollion, Rawlinson, Bossert, contradict you flatly. They really happened. They are real life stories that make use of outrageous coincidence in a way that no novelist would risk…’
He was right, and I had to agree. And when I thought of that strange destiny that had guided Schliemann to Troy, Layard to Nimrud, I recollected similar examples from my own life—for example, of my first major ‘find’—of the parallel texts in Phoenician, proto-Hattian and Kanisic at Kadesh. I can still remember my overwhelming sense of destiny, of some ‘divinity that shapes our ends’—or at least, in some mysterious law of chance—that came over me as I scraped the earth from those clay tablets. For I knew, at least half an hour before I found those texts, that I was going to make a remarkable discovery that day; and when I stuck in my spade in a casually chosen spot, I had no fear that it would prove to be a waste of time.
In less than ten minutes, Reich had talked me back into a state of optimism and sanity.
I did not know it, but I had won my first battle against the Tsathogguans.
(Editor’s note: from this point onward, the tape recording has been supplemented by Professor Austin’s Autobiographical Notes, by kind permission of the Librarian of Texas University. These notes have been published separately by the University in Professor Austin’s Miscellanies. I have attempted to use the notes only to expand material mentioned in the tape recording, which continues for another ten thousand words or so.)
The luck of the god of Archaeology was certainly with me that spring. Reich and I worked together so well that I decided to take a flat in Diyarbakir and remain there for at least a year. And in April, a few days before we set out for the Black Mountain of Karatepe, I received a letter from Standard Motors and Engineering, Karel Weissman’s former employers, saying that they would like to return a great many of Weissman’s papers to me, and enquiring as to my present whereabouts. I replied that letters would reach me care of the Anglo-Indian Uranium Company at Diyarbakir, and that I would be grateful if they would return Weissman’s papers to my London address, or to Baumgart, who was still in Hampstead.
When Professor Helmuth Bossert first approached Kadirli, the nearest ‘town’ to the Black Mountain of the Hittites, in 1946, he had a difficult journey over muddy roads. In those days, Kadirli was a tiny provincial town with no electricity. Today it is a comfortable but quiet little town with two excellent hotels, and within an hour’s reach of London by rocket plane. The trip from there to the Black Mountain, Karatepe, cost Bossert another arduous day’s travel over shepherds’ paths overgrown with prickly broom. We, in our own helicopter, reached Kadirli in an hour from Diyarbakir, and Karatepe in a further twenty minutes. Reich’s electronic equipment had already been brought by transport plane forty-eight hours earlier.
I should, at this point, say something about the purpose of our expedition. There are many mysteries attached to the ‘Black Mountain’ , which is part of the Anti-Taurus mountain range. The so-called Hittite Empire collapsed in about 1200 BC, overcome by hordes of barbarians, prominent among whom were the Assyrians. Yet the Karatepe remains date from five hundred years later, as do those at Carchemish and Zinjirli. What happened in those five hundred years? How did the Hittites succeed in preserving so much of their culture through such a turbulent time, when its northern capital—Hattusas—was in the hands of the Assyrians? This was the problem to which I had devoted ten years of my life.
I had always believed that further clues might lie deep under the ground, in the heart of the Black Mountain—just as deep excavations into a mound at Boghazköy had revealed tombs of a highly civilized people a thousand years older than the Hittites. My excavations in 1987 had, in fact, turned up a number of strange basalt figurines, whose carving differed strikingly from the Hittite sculptures found on the surface—the famous bulls, lions and winged sphinxes. They were flat and angular; there was something barbaric about them—and yet not in the manner of African sculptures, with which they have occasionally been compared. The cuneiform symbols on these figures were distinctively Hittite, rather than Phoenician or Assyrian, yet, if it had not been for these, I would have guessed that the figures came from a completely different culture. The hieroglyphs in themselves presented another problem. Our knowledge of the Hittite language has been fairly comprehensive since the researches of Hrozny, yet there are still many lacunae. These tend to occur in texts dealing with religious ritual. (We could imagine, for example, some archaeologist of a future civilization being baffled by a copy of the Catholic mass, with its sign of the cross and odd abbreviations.) In that case, we surmised, the symbols on the basalt figures must deal almost entirely with religious ritual, for about seventy-five per cent of them were unknown to us. One of the few statements we could read was: ‘Before (or below) Pitkhanas dwelt the great old ones’. Another read: ‘Tudaliyas paid homage to Abhoth the Dark’. The Hittite symbols for ‘dark’ may also signify ‘black’, ‘unclean’ or ‘untouchable’ in the Hindu sense.
My finds had excited considerable comment in the world of archaeology. My own first view was that the figurines