The Red Blaze is the Morning

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Day by blazing day Halvorsen stretches himself across a blistering abyss, patiently searching in recalcitrant rock and hot sand for morsels of the useless past, even though he has begun to doubt the meaning and value of his own work. By chilly night, soaking his damaged and aching leg in a shallow basin of tepid sea-water—in this arid part of Turkey, fresh water is a luxury—he feels seductive fingers tickling the membranes of his mind. Something is trying to get in: perhaps already has. Something keeps nestling down alongside his consciousness and whispering fantastic, tempting things to him, visions of far-off times, mighty civilizations yet unborn. Or so it often seems.

What is actually going on, Halvorsen suspects, is that he is beginning to go crazy. The fascination of what’s difficult, he thinks, has not merely dried the sap out of his veins, as old Yeats feared it would, but has parched his brain beyond the bounds of sanity. And yet he can still speak six languages, including Turkish and Hebrew and modern Greek, and he can read Latin and classical Greek besides. He can recite the names of the Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus without missing one. Yes, his mind still functions well enough. Something else, something equally intangible and even harder to define, is what has become impaired. And then there is the sore leg, too, which mended inadequately after last summer’s accident on the rocky slope and is painful all the time. The leg is really in very bad shape. He ought not to be out here on the summit of the hill with a pick and shovel. He should be sitting in his tent, supervising the work of others. But Halvorsen has always been a hands-on kind of archaeologist: a point of great pride for him.

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