Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [74]
This experience’s effect on him he decided was “unhealthy” and “morbid.”
I am sure you will have gathered by now that Frederick is and always was a man of great vitality, assurance, and has never been one to be afraid to voice opinions, take sides—assert himself.
If he had been less self-confident, probably the effect of that visit in Africa would have been much less.
However, he overcame his temporary loss of spirits, and started his lectures on Greece, which he had to abandon because of his first attack of stammering.
To come to the period just before he and I met outside the gates of London University.
There was a small, apparently minor incident … he was visiting an old colleague, who was engaged in an excavation in Wiltshire. He had stayed the night in a local inn, and had walked over next morning to visit his old friend. It was mid-morning and the work was in full swing. The professor himself, half a dozen amateurs there for the love of it, and two archeological students. A trench loosely filled with rubble had been exposed. The professor was unaware that Frederick was there. He was saying that the type of trench indicated that the foundations were for a stone building—the stones that had been keyed in to the stony rubble having been taken away for other later building. At which one of the students timidly piped up that he had recently been in Africa and had observed that in a village he was visiting, the people were making a hut of poles, mud plaster and thatch. The first stage of this was to dig a trench, the second being to stand the poles of the future walls in the trench, the third being to pack stony rubble around the poles. The professor did not comment on this. He walked away and Frederick followed him and announced himself. The professor took Frederick around the site and when he came to the trench filled with the rubble he said: “In my opinion this is the foundation of a wood and not a stone building, after all, certain primitive people did start wood huts by …” and etc. and so on. But if there had been no student back from a jaunt to Africa, the professorial voice would have announced with total authority that this building must have been of stone. And this was how the emphatic pronouncements of archeology are arrived at. It was this minor incident that made Frederick remember certain disquiets he had suffered last summer in Turkey. If “disquiet” is the right word for it.
All through the summer in Turkey he was thinking of his visit to the river-dominated society in Africa more than ten years before. He could not shake off the memory of it, although the two places had so little in common, one being under water for months of the year, the other being so high, dry and exposed. He could not shake off thoughts about the bases of modern archeology, which usually he just accepts as not more than nuisances no one can do anything about. Particularly about finance—that the financing of an excavation was always the key to it, and particularly whether it took place at all. Certain people got money easier than others. Some people couldn’t get money at all, or only with great difficulty. Some countries were easy money-extractors, others not. Countries had runs of popularity, were in vogue for a while, then went “out,” like styles in dress. He, Frederick, had been working on that particular site and not one he wanted to work on, because he had been able to get money for that site from an American source—a museum short of a certain kind of artefact which was known to be freely available on that site.