The Lighthearted Quest (14 page)

“Was there another man with him?”

Purcell eyed her a little curiously, she thought, when she asked that, but all he said was—

“No, he came alone, except for his chauffeur; they brought the car and took the cases away in it.”

Julia reflected again for a moment.

“He has a house here, hasn't he?” she then asked.

“Ah, that I could not say. He may be staying at the Minzah—many people stay there. I only see him at intervals.”

Julia was about to press her questions when that veiled door opened and let in several people, among them those she had seen on her first visit; she paid and went home.

Next day she took her letters of introduction round to Mme La Besse; she telephoned in advance, and was asked to come early, as the lady had to go out for the day. That suited Julia; this quest was evidently going to be a long job, and the sooner she started earning the better. Mme La Besse lived in a rather indeterminate little house standing in a small muddled garden, down a cul-de-sac high up in the modern quarter to the west of the town; from the main road at the entry to the cul-de-sac there was a splendid view, out over half Tangier lying far below, white among the green of trees, with the misty blue of the mountains of the Rif in the distance; but from the house itself, low and muffled in its rather ugly small trees, nothing of this was to be seen. Mme La Besse was a short stout woman with thick untidy grey hair, and dressed in ugly shapeless clothes; her beard, of which Geoffrey had spoken, was very
much in evidence, stiff greyish bristles all over her chin. But she had a pair of very bright lively pale-blue eyes and a thoroughly cheerful expression; this was accentuated after she had read Geoffrey's letter.

“Ah, this dear
Consett
—he is so charming. I like him enormously. He says you are his friend—his fiancée, perhaps?”

“Decidedly
no
—but I too like him,” said Julia. “He is very fond of you, and greatly wished me to know you,” she added courteously.

“Le cher garçon!
and such an ardent archaeologist. And you?”

“I am afraid not—I am completely ignorant of all that.”

“Ah well, never mind. Did he speak to you of my beard?” the old lady asked unexpectedly.

“Actually he did,” Julia said, embarrassed but candid. Mme La Besse laughed, delightedly; she seemed to think her beard the best joke in the world. When she laughed her whole stout flabby body shook like a jelly, and her rather ugly face became creased with mirth—Julia decided that her new employer was rather likeable.

For employer and employed they at once became. Mme La Besse asked if she could drive a car? The car proved to be a Chrysler, a make which Julia had in fact only driven on her dash to Glentoran a couple of weeks earlier; she had beguiled the long run from Renfrew to Argyll by driving much of the way herself—this entitled her, she felt, to undertaking to drive the La Besse machine, and she hardily agreed to do so. She for her part bargained for a four-day week, in order to have time to write her articles—she had already started one on Casablanca, and how money was made in Morocco. Mme La Besse did not appear to be much impressed by journalism; indeed she gave the impression of not being easily impressed at all—
“Tiens! Les petites feuilles”
was her only comment. But she agreed to engage Julia to work four days a week, for a very fairly handsome sum in francs, which
as Lady Tracy had foreseen would enable the girl to live practically free at her Spanish pension; and she also made no fuss about Julia's stipulation for an occasional week off if she wanted it.

The job was a curious affair. It comprised paying the bills (some of them months old), dealing with the Spanish servants, doing the shopping for the household, and buying the flowers—Mme La Besse had a passion for flowers, and liked to have her untidy little house full of them all the time. This was a thing Julia enjoyed; it involved constant trips down to the Gran Socco, the big open-air market, where vegetables, fruit and cheeses were to be bought, and where majestic Berber women, in those huge be-tasselled straw hats, sold flowers of every kind—roses, carnations, freesias, heaths and myrtles; most charming of all one of them, in particular, delighted in concocting bright formal Victorian posies, with garden flowers and wild flowers all mixed together—Julia loved these, and always had one in her room in the hotel, but Mme La Besse preferred grander displays. No accounts were kept that Julia could see; she was given money to go shopping, and brought back the change, but her employer waved aside her neat sheets of reckonings. Nor was there a great deal of correspondence, though now and again she had to type out a few pages of reports on
“l'excavation”.
It became clear to Julia that what Mme La Besse wanted was less a secretary than a mother's help, to deal with the practical affairs of life, leaving her free for more congenial occupations. Geoffrey was right, though—she was great fun.

Before the first week was out Julia to her great satisfaction was called on to drive the old lady down to
“l'excavation”;
she had not yet been outside the city at all, and was delighted at the chance of seeing something of the countryside. The site lay in the International Zone—in which the city of Tangier is embedded like the stone in a peach—on the coast, down beyond the airport; Julia sent the Chrysler humming along
a superb road, first through suburbs, then across open country through fields either ploughed, or blue with wild Spanish iris standing two feet high, and past streams along whose banks paper-white narcissus bloomed in huge milky clumps. When they turned out towards the ocean the splendid road degenerated, till it ended as no more than a yellow sandy track; cultivation ceased, and a fragrant healthy countryside, full of wild scillas, took its place. Set among the heaths and cistuses Julia presently saw an oblong of low stone walls, of a curious tone between deep cream and pale sand, sloping gently down towards the real sand of the shore, along which the green Atlantic breakers rose and poised, to tumble and fall in a thundering confusion of foam; the noise they made was splendid on that wild sweet-smelling shore, in the strong hot sunshine.

They parked the car near a small roughly-built shed, surrounded by a little courtyard full of the spouts and bases of amphorae, tiles, and archaeological bits and pieces of all sorts; in the shed itself, Mme La Besse explained, the more valuable objects were housed, padlocked. However they did not then enter it; the old enthusiast could not wait to show the newcomer the site itself. In fact it was charming, and laid out with the utmost ingenuity. At the upper end were three large underground cisterns, still holding water—two had vaulted cemented roofs, as the Romans built them, but the third was roofed with over-sailing courses of dry stone, unmortared; this, Mme La Besse stated, was the Phoenician style for such things. Julia asked how the water reached the cisterns, and was shown some sections of stone-cut drain-pipes through which it had been led, from springs a considerable distance away, up on the higher ground inland. In the next enclosure below the cisterns—each activity, in this ancient factory, had had a compartment to itself, on most modern lines—were shallow mortared tanks for treading the grapes to make wine; Julia had once been up the Douro to see the port vintage, and
noticed with amusement that these Roman or Phoenician structures were exactly like the
legares
in which, today, barelegged Portuguese men in flowered cotton pants tread the grapes to make port, the only difference being that in Portugal in the twentieth century the raw wine is led off through pipes, whereas here a small open channel, beautifully cemented, had led it away to an adjoining tank several feet deep. “That must hold at least eight thousand gallons,” Julia said, comparing it in her mind to farm tanks installed by the Monros up at Glentoran.

“Nine
thousand,” said Mme La Besse proudly—“Consett said at least nine thousand.”

Two Berber labourers in straw hats were busily engaged in shovelling sand out of the bottom of this receptacle and throwing it up over the side; Mme La Besse shouted greetings to them in Arabic, and they shouted back, happy and friendly. The sand kept on blowing in, Mme La Besse explained; that must have been bad for the Phoenician wine, make it salty, Julia observed, which made the old lady laugh and shake.

Next they inspected what Mme La Besse declared to be the
huilerie,
the oil-mill, where olives were crushed before their oil was pressed out; Julia was rather unconvinced by this, since there was little to be seen but a large block of stone surrounded by a shallow circular trench or gutter, mortared as usual. However the fish-pits, which they visited next, were extremely convincing. A range of deep tanks, each some ten feet long by six feet broad, and seven or eight deep, ran round three sides of another enclosure, all lined with beautifully fine close mortar; for fish, whether swimming alive, pickling in brine, or steeping in oil they looked just the thing, indeed it was hard to think of a purpose unconnected with fish to which such structures could be put. Julia—perfectly ignorant of Roman, let alone Phoenician remains—regarded everything she was shown with a fresh and slightly sceptical eye; she listened, also a little sceptically, to the old archaeologist's eager attributions.
The little temple in the middle of the whole lay-out, with its small elegant pillars, she was prepared to accept, and could even pay a happy tribute to a civilisation which insisted on the equivalent of a chapel built into the heart of its factories. But she felt less sure about three long enclosures lying towards the lower, seaward end of the rectangle of buildings, which Mme La Besse declared to have been warehouses for the finished products before they were shipped away—one for wine, one for oil, and one for the pickled fish.

“But how do you
know
that that is what they were for?” Julia asked in her usual slow tones, gazing at her employer from behind her immense dark sun-glasses.

“For what else should they be? And if you had seen the number of shards of broken amphorae that we cleared out of them, you would have thought the same! Oil and wine were certainly transported in amphorae; how they sent the fish we don't know—possibly in rush baskets lined with the leaves of palmettes.”

“What are palmettes?” Julia asked.

“Oh, this plant from which the Moors make the
crin vegetal
with which they stuff their mattresses—this countryside is full of it, you will see them when we have lunch,” said Mme La Besse, rather irritably. She hustled Julia down to look at the baths at the lower end; these too were perfectly convincing. Julia had seen the like in England, when dragged by Geoffrey to observe Roman remains. Hot baths, cold baths, stone steps leading down into both; the tile-vaulted chambers of the hypocaust, where fires were kindled below the sudarium, the sweating-room, immediately above; neat herring-bone tiling floored most of these rooms, and here and there a fragment of gay frescoes, orange and white, still clung to the walls.

Julia surveyed all this with approval; if the place had really been a factory, these dispositions for the workers' comfort were admirable. “Fine; pit-head baths,” she said—and then had to translate and explain to Mme La Besse about the English
arrangements for coal-miners to wash before they went home from their work. But in spite of her lingering scepticism she was charmed by the idea of such a factory, functioning more than two thousand years ago. Standing there, fingering the curious pock-markings in the beautiful rough golden stone of the wall, for a little while she let her imagination run—an unusual thing with her, picturing those long-ago labourers toiling in the fish-pits or carrying laden amphorae down to the triremes or quinqueremes anchored at the mouth of the small river which ran out just below the site into a bay sheltered by a projecting headland, sweating under the strong sun, as she was sweating merely from walking about. Here, where fragrant scents from the healthy uplands filled the warm air, and the surf thundered on the sands below, there was no suggestion of dark Satanic mills; if one had to be a factory-hand, better to have been a Phoenician one, she thought. And vast earthenware jars full of flowery aromatic wine like that which she drank nightly—free of charge, since it was
vinho de mesa
—at the Espagnola was an amusing counterpart to the tractors and saloon cars which she had watched being decanted from the
Vidago
onto this very coast—amusing, and somehow nicer, as honest wine is nicer than any piece of machinery.

These meditations were only possible because the foreman who directed the labourers had come up to ask some directions of Mme La Besse, but they were soon interrupted; he went away, and the eager old lady led the way down to where most of the actual digging was taking place, in front of the seaward wall of the site. Here five or six more Berbers, in headgear which varied from ragged turbans to torn straw hats, were clearing away the soil to lay bare curious stone slabs, some of them grooved, and several small stone boxes or tanks sunk in the ground, with one sloping side, which reminded Julia of nothing so much as the fitted wash-tubs in the laundry at Glentoran; the men greeted Mme La Besse with gleeful pleasure, and she chatted to them, with a word for each—clearly
she was a general favourite. The excavated soil, to Julia's astonishment, was wheeled away in barrows to be riddled at some hundred yards' distance before being tipped onto the foreshore—no hope therefore, as even her ignorance recognised, of being able to know with any exactitude where any particular object, revealed in the wire sieve, had come from. Had Geoffrey seen this extraordinary proceeding, she wondered?—however, she said nothing.

Mme La Besse was worried about those small stone tanks or boxes, and asked Julia if she had any idea what they could have been used for? Julia mentioned the laundry wash-tubs—“If you dug along behind them you might find a spout or something that led the water into them,” she said; she had already been shown parts of the underground system of stone channels through which water had been brought by gravity from the cisterns at its upper end down to every part of the site, and had admired its ingenuity. Mme La Besse was delighted with the laundry idea; she whipped a mason's trowel out of her belt and began to dig herself, and called up a Berber to help. Julia looked on, wishing that she had a trowel or spade with which to dig too, while Mme La Besse, on her knees, continued to speculate aloud as to whether this could have been a laundry or wash-house.