Chapter 9: An Away Day

The discovery of fragments of travertine in the nucleus of the agger galvanised Crudwright into precipitate action. He brought the current plan of work to a standstill.
The eight digging teams were given new objectives, namely to drive trenches across the line of the Roman road and cut through to expose the cross-section of the agger. Team one to start one hundred feet west of trench seven, with the other teams digging every twenty five feet eastward along the road from team one.
Feverish activity ensued after these orders were given, and Crudwright, mopping his streaming face with a red bandanna, joined me in the shade of a pavilion erected a furlong from where the frenetic enterprise was taking place. Sweating labourers, urged on by their gang masters, swung mattock and spade shifting the sand and soil from above the Roman road.

Hassan brought us each a pannikin of water, which Crudwright and I emptied in a trice. He wiped his lips with his sleeve.
“It will be several hours before the cross sections of the agger are revealed, and I suppose you wonder what I am about, Sir Elijah?”
I admitted I was surprised how the discovery of a fragment of travertine had led to a complete change to the excavation program. Crudwright then spent at least an hour telling me the significance of the discovery. He was as long winded as ever, so I will give a more concise version.

Travertine was used extensively in the building of the Temple of Aten at Amarna. It is likely – Crudwright said ‘a certainty’ – that travertine would also be used in the construction of The House of Fools, thus the appearance of fragments of the stone in the agger of the Roman road leads one to suspect the House of Fools is in the vicinity of the road.
The purpose of cutting cross-sections through the agger at twenty-five feet intervals was to determine how much travertine had been used in the foundations.
There had been no trace of the material in trench three, the trench dug one hundred feet to the east of the datum pole, and Crudwright hoped only a few random slabs had been picked up by the Romans rather than a full-scale despoliation of the buried House of Fools.
Crudwright surmised that The House of Fools would have been constructed from mud-bricks faced by the hard wearing travertine, which, had the Romans discovered the buried structure, would have been robbed out and the travertine slabs used as the surface stones rather than the sandstone blocks so far encountered. However, if only a few slabs of travertine had been found then the Romans would have crushed them and used them as gravel.

By the end of the day all the trenches had cut through the agger, exposing the cross -section. Crudwright then made a close examination of the makeup of the nucleus of the agger exposed in each trench. The conclusion he came to was that the Romans had found no more than a few slabs of travertine.(A slab being approximately one foot long and six inches wide, that being the standard size of a mud-brick of the time). The gravel made from these slabs was concentrated in the original trench seven, situated a hundred feet west of the datum pole, and the next three trenches to the east, i.e. in the trenches dug by digging teams one, two, three, and four.

Crudwright was in a jubilant mood. He was on the scent of The House of Fools and his fame would be assured if he could locate the site. However, I brought him back to earth with a bump.
“When the expedition arrived in Egypt you were allowed two months to find the House of Fools. If not located by then we are to move to Luxor and concentrate on unearthing Egyptian artefacts for display in the British Museum. There is little more than a week before the end of the month, Professor.”
“We cannot just up sticks and move when we are about to discover the most important Ancient Egyptian structure after the Great Pyramid,” he said with some heat. “The building is located near to where the gravel was used...”
“How can you be so sure? Those slabs could have been found and crushed a mile away...”
“And would have been used where the crushing took place. I am an acknowledged expert on the building of Roman roads, Sir Elijah, and can assure you the Romans crushed gravel as they went. The slabs would have been unearthed within a hundred feet or so from where the material was used.”
“So how did the Romans happen upon these slabs of travertine, which would have been at a far greater depth than the foundations of the road they were digging?”
He thought for a moment, and then let out a shout of triumph.
“Latrines! They were digging a latrine when they came upon them. A Roman latrine has to be at least fifteens feet deep. The slabs were probably surplus to requirement, and had been left and forgotten by the builders of the House of Fools.”

Crudwright had made a valid argument. The Romans were fastidious in digging deep latrines, which is why you never read of their armies being decimated by disease. You would have thought that lesson would have come down to our modern day military, but all too often latrines are too few, and not dug deep enough.
“So how do you expect to locate a Roman latrine dug over fifteen hundred years ago, Professor?”
“Captain Guest can use his skill in topological mapping. The latrine would have been a trench, about fifteen feet deep and ten feet long. Latrines would have been dug alongside the head of the road as the agger was constructed. When the road was advanced two stadia, roughly two furlongs, a new latrine would be built at the road head and the previous latrine filled in. Over the years the infill will have compacted towards the base of the pit, and the depressions indicating where a latrine had been dug should be discernible to a skilled topographical engineer, which Captain Guest is reputed to be.”
I thought it impossible to locate the site of a Roman latrine fifteen hundred years after it had been in use, but remembered Crudwright was the leading expert on Roman construction methods, especially roads, and therefore should know what he was talking about, which was not always the case with Professor Crudwright.
“Very well, I will get Captain Guest on to it first thing in the morning; meantime it might be useful if you give him the benefit of your experience in locating Roman army latrines.”
Locating, and then digging out a latrine is not a job I would relish, even if after fifeteen hundred year the contents of the latrine would have solidified and lost their original aroma.

At breakfast next morning Crudwright and Rollo were in deep conversation, and soon afterwards the pair went to the datum marker pole, where Rollo’s two helpers, Amal and Omar, began setting up the theodolite and running out the surveying chain. I left them to it, telling Rollo I would be available should he have need of me. As I said digging latrines was not my favourite occupation, esprcially when I was a lowly private in Portugal and Spain.

Excavation site, east bank of Lake Timsah. 24th November 1832.
It was my birthday, and the anniversary of the deaths of my previous family. Usually on this day I had a black humour on me, and would try not to fall into a slough of melancholic woe. However, since my epiphany at the Holy Cross Church graveyard in Bearsted earlier this year I had come to terms with the loss of my former family. At that moment, in some mysterious, inexplicable way, the characteristics of my previous family members had melded with my current family; Caroline with Mimi, and my two adopted daughters, Molly March and Domina Barbados, with my two birth daughters, Mollie-Annette and Caroline-Domina. Those who were lost to me in the fire at Hungerford Hall were merged with my present family.
I no longer grieved their absence because they were now part of my living loved ones. I took this as a sublime gift from God, as was my beloved wife Mimi. Of course my son, John -Jarvis, had not been replaced, but Woody Allen’s son Jean-Woodrow was some measure of consolation. I loved my step- son as much as any sons I might have had with Mimi, although, alas, she was unable to bear me any more children.
It seemed impossible I could love and cherish Mimi any more than when we first were married, but I did. Time spent with her was paradise; being separated from her was purgatory. I did have qualms when leaving the girls behind to travel to Egypt, but, God forgive me, it was nothing like the heartache I would have suffered had I left Mimi in England.

I had come to terms with the deaths of my previous family but still hated Eloise de La Zouche with a vengeance, and wished her dead, preferably by my hand. After learning of the downfall of her protector, Abdulla Bulbul Ameer, Governor of Alexandria Province, I saw a chance of exploiting her weakness. With that in mind I went looking for Thomas MacKay. I knew Thomas kept in regular contact with Sayeed bin Ghandou, and I would seek Sayeed’s assistance in having Eloise de La Zouche arrested, pending shipment to England to stand trial for the murder of Octavius Hardy. She had murdered many more men than him, but he had been my friend, and I owed it to his shade to avenge his death.