IN THE DESERT

Hokitika Guardian, 20 March 1930, Page 7

IN THE DESERT

A WOMAN’S EXPERIENCES. illy KATHARINE WOOLLEY. who is engaged with her husband, of llit; Briiuu Museum. mi excavations r.L Ur. Ur, Mesopotamia. The beginning of a new season’s dig is always a. big adventure, and the excitement of anticipation is twofold. There are hopes and expectations for what may be awaiting us in the ground, -eitlmr hidden just be low the surface over which we walk each day, or buried forty or'fifty feet deep and only laid hare after thousands of tons of sail have been moved. And the other and more immediate preoccupation about which we specuItle all summer and which become;; more urgent the nearer we approach our journey’s end C: In what slate shall we !ind oar site and the Expedition house? Will I hey have been flooded by the waters of the Unpin rates? Will the y" nd-.st»rm.s ha\c been worse than usual? .

* * -x- -xTlie answer was No am! Vos. Tln> floods did not roach us, fortunately, but flic saiid-sturms have been- more vi.denl aiHl more persistent tlmn cur before. We arrived in Baghdad smothered in dust ourselves alter the .desert crossing from Damascus and there were greeted by our head foreman and his sons. They travelled on ahead of us to Ur and an extraordinary sight met their eyes. In piaie of the Expedition house with its open court with rooms on three sides there was a low mound of the finest yellow sand l . Under this. Jay our house! A hundred Arabs set to work to dig it out. the roof, the walls, till at ground level the tanks in which we store our water emerged, resting on tlmir Nebuchadnezzar pavement, and so at last the house could be entered. But when the nailed-up door was opened it was discovered that the inside: of the house was lull of sand too. This says little for our ill-fitting doors and windows, but the sand must have blown through the very bricks themselves. The rooms are only ten feet high, and some had eight feet of sand piled in them, and'the digging began again—from the inside! But where life is so simple it docs not take long to pick up its threads again. V:.\ are twelve miles from our nearest water, but donkeys travel to and fro and bring us very mutldylooking water in kerosene tins, a protesting cow is dragged the same distance, a sheep slaughtered, the campaign against wnite ants, sand-flios. and mosquitoes is begun. Four days to make the whole camp clean, and then another day to make it habitable. -X- -X* -x- -XAs Ur was approached at midnight, travelling in the dark, the desert lay

flat and limitless around one. Suddenly a bump, a rise in the ground, l dark shapes on either side witli one gigantic shape dominating everything' and a. twinkling light. i he bump was the ear entering the ancient city of f r over its outermost wall, the dark shapes, were the ruins, tlie dominating oius the Xiggurat, the great tower already standing in Abrahams s time, and the light ca.nie from a lantern hold in the baud of one of our Arab guards. A grand welcome from all our mr:i, many Praises be to Allah.” for our sale return, and many deep chuckles when the dirging out of the house was told and told again by each man in tui'n. All night the jackals prowled round tlie house with their eerie cry, and • ;, '!ore it was light a rumble of voices was heard—the Arabs coming to he enrolled for work.

A* the sun rose the men could he seen crouching in a . wide circle, their bodies hunched up, their brown abas Rolled over their heads—for the ni rills and early mornings are cold though the sun is powerful by day. Pick-men, spade-men. basket-men, j ml wagon-ni. ii, all were greeted and remembered and watched their names being inscribed in what is grandly called ‘‘the. hook,’ 1 the hook vhieh some believe can of itself record against a. man’s mime his slackness or misdeeds!

i'hen the men were divided, some to start digging down into a yet 1111excavated part of the cemetery, the cemetery where during tlie last two years we have found the tombs of kings and queens; now we are sldll forty feet ni.xive their level, cutting into Nebuchadnezzar’s great wall, whirli lies flush with the modern surface. but each day we sink deepen 1 .

Tlie oLlua- half < ; f oar men were put on to flesh ground, a low-lying denuded area from, which all buildings of historic times have been swept away by rain and wind, anil the first ragged walls to appear are more than live thousand years old ; here we hope, digging down and down, to come on the Ur which stood beforci the Flood.