Lost trumpet

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
T think they will live with me always, those days.’
Subchapter i
BUT the next morning banished Aslaug Simonssen
from my mind as completely as it banished the
grasshopper. So in the days that followed. I came
to know and share in the toils and perplexities and
the heart-breaking exactitudes of research with which
the archaeologist afflicts himself. Abu Zabal’s mosque,
a small blue dome brooding in the west; Pelagueya’s
house, affronting the eastern sky with the crazy
uplift of its baroque towers—these were the only
permanent objects on my horizon, seen mostly, as
it seemed to me, from betwixt my own legs as I
stooped over this or that or the next trench; or
impinging themselves on my eyes with a sudden
ache because of their sun-radiance at the same time
as I would unbend and another ache bite sharply
and efficiently between my shoulders.
For the rest, it was a world of flux. We moved the
camp further along the canal-bank; dug; dis¬
covered nothing; moved it back again. We went
out on more mensuration with a theodolite. Of
nights, dead weary, we made tracings of suspected
drainages on our sketch-maps ; sometimes we were
IOO