‘He was no quitter, that’s for sure. When there was a challenge in front of him, he could get pretty one-track-minded about rising to it. He couldn’t stand the frustration of knowing that underneath all these rocks and dirt were millennia of cultural treasures just waiting to be unearthed, but almost impossible to get to. It was one obstacle after another: first the Soviet invasion, then the civil war. It drove him crazy.’

‘I’ll bet that if he’d been able to get to them, the findings would’ve been worth a pretty penny, too,’ Wolf said.

‘Sure, Dad made a lot of money from his discoveries around the world. But that wasn’t what really drove him. Most of the profits were funnelled straight back into the next project; and he lost millions from all those times he came away empty-handed. He wasn’t interested in getting rich. The same can’t be said for a lot of the other treasure hunters who explored this country in past centuries. Like Charles Masson, the British army deserter who spent years wandering all over Asia in search of valuable relics to dig up. And Sir Alexander Burns, who unearthed thousands of precious gold coins and other ancient artefacts before he was eventually hacked to bits by an angry mob.’

‘How does anyone know what’s buried under the ground?’ Ben asked. ‘I mean, where would you even start looking for it?’

‘We know a lot, thanks to the efforts of archaeologists who weren’t just looking to enrich themselves. By the nineteenth century scholars had already put together a pretty detailed picture of Afghanistan’s lost kingdoms and treasures. Hoards of loot would sometimes be stumbled on by a farmer or a well digger. Other times, natural erosion, landslides or even earthquakes could reveal things that had been buried for centuries. Like the famous Oxus treasure found in 1877, a huge hoard of coins and jewels and other precious objects found washed up by the river.’

‘So where’d it all come from?’ Wolf asked.

Madison replied, ‘Some experts have reckoned that a lot of it was treasure Alexander was carrying with him on his campaigns. Armies needed ready cash to pay for all kinds of expenses, and moreover he’d just come away massively enriched from the plunder of his victory against the Persians. The army’s baggage trains consisted of thousands of pack animals. When they died of heat, cold, thirst, or got eaten by starving soldiers, there was no way to carry those loads on foot, especially when you were already loaded up with armour and weaponry. I’m sure a lot of soldiers filled their pockets with smaller items, but what could you do with a heavy casket full of gold coins and ingots? There’d have been no choice but to abandon them.