His mind remained underground. While Zamora continued to enjoy the sanction of history, his initial euphoria had been tempered by certain aspects of his discovery. The remains were not as extensive as he had thought. The site was probably not after all the Lebtit of the Arabs. It was not Tarshish nor Auza, nor even Hecatomyplus. Possibly, it belonged to the burial ground of a middle-ranking Phoenician settlement. Beyond the chapel dedicated to Melcart and the objects photographed on the tarpaulin, he had subsequently found little except a number of cinerary urns.

Three of these urns contained the ashes and bones of animals. Zamora was preoccupied by the discovery of a fourth urn. This held the remains of something which disturbed him very much indeed.

In the thesis for which the University of Oran had awarded Zamora his doctorate, he had paddled with a single mind against conventional wisdom. He dismissed as Herodotean hyperbole the one aspect of the entire literature he could never bring himself to believe in: the image of mothers coming forward with their children, implacable, forbidden to shed a tear, their faces twisted in gladness as they offered the blood of their sons and daughters as a libation to Melcart, the Phoenician Hercules. Such remains, where they existed, he argued, belonged to unfortunate individuals who had died of natural causes.

He wrote then, “Those who believe in Flaubert’s graphic fictions are guilty of anti-Carthaginian propaganda . . . ” But all the signs of the Abyla burial ground proved him wrong. In the tophet below the Marina Española he had found the bones of a young woman; also those of an older man. He judged the two of them had been immolated alive. The vacuum conditions in the chamber had preserved the skeletons so perfectly their immolation might have taken place yesterday.

The evidence had sobered Zamora’s faith. It detracted from the pleasure he might once have taken in this morning’s letter from the Peninsula, urging him to resubmit his thesis. What was a thesis but three hundred and eighty-two pieces of paper if it could not begin to understand how Hercules had failed his Phoenicians?

What had happened to make them sacrifice not a lamb but a girl? What unspeakable dread? What oppressive deities, what dark ocean gods had demanded this appalling piety? Zamora could not guess. Experience, like Señora Criado’s pies, had to be broken down and digested. He was still puzzled, for instance, how it was that when that fool of a policeman had dropped the funerary mask, it had not cracked as he would have expected, but bounced.

“Look! There’s Daddy.”

“Oh, yes.” Politely for his grandson, Zamora leaned forward. Below, against the blood-red barricade, Tromso was filming the matadors, picadors and bandilleros. He had grouped them one behind the other as in a school photograph. Over their heads a sound-recordist brandished a long pole on which slithered an object resembling a grey seaslug. Another man used a circular reflector of white cloth to throw light on their faces.