Earlier, she’d noticed something glinting beneath a large boulder, propped against the side of the mountain, neat and tidy, almost as if it had been placed there by a giant hand. But she knows that if she stops now, she’ll lose her momentum. The cut smarts and her calves are already aching from squatting. They’ve come across a few fragments of early medieval pots and bowls, and a couple of late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century arrowheads, but certainly no evidence of the Paleolithic settlement which is the focus of the excavation.Īlice is tempted to go down and join her friends and colleagues and get her dressing sorted out.

It’s painstaking and monotonous work for the most part, the digging and scraping, the cataloguing and recording, and so far they’ve turned up little of significance to justify their efforts. It’s early in the day to be taking a break, but then the whole team is a bit demoralized. She can just pick out Shelagh in her trademark black outfit. In the main camp on the lower slopes, Alice can see her colleagues standing under the big canvas awning. It’s a place of secrets, one that has seen too much and concealed too much to be at peace with itself. It is a beautiful place, she thinks, yet somehow an inhospitable one. But now, the sun has flattened the land into submission, turning the greens to brown. In early summer, the pastures are green and speckled with yellow buttercups. In the spring, delicate flowers of pink and mauve and white peep out from their hiding places in the great expanses of rock. She’s been told that in the winter the jagged peaks of the Sabarthès Mountains are covered in snow. It’s her first time in the Pyrenees, although she feels very much at home. The cicadas keep up their unrelenting chorus, hidden in the shade of the dry grass. Below, the heat haze shimmers above the dented tarmac of the road. It’s warm, but she’s too thirsty to care and drinks it down in great gulps.

The only touches of glamour are her delicate silver earrings, in the shape of stars, which glint like sequins.Īlice unscrews the top of her water bottle. Now, as she gets older, she sees the advantage of looking younger than her years. Dressed in cutoff denim shorts, a tight white sleeveless T-shirt and cap, she looks little more than a teenager. Her concentration broken, Alice stands up and stretches her slim legs, lightly tanned by the sun. She tucks them behind her ears and wipes her forehead with her handkerchief, before twisting her ponytail back into a tight knot at the nape of her neck.

Strands of hair, the color of soft brown sugar, have come loose from under her cap.

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