Algeria

Earl Saxon – pardon me – Doctor Earl Saxon, as he insists on being called, was an acquaintance of mine before he earned his PhD in archaeology from Cambridge university. He was my high school girlfriend’s older brother. It was Earl who invited me to Bristol where I met Peter Throckmorton and got my first job in archaeology. And it was Earl who came to visit me in Boston in 1972 to ask if I wanted to come with him to Algeria the following year. He wanted to excavate an epi-paleolithic cave dwelling site on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast as part of his doctoral thesis research. There were some problems with his plan. He was a U.S. citizen and the United States didn’t have diplomatic relations with Algeria at that time. Another was that Algeria hadn’t allowed foreign archaeologists into the country since their revolution against French colonial rule that ended in 1962. And finally, there was the matter of his being Jewish, something he had neglected to mention when he had applied for a permit to Algeria’s CRAPE – the Centre de Researches Anthropologiques, Prehistoriques, and Ethnographiques, just as he had failed to mention he was on the teaching staff of the University of Haifa and had recently married a Sabra. He wanted me along as his sole assistant not only because I was an archaeology student, but because he said he had confidence I wouldn’t blow his cover. As for his visa? No problem, he said. He had a fake British passport that would do the trick. That should have been my first warning. But always up for an adventure, I said yes, and there have been many times since I wish I hadn’t.

Earl wrote to me from Cambridge that he had managed to get the dig permit. He said I should apply for a visa when I got to Marseille and that I should arrive at CRAPE in Algiers the first of June. He included a letter of introduction from a M. Mammary, the director of CRAPE, stating I was authorized to enter the country to conduct archaeological research. So, in the spring of ’73 I finished up exams and arrived in Marseille the last week of May. That’s when things started to go bad. I had hoped to find a letter from Earl at the Post Restante window in Marseille with last-minute instructions. Instead I found a telegram from a friend who was handling my mail in my absence telling me a grant check I had deposited just before leaving Boston had bounced, which meant that my Master Card payment had bounced and I was now not only maxed out but way over my credit limit. There was no ATM network back then but it wouldn’t have mattered – there was no money in my back account anyway. I only had a hundred dollars or so in my pocket and I still had to pay for my Algerian visa. I already had an open-dated airplane ticket to Algiers, so at least that wasn’t a worry. I figured I’d get the visa, get to Algiers, and sort the rest out later.

Ha!

The line outside the Algerian consulate stretched around the block. No matter your reason, there was one line and you had to wait on it. It took me three hours to get in the door. I was directed to a counter where I explained why I was there, was given a visa application, and was shown into a small windowless room with two chairs on opposite sides of a plain wooden table and a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I sat and completed the application.

Half an hour later a thin, haggard-looking man with short-cropped hair, a big bushy mustache, and a wrinkled suit several sizes too large came in and took the chair opposite me without saying a word of greeting. I slid my completed application across the table and he opened a manila file folder that was easily two inches thick with papers, put the application at the front, and spent a minute leafing through the pile, pausing now and then to read from a page.

How could they possibly have a two-inch thick file on me? I was only just now applying for a visa! Was their intelligence operation so good they had already devoted enormous resources to investigating me based on Earl’s request for the letter of introduction from M. Mammary? I didn’t think so. I would have been surprised if the file held anything more than the consulate’s grocery lists for the past year and was simply an attempt to intimidate me. Not many Americans applied for visas to come to Algeria.

Then he started asking questions. The ones you would expect at first. Why did I want to come to Algeria? I explained and showed him M. Mammary’s letter. How long did I intend to stay? Where would I be staying? How much money did I have? (None.) But then the nature of the questions changed. Was I Jewish? Were any members of my family Jewish? Did I know any Jews? Did any of my family, friends, or acquaintances know any Jews? Did I think I might ever want to know a Jew? (No, really?) Do I harbor any Zionist or pro Jewish sentiments? Was I a member of any pro-Zionist organizations? Did I subscribe to any Pro-Zionist publications? And so it went. For two solid hours. I lied through my teeth.

When he was finished, he told me to return tomorrow for a decision on my visa application, whereupon he stood and left the room.

Crap. Now I had to spend money on a hotel room and food for another day in Marseille. The consulate was in a poor section of the old town that was full of struggling immigrants and appeared to be the heart of the city’s red light district. I found the cheapest room I could, three bucks a night, paid in advance, in what I think was probably the seediest hotel in town. The only good thing was that it was Marseille. A bowl of incredible bouillabaisse cost only fifty cents. I made it through the night but was repeatedly awakened by the sounds of the oldest profession through paper-thin walls and by the constant flushing of toilets echoing through the ancient plumbing.

I got to the consulate at six the next morning, figuring to beat the line. So did every other Algerian with business at the consulate, and the line was just as long as the day before. The consulate opened at eight. It was five hours before I was shown, again, into the same small interview room. A different man, obese and straining at the seams of his suit, and who clearly believed one bath a week was enough, came in and sat across from me.

I asked if my visa had been approved and he didn’t answer, but started asking me questions. The same questions I had been asked before; all of them. Two hours later I was again told to return the next day.

And so it went. Every day for two weeks. My little bit of cash was running out and my temperament was nearing resignation to the futility of my effort. And though I was now an expert in who made the best bouillabaisse in Marseille, I never wanted to taste bouillabaisse again.

Then, without any explanation, on the 12^th of June, I made it through the line, got to the counter, was asked for my passport, and ten minutes later left with the visa stamped, signed, and sealed on a page of its own.

I was out of money. I had about a dollar left. I collected my gear from the hotel, walked to the bus depot, and boarded a bus for the airport. I didn’t even have enough for the full fare, so the driver left me off along the highway half way there, as far as my money would take me. I had to hitch-hike the rest of the way.

There was a seat on the next flight for Algiers, and it was leaving almost immediately, so I handed over my ticket, checked my duffel, grabbed my camera case, and rushed to the gate. I sank into my window seat in the last row of the plane and heaved a great sigh of relief. I was hoping my troubles were over. It was only then I realized I had left my tripod leaning against the counter at the check-in desk.

The flight was still boarding so I headed back down the stairs over the protests of the stewardesses. I said I had forgotten something and would be right back but I was anxious and I think I said it in English and doubt I was understood. I rushed across the tarmac – remember, this was years before airport security was even an issue – ran back through the gate, up to the check-in counter, where I found the tripod just where I had left it, grabbed it, and ran back to the gate, only to find my way blocked by the gate agent and the aircraft just starting to taxi away. I wasn’t going to be left behind. I pushed my way past the shouting agent and ran out onto the tarmac, chasing the plane and waving the tripod around in the air.

I don’t know if I thought I was going to make the plane stop or not, but I was desperate. My luggage and cameras were on that plane. I had no money. I did what I had to do.

And you know what? The plane stopped. The stairs lowered from the tail of the aircraft and I ran out to the plane and climbed aboard. No one said anything. The stewardess just smiled and said I should buckle my seatbelt. We were off for Algiers.

Old Chinese proverb: be careful what you wish for.

I’ve never lost my fascination of flying. I’ve never lost my appreciation for the sheer magic of looking down upon the world from a very, very high place. I was enthralled by my first glimpse of Africa as we descended to 10,000 feet on our approach to Algiers. I was especially curious about the Algerian Mirage fighter that took up station about a hundred yards off our wing on my side of the plane. Was it an escort of some kind? Was it normal?

The fighter banked away from us about a mile and fell back, then turned and sped directly towards us and open fire with its cannons. I barely heard the gunfire but I did see small holes appear in the forward part of the cabin on my side and larger holes ripped open on the far side. Blood spray filled the air up front and there was a loud noise from the wind rushing past the holes in the fuselage. People began screaming and shouting and soon the smell of urine, feces, vomit, and blood drifted back to the rear of the cabin. I just sat still and quiet, thinking, “Is this really happening?” No point in screaming. The situation was completely out of my control.

The fighter made only the one pass, then turned and sped off east, along the coast. Our plane didn’t appear to be on fire or out of control. We slowed down quite a bit but otherwise made what seemed like a normal approach and landing.

Taxiing up to the gate, I saw a long line of ambulances displaying the red crescent and a cordon of soldiers with automatic weapons. The plane came to a stop on the tarmac and the soldiers formed a ring around it with a corridor into the arrivals hall. I was one of the first off as we exited down the rear stairs and we were all directed into the building; medics and soldiers rushed back up the stairs behind us.  We waited for two hours in the stench and heat before customs and immigrations started processing us. The interviews were detailed and the luggage searches were thorough. It took another three hours to process the seventy or so uninjured passengers. After I made it through I heard people talking in the terminal who said six had died. There were others injured, but I don’t know how many. I could only make out so much; the French was heavily accented and I had no Arabic.

I never saw anything about the incident in the French-language newspapers in Algiers and I have never been able to find out anything more about the incident after all these years. It’s as if it never happened. But it did. I know, because I was there.

I took a shuttle from the airport to a large public square in the center of Algiers, then went into a hotel on the square and asked the concierge for directions to the address I had for CRAPE. He said to just follow the street in front of the hotel up the hill for two kilometers and I would arrive at the People’s Palace, and that CRAPE was on the palace grounds. With no money for a taxi, I shouldered my duffel, picket up my camera case, hooked the tripod onto the duffel, and started walking.

It was a steep hill and a winding road and it took an hour before I was standing in front of an arched wooden gate that looked like a service entrance in the tall masonry wall that surrounded the people’s palace. A polished brass plaque identified the gate as the portal to CRAPE.

I pulled on the bell rope that hung beside the door and looked around while I waited. There were two French colonial buildings directly across the street, the kind that had once had a shop on the ground floor and apartments or offices on the upper floors. But now one was the Algerian headquarters for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or the PLO. The other was the occupied by Black September, the terrorist organization that had murdered the entire Israeli Olympic team in Munich the year before. The buildings were hung with banners proudly declaring their identity. This was Algeria, where these terrorist organizations were celebrated as heroes of the Palestinian struggle. There was no need to hide here.

Militants sat on the front steps of Black September’s building, bandoliers across their chests, cleaning their weapons. I thought it was all for show. If they were so open about who they were, surely the didn’t fear an attack, so why all the weapons on display? Of course, I didn’t know the Israelis had been hunting down and killing everyone involved in planning and carrying out the Munich massacre. They had good cause to be afraid. They would all be dead soon.

A small window opened in the wooden door and an old face with a long, drooping mustache beneath a corn-flower blue turban filled the frame, and a toothless mouth asked me what I was doing ringing the bell. Pushing aside childhood images of Dorothy ringing the bell at the gates of the Emerald City, I stated who I was, and that I was to meet archaeologist Earl Saxon from England here on the first of June but that I had been delayed, and that I was sorry I was late, but would he please let Mr. Saxon know I had arrived? He informed me that Mr. Saxon was not there, that he had not been there for six months, and would I please now go away. He slammed the window shut and no further attempts to summon him with the bell succeeded.

I had a very bad feeling. I heard a loud and long blast from a ship’s whistle and looked down to the harbor and saw a large ferry headed out to sea. No doubt the ferry to Marseille. Hungry, penniless, no place to sleep, and standing with my back to a group of murdering terrorists who were probably by now wondering what I was about, I wished I was on that ferry and conceded to myself that I was in a dangerous situation.

Just then someone blew a horn behind me and I moved aside to get out of the way. The horn blew again and I turned around to see a Volkswagen beetle in front of the gate. It took a moment for me to realize Earl was behind the wheel. He waved and stood up through the sunroof and with a big smile said, “Hello Brad! I just came in on the Marseille ferry! Sorry I’m late. How long have you been here?”

The gate keeper appeared and opened the gate to allow Earl, his car, and finally and without apology, me, to enter the sanctuary of the People’s Palace and CRAPE.

That, I swear to you, is just how the entire day happened.

Earl had a hamper of food and we sat on camp cots in one of the warehouse rooms of CRAPE eating baguette, salami, and fruit while he tried to calm me down. Yeah, I needed calming down. The horrible absurdity of the day had caught up with me. I whined that the fighter pilot had tried to kill me! Earl said I shouldn’t take it personally. He was probably trying to kill someone else on the plane, and what did I have to complain about? I was alive, wasn’t I? He wasn’t very good at the comforting thing.

We slept among the bones of Paleolithic men, their femurs and tibia sticking out of crates, their skulls lined up on shelves above us. I thought that one day I would be no more than a nameless pile of bones like them. At least it wasn’t going to be today.

It took a few days scouring the Kasbah to buy the cheap things we would need for the dig: stakes and twine, buckets and brushes and such. The rest Earl had arranged to borrow from CRAPE: sifting screens, a transit, shovels, hatchets, pick-axes, and jerry cans for fuel and water. Every archaeologist and student carries his own Marshalltown #2 trowel and set of dental picks. I sold a spare camera lens in a photography store for about $135 in Algerian dinar, so I had some emergency funds. It was just amusing that every time we left CRAPE or returned, Earl would pull his collar up over his face and instruct me to “look inconspicuous” as we walked past the PLO and Black September offices. I tried to tell him that what he was doing was the opposite of inconspicuous, but he was the boss and always knew better.

Algiers was a beautiful and fascinating city, cosmopolitan and tolerant of its large secular population. Young women with uncovered heads, bare arms, and knee-length skirts walked down the streets holding their boyfriends’ hands. There was a night life with jazz, pop music, and dancing. It was Algiers, and I would learn it was not at all like the rest of the country. And the Algiers of today is vastly different that the Algiers of 1973.

We were ready to go. The Beetle was crammed full of gear, and what didn’t fit inside was tied to the outside. There was so much stuff tied to the car it no longer looked like a car at all.

A landslide had cut the coast road between Algiers and the town of Béjaïa, so we had to head south from Algiers, cross the Atlas Mountains, head east through the Sahara, and then turn north, crossing the Atlas range a second time and descending to the coast. It was during our drive through the Sahara in a Volkswagen beetle that I realized I shared not a speck of DNA with T.E. Lawrence. The thermometer I carried pegged out at 120 degrees. I had to make myself take every breath, each feeling like I was inhaling a hot, dry soup. I had to drink a liter of water an hour to stay minimally hydrated. My mind turned to mush. I hated it. The Beetle has an air-cooled engine in the rear of the car that tends to burst into flames when overheated. I’d seen it happen in more temperate climates. This was really all I could think about the entire time we were driving across the desert. I have never felt more relieved than when we turned north and started climbing out of the heat and into the mountains. Well, except maybe when the plane was shot up and landed safely, or when I landed on Westward’s deck instead of in the ocean when I was whacked by the boom, or when I made it back to shore two and a half hours after being swept out to sea by a rip tide off Acapulco and surrounded by sharks – but I digress.

The village nearest the cave we were there to excavate was several hours east of Béjaïa, past Souk El Tennine. The village was named Garage, because the French army had stationed a truck there before the revolution.

We arrived in Garage late in the afternoon and walked into a road-side tavern at the edge of the village. It was a one room affair with a dirt floor and half a dozen wooden tables with rickety chairs. Two of them were occupied by old men playing dominoes, each with several onlookers and supporters offering advice. I assume. They spoke Arabic. Everything stopped when we came through the door. There was a bar along the back wall with the proprietor standing behind it washing tea glasses. In French, Earl asked where we might find the mayor of the village, and it turned out the proprietor was the mayor. Earl presented him with a letter of introduction from M. Mammary that also asked the mayor to provide us with every kind of assistance.

The Mayor wasn’t exactly hostile, but he didn’t seem very pleased to see us either. I had the distinct impression he felt obliged to help us and would do so, but would be glad if we weren’t there at all. He offered us coffee, which was a sign of hospitality, but not so much as if he had offered us tea.

He had a place in mind for us to stay, and there were other issues to discuss, like how to get water to fill our jerry cans when we, infidel men, would not be allowed to enter the village proper to draw water from the well. Those sorts of issues. While Earl and the mayor hashed out these details, I noticed a refrigerator in the corner and asked if there were any cold drinks. The mayor gurumphed, and said it hadn’t worked for years. I looked it over and saw it was a propane refrigerator, very similar to the one I had had in Piraeus. It made sense. The village had no electricity. The most common problem with propane was a gummed-up regulator. I went out to the car and found my traveling tool kit, came back and took the regulator off the propane tank, dismantled it, and sure enough, it was all gummed up and the diaphragm was stiff. I cleaned it with alcohol from my med kit and oiled the diaphragm with silicone grease from my camera case, put it all together, and got a steady flame in the burner after I fired it up. It takes time for a propane fridge to get cold, so when Earl said we were leaving, I didn’t know if I had really succeeded or not.

The mayor told one of the men with nothing better to do to show us the building where we could stay and off we went, Earl and I in the VW and the man on his bicycle. The shed was several miles farther east, and we were a slow convoy making our way along the coast. At a point where the road made a sharp turn with a cliff of about a hundred feet down to the water on one side and on the other side a short rise before levelling out for a hundred yards and them jumping up again into the Atlas range, a small stone cottage stood on the level field with glassless windows but wooden shutters and a tile roof. The walls of the cottage were pockmarked and in some places penetrated by bullet holes ranging from small arms fire up to what must have been fifty caliber rounds. I could picture in my mind the jeep-mounted heavy machine guns the French used blasting away at Algerian revolutionaries taking cover inside. I had seen them in Peter Throckmorton’s photographs. He had covered the Algerian revolution for Paris Match. His images were so powerful they are often credited with helping sway French public opinion towards liberation. The French government had reacted by declaring Throckmorton persona non grata.

There were two other things of immediate interest about the cottage. The first was that there was a power line coming to it from the direction of a larger and well maintained house about a hundred yards farther along the coast road. There were no other buildings between Garage and where we were, and we would learn there were none for a long distance beyond either. Our guide told us that a team of Russian geologists lived there, and as the mayor had known we were coming for weeks, (it seems M. Mammary had sent him a letter) he had arranged for the Russians to run the power line to our cottage. It turned out the Russian’s house had a generator and they kept it running until about ten o’clock every evening, even when they were away doing survey work. Just what kind of survey work required a large short-wave antennae and a small satellite dish, I didn’t know, but who was I to argue? Electricity was good.

The other thing of interest was the cow in the cottage who appeared to be very happy to be there because it took the better part of an hour of pulling, pushing, shoving, and coaxing to get it out of the cottage. It seemed the cow had spent a fair amount of time there, because there was a foot of cow manure covering the floor.

But hey, we were archaeologists, and we had shovels! It was long past sundown by the time we had mucked out the one room, used half our water to scrub down the floor (the mayor had send village children to fill our jerry cans from the well), tacked mosquito netting over the two windows, and hauled our gear up the slope and into the cottage. The single bare electric lightbulb cast a harsh light and the odor was horrible, but it was home. Dinner that first night was just a chocolate bar and an apple, but I was too tired to care. I set up my camp cot and slept like the dead.

In the morning we drove back nearly as far as Souk El Tennine and bought a few basics at a roadside market. We would have to wait five more days until the weekly souk for fresh food. We had used most of our fresh water scrubbing down the concrete floor of our cottage so we stopped by the taverna in Garage on our way back to have our jerry cans re-filled. I was surprise when we were greeted like returning heroes. We were offered tea, not coffee. It seemed my repair of the refrigerator had worked, and the people of Garage had cold drinks for the first time in a very long while. For the rest of my stay the villagers did everything they could to make us feel welcome, with genuine warmth instead of obligation.

That afternoon we got to work carrying our tools, screens, and supplies up to the cave. And so began the slow and painstaking work of archaeology. By the fourth day we had cleared off vegetation and the overburden, established a prime datum, laid out a grid, and photographed our baseline. Each of us begun excavating our own 1-meter square, and by the end of the day we had recovered an abundance of micro-lithic tools. They needed to be cleaned off, so we dropped off our heavy gear at the cottage and drove east along the coast to a beautiful stretch of white sand beach. There was about a quarter mile between the road and the water, and a large, white linen multi-room Bedouin tent had been erected under a stand of palm trees. There were camels tied to stakes and smoke rising from a fire. We carried our buckets of artifacts down to the water far enough from the tent so as not to disturb, and were washing the lithics in sea water, when a very tall Berber in flowing robes left the tent and walked over to us. In almost good French he introduced himself as a Sheik to his tribe and asked who we were. Earl made our introductions and said we were archaeologists, and this seemed to delight the Sheik. He invited us to his tent for dinner, and we three men ate from a large platter of couscous, goat meat, and vegetables. The women stayed hidden in the shadows, and took the platter into their part of the tent when we were done. The Sheik told us of his days as a student in Paris, and he was hungry for conversation about the far away world.

His own land was up in the mountains, and the dates he harvested there were the finest in the world. He was quite sure! His people crated them up and carted them to Béjaïa, where they were sold and shipped all over. His dates got to go to all the places he could not. He brought his family down to this beach, which he said he also owned, every summer to enjoy the pleasant weather and the peace of the seashore. He also complained about the terrorist training camps up in the mountains, and he wished the Russians would stop supplying them with arms and training, then they would go away. So the other shoe dropped.

It was kind of a magic moment, that. Sitting in a Berber tent, our side open to the beach at sunset, eating dates and figs and drinking sweet tea. I had a vision of the Sheik’s entire family making their way down from the mountains on camelback, a long caravan of camels carrying their tents and clothing and cushions and cooking things. I think the smoke from the Sheik’s hookah might have had a little more in it than just tobacco.

The next day was the souk. The weekly traveling market. For two thousand years, there had been a souk where the Tennine river empties into the Mediterranean Sea. It was about an hour’s drive to Souk el Tennine, and we were about half way there along the pot-hole ridden dusty road when a shiny Mercedes limousine honked at us to move over and sped by, the Sheik and his wives sitting in the back seat, smiling and waving as they flew away in air-conditioned comfort. Fantasy and reality seldom converge.

Electricity had not yet made it to the small permanent village of Souk El Tennine, but there was a post, telephone, and telegraph office. There was only one set of utility poles coming into the town, and all one had to do to find the PTT was to follow the wires. I wanted to get my money situation sorted out. I had to be able to pay my way home and my grant check had bounced, so I needed to ask my father to foot me the cost of a ticket. I hated asking him for anything, but I was in a tight spot. I told the PTT clerk I wanted to make a trunk call and wrote down the telephone number along with Baltimore, Maryland, and USA. He took the paper into a back room and I could hear him talking briefly to a woman and then he came back and told me to take a seat, it would be awhile. After half an hour I heard the woman’s voice call out in French, “What country is this?” and the clerk shouted, “Oohsaw, Oohsaw.” The woman called back “Oohsaw?” The clerk replied, “Yes, Oohsaw, you know, the country of President Nixon!”

I had found it. A place where someone had never heard of the USA. After another fifteen minutes the woman called out something in Arabic and the clerk informed me that he was sorry, but the line to Algiers was down and it was not possible to make trunk calls at the moment. Given that the only phone in Souk el Tennine was in that office, and that all calls were therefore trunk calls, one had to wonder about the commitment of the PTT operators along the line, starting with the one ten feet away behind a door, but that was how it was. I never was successful placing a call out of Algeria. I was, however, able to retrieve some mail from poste restante that had been forwarded from CRAPE. My girlfriend of the time has sent me a picture of herself and a nice homey letter, just the kind a guy wants to get in the mail when he is far away from home. The interesting part was the wide, brown paper tape with the words, in French, “Algerian Bureau of Censorship” print along its length that had been used to re-seal the envelope after the Algerian security services had censored about a third of the letter with black marker. I wondered what in the world Janie could have said that had been considered inappropriate to the extend it warranted censoring. Sometimes one just has to laugh.

The souk was a feast for the eyes, nose, and ears. There were no tourists for hundreds of miles in any direction. This was simply life in coastal North Africa. There were very few powered vehicles at the edges of the souk. Mostly camels, donkeys, carts, and one shiney Mercedes limo. Sheep and goats had been herded in on the hoof, and the abattoirs were busy slaughtering animals and throwing the entrails into a communal pit. A new pit was dug every week, and my archaeologist’s eye could see the signs on the ground of hundreds, no doubt thousands, of pits from souks past. Chickens, too, were falling under the ax. Grains, vegetables, fruits, and root crops were being sold, as well as clothing, pots, pans, pails, fabrics, needles, thread, and everything else.

One woman had spread out a large home-spun woolen ground cloth and had made cone-shaped piles of spices and other things. She spoke only Arabic and I spoke French and English, but the meals I cooked in the cottage were boring as hell and I wanted spices. So I made an eating sign of putting my pinched fingers in my mouth and pointing at a pile. If she shook her head yes, I would take a little and taste it. If she shook her head no, or sometimes vigorously No, I wouldn’t. I wonder what was in those piles I couldn’t taste? Laundry detergent? Lye? Rat poison? Whatever, I only tasted those she said I should. The thing is, I had no labels to put to the flavors, just a color. I developed an inventory of tastes without names. I was just learning to cook. My elderly neighbor in Piraeus had started to teach me to cook towards the end of my year there, so I learned to cook with lamb before beef and I still make some of the things she taught me, but the flavors I was experiencing in the souk were nearly all new, and exciting. It has taken me years to identify the spices I learned there, and I think the experience has made me a better cook.

The souk was the high point of life for everyone. There were minstrels, a trio with an oud, flute, and tabor drum. The oud player would alternate between bowing his instrument and making up ribald verses about members of his audience, while the flute and tabor maintained a constant refrain. At least I think they were ribald verses. He was singing in Arabic and after each verse there was a lot of laughter and back slapping, and the target of the verse would throw a small copper or aluminum coin into the large, tambourine-like tabor. The drummer was skilled in flipping the coin out of the tabor and into his pouch without breaking his beat.

And then there were the snake charmers and medicine men. I thought they had been made up in Hollywood. But there they were, mesmerizing cobras with their flutes while their partners were selling elixirs and pills for what ails ya’.

I was buying a kilo of dates, which the vendor was hacking off a compressed block, when I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned to find the Sheik smiling at me and saying, “Those dates are from my trees. They are the best. You will enjoy them!” Then he turned and was gone.

The days went by and our excavations went deeper. Work was going well. We had an unexpected visitor one afternoon, a French oil executive who lived in Béjaïa had heard we were there and claimed an interest in prehistoric archaeology. We gave him a tour of the site and he reciprocated with a tin of Canadian bacon.

Meat! We hadn’t had any for a while. Earl balked at buying meat in the souk when he saw the bloody and fly infested abattoirs.

We saved it for the next day’s lunch, and at the appointed hour I reached into my backpack for the tin and it slipped through my fingers and started rolling down the hill towards the edge of a three-meter-deep trench that ran through the center of the site. I dove for it but missed, instead I stumbled and fell into the trench.

I landed on my left shoulder and head, knocking myself unconscious for the second time in two years. When I came to, Earl was standing over me with an angry expression. He was pissed off that I had been so inconsiderate of him that I had fallen and put his expedition at risk. He never once asked if I was injured or okay. I wasn’t okay. I was pretty sure I had cracked my scapula and I was certain I had cracked a rib. I had experience with that one and there was no doubt. I was also dizzy and had double vision, so I was knew I had a concussion. All Earl wanted to know was when I could get back to work.

Sorry Earl, I’m injured and you’re screwed. Deal with it. It took a few days for him to accept the truth of the matter but he eventually drove me back to Algiers. The coast road had been re-opened so it was a shorter and easier journey.

Earl said no real doctor would see me because I was an American and they would fear reprisals. I asked what he meant by “real” doctor and he took me to an acquaintance of his; an alcoholic French dentist who had been a surgeon in Paris but had had his license revoked for malpractice and fled to Algiers. I was never clear on exactly how Earl knew this guy. After a thorough examination he declared my injuries to be psychosomatic, and could you please pass the bottle. This pissed off Earl even more so he left me with the dentist and headed back to the site.

I had to get out of the country, to somewhere I could get some real medical care! Tickets out of Algeria had to be purchased with hard currency, not Algerian dinar. I kept trying to reach someone in the U.S. who could buy me a ticket with dollars but it was futile. I would awaken each morning to the beautiful and peaceful sound of muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, only to face the throbbing pain of my “imaginary” injuries when fully alert. One day I walked down to the Air Algérie office and noticed a placard on the counter that had a graphic that sort of looked like a Master Card symbol. I convinced the agent that my Master Card and that European credit card were one and the same, and halleluiah, she sold me a ticket to Paris leaving that afternoon. Just like that! I was grateful they had no way of checking the available credit on my card.

I rushed to the airport and was again relieved when I sank into my seat and the plane took off for France. We made a brief stop in Nice to clear customs and took off again for Paris. There was a solid cloud cover over all northern Europe, and the ride was bumpy as we approached Orly airport. We broke through the clouds into clear sky at about two thousand feet and dropped into the downwind leg of our approach. I again had a left-side window seat, and I could see a 707 ahead of us on its final approach. Something was clearly wrong. It was far too low and smoke was coming from the wrong places.

The plane clipped some trees and crashed on the runway. I saw a fireball erupt from the fuselage just behind the cockpit and sweep down the body of the plane and then we were past it and I lost my view. I shouted “No!” and looked around to see how other people on my plane were reacting, because I hadn’t heard anything from anyone else. No one appeared to have seen anything. The stews were all still in their jump seats for the landing and couldn’t have seen. They had missed it all.

Our pilot aborted his landing and we climbed back up into the clouds. The stew announced that, due to a problem on the ground, we had been put in a holding pattern until we were cleared to land. We circled Paris in very turbulent air for another two hours before being diverted to Charles de Gaulle. I tried to find out what had happened once I was in the terminal, but couldn’t find out anything. I had an open ticket for a return to Boston and was lucky enough to get on a flight leaving right away. Traveling with the sun, it was still the 11^th of July when I touched down at Logan airport. By then the newspapers had the story of the crash at Orly. One hundred twenty-three had died in the crash of Varig Flight 820 from Rio de Janeiro. Amazingly, ten crew and one passenger survived. An investigation later determined the plane had crashed after a fire broke out in one of the lavatories and had swept through the plane, but the cause of the fire remains unknown.

I spent the night at a friend’s house in Boston and saw a Harvard Health Plan doc the next morning. He took X-rays that confirmed that a rib and left scapula had been fractured but were not displaced, so he advised taking it easy and letting them heal. There were no MRIs in those days to show soft tissue details, but based on symptoms and examination, the doc concluded I had torn tendons that attached muscles I had never heard of to my scapula. Surgery might be possible but again, the best thing would be to wait and see how it healed.

Before leaving for Algeria I has written Dr. Michael Katsev to ask if I could come to Cyprus and talk about the future of his work and my studies. Katsev was finishing up seven years of excavating and reconstructing a 4^th century BC Greek merchant vessel that had sunk off the Cypriot coast near Kyrenia. He wrote back saying I was welcome anytime.

I straightened out my banking affairs, took a train down to Baltimore to visit my father and to get a second medical opinion from a Johns Hopkins doc, then I flew to Amsterdam, picked up my car, and set off for Athens. I was healing nicely and grew stronger each day of the drive. In Athens, I put my car in a bonded lot, bought an airline ticket for Cyprus, had dinner with Throckmorton, and checked in for my flight in the morning.

My Olympic flight departed from the international terminal, and the next gate over was being used by an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York with a stopover in Athens. A large crowd was waiting to board the El Al flight and a much smaller group was waiting for my flight. The El Al flight started boarding, and as had become standard El Al practice, the entrance to the jetway was flanked by two Uzi-toting security guards. With nothing better to do, I watched passengers file through the El Al gate. One of the security guards stopped a man who was about to pass through the gate and asked him something. The man and another next to him backed away suddenly, took hand grenades from their coat pockets, pulled the pins, and tossed them into the middle of the crown waiting to board. They were pulling machine guns from under their coats as I dove behind one of the large concrete planters that separated the gates. I heard gun fire before the grenades exploded with gut-wrenching, deafening blasts. Some other people in my lounge had made it to the safety of the planters, but most had been exposed. I looked over the planter and saw a bloody mess. I didn’t see the El Al security guards. The two gunmen were still firing, one into the crowd and the other through the glass at the El Al plane. I ducked back down and waited. The shooting eventually stopped but and I have no memory of how long I waited before Greek police arrived and took the shooters into custody. News accounts said two hours. I don’t remember it that way, but I’ve learned that memory is funny stuff, and the details I remember often conflict with the official version of some of the terrible things I’ve witnessed. What I do remember from the news reports is that five died and fifty-five were wounded that day. I was untouched.

I hung-out in Piraeus for another two weeks before I felt like returning to the airport and getting aboard another plane. I made it to Cyprus, was given a courtesy dive on the wreck site by Robin Pearcy, Katsev’s assistant, and marveled at the reconstructed ship in the museum gallery. I gather the dive on the wreck site was an audition, because Katsev encouraged me to apply for the dig at Yassi Ada the next year, where he would be deputy director to George Bass. I did, and I’ve already told you about the summer of ’74.

I made it back to Boston without any further incident and decided I didn’t want to fly ever again. I changed my mind when my father invited me to join the entire family in the Caribbean for Christmas and my birthday, which happen to be the same day, my gift being the full cost of the trip. Well, of course I said yes. The day before Christmas I met up with my father, his wife, and my brothers in Baltimore and we flew first-class to Puerto Rico on the upper-deck of a 747 back in the days when Pan Am advertised the plane had a piano bar up there. I never saw a piano bar. In Puerto Rico, we transferred to a twelve-seat LIAT flight for Barbuda. I was seated next to my brother Steve directly behind the pilot’s seat, there being no partition separating passengers from cockpit on such a small plane, and we sat on the tarmac in the tropical heat for a long time waiting for the flight crew to arrive. Steve knew a little about what I had been through the past summer, and he saw my white knuckles as I held on to the armrests with a death grip. He was doing his best to get me to relax and lighten my mood, sadly, I’ll admit, without much success.

Finally, we saw the pilot walking across the tarmac. He was a short, thin Latino with mirrored aviator glasses; his peaked pilot’s had at a jaunty angle and he sported French cuffs showing out of the sleeves of his tailored uniform. his strutted more than he walked, and he had a big smile with a row of white teeth that sparkled in the sunshine. At least, that’s how I remember him. Steve saw me grip my armrest even tighter. The pilot boarded at the rear of the plane and made his way forward. As he passed us Steve jokingly asked, “Hey man, we just got off a 747 and it was nice. So tell me, where’s the piano bar on this crate?” The pilot turned back to us and pulled off his sunglasses. He had two of the reddest bloodshot eyes I’ve ever seen. In a thick Puerto Rican accent, he said, “Piano Bar? Hell man, you’re lucky we got wings!”

Even I had to laugh. It broke my tension and I was able to relax. I ended up having a wonderful Christmas and a peaceful end to a very difficult year.