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In less than ten minutes the two companions had separated; the one, with his paint-box and camp-stool in his hand, made his way to the tomb where he was copying with delicate and extraordinary exactitude the exquisite figures and heads painted on the walls and pillars of the vast building; the other directed his steps to the site where the band of native excavators was already at work.
Stone hammers and axes, obsidian, flint and other arrow-heads, spear-heads, and knives, mortars and pestles, metates or meal grinders, obsidian and flint drills for making holes through stone or shell, bows and arrows, the bows of tough wood often brought from afar, and the arrows pointed with chipped flint or obsidian, deftly and securely tied to the shaft with tough and durable strings of sinews; shell beads, pipes, bone awls, punches, needles, etc.; stone fetiches in semblance of animals, the like of which were never seen on land or sea; ornaments of shell, turquoise and onyx, and even a kind of jade; sandals and mats of yucca fibre, and exquisitely delicate feather robes, these are some of the things that the excavators have found.
The flowers were scorched and dead under the piled-up ashes. But it was easy for the modern excavators to tell from the ground where the flower beds had been and where the gravel paths. Even the lead water pipe that carried the stream to the fountain needed little repairing.
John said nothing, but his lower lip trembled as the last trace of the beautifully sanded base lines disappeared under the excavators' devastating hands. "'Tis a pity," said the kindly Irishman, who noted their approach, "but it has to be, I guess, kids. Yis, the other team went home, fifteen minutes ago. Said they didn't guess there'd be a game today."
But where they had hoped to find thousands of precious things they have found only hundreds. Many pedestals are empty of their statues. Here and there the very paintings have been cut from the walls. Those are the pictures we should most like to see. How beautiful could they have been? "Evidently men came back soon after the eruption," say the excavators.
Dredgers of mud, navvies employed on suburban canals, excavators, loaders and unloaders of cargo, cattle drivers, whose driving, however, was done mostly on board ship, such and such like were the men who were the fathers of the families of St. Diddulph's-in-the-East.
Hence M. Botta, the most careful and the most scientific of recent excavators, came to a very positive conclusion that the Khorsabad buildings had had no second story, a conclusion which it would not, perhaps, be very bold to extend to Assyrian edifices generally. It has been urged by Mr.
He had by the greatest good luck secured a position with a manufacturer of surgical instruments, where his manual dexterity in the making of excavators, pluggers, and other dental contrivances stood him in fairly good stead. He lunched at a sailor's boarding-house near the water front, and in the afternoon worked till six.
On the 28th of March, 1863, some excavators working under the direction of M. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of Moulin Quignon, near Abbeville, in the department of Somme, found a human jawbone fourteen feet beneath the surface. It was the first fossil of this nature that had ever been brought to light.
In some of these the excavators found, buried in the ashes and charred by the fire, figs, chestnuts, plums, grapes, glass dishes of fruit, loaves of bread, and little cakes. Were customers buying the night's dessert when Vesuvius frightened them away? In a cool corner of the building is a fish market with sloping marble counter.
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