Autumn, 1965 · below the olive terrace
The Descent
Through the broken beams, into the rooms the ground was keeping.
What the light found.
The shovel hit wood. Not stone — wood, and three years of digging had taught him the difference. The rotted beams gave, and he dropped the last metre and landed hard on stone.
A narrow patch of moonlight lay on the floor beside him, no bigger than his open hand. His light found a low barrel-vaulted ceiling, stone walls fitted tight without mortar, and a soot-ghost on one wall where a lamp had once burned. A low doorway opened on a second chamber.
There, under a skin of matted earth — colour. Blues. Reds. The glaze of painted pottery: three amphorae beneath a broken shelf, and a small clay oil lamp on its side, its spout blackened.
The rest is the book's to tell.