The Study
Trim the Wick, and Read
The pool of light follows your hand. Turn the wick low and the room presses in; turn it up and the study shows itself. The text outside the light will not be read.
The shovel hit wood.
He did not move, did not breathe. Above him the wind had gone still in the olive leaves.
Not stone. Wood. Three years of digging and he knew the difference — stone rang hard and dead, and this was softer, a muffled thud.
He knelt and brushed the soil away with hands that would not stop shaking, and uncovered the edge of a tarred beam, then a second beside it — dark with age, fitted tight at the seam.
He set the shovel down.
With his fingers he worked at the place where the beams met. The wood was rotted at the joint. It gave a little where he pried it. He pulled harder — the thin muscles in his forearms cording against the strain, the hem of his shirt snagging and tearing on a splintered edge — and the first beam came up in his hands. He let it fall aside. The second held a moment longer, then gave.
Below the gap: blackness.
He lay flat in the dirt and put his face to the hole.
Cool air rose against his cheek. Not the cold of the autumn night, the cold that came off the fields after dark. This was drier. Mineral. The air of a place that had not breathed the sky in a long time.
— the opening of The False Eagle. The lamp goes further in the book.
Chapter One begins more than half a century later, on a plane, with a magazine open to a photograph of a stone.
