Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/295

and this I found in abundance. I assigned to each tumulus a gendarme and four of my very best Turkish workmen, of whom I was sure that they would work just as assiduously without an overseer as with one. The duty of the gendarme was to look sharp that all, even to the smallest potsherds, were carefully collected, and nothing thrown away. On the western slope of the tumulus of Achilles, fragments of the foundation-walls of the farmhouse, which Choiseul-Gouffier saw here, may still be seen peeping out from the ground.

Into both these tumuli I sank shafts from the top, three mètres long and broad. We worked at first only with pickaxes and shovels, with which the débris were thrown out as long as the shafts were less than two mètres deep; afterwards the débris were carried out in baskets. The diameter of the tumulus of Achilles is thirty mètres at its foot, its upper diameter being fifteen mètres; its lowest height is four mètres, its greatest height twelve. It had been explored in 1786 by a Jew, by order and on account of Count Choiseul-Gouffier, who was at that time the French ambassador at Constantinople. The Jew pretended that he had sunk a shaft from the top,^[1] and had found the upper part of the tumulus to consist of well-beaten clay to a depth of two mètres; that he had then struck a compact layer of stones and clay, resembling masonry, 0.60 m. deep, that he had found a third stratum consisting of earth mixed with sand, and a fourth of very fine sand, and had reached at a depth of 9.70 m. a quadrangular cavity, 1.33 m. in length and breadth, formed of masonry, and covered with a flat stone, which had broken under the ponderous weight pressing upon it. It is not quite clear whether the Jew meant that the cavity was in the rock or above it; at all events he described the rock as consisting of granite. He pretended to have found in the cavity a large quantity of charcoal, ashes impregnated with fat,