The Lost Forest Read online

  Chapter 11

  PALEOARCHAEOLOGY IN BRNO

  For those who were nostalgic for the Cold War era a few souvenirs lingered at the International Hotel in Brno, the capital of Moravia in the Czech Republic, it was not unlike many other hotels in the other ex-East Block countries.

  Ennis had been attending an Antiquities Fair in Vienna after which he had planned to visit Brno. He had two objects in mind, firstly after learning that an excellent example of an early eighteenth Biblica Hebraica was available at a specialist bookseller in Brno, he had emailed a purchase option subject to viewing the antique bible on his visit. Secondly he had decided to visit Zybnek Jaros, the director of the Department of Paelo-archaeology of the Czech National Museum.

  Jaros was known for his work in Palaeolithic archaeology, excavations at Palaeolithic settlements in karstic areas, interpreting topographic, stratigraphic and chronological data. He had been invited to join the team put together for the expedition organised the Department of Human Origins in Paris for the exploration of the limestone caves in the Lanjak area of West Kalimantan, where Ennis had discovered the calvarium.

  Some years earlier Jaros had worked in France under Pierre Ros, the head of research at the Department of Human Origins, and they had continued to cooperate for excavation work on a number of Neolithic and late Palaeolithic sites. His experience had been developed in the sandstone regions of Moravia, where he was still exploring and excavating the numerous ancient rock shelters that had been inhabited by man. He would form part of the team put together by Ros that included specialists in geology, sedimentology, physical anthropology, radiometric dating, archaeology and other specialised fields of research.

  Brno was just a two hour drive from Vienna and he was curious to learn why Pierre Ros had engaged Jaros, a Czech, for the expedition. Pierre had explained that as the conditions of the Kalimantan site were very unusual, closer to that of a Neolithic site than a very ancient habitat, the Czech’s knowledge and experience of rock shelters and stone tools would be invaluable in trying to determine the origin of borneensis and how he had lived.

  At the hotel reception there was the mandatory passport check, a reflex from the past. The reception was overstaffed, as were the dining rooms and bars by the regretful standards in western countries. Glancing around the lobby it woefully evident to Ennis that it had been designed by one of the 1980 Czechoslovak style modern architects, however he remarked and made a mental note of the poster that announced the ubiquitous casino found in Eastern Europe, with a photo of a group of beckoning well formed blonde spectators at the black jack tables, an explicit indication that gambling was not the only attraction.

  His room was small and only just comfortable, much too spartan to his taste, it reminded him of a typical tourist or commercial travellers’ hotel room that was common in Scandinavian countries.

  He left the hotel after a late breakfast taking the rear entrance which led to the town centre, descended a flight of marble stairs and crossed the road. On the roof of a nearby building a faded green sign announced ‘Sputnik’ in contrast with the garish MacDonald’s panel. The town had potential but it was not yet ready for the tourist trade and would probably not be for a long time. Many of the buildings, which were in the course of being renovated, showed the impact of bullets or shells on their facades that dated from WWII. Repairs had evidently been put off for over fifty years.

  The bookshop was in an arcade that had been indicated to him on a map that they had faxed him. He found it without too much difficulty and introduced himself to an intellectual looking blonde engrossed in a card index.

  ‘My name is Ennis, we exchanged mails concerning a book I would like to buy.’

  ‘Mr Ennis? Ah yes, let me see now…if I remember rightly it is a Biblica Hebraica’

  ‘That’s right’

  ‘Quite a nice example. Let me show it to you.’

  Ennis inspected the bible; the binding was fine and the general condition excellent. It had been printed in 1723.

  Just the thing for Abe Avner. The text was black and printed in Hebrew filling the centre area of the pages, whilst explanations in Latin were printed in red on both left and right sides and on the bottom of the pages. Avner would appreciate the present Ennis said to himself.

  ‘Excellent, you can accept my credit cards?’

  ‘No problem Mr Ennis,’ the blonde said with a serious smile.

  He returned to the hotel and called Jaros at his office to inform him that he had arrived and fix a time for their meeting.

  ‘Did you have a good trip?’

  ‘Yes, thanks everything was fine, perfect. Let me invite you to lunch if you’re free, we can meet here at my hotel.’

  ‘That suits me fine, then we’ll visit the office and after the Mendel Museum at the Saint Thomas Abbey, that’s where Gregor Mendel the father of genetics worked. Pierre’s told me all about you.’

  ‘Nothing bad I hope?’

  ‘No, but he told me a visit to the Mendel Museum would be good for you’re education,’ Jaros replied with a friendly laugh.

  ‘Where do you suggest for lunch?’

  ‘There’s a typical Moravian restaurant nearby,” he suggested, then adding, “It’s very good and convenient.’

  They started with a good whole bodied local white wine and Jaros ordered hlavní chod and a side dish, příloha, for them. After they had tasted the wine Ennis opened the subject.

  ‘Well is everything ready for Kalimantan?’

  ‘Everything is fine, I’ve put together a lot of reference material and discussed all the details with Pierre.’

  ‘I’d like to insist on the extreme confidentiality of our work, followed be our safety, things are getting hot down there at the moment, a lot of rioting and general unrest.’

  ‘That’s no problem to me, I’ve also been doing work at a site near Tbilisi in Georgia and there’s been a lot of shooting over there!’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ll show you the photos we took in Georgia?’

  After lunch the went to Jaros’s office in a government building that housed amongst organisations the local branch of the Institute of Science and Culture that had put office space at the disposition of the National Museum on the ninth floor, budgets for science had virtually evaporated after the Communist period and the Institute was struggling to make ends meet. It was an old fashioned ‘modern’ high rise building, the façade already in a dilapidated state, due without doubt to the poor quality of the materials used during the Communist era. They took the aluminium lifts, in the same style, joined by a couple of over made-up secretaries loaded with sandwiches from in-house canteen.

  Ten years previously several hundred persons worked in the state owned building, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall things had changed with a very severe diet of down-sizing as the country made its painful transition to market economy rules, resulting in a reduction in about half of staff, the rest were very soon due for some more of the same medicine according to Jaros.

  His secretary wore a short short skirt, Ennis noting that her legs were not too bad whilst thinking, and without being unkind, she was past the very short skirt age for a secretary in a staid government institute.

  Jaros was a computer addict typing every daily event directly into his computer as a sort of memorandum. He told Ennis that he was also a keen amateur pilot and owned a ULM, a luxury for a Czech, and could not resist showing Ennis a site for flyers with satellite images of the region and a forecast of the weekend’s flying conditions.

  The weather was cold and damp for late spring, and back in Vienna that evening, where he was booked overnight in the Hilton, the heavy rain poured down non-stop as though it were part of a deliberate plot to keep him confined to the hotel. The bite of the miserable weather made him look forward to his coming trip to Tel-Aviv where the weather would almost certainly be much better.