Joel picked one up and held it closer to get a better look. Turning it this way and that, he noticed that on one side it seemed to have some engraved shapes. The shapes were too simple to be hieroglyphics and they looked too unfamiliar to be any alphabet that he knew. But they did look like writing, not merely random markings.

He picked up another and looked at it, then another and then yet another. He noticed some repetition of the symbols, which confirmed his suspicion that there was nothing random about these engravings. They had been made purposively, by a human hand. And that made this a find!

He could just bag it up and mark it, leaving the others to figure out its significance in due course, but something about this discovery appealed to his ego. He wanted some small share of the kudos, even if someone else had dug it up, and someone more knowledgeable than himself would interpret it. And in any case, if it was something important, they would surely want to know about it now.

Joel realized that he had been daydreaming and Jane had noticed that something was up.

‘What?’ she asked, in that ever cheerful way of hers.

He held out one of the stone fragments and let her look at it, making sure that she didn’t actually get her hands on it.

‘Oh… my… God!’ she blurted out.

Fearing that others people would hear and start gathering round before he had had a chance to claim his glory, he threw the fragments into a plastic bag and raced over to Professor Gusack, suppressing the urge to cry out aloud like Archimedes on his homeward sprint from the public bath house.

While Joel was racing off to claim his share of the glory, Jane felt her breath constricting. Unlike Joel, she understood the full significance of what she had just seen. And she had to do something about it.