I've made several archaeological forays, but with meagre results. More is underwater than I thought; a lot of what looked like forest from Canary Wharf is really swamp. The soil is a web of roots, cables, and reinforcing rod--clotted with glass, burnt plastic, broken tile, corroded engine blocks. I need pumps, coffers, saws, screens, lifting gear, you name it; all I have is my machete, a folding shovel, and a worn trowel from our Alexandrian days. I've turned up two drowned books and some computer files, but the books were like wet bread, the disks blistered and warped.
Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance: A Novel (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1997), 130.
The oldest layer was a heavy clay flecked with charcoal and ash. It held chips of glass, the neck of a whisky bottle (Johnnie Walker, from the shape), a flattened plastic jug, a charred piece of motor tire, several cables, pipes, and architectural debris from the museum portico. The best find was a stack of magazines. Charred and waterlogged, they’d evidently been part of a bundle awaiting delivery or recycling. It took an hour to peel them apart— like trying to separate sodden mille-feuille pastry. In the middle was a single legible scrap, with what appeared to be a title. Something on Flaubert? I set the leaf to dry in the sun, and the print became clear: “I am Madame B. Ovary.” I’d unearthed the Reader’s Digest . . . I went back to the tree-throw and picked the roots clean. This produced more glass, some corroded costume jewellery, two shell-cases from a rifle or light machine-gun, part of a willow-pattern gravy boat, and the well-preserved sole of a running shoe—a Puma, no less.
Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance: A Novel (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1997), 134–5.
Boggy groun it wer and hevvy muck. We roapit off in sqwares and sorting thru it befor we draggit with the big buckit and the winch. We begun to fynd bodys and parts of bodys from time back way back. That happent some times in that kynd of muck in stead of rotting a way they got like old dark levver. Them bodys that morning they wer littl kids the yunges mytve ben 6 or so and the oldes may be 7 or 8. It takes you strange digging up a littl dead kid like that. From so far back and dead for so long and all the time they ever had ben just that littl.
I put my han in the muck I reachit down and come up with some thing it wer a show figger like the 1s in the Eusa show. Woodin head and hans and the res of it clof. All of it gone black and the show mans han stil in it. Cut off jus a littl way up the rist. A groan up han and regler show man he ben becaws when I wipet off you cud see the callus roun the head finger same as all the Eusa show men have.
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker: A Novel (New York: Summit Books, 1980), 72.