[Illustration: No. 157. A Trojan Dish with side Rings, and Plates turned by the Potter (Tower: 7 M.).]
In digging to the left and right of the Tower, a number of other interesting objects have been found since my last report; for instance, at a depth of 2 meters (6½ feet), a number of very neat although ordinary vessels with small rings on the sides and holes in the mouth for hanging them up, which have hitherto only been met with much further down; at a depth of 3 meters (10 feet) a small cover, with the owl’s face and helmet of the Ilian Athena, of very good manufacture; then, at a depth of 11½ feet, a small terra-cotta whorl with three stags in the circle round the sun. At a depth of from 5 to 6 meters (16½ to 20 feet), I found a great number of small knives of silex in the form of saws. At a depth of 10 meters (33 feet) I discovered a very curious instrument of brilliant yellow terra-cotta, a drawing of which I give. It is quite inexplicable to me for what purpose it can have been used; it is almost in the shape of a shield, and by the side of the handle which is ornamented with a tree, it has a cavity for putting the hand in. As it is made of terra-cotta it cannot, of course, have been used as a shield.[209]
After having had no rain here for four months, to-day, curiously enough, just after stopping the works, we have had a thunderstorm accompanied by a tremendous downpour of rain, and I regret extremely not to have been able to make a channel for leading off the rain-water from the Tower as far as the western declivity of the hill. But such a channel would need to be 50 feet deep and as many broad, otherwise its walls, consisting of calcined ruins and loose red ashes, would fall in. I should therefore have to remove 5000 cubic meters (6000 cubic yards) of _débris_, and such a gigantic piece of work I cannot now undertake.
In stopping the excavations for this year, and in looking back upon the fearful dangers to which we have continually been exposed since the 1st of April, between the gigantic layers of ruins, I cannot but fervently thank God for His great mercy, that not only has no life been lost, but that none of us has even been seriously hurt.