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sensuous.
    Traffic shunted past, heading down the Church street to the ring road. It was cool in the shadow of the tower and Jack was glad to be out of the sun.
    ‘What do you think is below us?’ the dowser asked. Jack looked down, then around, at the wide flagstones, the cracked pavement by the road.
    ‘The crypt?’ he volunteered.
    ‘The suicide gate through the city’s curtain wall,’ Garth corrected. ‘Glanum was divided in two by a massive wall, several layers deep, labyrinthine. It separated the urban district, which had a gate to the outside, from the Sanctuary heart. The remains of the gate into the Sanctuary are below you.’
    ‘How can you tell?’
    ‘It’s my job to tell. Come on.’
    He led the way round St John’s and through the narrow alley called Mourning Passage. They crossed High Street, passed through the crowds in Market Square to emerge onto Ickendon Way, a wide, busy road, now, but part of an ancient droving road. From here they walked briskly to the river. On the lawned bank, watching the barges and pleasure boats, Garth lit a cigar and pointed across to the recreation fields on the far side.
    ‘The buried city crosses below the river and reaches its widest point. The urban area, with a single, towered gate opening to the north. Anything strike you as strange?’
    ‘The city was built
across
the river?’ Jack asked, frowning. ‘It wouldn’t be easy to defend.’
    ‘Exactly,’ the man said. ‘It would be a stupid thing to do, wouldn’t it? A weak design. You build along the bank, like at London, or Paris, and use natural wells. And you make sure you strongly defend an access way to the river itself.’
    ‘Maybe the river changed its course. This could be the new course.’
    ‘River’s been flowing here for thousands of years.’
    ‘Maybe there were water gates. Like in London.’
    ‘Interesting idea. But I don’t think so. Again: why make the main gate so close to two water gates? That’s a concentration of weak points. It makes no sense. Does it?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I’m glad you agree. Think hard about what we’ve just been saying. Come on.’
    Garth, now, retraced their steps, working their way through Exburgh towards the Hercules excavation. Glanum, he explained as they walked, was shaped like a coffin, wide and single-gated at the head-end, the urban area with its forges, bakeries, potteries, leather-workers and discreet houses. The triple curtain wall, with its suicide passage, divided the coffin at the shoulders. The tapering body of the ‘coffin’, where the multitude of shrines were located, the actual heart of Glanum, lay substantially below Exburgh Castle hill.
    As they walked up Abermyle Street, through Gogmagog Square and back towards the church, Garth defined the perimeter of the city, showing how the old walls were now below modern buildings, how nothing of the new in any way reflected the buried.
    ‘It doesn’t fit,’ Garth said. ‘Everything below you, everything to do with Glanum, is at the wrong angle. It’s rare to encounter a hidden city like this, though they certainly exist. You usuallyget clues in the new town: Oldgate; Westgate; Oldwall street; Roman Way; Tower Green. You know the sort of thing. New towns are built on old towns and the shadows are there in the architecture.’
    ‘But not here …’
    ‘No. Not here. Because this is Glanum,’ he added cryptically. ‘The hidden city doesn’t belong, Jack. What do you remember from the museum? What is it you
know
about Glanum?’
    ‘That Glanum was obliterated on this site. Sometime in the third or fourth century AD. Between then and the first town of Exburgh, five hundred years later, this was just wildwood, wild country. The two histories don’t connect.’
    ‘What if there weren’t two histories?’
    ‘Not
two histories? I don’t get it.’
    ‘What if Glanum was never here!’
    ‘You mean – like a fake city? You’re digging up a fake city?’
    Garth was expressionless as they