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patient, too indulgent by far of this peculiar and opinionated Briton.
    ‘The Director will be back next week,’ she told Ysabella. ‘Then you can be properly assigned.’ She had long since decided that her eccentric visitor was not really an archaeologist at all, not if one thought it a matter of temperament as much as of the intellect. Her own leanings had developed into an obsession with historic Manila, the last thousand years, a period which could be further narrowed by starting at Magellan’s arrival in 1521 and ending with the razing of the city’s centre in 1945 when American troops finally crushed the Japanese. Much of her own fieldwork had been done a bare half mile away in Intramuros, the old Spanish citadel. In the 1970s one of Manila’sworse slums had been bulldozed and there, practically in the shadow of San Agostin church, Sharon had dug down beneath the broken rum bottles and flattened pork-and-beans cans of squatterdom, past Japanese helmets and rusting bayonets, back to coins of Philip II whose name a nation had inherited. She had recognised that these holes of hers dug within the dark grey sloping walls had become a private earthworks thrown up against sundry ghosts and vampires which stalked the caverns of the Philippine Heritage Museum: chiefly, the ghost of General Yamashita and the vampires of pot-hunting. At the most she would only ever find curios: a fragment of machine gun belt, a dented powder flask, a doubloon or two, pieces of messware. These things were safe, of little monetary value. From them she could reconstruct the ebb and flow of the citadel’s boundaries which did not always match the plans contained in vellum-bound archives in Madrid. That palimpsest of site over site, shifting and blurring (did the charred staves of narra wood at 4m 85cm corroborate the magazine fire recorded in 1688?), the vertically of her personal world, partially safeguarded her against the horizonless present. This was the cliché of scholarship, naturally. But most archaeologists had not to contend with museum authorities selling off items from its own collection to the tourist industry, nor with the hysteria of treasure hunting which surrounded any discovery or dig. At the merest hint of Japanese capital behind a construction site, island or beach resort anywhere in the provinces, the story would spread that somebody had inside information about the vast treasure looted by General Yamashita and hidden somewhere in the archipelago as he fled in 1945, hoping to retrieve it at leisure. Or a scuba diver had only to find a barnacle-encrusted dish or cannon to trigger a well-equipped assault on the site by rival gangs of looters. Conflicting claims were sometimes settled at sea or on beaches by night with brisk firefights of automatic weaponry. Far in the rear, the agents of the state came puffing along in leaky boats with rented gear, waving Ferdinand Marcos’s 1974 Presidential Decree no. 374 which specifically included underwater sites in the Cultural Properties Protection and Preservation Act (1966). By the time they arrived the vampires had like as not torn the place apart and irrevocably scrambled yet another fragment of the past. Laws these people had coming out of their ears; implementation was something else.
    ‘Properly assigned,’ Ysabella was saying. ‘Improperly assigned. What is it he’s doing, exactly, this Director of yours?’
    ‘Liwag? He’s down in Panay, at Tugtugo. That’s the galleon I was telling you about? In eighty feet of water? He said he’d be back mid-next week. Assuming there’s no bagyo .’
    ‘Bagyo ?’
    ‘Sorry, typhoon. One of the acts of God which rule life in these parts. A bad typhoon and the country falls apart for a few days into seven thousand storm-lashed islands, each fighting it out with the hatches battened down. No flights, no boats, often no radio. But it’s the wrong season. He’s probably haggling with the Aussies.’
    ‘The Aussies’ were a