A scene of ghastly devastation. Bodies lay exposed, limbs strewn at hideous angles. Each king was decapitated, each privileged neck sliced by diamond-edged handsaws, their proud torsos dismembered by chainsaws, line-drilling, and wire-cutting. The wide stone foreheads were reinforced by steel bars and a mortar of epoxy resin. Avery watched men vanish in the fold of a regal ear, lose a shoe in a royal nostril, fall asleep in the shade of an imperial pout.The labourers worked for eight hours, dividing the day into three shifts. At night, Avery sat on the deck of the houseboat and re-calculated the increasing tension in the remaining rock, re-evaluated the wisdom of each cut, the zones of weakness and new stress forces as, tonne by tonne, the temple disappeared.Even in his bed on the river, he saw the severed heads, the limbless minions, stacked and neatly numbered in the floodlights, awaiting transport. One thousand and forty-two sandstone blocks, the smallest weighing twenty tonnes. The miraculous stone ceiling, where birds flew among the stars, lay dismantled, out in the open, below real stars, the real blackness beyond the floodlights so intense it seemed to be coming apart, like wet paper.
