The drought in Europe is so bad that the level of the mighty Danube River has sunk to its lowest level ever recorded. Europe's second largest river, the Danube flows through 10 countries, but with the current heat waves, the river has shrunk so low that a cruise ship ran aground on a sandbank. And in Hungary the Paks nuclear power plant had to be shut down last week because the level of the river, used to cool the nuke, was just too low. Surprising things have emerged in the Danube's riverbed.
In Serbia a German warship, sunk during World War 2, was exposed for the first time, while in Bulgaria, villagers found the jaw and tusks of a mammoth. It must have been there for thousands of years. Took me back to when I worked on a University of Cambridge archaeological dig on the Channel Island of Jersey, known for its woolly mammoth fossils. I knew one of the archaeologists, Kate Scott, who had organised that I join them while backpacking overseas in 1977. The Jersey dig was in a cave called La Cotte. It was April, which I thought meant spring in the UK, but man, it was cold. Ice on our tents every morning and the ground was frozen. I cursed for not bringing a mattress. I came back from emptying the loo buckets (had to remember to stand downwind) and found Kate had stuffed newspapers into two huge plastic bags, sewn them together and voila! I had an excellent camping mattress. We walked down to the cave every morning and dug in our allocated squares. I was used to the hard fossil bones we found in South Africa, but these were soft. I was terrified of breaking them. “The thing to do,” a student told me, “is to dip this brush into glue, and trickle it onto the bone fragment and let it harden.” Not so easy while wearing woolly gloves. I ended up with my gloves glued to the brush. I never found anything spectacular, but Kate found a mammoth skull. It was magnificent. I loved to think of these massive creatures roaming England around 180 000 years ago. It was muddy, cold work and after our camp supper in the garden shed, we used to head down to the Smugglers’ Inn for a pint. Ah, it was so grand to stand in front of the fire and warm up. They served something I had never seen: warm potato skins with butter. Delicious. The professor’s wife told me that Prince Charles, as he was then, had been to their dig two years earlier when he was a student studying archaeology. He came with two bodyguards – but no torch. As no one had a spare torch, she gave the young prince a candle in a jam jar. “Do you know, when he left, he came carrying the jam jar and candle stub, and said: ‘Here are the things you so kindly lent me.’ I thought he was marvellous.” Well, I didn’t find a mammoth, and I missed out on digging with Prince Charles, but it was a great experience I’ll always remember.
