Ancient Egyptian Chemical Science

When did science start? To answer that, you have to ask, what is the scientific method? My answer to that is you start by observing something, and when you work out what you think made it happen, you try to use it with something else. After you have found a number of successes, you start to induce a hypothesis. Essentially, you have a set of observations, and a rule that conveys set membership. That rule is the hypothesis. You test it further, and sometimes you have success. Sometimes you find the hypothesis was wrong. The ancients, starting off from nothing, will have got it wrong more often than right.

The first example of chemistry would be when ancients found the first fire, and found that if you used it to treat meat, it was easier to eat.  Cooking was invented, and all sorts of other potential food was cooked. Sooner or later, wet clay was subjected to fire, and pottery was invented. This was not easy and it did not occur everywhere. There are a number of ancients who never learned how to make pottery. Somewhere along the line some malachite would have been in the base of a fire, and copper made. This heating of various things did a number of good things for people, and a number of not so good ones.

Once you realize you can do things, and you have an objective, you can try something, and if it works, even partially, you can subject it to a number of variations to improve your process. That is science. In ancient Egypt, one of the priorities was to find improved mummification. One of the surprises for us came from an embalming workshop in Saqqara. It was obvious that oils and resins were used, but the workshop contained a number of jars with residues in them (Nature https://doi.org/grqg2w; 2023) and the interesting thing for me is that mass-spectral analysis showed extracts from cypress and cedar trees, which are local, but there were also components from trees that grow in African rain forests, and another material that came from southern India, Sri Lanka and SE Asia. There was extensive trade even at 2000 BC, and the embalmers had obviously tried a lot of materials. The use of resins and plants with antibacterial, insecticidal and antifungal properties were used at least at 6000 BC. By the Pharaonic period, they realised that natron (sodium carbonate with some bicarbonate, chloride and sulphate) offered preservative properties. The natron was probably in solution, and the body would not have been dessicated, although dessication would follow thanks to the Egyptian hot dry air. The high pH of natron would stop any bacterial activity.

Did the ancient Egyptians gain any understanding of what they were doing. This question is more difficult to answer than it might be thought because our records are from scribes who were highly religious, which meant that so much would be recorded in terms of the Egyptian Gods, but the scribes never invented anything. They had to interpret everything in terms of religion. The problem with natron was it would bleach the skin, and the Egyptians did work out that coating the skin with resin stopped the bleaching. It is possible they worked that out because there is a papyrus (The Edwin Smith papyrus) that shows they had a rational and arguably scientific attitude to diagnosis.

The Egyptians were the first to synthesize a coloured pigment: Egyptian Blue, a calcium copper tetrasilicate, which was made by heating silica, lime and copper oxide in a flux of borate. By altering the ratio they could also make a green colour. They also made coloured pigments for makeup, including lead sulphide (black), lead carbonate (white, but also laurionite (Pb(OH)Cl) and the white powder phosgenite (Pb2Cl2CO3). These latter two had to be synthesized, and while PbS is found naturally as galena, the ore is shiny, and you will get better black with precipitation. For those who are horrified by the thought of putting lead sulphide on the skin, it is totally insoluble and could never pass through the skin.

They were also skilled at metalworking, and had a technique for soldering of gold jewellery that is of interest. They glued the objects together and put powdered malachite into the glue. When this was heated, the glue reduced the malachite to molten copper, which welded the objects together. Finally, they were good at making perfumes, and had developed techniques like distillation. They may not have had a full understanding of what they were doing, but they had a procedure by which they learned things.

Advertisement

Gorbachev: A Man for What Season?

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is dead, and the eulogies are flowing thick and fast, but mainly from those outside Russia. He may well have the record for the most praise for someone who made the worst botch-up of the job he was appointed to do. He is praised in the West for dismantling the Soviet Union, but that was the last thing he was trying to do. He believed that liberalizing the economy would improve the lot of Russians. After he was deposed and the USSR fell, the GDP of Russia almost halved, and only too much that was left fled the country in the hands of a few oligarchs. You see comments by Bill Browder on how bad Putin is, but he made a billion dollars from the ignorance of the ordinary Russian and according to Russia, he never paid a cent in tax to Russia. Quite simply, Gorbachev gave the country that hated Russia (the US) what it wanted and completely failed Russia. He had a dream, but he never checked to see whether it was realistic, and he never had a workable plan to implement it.

Gorbachev’s early important jobs related to agriculture. The Soviet Union should have been a major food exporter, but in the 1970s, in part because of poor weather, it had to import grain. Gorbachev was supposed to do something about this, and his response was to blame central decision-making. That may well have been a factor, but it was not the required answer. I visited the USSR in the early 1980s, and in a drive through the countryside of Uzbekistan the problem was easy to see. There were huge areas of the steppe that had been ploughed, and then, nothing. Not even harrowed to at least make it look as if something was being done. But in small “oases” there was extremely intense productivity. Those in the collective were given very small areas of land for themselves to use, and basically they concentrated on that. This was where almost all the local food came from, a tiny percentage of the total land. Now, if I could see this in a short visit which was really more as a tourist (I was getting over jet lag and enjoying a weekend before heading to Moscow for what I went there for) surely Gorbachev could have found this out if he wanted to.

Part of my life has been devoted as a consultant to fixing problems, and my first rule of fixing a problem has always been, first examine the problem in intense detail and understand it. To examine it, you actually have to go and look at it yourself. Reading a report is no good unless there is a recommendation to fix it, because if whoever wrote the report does not know how to fix it, perforce (s)he does not understand it. This is probably a major failing of leaders everywhere, but it was much worse in the USSR. If the leader cannot take the time off to look at it, he should delegate to someone who can. At this time fixing agriculture was Gorbachev’s main job; he was the delegated man, and at this point he failed. The USSR kept importing food, which also was a drain on foreign currency. One could argue that the system prevented success, but Gorbachev had Yuri Andropov as a friend, and if he could persuade Andropov, almost certainly what he recommended would be done. The simple answer is the farmers had to have an incentive to increase the communal yield. That introduces the most significant problem in economics: how to properly reward people. Something needed to be tried, such as giving small groups of farmers (since they had to maintain some part of communism) the right to take shares of the yield from a block of the commune land.

When Gorbachev became effectively the leader of the USSR, he had learned nothing from his agrarian program, and while he recognized industry needed a better output and productivity, he still relied on central planning, while ignoring implementation. A plan that might work is only of use if there is a working procedure to make it work. For his plans to work, first he had to remove the many layers of bureaucrats between the major decision and implementation. His first move was to remove the “old guard”. This was a clear mistake as a first move. They knew someone younger was needed, which was why they put him there. Many should have been potential allies. His replacements included people like Yeltsin, who ended up doing everything he could to subvert Gorbachev. Gorbachev was not a good judge of character, and completely failed the next step: if you want to run a central system the top priority is to find someone who gets things done. They are seldom people who play the political game making fine speeches praising Lenin. Gorbachev tried to introduce some sort of limited private enterprise and market economics, but because of the layer of incompetents under him and his demand that central planning be retained, that did not work.

The next major blunder was “glasnost”; giving the people the right to complain. There was too much to complain about. Freedom to criticize is all very well, but if the criticisms are going to be well-grounded and nobody is fixing them, the society fragments. Gorbachev apparently thought that if the people knew about all the problems they would rally behind his efforts to fix them. That was ridiculous. The noisiest dissidents are the least constructive. He needed fixers in place before allowing people to shout out what needed fixing. After all, a lot was obvious. Again, I recall going into a building in the old USSR that was supposed to be where you bought things. The shelves were empty. Fixing food production and providing a range of consumable goods should have been the first priority. If everyone had more to purchase, and higher incomes from the increased productivity, now open criticism would be harmless.

Gorbachev made an impression on Western leaders. The nuclear disarmament treaty was an achievement, but when it came to the reunification of Germany and the USSR giving the Warsaw Pact countries their independence from Moscow control, Gorbachev badly needed to ensure that NATO did not march East. Given that he was offering a lot, he needed a signed treaty ensuring the “neutral zone”. He could have obtained that from the Eastern countries, although he probably also needed the US to agree, but for some reason he made no effort at all, which eventually brings us to the current Ukraine conflict. He was to permit some of the republics to leave the USSR, but he made no effort to settle the legal conditions of doing so, which later led to the Georgian and now Ukrainian problems. The USSR owned all the factories, etc, in the breakaway republics, but these ended up in the hands of a very few oligarchs.  Gorbachev had great ideas, but was seemingly uninterested in the details of achieving them, or of ensuring decisions were not undermined by others. The end result was the rule of Yeltsin, and the impoverishment of a very large fraction of the population, the transfer of virtually all of Russia’s industrial and resource assets into the hands of a few oligarchs, the almost halving of the nation’s GDP, and all this really followed from Gorbachev’s inept governance. Gorbachev seemed to think people would rally behind to get the best outcome. That is delusional. They follow incentives or they fly off in different directions. He failed to provide incentives or control where things went. He achieved nothing of substance for those who depended on him. He is popular with those who took advantage of him.

Neanderthals: skilled or unskilled?

Recently, you may have seen images of a rather odd-looking bone carving, made 50,000 years ago by Neanderthals. One of the curious things about Neanderthals is that they have been portrayed as brutes, a sort of dead-end in the line of human evolution, probably wiped out by our ancestors. However, this is somewhat unfair for several reasons, one of which is this bone carving. It involved technology because apparently the bone was scraped and then seemingly boiling or some equivalent heat processing took place. Then two sets of three parallel lines, the sets normal to each other, were carved on it. What does this tell us? First, it appears they had abstract art, but a more interesting question is, did it mean anything more? We shall probably never know.

One thing that has led to the “brute” concept is they did not leave many artifacts, and those they did were stone tools that compared with our “later ancestors” appeared rather crude. But is that assessment fair? The refinement of a stone tool probably depends on the type of stone available. The Neanderthals lived more or less during an ice age, and while everything was not covered with glaciers, the glaciers would have inhibited trade. People had to use what was available. How many of you live in a place where high quality flint for knapping is available? Where I live, the most common rocks available are greywacke, basalt, and maybe some diorite, granodiorite or gabbro. You try making fine stone tools with these raw materials.

Another point, of course, is that while they lived in the “stone age”, most of their tools would actually be made of wood, with limited use of bone, antler and ivory. Stone tools were made because stone was the toughest material they could find, and they hoped to get a sharp edge which would make a useful cutting edge. Most of the wooden items will have long rotted, which is unfortunate, but some isolated items remain, including roughly 40 pieces of modified boxwood, which are interpreted as being used as digging sticks and were preserved in mudstone in Central Italy. These were 170,000 years old. Even older were nine well-preserved wooden spears is a coal mine at Schöningen, from 300,000 years ago. Making these would involve selecting and cutting a useful piece of spruce, shaping a handle, removing the bark (assumed to be done through fire) smoothing the handle with an abrasive stone, and sharpening the point, again with an abrasive stone.

Even more technically advanced, apparently stone objects were attached to wooden handles with a binding agent. The wooden parts have long rotted, but the production can be inferred from the traces of hafting wear and of adhesive material on the stones. Thus Neanderthals made stone-tipped wooden spears, hafted cutting and scraping tools, and they employed a variety of adhesives. Thus they made two different classes of artifacts each comprising at least three components. They were making objects more complex than some recent hunter-gatherers. There is a further point. The items require a number of steps to make them, and they require quite different skills. The better tools would be made quicker if there were different people making the various components, but that would require organization, and ensuring each knew what then others were doing. That involves language. We have also found a pit that contains many bones and tools for cutting meat from them, presumably a butchery where the results of a successful hunt were processed. That involves sharing the work, and presumably the yield. 

We have found graves. They must have endured pain because they invariably have the signs of at least one fracture that healed. To survive such injuries they must have had others care for them. Also found have been sharpened pieces of manganese dioxide, which is soft but very black. Presumably these were crayons, which implies decorating something, the somethings long rotted away. There are Neanderthal cave paintings in SpainFinally, there was jewellery, which largely involved shells and animals’ teeth with holes cut into them. Some shells were pigmented, which means decoration. Which raises the question, could you cut a hole in a tooth with the only available tools being what you made from stone, bone, or whatever is locally available naturally? Finally, there are the ”what were they” artifacts. One is the so-called Neanderthal flute – a 43,000 – 60,000- year-old bear femur with four holes drilled in it. The spacings does not match any carnivore’s tooth spacing, but they do match that of a musical scale, which, as an aside, indicate the use of a minor scale. There is also one carving of a pregnant woman attributed to them.  These guys were cleverer than we give them credit for.

What Started Civilization?

I am fascinated by the question when did civilization start? This question, of course, depends on what you mean by civilization. I assume the first step would involve a person becoming more skilled at just one thing, and trade that product for all the other things he/she wanted. That is necessary, but not sufficient. Perhaps, rather arbitrarily, I am going to define it as when people started to specialize sufficiently that they had to stay in one place. Now, food became a problem because the same area had to sustain the tribe, which might lead to the weeding of the undesirable and planting and tending the desirable. I suspect the first real such industry would be flint knapping. Someone who could make really sharp arrow-heads could trade them for meat, but the flint knapper would need to remain near the best supplies of flint.

Evidence for trade goes back at least 300,000 years, because the remains of a tribe has been found that used ochre for decoration, and the nearest ochre deposits were over a hundred kilometers away. Trade, however, does not mean specialization. What presumably happened was that the very small tribes (which may have been little more than a few families) would go to an annual get-together, trade, socialize, exchange young women (because small tribes need to keep up genetic diversity) then go back to where they can feed themselves. Neanderthals also lived in small groupings and probably maintained the same type of lifestyle. Is that civilization?

The stone-knapper would be the equivalent of a tradesperson, doing one job for one person at a time. Maybe that does not qualify. (Whether it does depends on whatever definition you choose. This problem persists in modern science where only too many silly ideas are conveyed by terms that become misinterpreted.) However, I feel that a processing plant really does qualify. For this you need a fixed site, a continual source of raw material, and to get scale, you need a number of customers. So what came first? It appears there are at least two contenders.

The first is bread. An archaeological site in Jordan that was occupied 14,000 years ago has unearthed a bakery, and the remains of bread. This was made by grinding wild wheat and wild barley to a flour, pounding tubers of wild plants that grow in water, mixing these together to make a dough and then bake it on hot stones around a fire. Microscopic examination of the remains shows clear evidence of grinding, sieving and kneading. The people were hunter-gatherers, and would eat meat from gazelles down to hares and birds, together with whatever plant foods they could forage. That the large stone oven remains here today shows this activity was in a fixed place.

The second contender comes from a dig near Haifa. They found stone mortars 60 cm deep used for pounding various species of plants, including oats and legumes. The evidence was that besides a place where food was prepared, they also made beer. Grain was germinated to produce malt, then the resulting mash was heated, then fermented with wild yeast to produce a “beer”.  This beer was probably more like an alcoholic porridge than what we thing of as beer, but it was an industry.It would be fascinating if it were beer that was the cause of civilization The need for beer would require grain, and because you could not carry around these large mortars, you would prefer to have your grain close, and in regular supply. Regular supply means storing it because grain is seasonal. Growing enough to keep a good beer supply means farming, and keeping the rats out of the grain. As it happens, cats have become domesticated for about 13,000 years. Your household cat is probably the clue.

E-Book discount

From February 20 – 27, Athene’s Prophecy, the first in a series, will be discounted to 99c/99p on Amazon. Science fiction with some science you can try your hand at. The story is based around Gaius Claudius Scaevola, who is asked by Pallas Athene to do three things before he will be transported to another planet, where he must get help to save humanity from total destruction well in the future. The scientific problem is to prove the Earth goes around the Sun with what was known and was available in the first century. Can you do it? Try your luck. I suspect you will fail, and to stop cheating, the answer is in the following ebook. Meanwhile, the story.  Scaevola is in Egypt for the anti-Jewish riots, then to Syria as Tribunis laticlavius in the Fulminata, then he has the problem of stopping a rebellion when Caligulae orders a statue of himself in the temple of Jerusalem. You will get a different picture of Caligulae than what you normally see, supported by a transcription of a report of the critical meeting regarding the statue by Philo of Alexandria. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GYL4HGW

Phlogiston – Early Science at Work

One of the earlier scientific concepts was phlogiston, and it is of interest to follow why this concept went wrong, if it did. One of the major problems for early theory was that nobody knew very much. Materials had properties, and these were referred to as principles, which tended to be viewed either as abstractions, or as physical but weightless entities. We would not have such difficulties, would we? Um, spacetime?? Anyway, they then observed that metals did something when heated in air:

M   + air +  heat        ÞM(calx) ±  ???  (A calx was what we call an oxide.)

They deduced there had to be a metallic principle that gives the metallic properties, such as ductility, lustre, malleability, etc., but they then noticed that gold refuses to make a calx, which suggested there was something else besides the metallic principle in metals. They also found that the calx was not a mixture, thus rust did not lead to iron being attached to a lodestone. This may seem obvious to us now, but conceptually this was significant. For example, if you mix blue and yellow paint, you get green and they cannot readily be unmixed, nevertheless it is a mixture. Chemical compounds are not mixtures, even though you might make them by mixing two materials. Even more important was the work by Paracelsus, the significance of which is generally overlooked. He noted there were a variety of metals, calces and salts, and he generalized that acid plus metal or acid plus metal calx gave salts, and each salt was specifically different, and depended only on the acid and metal used. He also recognized that what we call chemical compounds were individual entities, that could be, and should be, purified.

It was then that Georg Ernst Stahl introduced into chemistry the concept of phlogiston. It was well established that certain calces reacted with charcoal to produce metals (but some did not) and the calx was usually heavier than the metal. The theory was, the metal took something from the air, which made the calx heavier. This is where things became slightly misleading because burning zinc gave a calx that was lighter than the metal. For consistency, they asserted it should have gained but as evidence poured in that it had not, they put that evidence in a drawer and did not refer to it. Their belief that it should have was correct, and indeed it did, but this avoiding the “data you don’t like” leads to many problems, not the least of which include “inventing” reasons why observations do not fit the theory without taking the trouble to abandon the theory. This time they were right, but that only encourages the act. As to why there was the problem, zinc oxide is relatively volatile and would fume off, so they lost some of the material. Problems with experimental technique and equipment really led to a lot of difficulties, but who amongst us would do better, given what they had?

Stahl knew that various things combusted, so he proposed that flammable substances must contain a common principle, which he called phlogiston. Stahl then argued that metals forming calces was in principle the same as materials like carbon burning, which is correct. He then proposed that phlogiston was usually bound or trapped within solids such as metals and carbon, but in certain cases, could be removed. If so, it was taken up by a suitable air, but because the phlogiston wanted to get back to where it came from, it got as close as it could and took the air with it. It was the phlogiston trying to get back from where it came that held the new compound together. This offered a logical explanation for why the compound actually existed, and was a genuine strength of this theory. He then went wrong by arguing the more phlogiston, the more flammable the body, which is odd, because if he said some but not all such materials could release phlogiston, he might have thought that some might release it more easily than others. He also argued that carbon was particularly rich in phlogiston, which was why carbon turned calces into metals with heat. He also realized that respiration was essentially the same process, and fire or breathing releases phlogiston, to make phlogisticated air, and he also realized that plants absorbed such phlogiston, to make dephlogisticated air.

For those that know, this is all reasonable, but happens to be a strange mix of good and bad conclusions. The big problem for Stahl was he did not know that “air” was a mixture of gases. A lesson here is that very seldom does anyone single-handedly get everything right, and when they do, it is usually because everything covered can be reduced to a very few relationships for which numerical values can be attached, and at least some of these are known in advance. Stahl’s theory was interesting because it got chemistry going in a systemic way, but because we don’t believe in phlogiston, Stahl is essentially forgotten.

People have blind spots. Priestley also carried out Lavoisier’s experiment:  2HgO  + heat   ⇌   2Hg  + O2and found that mercury was lighter than the calx, so argued phlogiston was lighter than air. He knew there was a gas there, but the fact it must also have weight eluded him. Lavoisier’s explanation was that hot mercuric oxide decomposed to form metal and oxygen. This is clearly a simpler explanation. One of the most important points made by Lavoisier was that in combustion, the weight increase of the products exactly matched the loss of weight by the air, although there is some cause to wonder about the accuracy of his equipment to get “exactly”. Measuring the weight of a gas with a balance is not that easy. However, Lavoisier established the fact that matter is conserved, and that in chemical reactions, various species react according to equivalent weights. Actually, the conservation of mass was discovered much earlier by Mikhail Lomonosov, but because he was in Russia, nobody took any notice. The second assertion caused a lot of trouble because it is not true without a major correction to allow for valence. Lavoisier also disposed of the weightless substance phlogiston simply by ignoring the problem of what held compounds together. In some ways, particularly in the use of the analytical balance, Lavoisier advanced chemistry, but in disposing of phlogiston he significantly retarded chemistry.

So, looking back, did phlogiston have merit as a concept? Most certainly! The metal gives off a weightless substance that sticks to a particular gas can be replaced with the metal gives off an electron to form a cation, and the oxygen accepts the electron to form an anion. Opposite charges attract and try to bind together. This is, for the time, a fair description of the ionic bond. As for weightless, nobody at the time could determine the weight difference between a metal and a metal less one electron, if they could work out how to make it. Of course the next step is to say that the phlogiston is a discrete particle, and now valence falls into place and modern chemistry is around the corner. Part of the problem there was that nobody believed in atoms. Again, Lomonosov apparently did, but as I noted above, nobody took any notice of him. Of course, is it is far easier to see these things in retrospect. My guess is very few modern scientists, if stripped of their modern knowledge and put back in time would do any better. If you think you could, recall that Isaac Newton spent a lot of time trying to unravel chemistry and got nowhere. There are very few ever that are comparable to Newton.

Memories from Fifty Years Ago: Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1.

This post is to remind myself that fifty years ago (1968) my little Ford Anglia and I did a road tour behind some of the old Iron Curtain. I was something of an oddity, and I was sometimes referred to as a “stupid Bulgarian” for putting the GB sticker on back to front. The cobbled roads of Poland did not do a lot of favours for the car, since driving towards Krakow on August 22 the clutch mechanism began leaking hydraulic oil, and finding somewhere to get spare oil was a nightmare. Fixing it was impossible; getting the appropriate parts for a very aged British car behind the Iron Curtain was not going to happen. Interestingly, when I stopped at probably the only garage between Gdansk and Krakow, the Poles there refused to speak German. Germans could go to hell! When I managed to get through to them that I was English (OK, I wasn’t, but why a New Zealander was driving a British car would be to much) they suddenly became very helpful. Memories of the Third Reich had not died down.

Back on the road, and before long I overtook what I assume was a motor rifle Division. Trucks carrying soldiers, tanks, artillery, it seemed to take a lot of the afternoon passing it, with me driving on the left hand side of the road, which, of course, felt like usual driving. It seemed a little ominous because I had one more day on my Polish visa, and if you look at a map, options were limited. Interestingly, when I got into my car the following morning in Krakow, the usual black-market currency trader came up to me, and when he found I was going to Czechoslovakia, he immediately offered Czech crown at a huge discount. Even stranger, he would take zloty instead of the usual hard currency. I emptied out my zloty previously bought at a big discount in exchange for some D-mark, and which I could not find anything to spend them on, and got a big fistful of crowns.

On August 23, 1968, I crossed the border at Cieszyn into Czechoslovakia, as it was then known. Unbeknown to me, the Russian army had crossed the previous night. Getting across the border was interesting, but my expiring Polish visa meant there was nowhere else to go, and I had a legitimate visa for getting into Czechoslovakia. The border guards gave way to a military officer, and when I said I was trying to get to Vienna, he let me through. I stopped at an open square in Frydek-Mystek and bought myself a beer and some lunch. I was glad to taste Czech beer, which was far better than Polish beer, and looked out to see a tank on the other side of the square, and a number of soldiers. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the soldiers seemed to be dozing, while the people ignored them. Someone wanted to put a Czech flag on the aerial of my car, so I let them. Then it occurred to me that the person who let me through the border probably had a Russian uniform. Oops! The next bit of news was all the borders were closed.

So, where to go? The next step was fairly obvious: Olomouc. From there, roads went to Brno or Praha. Brno is near the border with the route to Vienna, but there were likely to be far more westerners in Praha, which meant that with more options, it was more likely a border would open soon. It was also reasonably obvious that I would have to stay the night somewhere, so that somewhere might as well be Olomouc. When I got there, all was not well because it was late afternoon. I tried the odd hotel, and met someone who would make a cameo appearance in one of my novels: he spoke 13 languages, so he claimed, but none were English, French or German. So, on the road again. I took the road towards Praha (and I cannot recall whether this was a decision or accidental) and nothing much happened except it started to get darker, then it was clearly night. I was going at about 60 mph, and came over a hill when I saw a small fire to the left and something not right. Emergency avoidance! I swerved left and went into a four-wheel drift, sending a shower of stones towards some clearly frightened soldiers (they would see a ton of steel heading their way). Fortunately, my youthful time spent doing drifts on gravel roads came to my assistance as I held the car and carefully made it back onto the road. (Hint – returning to the road is the most dangerous part as it is easy to overcompensate and start rolling.) Going left was pure instinct. Nevertheless, I had avoided colliding with a tank parked in the centre of the road and covered with camouflage netting to hide its shape. All the same, I decided I had better stop driving soon.

I came to a little village where the road turned right, but there was a further road going left and straight ahead. The road signs had been switched, directing traffic to Praha straight ahead. I stopped, and the Czech flag did a good thing – it brought someone who spoke English. He told me the obvious, but I said I really needed somewhere to stop. He took me to a hotel down to the left, and I found it was illegal to be moving. My guide said he would burn down the hotel if the manager didn’t accept me. Would I permit him to register me from the day before? Of course. Everyone was happy. After ensuring my belongings were in the room, I went back to the cross-roads where part of a Division was passing through. There was a Czech out there indicating the false road, where the sign was pointing but the soldiers were not to be fooled. There was a gap in the traffic, and I approached my new friend, and suggested he get the Czech on the road to point the right way: the drivers would not believe a Czech was trying to be helpful. So when the next part of the Division arrived, the Czech was ignored and the trucks started going down the wrong way. This went on for about half an hour, when a driver was almost going down the wrong way but he realised his mistake and hit the brakes. Everybody stopped behind him. He flung his truck into reverse and shot backwards, furious at the agitated crowd. What he forgot was he had a trailer with an artillery piece on the back, the barrel of which smashed the following truck’s window and the driver only just evaded. The crowd roared. Eventually, this was sorted and what was left of the Division went the correct way. I later learned that a Polish Division was split into five parts that night and it took three days or so to get them all back together. My small contribution to military history!

Next morning I was off to Hradec Kralove, where I found a garage. They could not sell petrol, but I did get a litre of hydraulic oil. They refused payment; it was illegal to sell anything under the occupation. My Czech flag was working! I took the road to Praha and all was well on another gorgeous morning. I passed a detour sign, but I knew better. (I had passed lots of them before.) I kept driving and I must have been fairly close to Praha when there was a minor disaster in the making. There was a dry riverbed, but no bridge. On the other side the road went behind a belt of trees. The last detour sign appeared to be true, but I had only two gallons of petrol left and there was no way I could make it around the detour. I took something of a deep breath, put the car in second gear and went down the bank to the streambed and floored the accelerator. I got up to about 45 mph by the other side, sustaining ferocious bouncing, then up the other side. I had just enough momentum to get over the lip and onto the road. Joy! Through the belt of trees and . . . Oops. I was at the back of a Russian military camp. This Czech flag may not be working in my favour now . . .

More next week for those interested.