They couldn’t have dug up a worse catch. In the now-rotting and done-to-dust wooden container there were a few items that nobody knew what to make of. It was an archeological find, and so before somebody could put a date to it, was possibly worth a fortune or worth a dime.
In it was an opener that could turn any can opened with it into a can of worms. A stick that when stirred with, would end up stirring a hornet ’s nest. A spanner to put into a moving wheel. And another strange-looking thing that would always upturn a cart. Together they represented a medley of instruments that had always wrecked history and made it what it was — a general mess.
And now it was unearthed again. And here it lay, packed in a polythene bag for further scrutiny. The people around still didn’t know if they should claim it as their find. It could make them famous if it was really something. Or it could make them the laughing stock if it wasn’t. They would all come and go. Turn it here. Push it around. When finally the decision was made to haul it over to the lab. The lab is where they did the carbon-dating and applied various chemicals to it to determine its authenticity.
On its way in a little run-down car from the excavation site to the railway station from where it would be shipped to the lab in the city, a strange thing happened. The car skidded over the year’s first rainfall of the dry and dusty area and jumped a little over some fallen stones and fell down the only ditch on the stretch to the railway station. There it turned turtle and the driver had to be dragged out of it by passers-by. The contents could not be hauled out as the side they were in was totally smashed in. So a crane was brought to pull it out. On the way there, the crane truck hit a boulder and got stranded. The only crane truck was now in need of another crane truck to get it out of the way. But of that there was none. So it lay there, obstructing traffic. This meant that the minister who was traveling from the town on right of it to the town on left of it had to abandon his route and take a chopper instead. The chopper that was available at such a short notice was one that the local bounty hunters ran to ship out the rarest items from the site of a civilization being discovered. As the press saw the minister getting out of this chopper, the news that ran the next day spoke of a clear nexus between the politicians and the bounty hunters and of the favours that the latter extended the former in return for who knows what. The minister was hauled out of the ministry by a visibly red-in-the-face government who couldn’t afford a damage to their reputation in the final year of the government. But the damage was done. The minister after getting axed and knowing a thing or two about his colleagues that was really true and not in the best interest of the people they represented, spilled a lot of beans. The result was that whatever was left of the government’s collective reputation was soon ground to dust. The causalities were not just the ministers and secretaries, but also the little development work that was being done. Not least of them the unearthing and development of this prospective historic site. As the government was shown the door, these projects came to a standstill. Resulting in a huge job-loss, migration of the working class to other cities and the one thing left to rot in a ditch by the road was a run-down car that nobody would look at twice or think of any value that would make them search its innards for anything valuable.