Land of Marvels: A Novel Read online

  “It can’t date from the level where it was found,” Palmer said. “It’s a thousand years too early. There was no ivory in circulation then, none that we know of.”

  It was something of a mystery to both of them how carved ivory of sophisticated workmanship could have found its way to such a deep level; it had been lying amid mud-brick rubble and fragments of painted pottery dating back to the third millennium before Christ.

  “It seems that there were elephants in Syria then,” Somerville said. “There might have been some local carving in ivory, though none has come to light. But I don’t think it is Syrian work in any case. It’s too refined, too ceremonious somehow.”

  He enjoyed speculations of this kind, and his spirits had lifted by the time they were drawing near the house. “There will be a reason,” he said. “There is always a reason, if you can find it. Someone made it who was once alive in the world. And someone else brought it here.”

  “The level needn’t be such a problem,” Palmer said as Hassan ran to open the gate for them. “It’s probably the doing of our little friend, the jumping mouse.”

  This was an accustomed joke between them, the jumping mouse, or jerboa, being a creature that had reached legendary status, having bedeviled generations of archaeologists in the lands between the two tributaries of the Euphrates, the Belikh and Khabur rivers, by its habit of building its nest in very deep burrows—sometimes deep enough to reach the living rock—and in the process throwing up shards and flints from the deepest layers onto the surface. Palmer was convinced—or affected to be—that this little animal seized upon various more recent objects, anything that took its fancy, and bore them down into the depths of the earth, even things bigger and heavier than itself. In this two-way traffic the layers were jumbled up and the dawn of history confused with the day before yesterday.

  The houseboys had laid the table on the shaded side of the courtyard, and the other members of the expedition had already started breakfast. Edith Somerville, sitting at the head of the table, saw Hassan, who had been squatting against the wall, scramble up to open the gate, saw her husband and his assistant enter side by side. They had been laughing together, but this laughter tailed off as they passed through the gate and came into the courtyard. She watched her husband come toward them though without seeming to look in their direction. And it was this, the habit of aloofness, something that belonged to him but was also assumed, especially when there was a group to be faced, greetings to be exchanged, that struck her anew as he approached, belied as it always was by something incongruously jaunty in his gait, a slight jerking upward motion of the feet, involuntary and almost pathetic when combined with his abstracted expression, as if he had suffered some blow and was exerting himself not to show the damage.

  The impression was not new to her, nor was the dislike for it that followed immediately; she hated any flicker of pity in herself, felt it demeaning. But the mixture of feelings was strong on this occasion, seeming to sum up, in these few moments, all that was contradictory and unresolved in the relations between them. So much was this so that she glanced quickly at the other faces around the table, as if she might see a similar feeling registered there, at that of Gregory, her husband’s Armenian secretary, his sallowness in contrast with the dark red complexion of Major Manning beside him, who had arrived among them the day before, and of Patricia, sitting opposite her, fresh from Girton College, who was there for no particular reason except that she was the daughter of a London friend and had liked the idea of joining the expedition. None of these faces seemed any different, except that of Patricia, whose looks had brightened at Palmer’s appearance.

  Then the two were at the table, apologizing for their lateness. She met her husband’s glance and smile, with its usual combination of irony and resignation, and returned to the enjoyment of her breakfast.

  It was easily her favorite meal. The bread here, east of the Euphrates, had been new to her, quite a revelation in its way, cooked on an upturned cauldron with a fire inside, beaten thin so it came in large, crisp wafers. Accompanied by wild honey, dried dates, and goat milk cheese, it made a delicious breakfast. She enjoyed her food and unlike most of her women friends at home had never needed to take care of her weight. She was a tall, full-bodied woman, but at thirty-five she was as light and graceful as she had been at twenty.

  Conversation during the meal mainly concerned the recent speech from the throne, news of which had been brought them by the major, who had been in Mosul the week before, staying as a guest at the consulate. A message of hope and more than hope, even confidence, that an accord with Germany and Turkey would be reached, was on the verge of being reached.

  “Approaching a satisfactory issue,” Manning said. “Those were His Majesty’s words. He was speaking with particular reference to our commercial interests in Mesopotamia.”

  He had a mannerism, fairly frequent, in the pauses between his words, an involuntary tightening of his lips, marked by a slight bristling movement of his fair, carefully clipped mustache, as if he were controlling an impulse to more violent speech.

  “Approaching, well, yes,” Somerville said. “We are not standing still, so much is true. But approaches can be long or short, can’t they? No disrespect to King George, his speeches are designed to reassure the nation, but ‘satisfactory issue’ is a bit on the vague side, don’t you think?”

  He caught his wife’s eye and saw something in her expression, something of admonition or reproof. He had spoken to their guest with a lightness that was sardonic, almost gibing, a tone that he knew had become more common with him of late, as his worries accumulated. It made him disliked; Manning didn’t like him, he knew that, though without much caring.

  The very fact of the major’s presence among them was proof that a language less vague was being spoken elsewhere. Manning spoke Arabic, he had an escort of armed Shammar tribesmen, he had traveled on camelback through the regions west of the Tigris and southward across al-Jazirah. After some days of ranging about among the headwaters of the Khabur he was leaving for Damascus next morning, a journey that would involve crossing the northern part of the Syrian Desert. The reason given out for these extensive travels was the need for reliable survey maps, and in fact Manning did occupy himself with these. But his main employment—Somerville knew this from Jehar, who sometimes, in the hope of baksheesh, included such items of information in his news of the railway line—was speaking to tribal leaders, offering rewards in the name of King George for promises of allegiance in the event of war, seeking to determine the number of friendly rifles. It was an enterprise that had caused a good deal of mirth to Palmer when he had heard of it. To take the trouble to record this information and transmit it to military intelligence in London for future reference in the event of war, when it was known on every hand that the promises of the sheikhs shifted with the desert breezes . . .

  “Rapidly approaching,” the major said now, pointedly looking away from Somerville. “Those were the words used.”

  A silence followed this, broken by Patricia, not out of tact so much as out of impatience with people who got so huffy over what was after all only a form of words. “Too many prophecies flying around, royal and otherwise,” she said briskly. “It’s dead easy to make prophecies, you can always adapt them to events and pretend you meant something different.”

  It was a presumptuous thing to say, in Edith’s view, improper too, unwomanly, trying to tell the men their business. Seeing the way Palmer smiled and nodded in full approval, she felt an increase of contempt for him. She noted the steady, unabashed regard of the girl’s gray eyes, the delicate flush of the complexion, the mouth still childlike in its softness. To have studied modern history at Cambridge was all very well, but women should behave as women, not try to talk about politics on equal terms with the men. The girl was so heedless, so inviolable in her self-absorption . . . Edith drank some coffee, thought it needed more sugar, reached for the bowl.

  “The only important commercial
interest that is approaching rapidly is a German one.” Somerville at once regretted this remark. He had not mentioned the news of the bridge, held back by an instinct of secrecy betrayed by his words now, he felt, and absurd in any case since everyone at the table must know he was referring to the Baghdad Railway. This great project, financed by the Deutsche Bank, was designed to link Constantinople to the Persian Gulf. It was not the fact of it he had wanted to disguise, but his own private belief, gaining on him daily in spite of his efforts to resist it, that it was aiming at him.

  He had risen as he spoke as if to forestall any further talk of the line, and he now smiled around the table in farewell. “I’d better walk over and see how things are going,” he said. And then, to Palmer: “Shall we have another look at that piece of ivory first?”

  Palmer got to his feet, though it seemed with a certain unwillingness to leave Patricia’s side. Together the two men made their way to the large stone-flagged room opening onto the courtyard, where most of the work of restoration was carried out.

  The ivory lay flat on one of the small tables, resting on a thick bed of black felt. Patricia had been eager to be given the task of preliminary cleaning, and Palmer had wanted to please her, so Somerville, after some hesitation, had agreed. It had meant no more than removing the marks of clay on the surface by means of a soft brush with wetted bristles, but he was obliged to admit that she had done it well. It was possible to see now that the background consisted of a pattern of lilies and papyrus flowers and that the tight curls of the victim’s head were not carved in the block but made up of a number of very small pegs with rounded heads that had been fashioned separately and inserted with astonishing skill. There were still some traces of the gold that had been used to highlight these curls, traces too on the victim’s skirt.

  Somerville took from his pocket a small magnifying glass he always carried with him. “There is quite a bit of clay still in the eyes,” he said, after some moments of scrutiny. “But the eyes themselves are made of pitch. The lion’s, I mean. It has run a little as if the lion were weeping. And there is what looks like compacted ash in some of the incisions.” He passed the glass to Palmer. “What would make the bitumen run like that?”

  “It must have melted,” Palmer said. “Must have been in a fire, or pretty close to one. Hard to know what else but heat would do it, the stuff sets like a rock and lasts forever. And then these traces of ash, if that is what they are.”

  “If so, the fire must have been here. No one would have brought a fire-damaged ivory plaque to this place with him. There was probably an inlay once, here in the arches formed by the lily petals.”

  There was nothing left of the stones they had used for this, cornelian or lapis lazuli, whatever it had been, but there were traces of some vitreous powder here and there that could have been part of the original cement. Once again it came to Somerville, as he continued to look closely down, that the victim was somehow collaborating in his fate, supporting himself on his arms, holding his face upward, offering his throat. This was no ravening spring of the beast on its prey. There was something stately and ceremonious in the inclined head of the lion, the enclosing grip of the paws as it held the man in its embrace and took the last of his ebbing life. It was power that was being celebrated here, power absolute and unquestioned. But whose?

  “It has something in common with a few of the ivories found at Nimrud in the 1850s,” he said. “Those they found in the fortified palace built by Shalmaneser. No one has yet established where they came from.” In the interest of the object before him, as the dim notion came to him that with luck he might add something to this debate, even finally settle it, he felt the rush of an emotion like relief; the specter of defeat, so close to him lately, shrank away, receded. “That would put it somewhere in the middle of the ninth century,” he said. “Getting on for three thousand years ago.”

  “If it was made for him,” Palmer said. “But it could be quite a bit earlier. The Assyrian kings of the period brought back booty from all over. A lot of it was someone else’s booty first.”

  “Or else tribute from subject peoples, more or less the same thing. A luxury product in any case.” Somerville straightened up from his examination and smiled suddenly. Smiles were rare with him, but they were attractive when they came, narrowing his eyes and bringing something youthful and almost reckless to his face. “No telling, not for the moment anyway,” he said. “But you can be sure this bit of ivory has seen a thing or two in its time.”

  “Starting with the beast they took it from. Can’t have been much fun for the elephant with the weapons they disposed of then.”

  On this note they parted, Palmer to resume the study of some cuneiform inscriptions that had been found on fragmented clay tablets at a depth of twenty feet, Somerville to return to the tell and see how the work was going. Before setting off, however, he looked in on his wife, who, together with Patricia, was busy in the smaller, adjoining workroom. They were occupied with assembling and trying to fit together some sizable fragments of pottery that had been found lying close together not far below the surface. It was Islamic ware, dating to the period of domination by the Seljuk Turks and beautiful in its coloring, with an opaque bluish and green glaze that had stayed fresh through the eight hundred years or so of its life. For Somerville it was too recent to be of great interest, medieval, in fact. Such pieces were common throughout the area; you sometimes kicked against them as you walked, the pots having been made in considerable quantities not far away, at ar-Raqqah, a prosperous trading center until it was destroyed in the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.

  For Edith, he knew, the age of the pieces had no slightest importance. The main thing was the promise of beauty, the achievement of a finished form that would crown the work, restore the original vessel complete in every part. The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. She continued her efforts in spite of all disappointments. In broken pots as such, those at the deepest and most ancient levels, fragmented and dispersed beyond all possibility of restoration, she took no smallest interest; they were meaningless to her. Life had to glow with promise; there had to be a fire of purpose. She had been disappointed in this too, without losing belief in it. And Somerville, as he stood watching her, knew himself to be part of that disappointment.

  She had looked up and smiled at his entrance but returned almost at once to the work. Her fingers were deft as she handled the pieces. Some hair had escaped from her headband and hung in tendrils over her brow. Patricia’s movements were slower; her lips were parted a little in the effort of concentration, and she held her head low as if it were burdensome. Not long, he thought, since she had sat thus on a bench in a lecture room. They did not get on very well, these two; he had no sense that he was interrupting anything like a conversation between them. But he had been too preoccupied with his own troubles to give much thought to what might divide them. It came to him now that Edith might simply be resentful of the girl’s presence there, that she would have wished to be the only woman in the company. The thought was strangely displeasing to him. Suddenly he felt like an intruder in the silence here, and he turned away and left without speaking.

  2.

  The mound presented a very different picture now from that desolate one of earlier. The men were working in their groups; voices resounded; there was the regular sharp impact of metal on stone and the softer sound, all-pervasive, as if the whole mound were afflicted by a scraping thickness of breathing, of the earth and rubble being shoveled into the baskets to be borne away. Two files of people were in constant movement, one mounting with baskets already emptied, the other descending, stooped to take the weight of the loaded baskets on their shoulders.

  Only now, as he felt within him the resumption of a steadier breathing and a greater sense of the open sky, did Somerville become properly aware of the tension he had felt, disguised from others, no
t fully acknowledged to himself, since early morning and the receiving of Jehar’s report. He began to mount the slope on the southern side, that facing toward the expedition house, making his way among low crags of granite and the rubble of ancient habitations.

  The summit on this side was his preferred viewing place. He stood still here and looked toward the horizon across the long sweep of the steppelands, dressed now in their spring green. It was the third time, standing here in the same place, that he had witnessed this brief tide of green. At the beginning it had accompanied his hopes, augured well for the momentous discoveries he had hoped to make here. Now it seemed a cheat to him, as did everything he looked at, the huddled mud-brick houses of the village, the dark tents of nomad herdsmen in the far distance, the scattered heaps where communities of people had once lived. He could see the glint of the streams that marked the upper reaches of the Khabur River and, at the farthest limits of vision, brief enough to seem illusionary, the occasional gleam elicited by the sun from the swamps of pitch. Sets like rock, Palmer had said. Only strong heat could have put those tears in the lion’s eyes. Might the pitch for the eyes have come from somewhere here?

  Beyond this, far beyond, still to westward, lay the imagined banks of the Great River, as Jehar had called it. Suddenly, disagreeably, he remembered the way the man had watched him, that predatory intentness. How far away was the left bank of the Euphrates, where the piles of the bridge now rested? A hundred miles, perhaps a little more. When they started work again, how long would they take to reach him? Fifteen days, twenty? In certain lights, on the verge of the horizon, he could persuade himself that he saw, luminous and fleeting, the steel of the girders, the green of the palms that lined the banks. It appealed to his imagination as strongly now as ever to think of the powers that had marched and countermarched across this land of the Two Rivers: Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, all bent on conquest, all convinced they would last forever, building their cities and proclaiming their power, empires following one upon another, their only memorial now the scraps that lay belowground, which he and his like competed in digging for.