Land of Marvels Read online

  Rampling learned in due course that Elliott had escaped the consequences of his treachery and had returned to his native land and the warm embrace of Standard Oil and the Chester Group. But Rampling was not a vindictive man, and he believed in the conserving of energy. The harm was done; there was no point in wasting further time on the matter. Disapproval of the American had been necessary during the time he was planning to have him killed. But if they had met now, he would have shaken Elliott by the hand and wished him well.

  He was, in any case, extremely busy in these months, working out the financial terms for an agreement on the Baghdad Railway. He was on the brink of success when the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo.

  Shared investment to protect, free competition, Rampling was always to maintain, might have saved the peace even then, had it not been for Austro-Hungarian arrogance and intransigence. But his true success, the accord for which he and his partners had been working in secret for several years, together with members of the government and the high military command, came in May 1916, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which defined British and French political and economic interests in the postwar period, when—as was hoped and believed—the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered. By this agreement Britain was to gain complete control over lower Mesopotamia from Tikrit to the Persian Gulf and from the Arabian boundary to the Persian frontier. This vast territory, which had never been home to a single nation, she was to rename Iraq.

  A Note About the Author

  Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker finalist for Pascali’s Island and Morality Play, and was long-listed for the Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel. His other works include The Songs of the Kings, After Hannibal, and Losing Nelson. He lives in Italy.

  Also by Barry Unsworth

  The Partnership

  The Greeks Have a Word for It

  The Hide

  Mooncranker’s Gift

  The Big Day

  Pascali’s Island (published in the United States under the title The Idol Hunter)

  The Rage of the Vulture

  Stone Virgin

  Sugar and Rum

  Sacred Hunger

  Morality Play

  After Hannibal

  Losing Nelson

  The Songs of the Kings

  The Ruby in Her Navel

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Barry Unsworth

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese,

  an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Unsworth, Barry, 1930–

  Land of marvels : a novel / Barry Unsworth. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Archaeologists—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. British—Iraq—Fiction. 3. Geologists—United States—Fiction. 4. Americans—Iraq—Fiction. 5. Excavations (Archaeology)—Iraq—Fiction. 6. Petroleum—Prospecting—Iraq—Fiction. 7. Petroleum industry and trade—Middle East—History—Fiction. 8. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1910–1936—Fiction. 9. Iraq—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6071.N8L36 2009

  823’.914—dc22

  2008009201

  eISBN: 978-0-385-52947-1

  v1.0