Land of Marvels: A Novel Read online

  “Twenty-five piastres,” he said, and heard the sum repeated loudly by the jubilant pickman.

  The rest of his rounds revealed nothing much, but he hardly noticed in any case, so taken up was he with thoughts of the stone. Could it have been quarried locally? It looked like gypsum, though the clay adhering to the surface made it difficult to be sure. Carved in relief, with that thickness, it could only have been part of a wall decoration . . .

  He was still occupied with these speculations and the growing excitement that attended them when the workpeople began to disperse. The carving would have to be examined carefully before any conclusions could be reached, however tentative. He would have liked to set about this at once, but as always at the close of the day’s work there were various claims on his attention, small disputes to be settled, the finds to be taken to the house and laid out there. When these things had been seen to and he had washed and changed, it was time for dinner, which at this season took place in the dining room of the house, the evenings being still too cold after sundown to sit outside.

  As almost always he was slightly late. A place had been left for him at the head of the table, facing the major, who sat at the foot, the same place he had occupied at breakfast. Somerville glanced around the table, saw that his wife was halfway down on the right, that his assistant and Patricia were side by side, as was now their usual practice.

  This evening, however, he was not the last to arrive. He had barely taken his place when Fahir Bey, the commissioner appointed to report on the progress of the excavation, entered the room quickly and began shaking hands, bowing to the ladies, uttering apologies in his fluent and only slightly accented English for disturbing them at their meal. He had ridden over from Ras el-Ain, where his quarters were. He had intended to arrive earlier but had been delayed by official business at the last minute. He was introduced to the major, who responded stiffly and with what seemed to Somerville some increased bristling of the neatly trimmed mustache.

  “Alas, our acquaintance will be short,” Fahir said. “You are leaving tomorrow, I understand.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Fahir had very dark eyes, and his eyebrows were jet black and arched in shapes so rounded and precise that they seemed artificial, as if painted on, giving him a theatrical look, strangely enhanced by the small, diagonal dueling scar on his left cheek. There was nothing theatrical now, however, in the way his smile faded and his eyes rested on the major’s face. “I was informed of it,” he said. “These are Ottoman lands, sir. A British officer, traveling here and there, seeking out the sheikhs, asking questions. Strange if we did not know when he arrived, when he is proposing to leave.”

  “I am traveling with a pass issued by the Turkish authorities in Constantinople, sir. I am an officer of the Royal Engineers, engaged in the compiling of survey maps on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society.”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” Fahir said. “A very august body. For Damascus, is it not, by way of Palmyra and Homs? The Royal Geographical Society wishes to have survey maps of the desert?”

  The major failed to reply to this, but the strain of his silence was relieved by Edith’s hospitable urging of the visitor to join them at table and the bustle of Ali, the houseboy, laying a place for him. The dinner was better than average this evening: a mutton broth, quite passable if somewhat too greasy; a salad of radishes and broccoli—plentiful at this season, though not for very long, in the riverbank gardens—followed by a brace of wild duck, shot that day by the cook himself, a man of uncertain temper named Subri. And they still, at this early stage, had a stock of Cypriot wine that had been brought down from Harran with other provisions at the beginning of the season.

  Somerville thought it unlikely that Fahir would have done any better at home. He himself hardly noticed what he was served these days, distracted as he was by anxieties of one sort or another. But when there were guests or occasional visitors he felt in some measure responsible for the quality of the food, which quite often came out of tins. Fahir was to be regarded as a guest though he came at regular intervals, once every ten days or so. He had no need to come more often: He had abundant sources of information; any of the workpeople would be ready enough, for the sake of a few gurush, to tell him of significant finds. The site was leased in regular legal form, and the Ottoman state had given consent to the transport of antiquities out of imperial lands. But if objects of material value were found, it was uncertain how far this could be relied on; it was, after all, this same Ottoman state that had appointed Fahir to keep a careful eye on him. And then, of course, his lease counted for nothing, it was a useless scrap of paper, when set against the rights granted to the Germans in the railway concession, prospecting rights of twenty kilometers on either side of the line.

  In an effort to drive away these thoughts, so painfully familiar, he glanced around the table. His wife was giving some instructions to Ali; Fahir was exchanging some smiling remarks with Patricia on his right; Palmer seemed to be saying something to the major, something about empires. The major himself had hardly spoken at all since Fahir’s arrival and their exchange of words. He had probably taken umbrage. Ridiculous if so, and extraordinarily arrogant. If a major in the Turkish Army, heavily escorted, were traveling about, questioning local chiefs and making maps in some part of the British Empire, some region of India, for example, he would have been at once arrested and locked up. Yet Manning assumed the right to do the same thing in Mesopotamia and seemed ready to take offense if the right was questioned. But of course he had a pass; that was the difference; anything could be bought in Constantinople these days, including licenses for spies.

  There was a sudden lull in the conversation, and he could hear more clearly now what Palmer was saying: “A few centuries, yes, but that is not very long in the scale of things.”

  It seemed he was referring to something Fahir had said earlier about the long subjection of Mesopotamia to Ottoman rule. Somerville saw Fahir look with sudden interest down the table. “But your British Empire is hardly more than a century old,” he said. “Too young to feel the touch of mortality.”

  “Empires never do feel the touch of mortality, it seems to me,” Patricia said. “You might have individuals who see the writing on the wall, but the imperial power as such doesn’t seem able to read the signs, it hangs on for dear life and always ends in a bloody mess. I mean, look at the Romans.”

  These remarks and the decided tone in which they were uttered and the way in which not only Palmer but her husband too gave them—and Patricia—their attention were all deeply provoking to Edith, further evidence of the girl’s presumption, her habit of intruding on the talk of men, not just with an expression of interest but with opinions of her own—and expressed with such definiteness, with such an absence of self-deprecation. It was so graceless. She had been too much indulged as a child, that was it, too much encouraged to show off; Edith had never liked to see little girls being trotted out to recite things and show how clever they were. She made up her mind to see less of Patricia’s mother when she got back to London.

  Palmer raised his hands, made a gap between them, widened it slightly. “When it comes to empires,” he said, “a few centuries one way or another makes precious little difference. Anyone who excavates in this part of the world is likely to dig down through half a dozen, going back five thousand years at least.”

  “And they all thought they’d last forever,” Patricia said, with an air of stoutly making her point.

  “Only the most optimistic of my fellow countrymen would nurse such a belief at present.” Fahir smiled as he spoke but there was no intention of humor in his words. “We have too many friends, and they all want a piece of us,” he said. “Britain, France, Russia. The sick man of Europe, you call us. A term of contempt. But it also brings contempt on those who use it. What do you do with a man who is sick? Do you help him to get well or do you merely prop him up for long enough to go through his pockets, meanwhile uttering hypocritica
l expressions of goodwill? Only Germany is a true friend to us, and she has shown this in various ways, one of them the building of this railway.”

  “Another is the training of your army,” the major said.

  “So it is.” Fahir had been a cavalry officer, and he made no secret of the fact that he had completed his training in Germany, where he had also acquired the scar. “Now there is no need for our junior officers to go to Berlin,” he said. “The German instructors are here among us.”

  The major tightened his mouth in a way more protracted than usual. “Britain is a friend to Turkey,” he said. “We are doing everything in our power to safeguard Turkey’s territorial integrity. You only have to look at the settlement signed by our governments last October, scarcely five months ago, when agreement was reached on a whole range of matters, the Baghdad Railway among them.”

  “This whole range of matters were mainly concessions Turkey was obliged to make. As for the railway, you got what you wanted, the right to control the construction from Baghdad to Basra and the right of veto for any extension of the line to the Persian Gulf.”

  “A triumph of diplomacy,” the major said.

  “Some might find other terms for it. Diplomacy works best for those who have the strong cards. You British speak often of the sacrifices you are making for the sake of Turkey. What sacrifice have you made in order to obtain these rights in the railway? You have declared yourselves willing to increase by four percent the duties on goods entering the Ottoman possessions. Such staggering generosity. What other imperial power is obliged to permit foreign nations to determine her customs dues? Major Manning, we Turks do not deceive ourselves. We know we need foreign capital and foreign technical assistance. We know that we have to pay a price for these, that we risk losing control of our possessions in the Near East. We see that the British have designs on Mesopotamia as far as Basra, the French have their eyes on Syria, the Russians are seeking to absorb Armenia. He would be a great fool who did not know these things.”

  A sudden anger had come into his voice with these last words, and Palmer, perhaps feeling himself to blame for having started this dispute, now made an attempt to shift the focus of the conversation. “Of course,” he said, “for an archaeologist only dead empires are interesting, and the longer dead the better.”

  It was not the most tactful of interventions, and it came too late in any case. Somerville was beginning to say something when Manning cut across him. He was looking at Fahir with unconcealed hostility. “That is a gross misrepresentation of my government’s policies,” he said.

  Fahir’s hostility was no less evident, but it came with a slight smile and a pretense of ironic detachment. “Your government’s policies are the same as those of any other government, to protect your interests and extend them where possible by any means available.”

  Edith Somerville now—and rather belatedly—remembered the words of her mother. If there is disagreement at a dinner table and if this is tending to be expressed other than politely and urbanely, it is always the fault of the hostess. But she had been stimulated and in a way roused by this quarreling, which had something noble in it to her mind, being due not merely to personal antipathy but to patriotic feeling. There was passion in both men and it warmed her like a fire. In another age they might have fought a duel. She preferred the major’s repressed rage to Fahir’s irony, but that was a question of taste. And she was on the side of Britain anyway, and proud of the British Empire, which everyone knew was the greatest the world had ever seen. All the same, the two could not be allowed to go on looking at each other like this. She cast around in her mind for a way of smoothing things over.

  “But this railway,” she said, “surely it only benefits those who have put their money in it and then hope to make a profit from the price of the tickets.”

  It worked, as it generally did. Both Fahir and the major were immediately eager to enlighten her, as were the other men at the table, so much so that several spoke together. Fahir’s was the voice that prevailed, perhaps through a tacit recognition that he was the one most entitled to speak of the benefits to Turkey of a line that was designed to pass exclusively over Turkish imperial possessions.

  He spoke eloquently of these benefits. With improved communications the huge resources of minerals and metals in eastern Anatolia could be fully exploited, the copper mines of Diabekir, the meerschaum quarries near Eskishehir—practically a world monopoly—the coalfields already producing half a million tons a year. Then there was the increased prosperity that would come from exploiting the agricultural resources of Mesopotamia, the foreign investment that would follow upon the large-scale irrigation projects. In remote antiquity the Land of the Two Rivers had been an important center of cotton production, and there was no reason why this industry should not be revived. The climate was ideal. Mesopotamia could be one of the world’s great cotton-growing regions. Grain too. Once the effects of irrigation and the railway were realized, Anatolia, northern Syria, and Mesopotamia, taken together, would export more grain than Russia . . .

  “All this will come from the railway,” Fahir said. “It will be of the greatest benefit to everyone. The foreign powers will obtain concessions to prospect and develop, the Turkish state will have direct trade routes from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople and so to the Black Sea. The local populations will see their standard of living tripled within three years of the completion of the line.”

  Fahir’s eyes glowed as he looked around the table. “A truly international enterprise,” he said. “Foreign investment, local industry, a process of mutual enrichment practically unlimited. The railway will usher in a golden age of prosperity to these lands.”

  There was nothing forced or consciously exaggerated in these words, or so at least it seemed to Somerville, who had not seen this fervor in Fahir before and would not have believed it could exist in him. All his habitual irony had dissolved in this vision of paradise, this process of mutual enrichment, continuous, without end; it was as if his own words had transformed him even as he spoke them. A sense of marvelous possibility or a genuine belief that these things, in a Europe so divided, would come to pass? It was impossible to know; Fahir himself would not know. Perhaps no more than a dream of water to a man with a thirst. He was a servant of the Ottoman state, devoted in his way. Now, after the centuries of domination, the empire of the Osmanli Turks was slipping away. When our grip on power is loosening, we will fall back on what is second best, visions of cooperation and mutual benefit . . .

  Somerville felt himself convicted of meanness and smallness. He could not share this hope in the future. The wealth was there and the lure of it was real enough. But those who financed and controlled the line were unlikely to have the well-being of local populations or the integrity of the Ottoman Empire high among their priorities. In any case, whatever the intricate pattern of desires and hopes that accompanied the railway, whatever wealth it might bring, his own view of it was starkly simple: It was threatening to put an end to his excavation and with that deal a mortal blow to his whole career.

  “Quite a speech,” Palmer said a little later, after Fahir had retired for the night. “He forgot to mention a few things, though.” His face wore its usual expression of cheerful skepticism. “He forgot to mention one of the chief Turkish interests in the railway, which is to be able to move troops and munitions speedily to the head of the Persian Gulf and threaten British communications with India in the event of war. Quite a few things he forgot to mention, actually. There are substantial deposits of chrome ore in Cilicia, and the line passes close by them. If you have it in mind to manufacture armor-piercing shells, you need chrome.”

  “Well, it’s the Germans who are building the line,” Patricia said. “I suppose they would like to get their hands on the chrome too. I mean, if Turkey needs foreign capital to help with her cotton industry, she needs it just as much to help her make jolly good hand grenades and stuff like that.”

  Palmer and she were very much
alike, Somerville thought, very well matched. They talked the same language. Both took a sort of glee in deflating high-flown sentiments. A glee not shared by Edith, who would find it mean-spirited and cynical, she would probably be striving to shut the girl’s words out. There were just the four of them now, after dinner; they had moved into the sitting room, where a wood fire was burning. Somerville and the younger people sat close to the hearth, and Edith was a little farther off, in her favorite armchair, reading by the light of an oil lamp on the table beside her.

  “How did you know about this chrome business?” Somerville asked.

  “Financial pages of the Times,” Palmer said. “If you want to know how things are going, keep an eye on the market for metals. Better than a hundred so-called authoritative editorials. The prices of certain metals have been increasing steadily for months now. All the international accords and treaties and high-sounding assurances haven’t made a scrap of difference. Lead, chrome, zinc, antimony in particular.”

  He paused for a moment for effect, then straightened his back and adopted an oracular manner. “My friends, I put it to you, what have these metals in common? Bear with me, and I will tell you. They are all found in substantial quantities in Turkish Asia, and they are all very important for the manufacture of field guns and armor plate.”

  Somerville glanced across at his wife, who had not looked up from her book during this conversation. She was rereading one of her favorite novels, Scott’s Rob Roy, one of a stock she had brought with her, all of which she had read before, not once but several times. The slightly flickering light cast by the lamp gleamed on her lowered head, the fair tresses at her temples. She was sitting with her legs drawn up beneath the long skirt of her dress. She never sprawled or slumped or adopted ungainly postures, unlike Patricia in this; some principle or instinct of grace informed all her movements. Grace and decorum together—the combination had moved him from the beginning, from the days of their courtship, with something dutiful in it, almost childlike, as if some silent appeal for approval were being made. He had the same feeling, though aware of a lack in logical connection, about her habit of reading novels that were already deeply familiar to her, a habit that she must have had already in adolescence.