Land of Marvels Read online

  He found Palmer, who had not been at breakfast, there before him, seated at the table, microscope in hand, a lamp at his elbow in spite of the daylight. Before him, laid down on the table, loosely fitted together, were the pieces of a clay tablet found some days before among the thick debris of mud brick. He looked up as Somerville entered. “I was hoping to see you,” he said. “It took ages to clean these up and assemble them. This is the first time I’ve looked at them properly. I didn’t feel like going over to the dig this morning, not just yet.”

  “Nor did I.”

  There had been something disjointed in these opening remarks of Palmer’s, a lack of consequence unusual in him. His eyes looked wider open than usual and had a slightly staring look. “Yes, quite a job,” he said. “There are some gaps, of course.”

  He was silent for several moments, still looking in a curiously detached way at Somerville. Then he said, “I didn’t think much of it when they turned up. I thought it would be the usual thing, you know, some scraps from a list, an inventory, some record of an exchange of goods, perhaps Hittite or Mitannian—they both traded in this region. I didn’t believe I’d be able to make it out. In any case, the surface looked too much damaged, it was impregnated with a mixture of wood ash and mud dust, devilishly hard to move.” He paused again, looked quickly down at the fragments as if to make sure they were still there. “But I was wrong,” he said. “Some of the cuneiform is as clear as when the marks were first made. The clay has been baked hard. Thank God for fire—there’s nothing like a good blaze for preserving inscriptions. This is in Akkadian, the dialect of it spoken by the Assyrians.”

  There was silence between them for some moments. Their eyes met, fell away, met again. “Akkadian caused a lot of trouble at one time,” Palmer said. “But once they realized that it is a Semitic language akin to Babylonian, it was deciphered quite soon. What we are looking at here is part of an Assyrian royal inscription. Oh, by the way, Patricia and I are sort of engaged.”

  Somerville found that his mouth had gone completely dry. “Congratulations,” he said. “You couldn’t do better. Is there any mention of Ashurnasirpal?”

  “No, why? The name of the ruler is missing—we only have some pieces of the lower half. It seems to be a record of the capture of Memphis by an Assyrian force. There’s part of a name, but it is not Assyrian. Taha or Tark, it looks like.”

  “Might be Taharqa—he was king of Egypt when Memphis was taken and sacked by the Assyrians. But that was much later, it was Esarhaddon who was the Assyrian king at that time.” He felt an obscure sense of disappointment. “Nothing to do with Ashurnasirpal,” he said.

  “Why did you think it might be him?”

  In as few words as possible Somerville explained what he knew he should have explained already as being due to a colleague but had been held back from doing so by a secrecy that had somehow grown with his disappointments. He told Palmer about the form he had traced out, the ash he had found in both the stone and the ivory.

  “They used pitch for the lion’s eyes,” he said, “and on the points of the man’s hair. Pegs of ivory capped with pitch. This must have been partly melted in some fire before hardening again; it has formed what look like tears in the lion’s eyes, and it has run down into the roots of the victim’s hair. It is Egyptian work, or work influenced by Egypt. But they had no bitumen industry that we know of. So I thought, you know, that it might have come from somewhere not far from here, perhaps Hit on the Euphrates. There was a trade in bitumen there long before the Assyrians became a power in the region.”

  “That’s right. At Tell Halaf the Germans have found pots that had been broken and repaired with pitch in the Ubaid period, a thousand years before Assyria was on the map at all.”

  “So it seems likely that the Egyptians, or whoever it was, used imported bitumen when they fashioned the ivory plaque, which I think might have been part of a chair back. But in that case, how did it get here? Then I remembered that Ashurnasirpal took an Assyrian army on an expedition to the shores of the Mediterranean not long after he came to the throne—round about 875. He was the first in a long line of Assyrian empire builders.”

  “The Great Sea, as they called it. He boasts about it in the annals. I washed the blood from my weapons in the Great Sea and made sheep offerings to the gods. Charming chaps, weren’t they? There would be rich pickings on that coast. The ivory could have come from there, somewhere like Byblos or Sidon—they had a lively trade with Egypt. I wouldn’t call him an empire builder myself, more a sort of large-scale raider.”

  “Not easy to draw the line. It is more or less how we acquired our African colonies, isn’t it? I mean, what else would you call Cecil Rhodes? Anyway, it seems reasonable to think the plaque might be part of the booty they brought back.”

  “He boasts about that too. The details of the loot are always very important in the annals. He came back with gold, silver, copper, linen garments, large and small monkeys, ebony boxes, things fashioned from the tusks of the walrus . . . Yes, I see what you mean, ivory, in other words.”

  “And it was Ashurnasirpal who made his capital at Kalhu, on the other side of the Tigris, about the same time. And I think he was the first Assyrian king to use gypsum for sculptures not exposed to the weather. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think they used limestone before that.”

  Palmer shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “Out of my line.”

  “Gypsum is softer, you can get more detail. And the carved stone we found, that is gypsum, and so I thought, you know, there must be some connection, perhaps he is the link, perhaps there is some clue in the closeness of the dates that will help us to understand how these things got here. But now there is this business of Esarhaddon and the invasion of Egypt, and that was in the early seventh century, about two hundred years later.”

  “Well, it’s still Assyria, isn’t it? This is the third year of excavation here, there has been no sign of an Assyrian presence before. These things have all been found recently and all in the same area, on the east side of the mound, where we have opened the new trench.”

  Somerville felt a tightening of the chest. It was from the eastern side that you could look down on the railway buildings. This was where the German voices came from, the clatter of metal, the thumping sound of the open trucks as they passed along the rails. “We will go farther on that side,” he said. “We’ll keep some people on the trench where the things were found, and we’ll start a new one in sections, at right angles to it.”

  4.

  Jehar found himself spending more time in the rail yards at Jerablus than he had ever intended. He had returned there in the company of a trading party, eager to gaze at Ninanna again and to pick up something further about the progress of the railroad that he could sell to the Englishman. But after that great leap of the bridge there had been what seemed like a pause for breath; work on the left bank had not begun; they were still waiting for the rails to come from Aleppo. It had occurred to him that he might invent some story of the line to take back with him, a strike among the workforce, a large-scale ambush by the desert Arabs with great loss of life. Storytelling came naturally to him, he had a gift for it, and the stories became true to him as he told them, as he embroidered them with detail. However, an elementary caution remained: He was held back by the fear that his employer might find the stories contradicted by others and so would cease to trust him and therefore cease to pay him for the information he took back.

  Meanwhile, instead of adding to his stock of money, he was experiencing difficulty in holding on to what he had. He kept his eyes open, watching the movements of goods about the yards, the guard that was kept on the warehouses and storage sheds, the hours of opening and closing in the offices of the German surveyors and engineers, the quality of the locks, the fastening of the windows. There were moments of inattention, and one had to be ready for them. He succeeded on different occasions in stealing some pick handles, a tool kit in a leather holster, a three-gallon drum
of kerosene. These things he sold for what he could get in the shanties that had sprung up in the area of the docks and by the riverside. The town had swollen greatly with the coming of the railroad and held now a good many people who did not ask where things came from. Sometimes he took serious risks for Ninanna’s sake. The police were not much in evidence here, but there was always the justice of the gang to be reckoned with. Once, in a dockside tavern, pretending to pause while he watched a game of dice, he stole a purse from a coat belonging to one of the players, which was hanging over the back of the man’s chair. He was seen, and only flight and the refuge of darkness saved him from serious injury. He went in some fear now of being recognized.

  His consolation, which was also his torment, was that he could see Ninanna every day, for hours on end, from midmorning till nightfall, while she was there at the café. All that was needed was the price of a glass of tea. The café stayed open until midnight and later, but he had no hope of seeing her after dark; the uncle, aware of having a valuable asset, kept her carefully sequestered from view and from the temptations of darkness.

  The sight of her filled him with hope. But all the men there could watch her too, as she moved about with her tray, serving tea and coffee and raki, gathering the empty glasses. Not only were they feasting their eyes on her, but also—in his imagination—nursing schemes similar to his own. He was not capable of distinguishing his own desires from those of others; anyone who set eyes on Ninanna, saw the candidness and beauty of her face, her grace of movement and her shapeliness, would be stricken by love for her just as he had been and would start getting together the gold pounds. He knew that the uncle would not hesitate for a moment if another came to him with the money.

  This uncle, in Jehar’s eyes, had no fidelity in his nature, no sense of right or wrong whatever. He had complained that Jehar sat all day over one glass of tea and how was he to make a profit if everyone behaved like that? Such a shameless and avaricious person was no use to anyone; he simply cluttered up the earth. It had sometimes come to Jehar’s mind that he might put an end to this miserable man if a good chance presented itself, but he was uncertain how the girl would take it, whether she would trust herself to him, whether there were others with whom she might seek refuge . . .

  Meanwhile he found ways of talking to her, though never for long. She came for water to the pump that was near the office of the German engineers, where he had first seen her; sometimes on these occasions she was alone and would have some little while for talking, or listening rather—she said very little. The small kitchen where the coffee and the tea were made had a door that gave onto the outside yard, which had always a dark smell of soot and hot metal and spent steam from the shunting of the engines, but which nevertheless was kept open because of the heat from the stove in that narrow place. Keeping a wary eye out for the uncle, who was generally behind the counter inside, taking the money, Jehar would cross the tracks and come to stand at the open doorway, and by these means he sometimes succeeded in talking to her for a few minutes, with the clangor and hissing of the shunting bays on one side and the voices from the café on the other.

  Such scattered moments did not make for conversation as this is generally understood, and Jehar had seen from the beginning that he must find one single topic, one that could be resumed at every opportunity, which would in effect, in spite of all interruptions, make an unending story. He found it in a vision of their future together. This, with all that it contained of happiness and fulfillment, was situated in the town of Deir ez-Zor, on the right bank of the Great River, which he had seen when working on the rafts that carried the pitch upstream and downstream from the black fields of Hit.

  He described the town to Ninanna, the green islet in the midst of the stream, the permanent bridge that went from one bank to the other, the six white minarets that rose above the roofs of the houses, the great mass of gardens and palm groves and cultivated fields that extended along the river for many miles to the east. Memory and invention combined with love to make him eloquent. Their future at Deir ez-Zor was an amazing story, and no one had ever told her such a story before. She listened at first with her face turned from him; but gradually, as the story took on more and more wondrous detail, she would look directly at him, beguiled alike by the repetition of what was already familiar and the constant addition of what was new. She would sometimes ask questions, and when he answered Jehar would add something more to the story, some novelty that had not been there before. No less than twelve pillars supported the bridge, and these pillars were of stone. The town was lawful and orderly; no one went in fear of his property or his life. Not only was there a garrison of Turkish soldiers, but peace was also ensured by the Bejt Ftejjeh, a very powerful and numerous family long settled in this region, who had prospered under Ottoman rule.

  Many members of this family worked in the government offices, he told her, and they gave a sympathetic hearing to Arabs. The Government House was situated on the river, and it was tall and white with many windows, and it had a wide courtyard. There were always two guards at the gate, in uniforms of blue and red. Deir ez-Zor had several primary schools and a high school and a polytechnic school—their sons would have good instruction. And there was land. To the north of the town were the gardens of as-Salhijjeh, the property of the Pasha, the Turkish overlord, but much of it neglected because the Pasha lived in Baghdad and came rarely.

  This Pasha entered increasingly into the story, becoming always more corpulent. He sat there in Baghdad, eating halvah and pastries filled with honey and cream and kebabs of every description, getting fatter and fatter and making Jehar, who did not get enough to eat in these days, feel hungrier and hungrier as he invented the dishes. He puffed out his cheeks to make her laugh; he had no idea what the Pasha looked like, or whether he truly existed, but it was obvious that soon he would cease visiting his lands altogether. He would become totally immobile, and Jehar acted out with staring eyes and rigid head this stricken immobility of the overstuffed Pasha. Laughter came easily to Ninanna, widening her eyes, replacing the look of wonder that the story had brought to them.

  A piece of land could be rented for the price of the tax on it; the flush wheels that brought the water from the river could be repaired, the irrigation channels dug out again . . . In these snatched moments, amid the dirt and din of the rail yards, these two, who had not once touched each other, who owned nothing, created together a land full of promise, an earthly paradise.

  Jehar knew he was gaining ground with the girl; he could see it in her eyes. But the knowledge brought him no peace, rather the contrary, increasing his sense of what he stood to lose. It was a pattern familiar to his experience and his general sense of the nature of life, the crushing of human prospects, just when they seem auspicious, by some stroke of fate, something not envisaged, unpredictable. He had known it often enough in his gambling days, this dark game of fate. It troubled his sleep now; he dreamed of unmaskings, disguised enemies, trusted faces turning ugly.

  Driven thus, he visited the uncle in the small shed he called his office, where, in addition to a table made of planks scavenged from the yards and a single chair, there was a low pallet against the wall, because this shed served also as the uncle’s sleeping place.

  Standing before the seated man, taking care to speak respectfully and show no sign of the contempt and hatred in his heart, glancing around cautiously in the hope of seeing something in the nature of a strongbox where the takings from the café might be kept, Jehar offered his services in any capacity the uncle might choose, as watchman, caretaker, sweeper, handyman. He would ask for no payment, only board and lodging. However, they would agree on a nominal wage, and this would be regularly deducted from the hundred gold pounds, and so, week by week, the debt would be paid and in the end Ninanna would be his.

  It had seemed, as he sketched it out in his mind beforehand, a reasonable proposal. It would require patience and self-control, but he would be able to see the girl every day; he would be
able to watch out for possible rivals; he might succeed, before the debt was paid, in persuading her to run away with him to Deir ez-Zor. In any event, he would be well placed to kill the uncle if he went back on the agreement or tried to make a whore of the girl or sell her to someone else. Yes, it had seemed eminently reasonable. But the fabulist is not always the best judge of his own fables, and the more hope he has in them, the more he is likely to deceive himself. Well before the uncle’s ugly smiling, Jehar had realized that the story would fail to convince.

  The uncle chuckled in a way that seemed evil to Jehar. He was a heavy man and would remain quite still for long periods with his small eyes almost closed below the fringe of his headcloth. In fact it was he who had served as Jehar’s model for the palsied Pasha of Baghdad. He opened his eyes now, however, to look at the man before him. “Do you take me for a fool?” he said. “I am to give you free board and lodging for months on end and as a result of this generosity lose the bride-price? What work is there here for a watchman or a sweeper except to watch for coins that he can sweep into his pockets?”

  He said nothing more, and indeed there was nothing more to be said. Jehar turned and left, confirmed in his antipathy, nursing murder in his heart. The uncle had as good as called him a thief, a gross insult, not to be borne. And what kind of man was it who would sell his own niece to someone whose honesty he doubted?

  He thought of crossing the yard and looking in at the doorway of the kitchen in the hope of seeing Ninanna. But as he passed the company drawing office he saw one of the Germans emerge bareheaded and go around the side of the building. He did not lock the door; it was obvious that he was not intending to be away long. Gone around to the privy at the back, Jehar thought. He drew nearer. There was no one else in the office and no one nearby. The work of a moment to mount the wooden steps, enter, sweep together the several papers on the desk, clutch them in one quick handful, and leave as he had come.