Land of Marvels (20 page)

He was smiling as he finished, warm with the raki, glad to be alive. But in fact he always felt some unease in the telling of this story, in spite of his chuckles and headshakes, because there was something in it that baffled him, something that defied common sense and mockery alike. The man had paused, but there had not been time for anything like decision; instinctively he had risked himself . . . Now, as he was raising his glass to drink, in that moment of indecision and unease, in the presence of a mystery, he felt the touch of Allah, and the idea came to him, at first like a distant strain of music, a promise of harmony. Then it came nearer, and it was a clash of cymbals, it was the song of a thousand throats. A hundred pounds, all at one stroke!

______

Somerville’s insomnia became a settled condition during this period of discovery. He would fall asleep almost the moment that his head touched the pillow and sleep profoundly through the first part of the night, untroubled by any dreams vivid enough to remain with him on waking. Invariably he would open his eyes in the darkness, long before dawn, with the cold knowledge that sleep would not return to him.

This lack of sleep combined with his anxieties and the excitement of the discoveries they were making to give a quality of slight hallucinatory disorder to his days. From time to time he had a sense of movement at the edges of his vision, glimpses of some bright flickering motion, like small tongues of fire, seen from the corners of his eyes but never evident to his direct gaze. Sometimes he seemed to hear, in the far distance, beyond the verge of sight, a faint, repeated striking of metal on metal, and there were times when this became indistinguishable from the pulse of his own body.

In the hours of wakefulness, lying motionless while he waited for daylight, he elaborated the story he had begun to tell himself from the moment of finding the piece of carved ivory. This story began with the second Assyrian king to be called Ashurnasirpal, the first of them all to boast of his power to inflict suffering, the first to make this power the symbol and test of kingship, the first to aim not merely at conquest and plunder, as had his forebears, but at the permanent subjection of the conquered peoples, changing the very nature of the state, from one rich and strong within its borders and content to be so to one that gloried in dominion, ruthless in its greed for territory and vassalage, a policy that was to be followed by all his successors down to the last days, down to the fires in which the empire perished.

Mysterious in its workings this alchemy of empire, a change of chemistry in the body of the state, a thirst that once created was never slaked. He thought of the limestone statue of Ashurnasirpal, found in the temple of Ninurta at Kalhu, the hooked nose, the stony gaze, the rigid pose of the despot, the mace and curved spear in his hands. This king, early in the ninth century before Christ, invaded Syria, skirted Mount Lebanon, conquered the cities of the Great Sea, and brought back stores of booty, among which was an ivory plaque showing the lion of empire with its teeth embedded in the throat of a male victim, a Nubian, the throat offered in ultimate submission. That is why he took it. It had pleased him to take possession of this symbol of another’s dominion, to take the power of it into himself. Like capturing the enemy’s gods, another practice of the Assyrians. He had taken it back with him to Kalhu on the Tigris, a new palace, a new city, rich and splendid, built by slave labor to his order. There it had stayed for a period of time unknown. Who had brought it here? In the long line of kings that followed he had found record of one name only, Esarhaddon, who inherited the throne some two centuries later on the murder of his father, Sennacherib.

Sometime during his reign, probably sometime around 672, when he had proclaimed his son Ashurbanipal the legitimate heir to the throne—reasonable to suppose some degree of retirement after such a proclamation—this king had come here, had built himself a summer palace, here at Tell Erdek, where they were digging. My mound, he thought, the one I singled out. My instinct was right after all.

Certain things this king had brought with him, things perhaps that he had a particular fondness for or were in some way important to him. That would explain the presence of the ivory piece. Other things had been made here for the decoration of his palace or for his own protection, among them the carved relief of the guardian spirit. And—clinching piece of evidence—it was here that the tablets had been inscribed, those relating to his triumphs in Egypt and those dictating terms to the rebellious desert tribes.

So far everything held together. But Esarhaddon had not died here. He had fallen sick at Harran, on his way to another Egyptian campaign, and died there. So much was known for certain. Had his descendants continued to use this place? Perhaps his son and successor, Ashurbanipal, had come here in his turn. Erudite, ruthless—of all the rulers of Assyria, this one had been to Somerville’s mind from his boyhood days the most awe-inspiring and, in a way he only half confessed to himself, enviable. It was he who had assembled the great library of cuneiform texts at Nineveh, thousands of tablets containing the whole range of Assyro-Babylonian knowledge. It was he who had subdued the rebel Arab tribes west of the Euphrates, a difficult desert war waged against elusive enemies, but he had conquered, he had cut them off from their wells, he had forced them to cut open their camels and quench their thirst with blood. From this he had gone on to devastate the land of the Elamites and sack their capital of Susa, putting a final end to hostilities between the two nations that had lasted three thousand years.
Their bones I carried off to Assyria. I denied peace to their shades. I deprived them of food gifts and libations of water
. . .

What implacable power was this, to punish his enemies beyond the grave and to believe, to actually believe, he had the peace of their souls in his hands. In the year that Susa fell, 639
B.C.,
he was to outward view at the apex of power. From his magnificent palace at Nineveh he could look out at a world that was prostrate at his feet. His storehouses were overflowing with booty; his foes were conquered, the rebel chiefs dragged behind his chariot or fastened to his gates with rings through their jaws like dogs.

Yet the signs were there, if there had been any to read them: Egypt was passing out of control; Babylonia was inflamed with hatred and desire for revenge; his army was exhausted and its ranks reduced by years of continuous fighting. And beyond the Zagros Mountains, unsuspected, the growing power of the Medes. Less than thirty years later, in the reign of his son, the Assyrian Empire had ceased altogether to exist. And it was this suddenness, this death in the midst of plenty, that made Assyria the supreme symbol of the doom inherent in all dominion. Perhaps this king, unaware of such doom, with no faculty for imagining it, had rested here after his triumphs, here in this place where they were digging. It was likely enough. The scraps of furniture found in the ash, the rare woods and metals—a palace built at such expense would not have been so soon abandoned. And those who devastated it with fire would not have done so, surely, if it had not been occupied by the hated Assyrian. But Ashurbanipal had not lived to see this devastation; he had died in 627, or so it was generally believed. Then who had died here in the flames?

The questions revolved in his mind morning after morning as the light slowly strengthened in his room. He knew the answers could only be found by further search. And the railway was drawing nearer day by day.

Driven by these stresses, he took to walking out to the mound early, before it was fully light, as if he might notice something, perhaps some small clue hitherto overlooked. And some days after his dinner table argument with Elliott this actually happened, though the light that was shed was far from sudden.

It was close on sunrise when he reached the site, the time of morning when he had seen the dust of Jehar’s party as it approached, heard from him that the bridge had finally spanned the river. But this time he did not pause to look westward toward the glittering streamlets of the Khabur and the distant fields of pitch but skirted the mound and climbed the long slope to the summit on the eastern side, where they had made the recent finds.

He had never stood here alone at this hour before, and the configuration of the land, in this early light, seemed strangely unfamiliar. The sheds and warehouses of the railway people seemed closer than ever this morning. The offices intended for the clerks and technicians, still no more than timber frames, lay beyond these, and beyond again lay the first houses of the village, half a mile away, suffused in a thin mist; he could make out lights here and there.

There were no lights, no sign of any human presence, in the railway buildings, no guard or caretaker to be seen anywhere, though he thought there must be one. The construction workers and those in charge of them would be asleep still in their billets in the village. Useless to deceive himself; worse than useless, stupid. The buildings were makeshift, but their proximity was not accidental: The Germans would know, none better, where the rails were to be laid . . . Once again, from somewhere far distant, far beyond the verge of sight, he seemed to hear the repeated sound of metal striking on metal. He raised his hands to his temples, which were throbbing slightly, and the sounds ceased as if he had closed his ears to them. At this moment the sun rose above the low hills at his back, and the first rays fell across the slopes of the mound, lower down, where the ground leveled. He saw then what he had never seen before, the rough shape of a circle, darker against the biscuit color of the earth, as if it still held within it the dampness of the night.

He did not these days altogether trust the evidence of his senses. If his sight could be troubled by that flickering, like flames or the moving teeth of a saw, it might also present him with shapes of shadow that were not truly there. He blinked hard, thinking it a trick of the slanting sunlight; he had walked over this slope a hundred times and seen nothing of this sort. But when he opened his eyes it was still there, quite clear in outline.

Like a man moving at some other’s behest, he began to make his way down the slope. Where the ground leveled, where the rock lay below the earth, it had been. But already, before he reached the foot of the slope, he could make it out no longer, see no slightest indication of a shape designed, nonaccidental, among the whitish limestone that showed here and there like patches of pale scalp amid the yellowish mixture of sand and gravel. After perhaps ten minutes of fruitless search he returned to the summit, to the exact point where he had stood before. Strain his eyes as he might, he could see no sign of the shape; it had vanished as if it had never been.

Voices carried to him from the houses of the village. Elias and Halil would be here before long, and Palmer, probably accompanied by Patricia. Soon afterward the workpeople would begin to arrive. Once more he strained to see. There was nothing; the earth was a uniform brownish yellow, marked only by the outcrops of rock. He hesitated a moment longer, then began again to descend. As he did so he saw Elliott and three others come into view, mounted on horseback. They were heading, he knew, toward the fields of bitumen that lay some miles in a northerly direction, invisible from here, not yet touched by the sun. He watched them until they disappeared into the haze of morning.

10.
 

E
ach morning, armed with rifle and revolver, accompanied by his interpreter and two men from the village, also armed, Elliott set off on horseback for the fields of bitumen that glittered a somber welcome to him as he drew near. For a time that could not be measured, before there existed beings able to measure time, this seeping had continued: the slide of oil from below the sealing rock, the spreading acreage of swamp.

The source might be far away from the borders of the pitch; oil could migrate many miles before flanking the belt of shale or clay that held it trapped. He had to find clues to the direction of the flow, the whereabouts and porosity and depth of the underlying reservoir rock. Color was some indication of this, though far from entirely trustworthy; the fresher, more recent flow would be paler, sometimes yellowish against the darkly weathered older pitch.

He was proposing, with the help of his escort, who would lay aside their rifles to take up picks and shovels, to dig exploration wells and so obtain a cross section of the surface rock. Digging was not drilling; it was in keeping with his role of archaeologist. But for the time being, in these early days, he contented himself with the study of hand specimens and some scraping of the sedimentary limestone just below the surface. He kept a lookout for fault lines in the beds of sealing rock where oil or water might have gathered; over the millions of years since its formation, under the stress of pressure and heat, the rock would have buckled in places, crumpled into deep folds where oil or gas or a combination of the two might have accumulated.