Land of Marvels

9.

Rampling, at the moment Somerville was standing in the starlight, bitterly attributing deceit and falsehood to him, was in the dining room of the Hôtel d’Orient in Damascus, in the company of several others. And he too, in his own way, was occupied with the Baghdad Railway.

During the meal the conversation had been general. But now, over the coffee and the excellent Armenian brandy, to the strains of a trio dressed in Tyrolean hats and lederhosen playing tunes from The Merry Widow amid the Moorish arches, they came down to business. It was Donaldson, principal secretary at the Foreign Office, who began this shift toward a more serious tone. “We were wondering,” he said, speaking in French, “whether you have given more consideration to the proposals of my government in regard to the joint financing of the railway south of Mosul.”

Here was one who would end up with a perforated duodenum, Rampling thought, looking across at the pale, drawn face of the man who had spoken. Not yet forty and a knighthood already, a brilliant career foretold on every hand. So impatient of these social preliminaries, so eager to come down to brass tacks, as he would have put it, that he had done no more than pick at his dinner, had drunk only water when there was a first-rate wine of the country in plentiful supply. No capacity for enjoyment, no ease in company—a man would not go so very far without that, no matter what was prophesied for him. He himself had both, in good measure. He listened to the predictably cautious reply of Donaldson’s French counterpart, Chapot. Yes, full consideration had been given to the British proposals, but very little could be done without Turkish agreement; the whole length of the projected line, all the way to Basra, ran through territories indisputably part of the Ottoman Empire…

“The Turks have everything to gain from the line.” This came from Cullen, the British Resident at Baghdad.

“As consultant to the Turkish Ministry of Finance,” Rampling said, “I can give absolute assurances that the British offer of a twenty percent participation in the enterprise will be guaranteed by the National Bank of Turkey, which as you know has recently been established by Sir Ernest Cassel with the express purpose of promoting investment of British capital in the Ottoman Empire.”

It was to offer these assurances in his own voice and person that he was there at the table. He had been invited by the Asquith government, on very lavish terms, to take part. But it was not the fees and expenses that were his main reason for being there. Of course money was always desirable, however much of it one already had; it was through following this principle that he already had so much. But he had business of his own in Damascus, and the invitation had come as a convenient cover. In any case, he had no belief that there would be any concrete outcome from this meeting. There was a German director of the railway company at the table; but there was no Turkish representative, and this was because everyone knew that the Turks would make demands in return for concessions, and there was no concerted policy on this. Everyone also knew that the line south of Mosul would pass through some of the richest oil reserves so far ascertained in the Near East.

It would be just another in a long series of meetings. Most of the men there had traveled weary miles to attend; they would return home, submit their cautious, inconclusive, mendacious reports—further proof, if proof were needed, of the division and distrust that reigned among the powers of Europe. The only difference lay in the choice of meeting place. This Damascus hotel had been the brain wave of the Foreign Secretary himself: an informal atmosphere, bonhomie, a frank and free exchange of opinion. Then he goes and sends a man like Donaldson… No, threats to national interest might create international alliances, but these did not lessen the likelihood of war—rather the contrary. Only money might do this; below the patriotic bluster and the public pronouncements, money worked in silence to make partners of enemies, to form alliances of a different kind, too profitable to risk breaking.

The Tyrolean trio, whose smiles were wearing thin, had now embarked on excerpts from Gypsy Love. Rampling rose from the table and bade the company good night. He had done what was required of him; he could see no further need for his presence.

The following morning he embarked on his more private program. It was some years since he had last been in Damascus, a city he had always liked. He decided to set out from the hotel early enough to allow a stroll before the first of his appointments. He was accompanied by the fearsome Dikmen and by his secretary, Thomas, whom he did not trust completely—that would have been against his principles—but trusted more than anyone else. Thomas had been in his employment now for more than twenty years and had always proved the soul of discretion. With them was also a dragoman hired through the hotel, a Syrian who spoke French and English as well as his native Arabic; he would be useful in easing the way with small bribes if need be and would know the streets and which ones to keep clear of.

Rampling had dressed with his usual care in a suit of shantung silk of a very pale blue color and a pearl gray shirt, also of silk, with a fashionably narrow collar. On his head was a panama hat with a turned-up brim; in his right hand one of his silver-mounted canes; in his nostrils the occasional whiff of lavender from the handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket.

It was a fine spring morning, still cool and pleasant. The apricot trees were in splendid flower in the gardens bordering the Barada. To the south lay the cone of Mount Hermon, the snow on its summit radiant in this early sunshine. They went some way toward the citadel, then crossed the stream by the little bridge at the beginning of Gayvet Avenue. As they walked, the dragoman, who announced his name as Richard and had a family to support, while shooing mendicant children out of their path, told Rampling a story he had told others before, thereby gaining goodwill and extra payment. The Prophet Muhammad, standing on the hill called Samaniyeh, gazing over the beauties of the city, had remarked that since there is only one Paradise, it should not be sought on earth and therefore he would not enter Damascus.

The offices of the Crédit Lyonnais lay just past the Palace Hotel. Rampling left Dikmen and Richard in the waiting room below and together with his secretary was shown up to the expensively appointed boardroom on the first floor. Awaiting him were the president of the bank in Syria, the manager of the Damascus branch, and a senior partner in the Imperial Ottoman Bank, which was largely under French control.

Armed with statistics provided by his secretary, Rampling spent two hours there, seeking by all means possible to allay the suspicions and quieten the fears of the French bankers. It was vital for his own interests and those he represented, both commercial and political, that French capital should be invested in the Baghdad Railway to an extent of 20 percent of the total holding. This would bring France to a parity with Britain and make them equal partners, and this in turn—and more important—would enable agreements to be reached about zones of influence in the territory traversed by the line. The grip of the Ottoman state on these territories was loosening from week to week.

He was given a courteous hearing, but it was no easy task that faced him. There was deep hostility to the railway on the part of certain French commercial interests. It was feared that this new line would divert traffic from the existing route across Europe, thus seriously reducing the importance of the port of Marseilles and involving significant losses to French railways. Then there was the question of silk exports, which Rampling had studied while still in Constantinople. The powerful and influential silk manufacturers of Lyons were afraid that since the concession was after all in German hands, whatever the source of the capital invested, the railway would bring about a rise of German economic power in Turkey and threaten the supply of cheap raw silk from Syria, practically the whole of which had hitherto been consumed in French mills.

These were serious objections, and Rampling took care to give them due weight, while reiterating the argument, which he felt to be his strongest card, that those who established a financial interest in the line would thereby establish claims on the territories the line passed through at a time when the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating. There would, in short, be a day of reckoning, a division of the spoils.

Neither he nor the French mentioned the imminent threat of war, but it underlay everything that was said, as did the knowledge that their two nations were bound by treaty obligations and would be allies should war come about. To the victors would go the prizes, and the richest prize of all was Turkey in Asia, the wealth in minerals and fuel, largely untapped, the enormous potential for agricultural produce, the strategic importance for nations like their own that were seeking—naturally in a spirit of partnership and cooperation—an extension of colonial power.

How far he had succeeded it was not possible to tell from the impeccable courtesy of his hosts on parting. But he had spoken as an associate of the Morgan Grenfell group, which had close ties with French banking interests, and this would carry weight. He was, moreover, confident that his argument would carry the day, that his vision of the future was ultimately compelling: In this dangerous place that Europe had become, to protect your interests you must seek constantly to enlarge them; who held back, who played too safe, would fail and die, and the earth would cover him over.

He was some minutes late for his noon appointment, which was with Kruckman, one of the German directors of the railway company, who had been at their table the evening before and whom he had known for some years, though neither of them had given any indication of that in the course of the dinner, having made this arrangement to meet by telephone earlier in the day. An open-air meeting had been decided on, without any presence other than their own. There were in any case no formalities to go through, no papers, no signatures. Agreements in principle had already been made; it was no more than a chat really, a handshake, an expression of goodwill.

Very agreeable too, Rampling thought, with a certain sense of relief at there being no need to urge or persuade. The place they had chosen for their meeting was a small park between two of the gates in the old city walls, the Gate of Paradise and the Gate of Peace. The ground sloped upward gently, and from the summit of the mound they could look across to the dome and minarets of the Omayyid Mosque nearby and the gardens and orchards of Salihiyeh to the north. The midday sun was warm, and Rampling took off his jacket and gave it to Dikmen, walking some dozen yards behind them, to carry, having first asked him if his hands were clean.

Kruckman spoke passable English, and he was a friendly man, easy to talk to, combining joviality and cunning and a sort of cynical good-fellowship, qualities that Rampling always found congenial. In addition to being on the board of directors of the Baghdad Railway, he represented the Deutsche Bank in Syria and was a trusted associate of von Gwinner, the president of the bank.

Strolling together side by side in the spring sunshine, they said the necessary things, made the necessary assurances. Solidarity and common interest were what they both were concerned to express, sentiments somewhat forced on the German side, though naturally Kruckman gave no indication of this. Only the previous week, in London, his bank had finally been obliged to recognize southern Mesopotamia, as well as central and southern Persia, as exclusive fields of operation for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the British government had a controlling interest. This had opened the way for the formation of an Anglo-German syndicate to organize the newly formed Turkish Petroleum Company for the exploitation of the vilayets of Mosul and Baghdad. The controlling interest in this would still be British, through the National Bank of Turkey, in which Rampling had a substantial holding, but a 25 percent share would be offered to the Deutsche Bank. Agreement on this, a united front, was essential if they were to succeed in obtaining a charter from the Ottoman government.

Rampling returned to his hotel convinced that this accord would hold. The Germans had little choice; they had come too late into the field to gain any more commanding position; they must see that the best interests of German industry would be served by securing this quarter share. The potential profits were huge, and they constituted a force for peace, as he had not failed to point out to Kruckman. For who would want to hazard benefits like these on the doubtful outcome of war?

So cheered and invigorated was he by these thoughts, by his restored hope in the workings of capital, that he had decided to get some girl brought in to take her clothes off and do what she was told. But the packet that had been delivered by courier in his absence brought an abrupt end to this mood of celebration. It contained the information that the geologist Elliott had been closely watched while in London, a fact that he already knew, as it had been done on his orders. But the watching, it seemed, had not been careful enough. Elliott had succeeded at least once in escaping it—a proof of guilt in itself. He had visited the German Embassy. A security guard there, beset by gambling debts and in fear of bodily harm from his creditors, had come forward belatedly—and at a price. He had seen a handshake, heard a name. A meeting with a secretary at the embassy and two others not employed there, both Germans. He would have thought nothing of it, but next morning he had heard the name again. A man had come and asked him questions about visitors, politely, not like a policeman. He had said nothing at the time, not knowing the purpose of these questions, but the man had left a card with an address, an office just off the Strand. After some days it had occurred to him that this might be something he could sell…

It took Rampling no more than a few minutes to read this report. It took him less time to come to the only possible conclusion. Elliott had taken a risk in going so openly to the German Embassy, but of course he could not afford to seem secretive to the Germans, could not afford to rouse suspicion that there might be competitors; they must believe, as he himself had been tricked into believing, that the American was serving only one master. Elliott must have realized he was being shadowed and succeeded in throwing his tracker off the scent somewhere not so very far from the embassy—hence the questioning next morning. He had gone calmly on to keep his appointment; the man had nerve, obviously. The detective agency had slipped up; it certainly would not receive the balance of its fee…

Something more drastic than this would have to be done about Elliott. Elliott had betrayed his trust. Elliott, no doubt for a substantial sum of money, had made a deal to report his findings also to the Deutsche Bank.

This was a day different from any other in Jehar’s life, the day of his great idea, the day when he became, instead of a man who waited on the whims of others, one who shaped his own destiny.

For most of its course the day resembled all others that he spent at Jerablus. In the morning he found three hours’ work hoisting coal in wicker baskets from the stockpile onto the waiting trucks, which were to carry it over the river and down the line. After this, standing in the yard at the kitchen doorway, hens scrabbling and stretching their necks nearby, two ragged men shouting in argument on the other side of the track, he watched Ninanna making coffee on the makeshift stove and added further details to the paradise of their future life together.

At Deir ez-Zor, he told her, beyond the lands of the fat and indolent Pasha, the banks of the Great River were well wooded and beautiful. That he had never set eyes on them did nothing to detract from the fullness of his description. There were wide meadowlands bounded by green hills, and the river wound among them, glittering in the sunshine. Yellow daisies grew there, and dark blue irises, and in the clear pools there were floating lily pads that gave off a scent of great sweetness. Just now, at this time of the year, the almond trees would be flowering, and in the strips of land adjoining the river the watermelons would be showing the first leaf, the seed leaf. In places the banks were steep and tangled with brushwood; wild boars littered there, and ducks took refuge, also the beautiful bird called the Aleppo plover. Red geese came to make their nests in these banks, where they were high and rocky. A man with a good rifle could provide his family with game all the year round. He, Jehar, had such a rifle, a bolt-action, breech-loading Enfield rifle of most recent design. He kept it hidden, wrapped in an oily rag, below the boards of the shack where he slept, but he did not tell Ninanna this, nor did he tell her how he had acquired it, which was by the ambush and murder, in company with some others, of a small contingent of Turkish troops. They were hated as occupiers, and hatred was just cause for killing and theft in Jehar’s eyes, even if the hatred was borrowed for the occasion; he had no particular animosity toward the Turks, had merely coveted one of the rifles they were issued with. He was a crack shot, he told her; he could hit a piastre piece flung high in the air.

She listened to him with attention, keeping an eye on the pan, waiting to spoon in the coffee and the sugar when the water came to the boil. Sometimes, in the interest of the narrative, she would be in danger of forgetting her duties; she would look closely at him, her mouth a little open, her dark eyes full of wonder as she tried to picture these lands he spoke of, so different from the world of the yards that surrounded them, the flowery meadows, the shining stream, the birds flying overhead. She looked forward to his visits and tried in the midst of her tasks to make occasions for them. Jehar felt his power over her, and in the absence of touch between them it stirred his loins with a sense of conquest; it was as if by subjugating her with his words, he were laying hands on her body. He had been away for some days, but the story had reached such a plenitude of promise that it could be resumed at any time; it had no breaks in it and no beginning and no ending. And Ninanna knew that he brought the story to her as a tribute, an offering laid before a queen by a subject chieftain. She knew she had empire over Jehar, and the knowledge gave her a certain right to call him to account.

“I missed you,” she said. And then, though she knew the answer: “Why did you go away?”

“I had to see the Englishman. I had to tell him… The line, they have started laying the track on the other side, beyond the bridge. They are almost halfway to the Belikh River.”

She nodded. She had no interest at all in the progress of the line, whether it went here or there. “I missed you,” she said again.

“I had to go. He gives me money for the information I bring him. I am his news bearer, I am the one he trusts. The money he gives me I put to the money I have saved already. When I have the hundred pounds, I will take it to your uncle and he will give you to me.”

“Then we will be married and we will go to live at Deir ez-Zor.”

“Yes.”

“Will it be long?”

“No, not very long.” This he tried to say with the ring of reassurance in his voice. It was important that Ninanna should believe it. But in fact his stock was growing painfully slowly. He had lost weight in his efforts to save expenses on food. And lack of trust in the uncle was robbing him of sleep.

The work of the yards at Jerablus, the extension to Tchoban Bey, the building of the great steel bridge, the rail link to Alexandretta, the construction of storage depots and houses and offices for the employees of the company, all this had brought in its wake a great number of people, many of whom had no intention of seeking work on the line or doing honest work of any kind. Various nationalities commingled in this improvised township of canvas and tin canisters and scrap timber. Turk and Arab and Kurd rubbed shoulders here, along with an assortment of footloose Europeans and Americans, a good number of whom were fugitives from justice. However diverse in race and origin, all were driven by the same prospect of easy money. There were bars and gambling dens and makeshift stalls. Drunkenness and violence were common. There were also brothels. These were mostly for the benefit of the German railway employees and for off-duty Turkish noncommissioned officers, people with the money to pay. Mostly, but not entirely: a pocket picked, a purse snatched, a win at dice, some surplus of wages that did not go on drink—anyone might find himself waiting in line for his turn with one of the girls. It was a constant demand, there was a lot of money in it, and it was Jehar’s growing fear that the uncle would grow tired of waiting for the bride-price and force Ninanna into whoredom. It was done commonly enough, and it didn’t take long. She would be kept locked up for a while, violated a certain number of times free of charge… The first move the uncle made in this direction would be the last he ever made on earth. But what if the thing was done while he was away on the site of the excavation, carrying reports back to the Englishman? The uncle would not live to profit from it, but it might be too late to save Ninanna. Fears of this played tricks with his senses. As he lay awake, it sometimes seemed to him that amid the nighttime sounds of quarrel and riot he could hear Ninanna screaming.

These fears he sought to dispel by dwelling on those of another. “The Englishman is afraid of the railway,” he said. “That is why he pays me for telling him that the line draws nearer. He expects only bad news. It is in keeping with his demon that the news should be bad. But he thinks that by paying he can somehow keep the line at bay. The line is like a fierce dog to him. Paying me is like throwing meat to it.”

Ninanna’s eyes widened as she looked at him. The threat of the line became real to her at that moment. The Englishman who was digging for treasure had joined the fat Pasha, creatures half real, half legendary. “How can that be?” she said. “The money, he gives to you, not to the people of the railway.”

“It is how people think about money,” he said. “And about time also. The Englishman is near to the finding of the treasure. He thinks that if he pays it might be granted him to possess the treasure before the line reaches him.”

He told her then of the things he had learned on this last visit of his: how they had started digging on the far side of the mound, the side that looked down over the German railway buildings; how they had found a wall and then rooms, palace apartments under a layer of ash. The wall continued; they would follow it. Perhaps they would go below this floor to a lower level, where the treasure might be; so far only fragments of small value had been found, but if they were granted some weeks more…

“He tries to hide it from me, to show nothing. This is because he thinks I am lesser than he. For that race it is a bad thing to reveal your feelings to a lesser person, they think it is a cause for shame—”

He was interrupted here; she had to leave, the coffee was cooling. Jehar was obliged to move away because she gave him a backward glance as she passed into the café, narrowing her eyes in a way that had become a signal between them, and he knew from this that the uncle had entered from the door on the other side.

But this day was not destined, like all the others, to end sadly for Jehar in longing for the girl and distrust of the uncle. It was like the finger of Allah, as he afterward thought of it, pointing him the way. Lately he had kept away from bars, not wishing to squander any of his savings. This evening, however, a certain mood of depression, a sense that he was losing his battle with circumstance, led him to a drinking place, no more than a shed, roughly timbered, roofed over with canvas, with a narrow bar, no space for seating and no one to serve you; customers had to jostle through the crowd to get to the counter. The drink was raki, made from crushed grain and fermented in open pans in the hot sun of the previous summer, raw to the taste and very potent.

The men surrounding him were of every kind, but there were some there who had a look in their eyes that he knew; they were men who had survived harsh toil but still lived with those who had not survived it, men who had worked on the line for years and given up their strength to it day by day, from the high Anatolian plateau to these banks of the Euphrates, through the Taurus and the Cilician Gates and the Amanus Mountains, where there were no natural passes, where the hills had to be pierced by blasting and tunneling. Many men had died in these ten years of labor—by falls in precipitous places, by sickness in that harsh climate, by accidents occurring in unloading the rails and sleepers or coupling the trucks, by attacks from mountain tribesmen hostile to the line. Two of the convicts released along with Jehar to work under the guns of the guards had died, one under a fall of rock, one when a shattered leg had turned gangrenous.

Perhaps it was recognizing this haggard companionship with death printed on some faces there that set Jehar talking now, with two drinks inside him and the third in his hand, set him telling a story of death to those standing near him. At least there was no other reason he was aware of.

It had happened during his early days of working on the railway. A charge of dynamite, a powerful charge designed to bring down a steep and rocky escarpment ahead of the line, had been laid. They used Armenian conscripts, Jehar said with a chuckle, because being subject to military law, they could be shot if they refused and because they were half starved and so light enough to be lowered down in a basket over the cliff face without the rope breaking. The fuse was shorter than it should have been, and it was shortened further by the charge having been set in the overhang on the farther side of the cliff. The Armenians had to light the fuse, then be hauled up and then run for their lives. Jehar acted it out, eyes staring, mouth open, arms working like pistons. But one of the two had stumbled and fallen and in falling done some hurt to his leg. The other—and this was the point of the story—instead of making good his escape, had paused to help his companion get to his feet and had tried to bring him to safety. This doomed, shambling run of the pair Jehar also acted, within the confines of the space allowed him by his listeners. But the charge had detonated; they were too close. Killed by the blast, stoned to death by flying splinters of rock—Jehar spread his hands; the manner of it was not important. The point was the folly of it, two men dying when only one needed to die.

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.