Land of Marvels

12.

The presence at Tell Erdek of a newcomer, another archaeologist, was naturally reported to Fahir Bey, the Ottoman commissioner who was following the progress of the excavation. Also reported to him, in considerable detail, were the movements and activities of this newcomer, and they did not strike him as altogether consonant with those of a bona fide archaeologist, at least not of the kind he had observed at work before. This man was wandering far and wide; he was spending all his time in areas where there were no configurations of ground that might indicate previous human habitation. The men who accompanied him had been separately questioned, though not the interpreter—that would merely have served to put the American on his guard; they professed not to know what he was seeking, and this might be true. He was paying them well, it was enough. Fahir felt sure, however, that one or two well-chosen questions would be sufficient to establish whether he was what he claimed to be; with this end in view he chose a day to ride over and make the newcomer’s acquaintance.

By a rather singular coincidence the day he chose was also the day when Major Manning made a reappearance, accompanied as before by an escort of Shammar tribesmen, mounted and armed. He was still occupied with surveying and mapping the region, he explained, now officially commissioned to do so by Sir William Wilcox, in preparation for the important and extensive irrigation projects this great engineer had been appointed, with the full approval of the Ottoman government, to carry out in Mesopotamia.

So this evening, as darkness fell and the lamps were lit, it was, with the sole exception of Elliott, the same company that had sat down to dinner on the evening of the day when the piece of carved stone had been found, that depicting the guardian spirit of the Assyrian kings, which had first turned Somerville’s attention to the eastern side of the mound, where they were digging now.

Fahir lost no time in expressing his doubts directly to the one who was the cause of them, a policy in the main determined by his paradoxical position of being able to admonish, even to threaten, and at the same time feeling essentially powerless. Mesopotamia was full of foreign spies and impostors, who should all be sent packing. But his government felt it unwise to offend the United States or the European powers, even in small matters—and what seemed small might not prove to be so—because the former had made large investments in Anatolia and the latter, by an agreement among them, determined the level of customs duties on imported goods and Turkey desperately needed an increase in these to help shore up her ailing finances. That his country, with its vast imperial possessions—one of the greatest and most enduring empires the world had ever seen—could not set its own customs dues and was regularly blackmailed on this account was a source of private humiliation and rage to Fahir, though he took care not to let this show when he was in the midst of infidel foreigners. As a member of the Young Turk movement he was an infidel himself, but a Muslim infidel, which was something very different to his mind.

His feelings of resentment, as always, took the form of a rather elaborate courtesy. “They tell me,” he said, in his careful English, looking down the table at the American, “that you spend much time examining the surface of the ground. May I ask what it is that you are so earnestly searching for?”

“Sure you may,” Elliott said amiably. “Surface indications are of first importance. The surface offers valuable clues as to where it might be profitable to start digging.”

This seemed for a moment to Somerville, sitting at the head of the table, so audacious a statement of Elliott’s true aims that his breath caught a little. He was not sure he had heard properly; the accent was not always easy, words of two syllables sometimes came out as only one. Had he said “drilling”? The last thing he wanted was for the man to be unmasked now; it would seem to Fahir that by acting as host to one he knew for an impostor he had made himself a partner in the illegal enterprise, which, in a certain way, of course, was true. Then, in addition to the inexorable advance of the railway, which plagued his days and haunted his nights and from which his only relief was the excitement of the discoveries they were making, there would be a squad of Turkish soldiers posted on the site, watching every move, getting in the way. But no look of triumph, no change at all had appeared on Fahir’s face. His head was still inclined forward in the attitude of courteous attentiveness that always seemed ironic in him, like a parody.

“Well, yes,” he said now, “forgive my ignorance, but what kind of clues would be so valuable? We have understood from our friend Somerville that this Tell Erdek was the site of an Assyrian royal palace in the time of the Sargon dynasty. Are you looking for further evidence of this?”

“No, sir, not at all,” Elliott said. “I am not an Assyriologist. My colleagues”—and here he smiled benignly at Somerville—“sometimes tend to think the Assyrian presence in this region the only thing of interest, but there were other empires that preceded theirs. My area of expertise is the Hittite kingdom in the Late Bronze and Early Iron ages. Of course, it is well known that this kingdom was centered in Hattusas, which the Hittites knew as Hattusha, the site of the present village of Boğazköy in central Anatolia. Now that is a long way from here, a very long way. But it has to be borne in mind that at its fullest extent, in about 1180 B.C., their empire included most of Syria and all of Mesopotamia, down to Babylon. That is a very considerable extent, sir, very considerable. In fact the Hittites were here first—it was the Assyrians who took over from them. There are Hittite remains scattered all over this region.”

He had spoken with an air of authority that secretly astonished everyone at the table but his questioner. Fahir raised his head. His face had lost all expression. He still persisted, however. “And what kind of remains would signify the presence of these Hittites?”

“Well now, that’s a mighty interesting question. Some consider the Hittites to be the first people to work with iron and thus the first to enter the Iron Age. This is disputed, but obviously any surface traces that could bear it out would be of immense importance. Then again, they were famous for their skill in building and using war chariots. The period when they went from sheathing the wood in bronze to sheathing it in iron is fairly reliably dated, but reinforcing evidence is always desirable. The smallest scrap of metal can be vital in indicating where to take a closer look. Then there are fragments of clay tablets that often lie quite close to the surface. They may bear traces of inscriptions. The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, as I am sure you know.”

“Yes, of course,” Fahir said. “May I ask who is employing you and financing these investigations? This is not mere idle curiosity on my part, you understand. I am required to furnish information of this sort in the reports I send to my superiors.”

Elliott smiled and nodded with an appearance of full understanding. “I am fortunate enough to have ample funds of my own,” he said. “I can indulge my passion independently. I consider it a great privilege and a great responsibility to be able to shed light on the past, to serve the interest of truth, to strive to add something to the sum total of human knowledge. An understanding of the past is of vital importance, not only for the way we live our lives now but for the way future generations will live theirs. As someone wiser than I has said, if we ignore the lessons of the past, we will be condemned to repeat our mistakes.”

A silence followed on this, rather prolonged, broken by Major Manning, who spoke now for the first time and was clearly as unafraid of anticlimax as he was of practically everything else. “There’s a lot of stuff very close to the surface,” he said. “For part of the way down here I followed the railway. The gravel they use for the bed of the track is full of broken pots.”

He looked directly at the American as he spoke and gave him one of his thin, infrequent smiles, clearly friendly in intent. His words turned the talk toward the progress of the railway, and Fahir for one seemed glad of this. He had spoken to various people, including the German advance party near the excavation site. The general opinion was that the line would reach the site and pass beyond it within a fortnight.

Edith saw the lines of tension gather in her husband’s face as he listened. But her regard dwelled mainly on Elliott, who was silent now and whose face wore a slightly amused expression. He was pleased with himself; he had come through with flying colors. Well before he got here he had chosen this limited field of knowledge, studied it, memorized some salient facts. He had really performed very well, she thought. Such care, such attention to detail, could only be admired. Daddy would have given the same sort of consideration to one of his cases. But it was not quite admiration that she felt now as she looked at him. The care he had taken had been in support of falsehood, a pack of lies, in fact. Was that the difference? But Alex was a man of vision, a man of fire. He was striving to unlock the secrets of the earth, Pluto’s kingdom. Once embarked on a necessary deception he would bear it out, make it good, rejoice in the triumph of prevailing. Was not this better than to be like John, the victim of deception, the poor dupe?

Thus she struggled to preserve the idealism of the man who had made the gift of fire to her, but could not succeed altogether, not while his face still held that look of satisfaction. And it was this failure that gave a certain coldness to her manner when the time came to say good night to him.

In bed, before sleep came, she went on thinking about it. She heard her husband moving about in the next room and tried to fight off the pity for him that came with the memory of his face, so drawn with anxiety, at the dinner table. She had always hated the emotion of pity, when she felt it for others, when she felt herself the object of it; it was this that had made her draw back from Patricia, the note of pity she had heard, or thought she had heard, during their argument about voting rights for women. Pity was negative; it was defeat… She thought again of that little smile on Alex’s face. It was more than relief at having passed the test; he had enjoyed outwitting Fahir.

He had been so earnest, so fervent. That blaze of sincerity in the blue eyes, that straight, unwavering regard, the voice that came in blurts, like the very throes of truth. But what struck her most in retrospect was the way he had spoken about the future of humanity, the benefits that would come to future generations. Not from oil this time but from a knowledge of Hittite war chariots. He had spoken with a conviction that had nothing to do with his knowledge of archaeology, was independent of it. It was as if, at a certain point, the mantle of prophecy fell on him, and then knowledge or ignorance, truth or falsehood didn’t matter any longer. She remembered how he had clenched his fists as he spoke of the hot embrace of the rock, a sacred fire in a past so remote she couldn’t imagine it, and how the same passionate awe had throbbed in his voice when he went on to speak about the present and the future, the statistics of production, the profits to be made. The same fire… It was in the puzzlement of this that she finally passed into sleep.

Elliott had noticed the more distant manner, the way her eyes did not quite meet his own when she bade him good night. He did not trouble himself too much as to what the cause might be; it could not be anything to do with him, he felt sure of that; he had been brilliant at the table, he had held his nerve, she should have been impressed. Women were subject to moods; the fact was well known. However, he took it for a sign that they would not be meeting that night; she would not be coming to him, entering his room and joining him in bed, hot with her own stealth and eagerness—it was quite a while since he had had a woman so ardent.

All the same, he did not mind, tonight, if she did not come. In a way he was glad of it. He wanted to have time to himself on this, one of the most important days of his life, as he felt it to be, a highlight in his career. His victory in the game with Fahir, that triumphant parade of knowledge, had been a sort of celebration, in a minor key, of the momentous discovery he had made earlier that day, about which, naturally, he had said nothing to anybody.

They had returned to the pyramid of stones on the following day. He had gone over that shallow rise, which was roughly oval in shape and covered something like a mile from north to south and perhaps half of that at its maximum width. As he tramped back and forth, the conviction had grown in him that it formed a single geological structure. His work party, who he knew had long ago decided that he was mad, he left to their own devices. His excitement had grown at the thought of what this formation might be. He had felt neither weariness nor any discomfort from the sun. Then today, in late afternoon, when the sun’s rays were slanting low and shadows were long, he had ridden to a point some two miles beyond where the sweep ended. Here the ground rose fairly sharply to a rocky shelf. It was no more than a hundred feet in height, but standing here and looking back the way he had come, with the sun’s rays slanting across, he saw beyond any doubt that it was a single unit he had been traversing, a single shape, a diapir.

How long he had stood there, as the realization came to him, he could not afterward recollect. Some massive formation of the rock had been forced up to pierce the surface, hardly perceptibly, like the slightest protrusion of the tongue between the lips. No, not quite like that: It had no crest or peak; it was a single shallow dome, the cap of rock that had formed over it. He remembered the water charged with salt, the taste of it on his fingers, the prevalence of salt springs everywhere. This great cylindrical mass pushing up from below, piercing the surface, could it be rock salt?

Conviction had grown as he thought about the dimensions of the thing. If it was a mile across on the surface, it could be five or six miles in depth below. Salt, being lighter in density than the surrounding rocks, was often forced up, but very rarely in quantities like this. He had read about salt domes but never seen one. They had been observed in various places, the Gulf of Mexico, the Zagros Mountains, southern Persia. But no prospecting had been done yet, none that he knew of. After the millions of years of heating and compression that had molded the dome and forced it up, the salt, in its rise, would have wrenched out of shape the strata containing the petroleum, forming perfect traps…

The excitement that had seized him in the afternoon as he stood looking down returned to him now, set him pacing backward and forward in his room. As always, a sense of the miraculous attended on him—the nearest he ever came to ethical feeling, though it transcended all notions of right or wrong. How many millions of years, how many floods and evaporations in the shallow sea that had once been Mesopotamia had gone to form these vast deposits of salt? In its slow, irresistible journey up to the surface, the salt would bend the layers of rock above it, bend them upward, forming pockets where oil and gas would collect, trapped along the flanks of the cone, between the salt and the enclosing rock. The dome-shaped cap of rock forced up to the surface, this could have formed a reservoir above the salt, where oil might gather. A lake of oil, not far below, easy to get at. Closer examination would be needed, but this would explain the oil seep, the swamps of bitumen…

He was disturbed in this excited reverie by a light tapping at his door. His first thought was that Edith had decided to visit him after all. But it was too early for this. He opened the door to find the British major at the threshold. Manning looked neat and spruce in a white shirt and white shorts and white stockings that rose just below the knee. There was about him a slight odor of what Elliott thought might be disinfectant soap.

“I hope it’s not too late for a visit,” he said, “but I am a great believer in prompt action.”

“I guess that’s the military training.” Elliott stood aside for the major to enter. What kind of action could he mean? Perhaps it was hair lotion or the sort of thing one put on one’s face after shaving. Could the major have shaved before coming to pay this visit? Could some glance or word of his own have been misunderstood, misinterpreted? The British picked up some kinky habits at those schools of theirs, that was common knowledge. The clipped mode of speech, the mannerism, noticed at dinner, of tightening the lips, causing the carefully trimmed, gingerish mustache to bristle slightly—was there some wrestling with impulse going on there? Better get him sitting down as soon as possible.

“Have a seat,” he said, pointing to one of the two upright chairs at opposite sides of a small table, all the seating there was in the room. “Would you care for a drink? I’ve still got some of the Scotch left that I brought with me from London.”

“Thank you, just a spot.”

“Water?”

“No thanks, just as it comes.”

Manning watched the American as he poured out the drinks. A tall man, steady-handed, moving easily on his feet, with a direct and open regard and a sort of shine about him, as if the light fastened on him, favored him in some way. No telling from appearances. That unblushing reference to London, scene of his treachery. This was the traitor who was working for two conflicting interests, two countries on the verge of war, and taking payment from both. Such baseness was hardly conceivable; it was beneath contempt. He felt more than ready to carry out the orders he had received; he felt it as a mission. He was on duty; it was why he had taken pains with his appearance, shaving and dressing carefully before his visit. “Well, cheerio, down the hatch,” he said, raising his glass to Elliott, who had taken the chair opposite.

“Your very good health, sir,” Elliott said, managing to infuse this accustomed phrase with accents of deep and heartfelt sincerity.

“Won’t beat about the bush, don’t believe in it, never have,” Manning said. “I am the bearer of a letter from Lord Rampling, authorizing me to collect your interim report and convey it back to London.”

“Interim report? I haven’t made an interim report. I wasn’t asked to make an interim report, not at this early stage. There must be some mistake.”

“No mistake.” Manning’s right hand went to the breast pocket on the left side, unfastened the button, drew out a sealed envelope, and laid it on the table.

“No, I don’t mean to doubt the genuineness of the letter…” Elliott paused a moment or two, then said more slowly: “No, I meant some confusion about the nature of my instructions.” Looking across the table, he saw the major’s mouth tighten in that slightly lopsided involuntary grimace. “I’ve not been here long enough to make a comprehensive report,” he said. “All I’ve got are notes. How come you have been saddled with this business?”

“Well, by chance really. I was due to leave for Mesopotamia anyway. I know Arabic, and I know this region well. It seemed a good idea, you know, to pick up any papers you might have as I was passing by.”

“Are you working for Lord Rampling?”

“Good heavens, no. I am a military man. I have specialized in cartography, and I have been detailed to carry out surveys and make contour maps of the region between the Belikh and the Khabur, preliminary to a major irrigation project to be carried out under Sir William Wilcox. You will have heard of him, no doubt.”

“The engineer, yes.”

“That’s a very mild way of putting it. He is an international authority.”

“Well, I don’t know much about irrigation.”

“The Wise Men come from the West now, you know. Once they came from the East, now they come from the West. I am quoting Sir William when I say that.”

“Meaning he is one of the Wise Men?”

“Yes, so he is. And among the nations Britain is foremost in irrigation technology. We lead the world. In the absence of a report the letter authorizes me to take whatever notes you have so far accumulated.”

Elliott made no immediate reply to this. Like most tricksters he was distrustful, and a certain suspicion had entered his mind while Manning was quoting the words of the wise Sir William. He had the definite impression that the major was acting a part and that he was not—unlike himself—a very good actor. The attempt at a friendly, easy manner had not succeeded. Of course, this did not necessarily mean that he was up to something; such attempts on the major’s part would probably never be successful, whatever the circumstances, perpetually defeated in advance by the stiff movements of shoulders and head, the occasional nervous twitch of the face. All the same, there were things here that didn’t quite add up. Manning seemed to want him to believe that picking up the papers was a casual matter, something he had been asked to do in passing, as a convenience, in the course of other business. If that was so, why the haste, why this visit rather unconventionally late on the first evening of the major’s arrival?

“A little more Scotch?” he said.

“Just a drop. It’s very good. Malt, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right. Twelve years old. I see you know something about whiskey.” Could the major be a fake? He was almost too good to be true, but that might be the reason he had been chosen. Like a double bluff… Could he be working for some other oil interests? The d’Arcy Group, for example, or Shell, or the newly formed French combine, the CFP. In that case, it would make good sense for them to try to get whatever information they could; it would save them time, put them a step ahead. “Perhaps I’d better see the letter,” he said. “Not that I doubt your word, of course, but Rampling has placed a great deal of trust in me, not only in my capacity but in my prudence.”

“Of course.”

The wax seal had an official imprint; Rampling’s sprawling signature lay below a clear and explicit authorization of the bearer to take possession of all written records so far made. Nothing obviously wrong with the letter, but there wouldn’t be, would there? How could he know whether it was genuine? Easy enough to stick a bit of red wax on the flap. That stamp would be lying about on the desks of a hundred offices in Whitehall. He had no specimen of Rampling’s signature. His contract was with the Turkish Petroleum Company; Rampling’s name appeared nowhere on it.

“I must keep possession of the letter,” Manning said, holding out his hand for it, “until such time as the notes are handed over. The notes would suffice. In the absence of an interim report, I mean. They would help us to form a picture of the progress you have made to date.” Notes, reports, it didn’t really matter. His orders referred only to written records; once he had those, he would shoot Elliott, and that would be that, he could leave with a sense of duty done. No sign of guilt or confusion on the fellow’s face, a hardened scoundrel if ever there was one.

“How can I make the report if I haven’t got the notes?” Elliott said. “In any case, the notes by themselves would be of no use to anyone, they are only comprehensible to me. I use my own system of personal symbols. For the sake of security, you know. It’s a kind of code. It wouldn’t do for these papers to fall into the wrong hands, would it?”

“No, certainly not. How much time would you need? To get them into shape, I mean.”

Elliott narrowed his eyes with an appearance of considering. “Well,” he said, “to tell you the truth, there have been some important indications recently, just in the last few days, in fact, but I can’t commit myself to a definite opinion without further checking. Then I would have to make a full summary of all the findings in the form of a written report, incorporating the maps and sketches I have made. I should say it will be a week at least before I am in a position to hand anything over.”

“I see, yes.”

Manning said nothing further for a while but stared down at his glass with a slightly frowning expression. In certain ways he was not the right choice for an assignment of this sort. He was too emotional, for one thing. And he had a rigid cast of mind that made him easily thrown out by the unexpected. He had not foreseen this present setback, and there was no provision for it in his orders. He had envisaged it as a cut-and-dried transaction: Convinced by the letter, Elliott would hand over his papers without demur; then, in the course of the next day or two, there would be an opportunity to follow him out to some lonely place, preferably at a time when he was busily occupied and therefore not on the lookout, and shoot him, making it look like the work of some trigger-happy Bedouin tribesman. He was an army Grade A marksman, and he was confident that in open ground with an unrestricted view he could kill Elliott with a single shot at four hundred yards. Now there was this complication. But it sounded as if the American was onto something. It was a patriotic duty to make sure that any information of value got back to the mother country. He could keep a close watch on this treacherous geologist, make sure no approaches were made to him by a third party. “All right then,” he said. “There’s no great hurry. I have a roving commission. I can afford to wait a few days.”

“I sure am glad to hear you say that.”

On this, Manning finished his drink, patted his mustache with a handkerchief he kept in the sleeve of his shirt, and stood up to take his leave with the best he could manage in the way of a smile.

For quite some time after his departure, Elliott remained where he was, standing motionless in the middle of the room. A new and more disquieting thought had struck him even as the door closed on the major. Supposing the letter was genuine, after all. In that case, what could it mean to be asking him for notes and reports at such an early stage? No previous mention had been made of any such requirements. It came back to his mind, but in a different light now, that attempt on Manning’s part at an offhand manner, falsified by the haste and urgency he had not been accomplished enough to conceal. Had they got on to him somehow? He knew he had been watched in London, watched and followed. But he thought he had thrown pursuit off for long enough to call at the German Embassy undetected. Perhaps he had been mistaken in this…

If so, his whole security, in fact his best chance of staying alive, lay in keeping possession of the papers; he was glad now that he had spoken of recent important developments, not yet written up. Until they were satisfied that they knew what he knew, however much or little it was, and had the evidence in their hands, he was safe enough. After that they would want to stop him talking, make sure he did not pass anything on to the Germans. The stakes were too high; they would not want to take chances. In fact he had never had any intention of passing on anything of value either to the Germans or to the British. All the capital he possessed and all he had been able to borrow was invested in the Chester Group, an American combine very interested in exploiting deposits of oil in Mesopotamia. He was acting for them; it was to them that he would make his report. This had been agreed before he had left the United States for London.

The major would have his orders. A bonehead, but his finger would be steady enough on the trigger. “I can shoot too,” he said aloud, very softly. The major would not realize he suspected anything. With the advantage of surprise he would have a good chance of putting a bullet into Manning before Manning put one into him. Or perhaps the major would arrange an alibi, bribe some local tribesman, make it seem like a casual murder in the course of a casual robbery, the sort of thing that happened here from time to time. He thought not, however. Manning would regard killing him as a patriotic duty; he would want to keep things in his own hands.

In the meantime what to do with the notes and sketches he had made already? He would keep his door locked and the window, which also gave onto the courtyard, secured. This would strengthen the impression in Manning’s mind, if he made an attempt to enter the room and search, that the papers were valuable.

But the fastenings of the window were flimsy, and his bedside drawer, in which the papers were kept, had no lock. He would not keep them here; he would take them to Edith and ask her to keep them for him. He would say he was afraid of robbery by rival interests. He would say that Manning was in the pay of the Russians and that they were dangerous people. He would hint that his own life was in danger, not seeming too much afraid, of course, so as to stand the test of heroism in her eyes. He would swear her to secrecy. She was given to notions of high enterprise. She would jump at this sort of romantic involvement. She would swallow it wholesale if he pitched it up enough. Besides, it was partly true…

The shaft went straight down, and it was deep. They had to widen the mouth considerably and dig two lateral trenches, one on either side, so as to convey away more easily the filling of earth and stone chips. On the fourth day of digging, the deeper of these trenches, which sloped down to a depth of twelve feet, revealed the crown of a brick vault. Since they had started digging from a point lower down, they were already below the level of the palace apartments, but there was so far no trace of fire. They did not attempt to clear the roof from above for fear of damage, but continued down the shaft, the work becoming slower and more laborious as they went lower. Roughly eight feet farther down they came upon what Somerville had wanted so much to find that he had hardly dared to hope for it, the beginning of a stone stairway projecting outward from the vertical line of the shaft in the direction of the vaulted ceiling, roughly the height of a man below this. There was no doubt in his mind now. It was a vaulted tomb of traditional construction; the stairs would lead to an anteroom.

The deeper of the trenches had to be enlarged further, made into a pit, so as to give access to the head of the steps, which were heaped over with rubble. On the afternoon of the day when the first two steps were uncovered, Somerville and Palmer together, both in a state of considerable elation, were directing this work of enlargement, which it was thought would take some further days, and Jehar was watching both men from a point carefully chosen, about fifty yards away. He was waiting for a suitable moment.

Since first setting eyes on Ninanna he had been constantly surprised by his ability to wait. Before that he had always lived in the present moment, his lusts and rages and his need to survive always directed at what was there before him, as opportunity or necessity. Even now he had no real sense of the future as a progression in time, a sequence of days during which people aged and changed. The future he waited for was an improved state of being, a sort of readjustment of the present, no more than a step from the railway yards at Jerablus and the watchful and miserly uncle to the wondrous land of Deir ez-Zor, immediate prosperity in the river trade, and unrestricted enjoyment of Ninanna’s beauties.

He brought the same spirit of patience to his dealings with the Englishman. The idea that had possessed his mind almost to the exclusion of all else since that night in the bar when he had related the story of the two Armenian conscripts, he had not gone running to the khwaja with it at the first opportunity, brilliant as it was. No, he had watched and waited for the right moment.

It came now. He had known about the discovery of the tomb shaft; the work of excavating it was already under way when he arrived. He had known when they had uncovered the section of brick vaulting, but still he had waited. Now, today, they had come upon the beginnings of a stairway, leading down. There could only be one reason for steps under the ground: They led to a burial place. It was there that the treasure would lie; soon now the khwaja would be feasting his eyes on it.

Somerville was alone when he saw Jehar approach, Palmer having gone some distance off to take measurements, and he was lost still in the discoveries they had made that day. Stone steps, a vaulted chamber—it gave every sign of being the entrance to a royal tomb.

“Yes, what is it?” he said. He spoke sharply, reluctant to leave this elation of discovery for the ugly shapes of danger and doubt he knew from experience this messenger would bring. Jehar was a carrier of anguish and a vendor of it.

“Lord, I have come from the track of the railway. It is getting close, they have reached the village of Arattu. The people say that within one week they will reach Ras el-Ain.”

He paused a moment, then said, “They will come through this way, they will smash the tell.” He drove the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left to make a smacking sound of impact. “Much crushing and damage,” he said, “many ancient and valuable things all smashed up. Also, the people here, below us here, they will start soon, maybe in two or three days, to transport the rails and sleepers and links they have been storing in their sheds here, to the railhead at Arattu and to some other places. The purpose of this is to avoid delays in continuing the line. This I have been told by very trustworthy people, whose word cannot for one single moment be doubted.”

For some moments Somerville regarded the man before him without speaking. He did not believe this last statement, did not believe, in fact, that Jehar numbered any trustworthy people among his acquaintance. It had been the flourish of the habitual liar, the sort of bravura that would always give Jehar away and that he would never be able to resist. But that the Germans below would start moving materials to the railhead very soon, any day now, was entirely probable, certain, in fact. A sudden weariness descended on him, replacing the elation of earlier. Only a few short weeks had elapsed since he had appointed Jehar as his messenger on the scant qualifications of speaking some German and having worked on the railway in the mountains of Anatolia. But it seemed a lifetime now that he had been anguished by the news Jehar brought him and by the very sight of his face, with its light eyes and straight brows and fiercely serious expression—a fanatical face, but with an unsettling innocence in it too… “Well,” he said, “we’ll have to hope for the best. I’m tired of paying you to bring me bad news. I’ve had enough of it. In fact we can consider our agreement at an end from this hour forth.”

Jehar drew a breath. His moment had come. “No,” he said, “Jehar brings you good news this time, news of the best. He brings you no less than the solution to this problem of the railway. I, in my time of working on the line in Turkey, became very familiar with dynamite.”

“Did you indeed?” Jehar’s face wore a look he had never seen on it before, an expression of great happiness, almost of beatitude. It came to Somerville that he might be under the influence of hashish. “Dynamite, eh?”

“It is true, please believe me. I used it every single day. The Germans, they have dynamite in a shed below us here. I have watched, I have seen it. It is used to make gravel for the bed of the track. This shed is kept locked, but a lock can be broken. I also have experience of breaking locks.”

“Are you actually proposing to steal their dynamite? Apart from being a crime, what good would it do? I can only think that you are joking.”

“Lord, the joke will be against them. We will blow up their sheds before they can start transporting the rails. We will use their own dynamite to do it, that is a good joke, no? It will be much better than blowing up the track. The line cannot proceed without these materials. It will take them weeks to replace them, as many weeks as it took to bring them here. If you will promise Jehar one hundred gold pounds, he will do this for you, he will save your treasure. You have but to say the word, and it is done.”