Land of Marvels

14.

They were helped in reaching the lower steps by the discovery of a natural cave where the limestone had split and shifted owing to the operation of underground streams. Miraculously, as it seemed, the water had bypassed the tomb.

There were six steps altogether, descending steeply. Then, after a space of four feet, three broader steps that mounted to the doorway, fallen in and ruinous, of an entrance chamber. At once, just beyond the threshold, they began to make finds, various bowls and drinking vessels of alabaster and pottery, needed for feasting in the life to come. They were beneath the roof of the vault now. This had held up through the millennia, and the stone floor beneath was clear. There was a limestone statuette lying against the wall, a seated figure, upturned.

Further work was suspended while Palmer took photographs with the aid of lamps. For a moment, while he did this, there was no one with him, Somerville and Elias and the group engaged in clearing the threshold having returned to the surface, where Somerville told them to remain for the time being. He was possessed now by fears, which he recognized as irrational but could not help, that someone, anyone, would do some irreparably clumsy thing, somehow interrupt and violate this miraculous sequence that had started with the first sight of the descending steps, had led to this threshold, would lead across the floor of the anteroom, through the fallen masonry that blocked the entrance beyond, and so into the burial chamber itself and the royal sarcophagus he believed would lie there. The sight of Jehar, standing some distance off, did nothing to reassure him. It was obvious that Jehar had not taken no for an answer; he haunted the site, a ubiquitous presence, always alone, always watching.

Palmer did not touch the statuette, which was grotesquely tumbled from the sitting position, skirted knees raised, head lying back, rather like a large white beetle that had been overturned and could not get itself right again. But he looked closely at it, more closely than he had had leisure for up to now. And he played the narrow beam of his torch over it, the better to do this. And in so doing he noticed what neither he nor Somerville had noticed previously: There was the stylized symbol of a spade thinly incised along the forward base.

Somerville, descending alone, found his assistant on his knees, as if in prayer. “The spade,” Palmer said, and he shone his torch on it again for Somerville’s benefit. “This can’t be Assyrian work.”

“Why not?” There was no note of dissent in this, only a simple question. Palmer knew more about this sort of thing than he did. “It doesn’t look so very much like a spade, more like a hooded figure,” he said.

“It’s the Babylonian symbol for a spade.”

“Babylonian? What is it doing here then?”

“It must have been placed here to guard the entrance to the tomb.” Palmer squatted to take another look. “There’s no doubt about it,” he said after a moment. He looked up at Somerville, and the beam of his torch cast a partial light over the lower part of his face, giving him a curiously disembodied look. “The spade is the sacred symbol of Marduk, the Great God of the Babylonians.”

“A captured god,” Somerville said. “Yes, there are precedents for it in Assyrian practice. It would make sense if you had your back to the wall, if the Babylonians were at the gates and your own gods had failed, to use the enemy’s god for protection.”

“A very ancient and potent god,” Palmer said. “He doesn’t look so impressive at the moment, does he, doing a knees-up like that? I suppose we can put him upright now.”

The statuette, though no more than a foot tall, was surprisingly heavy. A considerable effort was needed to raise it, very carefully, and set it upright against the wall. At once, in this restored position, it reasserted its elemental power, head thrust forward, hands on knees, transformed into an object of terror and devotion.

“Yes,” Palmer said. “You can see it, can’t you? He wasn’t one to cross. The sculptor, whoever it was, must have been in fear and trembling when he made him.” He got up and took some steps farther into the chamber, toward the entrance to the larger chamber beyond, which was blocked off by double stone doors and a fall of masonry across the entrance. “If he was there, where he is now, against the wall, anyone making for the tomb would have had to cross the path of his gaze and so incur his curse. Like a kind of psychic burglar alarm.”

“His eyes are made of pitch,” Somerville said. “Like the lion’s. But they have not been touched by fire. If it was so, if Marduk was installed here as a last-ditch defense against any who would come to violate the tomb, it must have been close to the end, it must have been in the last—”

He was interrupted by a sudden exclamation. “Come and look at this,” Palmer said. He was standing close to the blocked doorway, gazing upward. Part of the wall on one side had fallen across the entrance, but the stone lintel above it was still in place, and the beam of Palmer’s torch was resting steadily on this.

“What is it?” Somerville moved to Palmer’s side and looked up at the lintel. After a moment he made out the marks of incisions on the stone. It was cuneiform script, Assyrian.

“They chiseled the signs into the stone. Pretty deep, aren’t they? They wanted the message to last.”

“Can you make it out?”

“I don’t think it’s a text, it looks like just a single name. Hang on a minute…” When he spoke again the pitch of his voice was higher, charged with a tone of protest. “Can’t be,” he said. “Must be a fake of some kind, a theft of identity. If they can borrow the power of a god, I suppose they can borrow the power of a king too.”

“What king?”

Palmer lowered the torch. “The name up there is Sin-shar-ishkun,” he said. “There can’t be any mistake. The first syllable refers to the god Sin, who appointed him shar, or king.”

“There was only one king of that name,” Somerville said. “He died in the flames when the Babylonians and Medes took Nineveh in 612 and put the city to the fire.” He made a gesture toward the doorway and the chamber beyond. “It’s in the Chaldean chronicles. Whoever is in there must be an impostor. Look, it’s getting late now, I don’t think it would be advisable to go any further today. We’ll get them to make a barrier to block off the entrance to this anteroom, keep out the light, keep people out too. Planks lashed together will do. We’ll set a guard of four men to stay at the top of the shaft. I’ll stay with them if you will send someone with provisions for me. Tomorrow morning we’ll clear the doorway and try to shift the doors. With any luck, they will still turn on their pivots. It won’t take more than two or three hours. Then we’ll see who is inside there.”

“No reason why you should do the whole night. You need sleep just like the rest of us. I’ll come to relieve you around two A.M.”

In the heightened state of his nerves—and with the knowledge that his assistant disliked any disturbance of his sleep—this offer brought a prickle of tears to Somerville’s eyes. He was reluctant to accept, however, reluctant to leave the scene even for the space of an hour. But Palmer insisted and in the end prevailed.

Manning had not told Edith the whole truth, by any means: He had limited himself to the American’s duplicity, he had naturally said nothing about his own designs once the report was secured, and he had said nothing that might cause her to suspect that Spahl was on the same quest. Such knowledge was useless to her, he had reasoned, and might even be dangerous, causing her to do or say the wrong thing. He was not a man with a great play of mind, but he had seen from the way she took the news—first the rage, then the tears—that there had been something going on between her and Elliott, that the swine had been taking advantage of her. Hell hath no fury, he had said to himself sagely, and he took care not to fan the flames.

Consequently, Edith, in deciding what to do with the papers that had been so falsely entrusted to her, had no idea that Alex was in any real danger. She wanted to show her contempt for his behavior and to make sure he understood that all was over between them. After some thought she decided to return the papers to him publicly, with as many spectators present as possible to add to his discomfiture. On the morning following the major’s revelations she rose somewhat earlier than usual and took more trouble with her toilette, arranging her hair carefully and putting some color on her cheeks. She chose a dress that she knew to be becoming, one that fitted close but not so much as to be vulgarly flaunting. When she felt sufficiently ceremonious and prepared for the scene she made her way to the courtyard, Elliott’s folder under her arm.

She found everyone but Palmer seated at the breakfast table; he was still at the site, and Patricia was proposing shortly to take him a thermos flask of tea and stay there with him until Somerville returned to relieve him. It was a good occasion, with everyone present like this; in fact during these days there had been what seemed an increased sociability among them; Elliott in particular was never seen alone but always in the company not only of the major but of the Swiss journalist.

She was put off her stride a little by the sight of her husband at the table; he was rarely at meals now, and she had somehow not envisaged him as a witness. Might he not think it strange, seeing her dressed and made up like this, seeing this rejection of Elliott’s papers along with Elliott himself? But it was too late now to hold back. Holding herself very straight, as she had been taught to do as a child when reciting poetry or acting the queen in pageants—she had always had the queen’s part—Edith walked to the place where the American was sitting and dropped the file with deliberate carelessness on the table beside him. “I have no further use for these,” she said—or for you either, her tone and looks implied.

But she had forgotten, in the hurt to her feelings, quite a number of things. She had forgotten that Elliott was still officially an archaeologist, that the major would be obliged, in company, to pretend to believe this, that the Swiss would believe it anyway, that it was important for her husband’s credit and his relations with the Turkish authorities that it should be generally believed. These things came to her, all in a rush, in the silence that followed. Elliott had not moved. She felt the color rise to her face. She looked across at her husband with a sort of entreaty, conscious suddenly of how much she cared that his name and his ambitions should be protected. But he did not meet her gaze; he seemed abstracted, hardly aware of what was happening.

It was Manning who saved the situation, for which she was always to be grateful to him. “Your notes about the Hittites, Elliott, I suppose,” he said. “Have you found any evidence of those bronze-sheathed war chariots you were talking about the other evening?”

Elliott rose from the table, keeping a loose and careless hold of the file. He did not glance at Edith but looked steadily at the major. After a moment he nodded. “There are indications,” he said. “Certainly there are indications. I am compiling a report.” A sudden smile came to his face, exuberant, full of confidence. He looked with his usual unwavering frankness at the major and Spahl, who were both now standing. “In fact,” he said, “I have already compiled it. It is on my person at present. I am proposing to carry it on me at all times—to avoid losing it, you know. When I return home, I am hoping to publish it in the American Journal of Oriental Research.” He turned toward Edith then, but still without looking directly at her. “These notes are no good to anyone,” he said. “They never were.” And as he spoke he dropped the file back on the table with a gesture very similar to hers.

He was moving toward the door, closely followed by Manning and Spahl, when Somerville, seeming to emerge from some species of daydream, addressed the whole company: “I’d like to invite you all to come over to the excavation site at midday today. We will have cleared the entrance to the burial chamber by then. There is every sign that the tomb has not been disturbed. We expect to find a sarcophagus inside, perhaps more than one. I want you to be witnesses of what promises to be a momentous discovery. I am sure that you as a colleague”—and here he looked at Elliott—“will want to be present.”

“Certainly,” Elliott said.

“I too,” Major Manning said. “Sounds dashed interesting.”

“This in my article will find a place,” Spahl said.

Somerville looked at his wife, noticing that she looked particularly attractive this morning. “I know I can count on you to be there.”

“Of course.”

The invitation issued, Somerville remained where he was, watching the others leave the table, Edith too. She had eaten nothing; she had not so much as sat down at the table, unusual with her, she always enjoyed breakfast. He himself had eaten very little. He had been punctually relieved by his assistant, but he had not succeeded in sleeping much afterward. He was overwrought, and the talk he had had with Palmer before leaving for the house had added to the tension of expectation he was living under. Palmer had not been able to sleep either, and lying awake, waiting to return to the site, he had remembered something. The series of Chaldean chronicles that began in 616 B.C. were an invaluable record of the last days of the Assyrian kingdom and provided a detailed account of the destruction of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes in alliance in 612. There were omissions in them, of course, and defacements of the text, and one of these last had come to his mind and assumed particular significance as he lay there. He had tried to bring the passage to mind but had not been able to remember much but the date. A strong attack they made against the city and in the month of Ab… Then he had remembered, with sudden excitement, that the words referring to the king’s death had been bracketed off in the translation and queried as uncertain. On that day Sin-shar-ishkun, the Assyrian king [was killed?]… Some accidental damage to the face of the text, just at this point, a chance in a thousand? Or some uncertainty on the part of the scribe? Was there some alternative version, some knowledge possessed by only a few? In any case, in the absence of more evidence, that he had died there was an assumption, no more than that. He was thought to have perished in the flames because nothing more was heard of him after the destruction of the city. But no proof had ever been offered; the body had never been identified.

This fact—the uncertainty that lay over the king’s death—he had mentioned to Somerville, and they had talked about it for a little while. It was in Somerville’s mind now, to the exclusion of all else, as he watched the others leave the breakfast table, saw the houseboys enter to clear away the dishes. And it was still there a little later as he walked back to the mound, an essential element in what was becoming to his mind a marvelous story.

On the way he went over the official version of events as far as he knew them. The father of Sin-shar-ishkun was Ashurbanipal, the learned and ruthless, the last great king of Assyria, hunter of lions, creator of the vast library of cuneiform texts at Nineveh. He died in 627, and Kandalanu, the puppet king he installed at Babylon, died in the same year, which had led some to believe, and Somerville among them, that this monarch never existed, that Kandalanu was a throne name and it was Ashurbanipal himself who was worshiped at Babylon in a form of a statue named Kandalanu.

A not uncommon practice for the Assyrian kings to create alternative selves—it was what he now believed Sin-shar-ishkun to have done. In 623, on the death of his brother, he had become king of Assyria, the last of the line. Eleven years of desperate fighting against the growing power of the Medes, the destruction of Ashur, the home of their gods, the meeting of Nabopolassar the Chaldean and Cyaxares the Mede below the walls of the devastated city, the agreement they made there to divide the dying empire of the Assyrians between them. From that point on they were to fight side by side, and Assyria was doomed. Then the final battle, the final siege, and the defective text that Palmer had remembered.

His excitement increased as he drew nearer the mound. Today might see the answer to the enigma contained in the chronicles. A totally new light on the last years of the Assyrian kingdom. If so, he would go down in the annals of archaeology, and Palmer with him; he would join company with the great ones of the past, so much revered, Layard, Rassam, George Smith. He would be famous; he would be in demand; he would never again lack for financial backing.

He found Palmer sitting hand in hand with Patricia at the entrance to the vertical shaft. Hardly a hundred yards beyond them, the tin roofs of the German sheds gleamed in the early sunshine. The workpeople were arriving, and the two foremen stood talking together at some distance from the shaft, obviously wanting not to intrude on the young couple. Fortified by the tea Patricia had brought him and by her company, Palmer declared that he would stay on and see the progress of the work. Patricia too wanted to stay. Only one group of six, composed of the workmen Somerville trusted most, under the pickman who had found the stone carving of the Guardian, was set to work on clearing the rubble that lay over the entrance to the tomb and opening the stone doors. The rest of the people, directed by the foremen, were set to work higher up on the side of the mound, one party continuing to trace the course of the wall, the other taking up the flooring of the ash-covered platform they had found.

By midmorning the rubble had been cleared. The six men were enough to make the stone doors swing open on their iron pivots. Somerville sent them up to the surface and stationed Elias at the mouth of the shaft with instructions to wait there for the people of the house and allow no one else to come down. Then—and only then—he and Palmer, armed with lamps from the anteroom, stepped over the broken brick that still lay strewn over the threshold and entered the chamber.

Set longways against the wall that faced them as they entered, and occupying most of the wall—there was scarcely room for a man to stand at either end—was a terra-cotta sarcophagus three or four feet in height, closed with a slightly beveled lid, also of terra-cotta. In the walls on either side were shallow alcoves containing carved alabaster vases of closely similar design. Otherwise the room was bare.

Somerville halted in the middle of the room, held back in these first moments by a sort of superstition from proceeding farther, as if haste might seem disrespectful to the presences here. He held his lamp up toward the ceiling. “It’s a perfect barrel vault,” he said. “These bricks were set by people who knew what they were doing. Shaft, steps, anteroom, burial chamber—he must have had it built long before, maybe years before. He wanted to be ready for the end, when it came.”

“There’s an inscription.” Palmer had not been so reluctant to approach the sarcophagus. He was crouching forward now, looking closely at the foot.

“Can you read it?”

“I think so, yes. Take me a bit of time. The terra-cotta is in good condition, good as new, almost.”

“Is there a name?”

“Hang on a minute. There’s an invocation to the gods at the beginning and the usual curse on anyone who comes to disturb the tomb. The name of the occupant should be somewhere between. Yes, here it is, two names.” He paused here for further scrutiny, a pause that seemed long to Somerville. “One of them is Sin-shar-ishkun,” he said at last. “I can’t make out the other just yet. It’s a woman’s name.”

The rush of relief these words released in Somerville made him unsure he could control his voice if he tried to speak. He fell to studying the lid of the sarcophagus. It was sealed with bitumen, he saw now. “We’ll need a sharp, thin-bladed knife,” he said, restored to self-control by this practical consideration. “Preferably with a serrated edge. Would you go up and ask Elias to find one for us?”

He made no further attempt to examine the sarcophagus while he waited but stood without moving in the center of the room, feeling the silence of the place settle over him. Two names. It was unusual; in fact he had never heard before of an Assyrian king and his consort laid in the same coffin or even in the same tomb. The royal women were buried at home below the domestic wing of the palace; the kings were customarily taken to Ashur, dwelling place of the father-god, for burial. But the city had gone up in flames, and the god Ashur made captive and led away on a cart in 614; it had been the first of the Assyrian power centers to fall. The tomb must have been built well after that. He could not recall the name of Sin-shar-ishkun’s queen; perhaps he had never known it.

When Palmer returned with Patricia, they were accompanied by Edith. A few minutes later Elliott, Manning, and Spahl arrived; it seemed that these three had walked over together. Somerville waited until everyone was assembled and the lamps were set around the wall. Then he set to work with the knife Palmer had brought. It was easier than he had thought, there was hardly need for sawing; the bitumen was brittle, the seals parted one after the other as Elliott and Spahl, standing on either side of him, eased up the lid very slightly at the points where the knife was inserted.

“We are ready to take the lid off now,” Somerville said. “It will probably need four of us at least. I’d just like to say a few words first. I wanted you to be present so that if questioned about the authenticity of these proceedings you will be able to give eyewitness accounts. Mr. Spahl, in particular, as a journalist of considerable standing, might be willing to bring the discovery before a wide readership, might even be glad to be the first to do so.”

“Indeed yes,” Spahl said. “A scoop of big proportions, my paper will be greatly pleased.”

“I feel it is important for you to be informed of the facts, as far as Palmer and I have been able to establish them. The name on the sarcophagus is the same as that over the doorway to the tomb, it is the name of the last king in the line of Sargon, effectively the last king of Assyria. There is a name alongside it, a woman’s name.”

“I can manage to make it out now,” Palmer said. “It is Lattalia.”

Somerville went on to speak of the doubts that hung over the final fate of this king, the time and place of his supposed death. He told them of his own first belief that this must be an impostor. “Impostors were not uncommon in ancient Assyria,” he said, “especially in times of crisis or extreme danger, when the king might temporarily bestow his identity—and his name—on another. There are precedents for this, historically documented. If you will bear with me a few minutes longer, I will tell you what I think might have happened. In the summer of 612 B.C. the Assyrian Empire was in its death throes. Ashur, the religious capital, had been destroyed two years earlier. Now the siege was tightening around Nineveh, the administrative heart, the seat of government. Sin-shar-ishkun, whose name is on this sarcophagus, decided to give that name to someone else. The true name of the man he chose is not recorded anywhere as far as I know. I think it probable that he was some high military commander—a reasonable choice at a time like that.”

He paused on this and smiled a little. He had visibly relaxed in posture as he talked; it was now as if he were delivering a lecture to a group of students. None of his hearers had made the slightest sound or the slightest shift of position. None of them had taken their eyes from him. He is in command of us, Edith thought. As if we were children, listening to wonders. Such different kinds of people, yet we are all in the grip of his words, in the grip of this story he is telling. She had never seen her husband as a man with a gift for storytelling. And it was more than that, much more: His voice was quiet, but there was authority in his words, a kind of power emanated from him. And there was nothing assumed, nothing theatrical; he was entirely himself.

“So for a while there was a king in Nineveh who was not the true king. The true king escaped the siege, fled here with the belongings he valued most. Among these was a statuette of Marduk, the god of the Babylonian enemy, who he hoped might protect him. With him came queen and concubines, servants and guards, followers ready to cast their lot with him. We know now that this place was a residence, probably a summer palace, of the Assyrian kings, at least for a century or so—since the time of Esarhaddon. We have found definite proof of this. So here the king lived quietly under his borrowed name for some time longer, perhaps some years, far to the west of the Assyrian heartlands on the Tigris. This vaulted tomb and the sarcophagus were made ready on his orders, and when the time came for him to be laid to rest, he had Marduk installed in the entrance chamber as a guardian. Perhaps we can try raising the lid now. There is no room behind it, but if Elliott and Manning can take the sides, the rest of us can try to lift it from the front and rest it back against the wall.”

It took all five of the men, straining with the effort and the need for care, to raise the lid and get it propped securely resting on its edge. In this combined effort, and in the wonderment of looking down into the coffin—they were the first to do this—these men were as one, bound together in a common sentiment for the first time and the last.

Edith and Patricia came forward now and joined the men, and all stood close together there, looking down. The two skeletons lay side by side. They had died, or been laid in death, on their backs; the caverns where their eyes had been seemed in that inconstant light of the lamps to have retained some power of seeing, to be returning the gaze of the spectators. The flesh had long gone, but the framework of bone was perfectly preserved; no hand had touched it. Only the teeth were ruinous.

“They have been lying here for about twenty-five hundred years,” Somerville said, breaking the long silence. She had been shorter than her burial companion by a foot at least, but the two skulls were on an exact level, he noticed now. As if they had lain with faces close, he thought. But of course they must have died outside the coffin. Perhaps the king gave orders that they should be laid with their faces touching. “Queen or concubine, no way of knowing for the moment,” he said. There was a shared headrest of what looked like filigree gold lying beneath the skulls. The dust of their decay lay around them, and a scattering of beads from the necklace she had worn, more than one necklace probably. The beads were numerous and of different types and coloring; he caught the glint of gold among them. Other jewelry he saw in this first quick, surveying glance: fibulae, armlets, a pendant with a thin chain. There were three rings on the man’s right forefinger. Priceless, these objects. He felt a surge of protectiveness almost violent in its nature. The others were standing too close; he would have liked to shift them away. “We’ll get a covering made,” he said to Palmer.

It was Patricia, striving in typical fashion to combat the awe that had descended on her, who came up now with a question that brought them back from the violated privacy of these bones to time and event. “The man he gave his name to,” she said. “What became of him?”

“It is not known,” Somerville said. “Nothing in this room will tell us. I can only say what I think might have happened. The man who took the king’s name was not happy with it. He was a man with high ambition. He did not want to be identified for all time to come with a defeated monarch. So he gave himself a new name, Ashur-uballit, a very illustrious one in the annals of Assyrian history. The first king of that name had freed his country from foreign domination, freed his people from the tribute they had been paying to the Mitanni, and been hailed as king of the universe by a grateful people. This army officer, whose true name has not survived, thought the adopted name would act as a sort of talisman, a guarantee of success. Like capturing a flag or appropriating an emblem of another empire or using an enemy god as guardian because he has proved a stronger god than your own.”

“A good move,” Elliott said, speaking for the first time. “I admire that guy. Desperate situations call for desperate remedies, isn’t that what they say? He wouldn’t accept defeat, he kept his nerve. In my opinion, that was a man who deserved to make good and succeed in life.”

Yes, you tricky devil, Manning thought as he glanced at Elliott and sought to guess whereabouts on his person the report might be. You would admire a trickster, wouldn’t you? “But did this king actually exist?” he said to Somerville, with a sense of returning to decent discourse.

“Oh, yes, he existed. So much is certain. He proclaimed himself Ashur-uballit the Second and he succeeded in escaping to Harran, where the Belikh joins the Euphrates. There he made a stand, supported by an Egyptian force that had come to the aid of the Assyrians. But they were defeated, and he fled westward across the Euphrates and was never heard of again. It isn’t known whether he lived or died. He may have abandoned his new name in order to escape pursuit. In any case, at this point he simply disappears from history.

“It took the invaders several more years to mop up the remnants of the Egyptian and Assyrian forces, but by 605, when they took Carchemish, it was all over, the whole region was in their hands. And that would have spelled the death of these two lying here. I think that they had these few years of grace while the fighting was going on. I think that when he knew the enemy was at the gates he took his own life, probably by poison, and she followed suit.”

Not much was said after this. Somerville announced his intention of staying on there for a while. He wanted to look more closely at the contents of the sarcophagus and to arrange for a cover to be made. Palmer was in need of a rest after his vigil, and Patricia wanted to go back to the house with him. The three other men left in a body. Edith waited until everyone else had gone; then she went to her husband and kissed him. “John, you were wonderful,” she said. “I was so proud of you.”

When she too had gone, Somerville did not approach the sarcophagus but remained where he had been standing to hear the thanks of his departing visitors. He felt the warmth of Edith’s kiss on his lips, and it sustained him in the moments of exhausted reaction that followed. Like marionettes, the two of them lying side by side, neat and dutiful and somehow pathetic, their bones perfectly in place. Not waiting to be fleshed again but for some touch on the string that would bring them both upright together…

He had been troubled by the thought that some impostor, some false claimant, might be buried here. But he felt certain now, as he stood alone in the silence, that this was not so, could not be so. No man or woman of the time would choose to die under a false identity. Who would wish, as he stood at the threshold of the Underworld, to risk the curse of the god Sin by stealing his name or denying it? Sin-shar-ishkun. Not one of the great Assyrian kings, not like his grandfather Esarhaddon or his father Ashurbanipal. Heir to ruin and destruction. No hero, any more than he was himself—a hero would have died in the flames—but the last of the royal line of Sargon.

His own name would be made now, his own identity confirmed. He would rewrite the final chapter of Assyrian history. In archaeology a discovery as revolutionary as this would generate a vast amount of activity aimed at corroboration or disproof. And the man at the heart of a controversy like that could be sure of fame.

Drawings and notes would have to be made; the attitude and position of the skeletons would have to be carefully recorded, along with the nature of all the objects in the coffin. This before anything was touched. The necklaces would have to be restrung as closely as possible in the original order, which meant much patient work matching the beads. Before the beads could even be handled the loose dust would have to be blown away delicately enough to leave them undisturbed. For the first time now it came fully home to him, the work that would be needed, the labor of preserving this material, much of it no doubt in bad condition. Then there were the skeletons themselves; to get them without damage from the sarcophagus would mean shrouding them separately in thickly waxed linen, wrapping them around so that they could be encased and so lifted clear. Everything—the alabaster and ceramic drinking vessels, the statuette of the god, the jewelry—would have to be packed on the surface and made ready for transport to London. To get the sarcophagus to the surface some system of pulleys would have to be devised, a difficult operation in that narrow space.

With a sudden gesture Somerville raised hands to his temples, stilling the sound, not heard but felt within him, indistinguishable from the pulse of his life in that quiet place, the clash of metal against metal. There were weeks of delicate, painstaking work awaiting them here. Three weeks, four weeks… He quitted the chamber with a sensation of escaping the silence there, which had become intolerable now, and began to make his way up the sloping trench on the left side. He had some idea of finding Elias or Halil and arranging for a cover to be made for the sarcophagus. Elias was there, but the first person he really saw on reaching the surface was Jehar, standing in exactly the same position as before.