Land of Marvels

15.

In the afternoon of that day Major Manning was as usual engaged in watching, from the half-opened window of his room, the comings and goings in the courtyard. Some two hours previously he had seen Spahl come through the gate on foot and cross to his own room, where he had remained—no doubt to keep watch too. He had seen Palmer leave, also on foot, which meant he would be making for the mound. Palmer had been wearing a cartridge belt with a revolver in the holster, the first time Manning had known him to do this. He had also been carrying a small knapsack. He would be going to relieve Somerville, who had not returned with the others. But an hour or so later he had come back alone, this time without the knapsack or the belt or revolver. So Somerville had been unwilling to leave the site. Was it possible they only had one revolver between them? Since Elliott had let fall the fact that he was carrying the report on him, the major had become absorbed to the point of obsession in surmising the motives of everyone as well as observing everyone’s movements, as if something missed might give Elliott a crucial advantage. The American was cunning, as criminals often were; he might have made that declaration at breakfast with the idea of acting as a decoy, getting them to track him to some preselected place where he could lie in wait and ambush them; the major included Spahl in these speculations because though not on the same side they were on the same quest. Or then again he might have said it to make them suspect that very thing and slow them down, whereas his real aim was simply to make a run for it at the earliest possible opportunity.

Elliott had kept to his room after luncheon. But now, shortly before, he had suddenly emerged in shirtsleeves, with a towel over his shoulder and made his way across to one of the two bathhouses, which were in the far corner of the courtyard on the side farthest from the gate. Before setting off, Manning noted, he checked his window fastenings and locked his door, slipping the key into his trouser pocket. He was followed almost at once by a house servant carrying two buckets of water from which a thin steam rose and lingered in the windless air.

The bathhouses were in an awkward place; it was only possible for Manning to keep them under surveillance by leaning well out of his window. He saw the houseboy return without the buckets; then he sat back to await the American’s return.

But the next person to come to Elliott’s door was not Elliott but the Arab who acted as his interpreter. This man knocked repeatedly on the door and called, “Mr. Elliott, sir!” several times, getting no answer.

Manning emerged from his room and walked over to him, “No use knocking,” he said, “he’s having a shower.” But even as he spoke a terrible suspicion came to him. He went quickly across to the bathhouse Elliott had entered and pushed the door open. There was no one there. The two buckets, still faintly steaming, stood on the wooden boards. He ran back to the interpreter, who was still calling, “Mr. Elliott, sir!” He saw Palmer and Mrs. Somerville emerge from their separate rooms to see what the disturbance was.

“Two months’ wages!” the interpreter said. “He has gone without paying me.” It was clear from his voice and his face that he was close to tears. “He took me from my home and my family,” he said. “What shall we do now? How shall I feed my children?” He spoke English well, with an American accent.

“He can’t get far,” Manning said. “Not on foot and dressed like that.”

“He can get far, sir, he can get very far. One of the horses, the one he uses, is missing.”

Manning fought down his agitation, summoning his military training to his aid. Assess the situation; ascertain the direction of enemy fire; issue your orders. The bathhouse was in that part of the courtyard farthest from the gate, nearest the stockade where the horses were kept. This stockade was not visible from his room. The horse would have been already prepared and saddled, ready to be led quietly away, just in those few minutes, as he had sat back and waited. Elliott would have known he was not being watched; he would have seen I was not leaning out… It was quite in keeping with the blackguard’s character that he should decamp without paying his dues. To cheat a servant like this! It was late, darkness would fall before very long, but Elliott could not be far ahead, not more than ten minutes.

Spahl, who also kept his window open, had heard this knocking and calling, had seen Manning emerge from his room and question the man at Elliott’s door. He knew the man for Elliott’s interpreter, knew that he slept in the servants’ quarters and accompanied Elliott on his expeditions. He had heard almost everything the man said, as he had spoken in loud and tearful tones. Manning had said little, but Spahl had noted his haste to get out one of the horses.

He would follow, at some distance, keeping Manning in sight. He was a colder-blooded man than the major, less nervy, and he had been on missions of a similar sort before. He knew his duty, but it was more of the bureaucratic than the patriotic sort. The one who lay third always had the advantage. He would let Manning bear the brunt. If the Englishman came off worse, Spahl was confident he could still deal with Elliott at either long range or short; if, on the other hand, Manning succeeded, he could kill him and so obtain the report. If Elliott escaped them both, it would represent a failure and it would go against him. But life was a mixed bag of failures and successes after all. The main thing was to come out with a whole skin.

When, as expected, Spahl had set off after Manning, Alawi waited some minutes, then went to join Elliott, who was comfortably seated in the space between the rear side of the bathhouse and the stockade wall, quite invisible to view. Night was not far off now; the brief Mesopotamian dusk would soon be upon them. Their horses, already saddled by Alawi and loaded with the things they would need for the journey, were waiting beyond the gate, on the side away from the track to the mound. Alawi had advised the major to take this track. Being alone, he had said, Elliott would risk the open country as little as possible; he would make for the Khabur River and hire a boat to take him down to the Euphrates. When they had discussed the way they would go back to Aleppo when the work was done, this was the route they had planned to take. They had planned it, he said, and now this man he had trusted had treated him thus.

Manning followed this advice and Spahl followed Manning. Meanwhile the man they were hunting, with his friend and associate at his side, the report securely buttoned in the breast pocket of his shirt, was heading in quite the opposite direction.

Somerville had not wanted to leave the site or even to move away from the burial chamber. He had not wanted to return to the house for long enough to put the money together to make the advance payment Jehar had asked for—one-half of the total. He had given him only what he had in his pocket, twelve gold pounds in coin and a handful of gurush. Jehar had been magnanimous; he had found it an occasion to show greatness of soul. He knew the khwaja was a man of honor, a man of his word; was he not an English lord? Jehar was content to wait for the money. He had promoted himself on the spot; it was an agreement between gentlemen.

Somerville did not want to think about Jehar and strove to put the man’s jubilant face out of his mind, together with all speculation about the time Jehar would choose and the manner of the thing. While he kept his thoughts on the momentous discovery he had made—his, it was his, he had seen the shape of the shaft—he could be convinced that he was justified. He had chosen to believe Jehar’s assurances that no one would be hurt.

The boards were over the entrance to the anteroom, and the stone doors that gave admittance to the tomb were drawn together to allow the passage of only one man at a time. He felt secure here; there was nowhere for the moment he would rather be, except perhaps at the Royal Society in London astounding everyone with his revelations. He had the bread and cheese and dried dates that Palmer had brought; he had brandy in a metal hip flask; he had the revolver and the cartridges. He was not much used to firearms but felt, at these close quarters and with the advantage of surprise, more than a match for anyone who came through the narrow aperture into the tomb.

He went to the sarcophagus, looked down at the skulls side by side on their headrest, felt again the curious readiness that skeletons have, the promise of alacrity they show, as if waiting for a call. More suggestion of life in them than there would be in corpses, much more, he thought. Even corpses mummified. The relation between them would almost certainly never be known. Close they must have been, for the king to break with custom and share his death space with her. If she had died on his orders as a forced companion on his journey to the Underworld, or died at the decree of custom, he would not have done this. They had waited together for the approach of the fire, for the end they knew was coming, and when it came, they had died together and the fire had not touched them. The palace apartments, yes—there were the weeping eyes of the lion of empire, the ash and clay compacted in the stone relief of the guardian of the portals, the thick layer of ash that had covered the platform, with the scraps of furniture mixed in it. But the invaders had missed this place; the Babylonians had not encountered the stare of their god.

Not love as we would understand it, not romantic love. But something no less potent. She had been faithful to the death. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was swept by mingled feelings of envy and grief. She had followed him through defeat and hazardous flight and through the years of obscurity and exile, a failed king… Together they had escaped the fire, and together they had lain inviolate here through the centuries. Through me they will be kept alive, he vowed to himself, alive and intact for all the time that is left for people to wonder at such things.

The sound of horses, as first Manning and then Spahl passed along the track, did not come to him down there.

The main problem for Jehar lay in choosing the right time to force the lock and steal the dynamite. The day he would do it was never in question; it was today, the first one, now. But he had to find an hour between the end of work at the sheds and the onset of darkness; he did not dare to show a light, there were people too close.

From a point on the eastern side of the mound he watched and waited. There was already some graining of darkness in the air when the last of the workmen left. By good fortune, the night guard’s shack was well behind the sheds, out of the way; he would not begin his rounds—if he began them at all—until night was well advanced.

He had taken the measure of the lock days before, even before making his proposal. He was armed with what he needed, a short spike with one end flattened and an iron bar. One of the few truthful things he had said to Somerville was that he had experience of breaking locks. A certain amount of noise was unavoidable. He hoped the watchman would not hear; if he did, and came to investigate, Jehar knew he would have to kill him, and for this purpose he had a third essential tool: the knife he wore at his belt below the loose-fitting smock.

But no mishap of this sort occurred. He sprang open the lock, entered the shed, and took what he needed without impediment. The dynamite was in boxes lined with thick cloth. He had a canvas bag slung to his body for the blasting caps and the fuses. There was still light enough to see by as he made his way to the preselected place, a shallow declivity immediately below the line of the sheds. He had already, the night before, covered from view by the forward bank of this ditch, worked patiently to make recesses in this bank where the dynamite, bound in bundles of ten sticks, could be inserted and packed around. Three of these holes he had made, at intervals of twenty paces. It was a heavy charge of explosive, but he was resolved to make a thorough job of it and so be sure of his money.

It was now, in a certain way, that Jehar began to pay the price for having turned his life into a story. He had not spoken the truth when he told Somerville that he had great experience in the laying of explosives. In fact he had none at all. It was like the boat building on the Great River that was to be the foundation of his and Ninanna’s fortunes; he had never done it, but more than once he had seen it done. He had watched while they inserted the blasting caps and while they placed the fuse into the neck of the cap when it was in place. He knew that the fuse had to be squeezed and crimped when this was done in order to ensure a tight fit. And he knew the dangers of this; he had once seen a man squeeze the explosive instead of the end of the cap and get his hand and forearm blown off. He knew too that the fuse had to be dry and cut level to avoid friction and that great care had to be taken to avoid cracking the outer covering. He did not know what was inside the blasting cap or the fuse or the explosive itself, but he did not need to know these things.

What he needed to know was what Elliott, now some miles away, could have told him: that petroleum is generally less dense than the rock that surrounds it, that it will flow upward to the earth’s surface through whatever cracks and pores and fractures it can find, that it sometimes reaches a containing enclosure beneath a layer of impermeable rock and that as this sedimentary layer builds up it presses down on the fluid trap below, creating a condition known as overpressure. Elliott might also have added that such overpressured pockets often contain quantities of gas and might lie close to the surface, in which case they are unpredictable and liable to cause violent eruptions, and that the risk of this is even greater where rivulets of salt water through layers of limestone have dissolved the rock and over long periods of time created a hidden and unsuspected underground landscape of caves and corridors.

It was in happy ignorance of these facts that Jehar now began to position his fuses.

_____

Darkness was falling as Manning rode along the track that ran past the mound toward the German railway sheds. He was beginning to despair now; before long it would be impossible to see anything clearly. The swine had given them the slip; by morning he would be beyond pursuit.

Then, just ahead of him, he saw a figure in movement, head and shoulders only visible, the rest concealed below some dip or hollow in the ground. The figure appeared to be wearing an Arab headdress. Manning, his mind overheated by the violent reversals of the afternoon, remembered the towel Elliott had carried over his shoulder and came to the immediate conclusion that Elliott had used this same towel to disguise himself as an Arab and was now preparing an ambush. At once he dismounted and crept some yards forward, his rifle at the ready. When he came upon a low ridge that offered some cover he went down flat. The movements of the figure were inexplicable. He saw a brief glow of light, then another. “Elliott!” he shouted. “Stand still and come toward me with your hands up.” The contradiction in these orders was not immediately apparent to him. “I want that report!” he shouted.

But instead of obeying, Elliott began to run away, like the coward he was.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Manning shouted.

Jehar understood this; the earlier words had been incomprehensible to him. He understood his danger. But he could not obey because he had lit the fuses and they were less than the span of a man’s arm in length. So he went on running, and after a moment more Manning shot him.

Spahl, also lying flat, was close by. Following at a distance he had seen Manning dismount, and he had followed suit. He had been able to get near enough to hear the major’s shouted orders and the shot that shortly followed. Evidently Elliott had been hit. This assumption was confirmed a moment or two later when he saw Manning get up and move forward, obviously intending to recover the report. He was training his rifle on the major when a sound louder than any he had heard in his life before stunned and deafened him: A great gout of fire rose high into the air; fire from the base of this fountain streamed toward him like a river in spate, scorching his face and hands, half blinding him. He saw the major stand clear and distinct for one moment, enveloped, like a genie of the fire. Then he was no more. Spahl turned to run, but he could not see where he was going. He knew his clothes were on fire and he knew he was screaming. His rifle writhed and twisted where he had let it fall. The burning stream, traveling now at an appalling speed, caught him, engulfed him, seemed to lift him a little, then let the carbonized remains fall.

Somerville heard the tremendous roar of the gushing oil and gas without knowing what it was. It seemed in these first moments like the feared arrival of the locomotive train, multiplied a thousand times. He went through the aperture in the doorway, moved aside the boards that covered the entrance to the anteroom, and began to mount the steps he had discovered so recently and with such joy. The sound grew louder, deafening. He became aware of intense heat and a terrible stench of decay as if some huge creature were rotting somewhere in the night above him. Looking upward, he saw a flare of light half muffled in black smoke. He had some confused notion of retreating, as if to find safety in the tomb, but even as he turned to descend again the river of fire found the entrance to the shaft and the trenches, swooped down upon him in a threefold stream, consumed him in seconds as he stood there, swallowed up the god Marduk in the anteroom, surged through the opening in the stone doors, flooded into the burial chamber, melted the alabaster vases in the alcoves, swept stinking and shrieking into the sarcophagus, and—in less time than it would take a moth to die in a candle flame—put an end to the long and patient vigil of the bones.