Land of Marvels

Afterword

It was never discovered who had laid the charge of dynamite and for what purpose. The only two people who could have explained this were both dead. No evidence of theft remained, as the railway sheds were completely destroyed and their contents scattered over a wide area and largely submerged in the tide of oil, which had also killed the night watchman as he dozed in his shack.

Manning and Spahl had been seen setting off for the mound, and it was assumed that they too had died in the inferno, though no trace of them or their horses was ever found. Why they had taken that route, one following behind the other, at that time of day, remained a mystery. Elliott and his interpreter had disappeared at the same time, and there was some speculation between Palmer and Patricia, recalling how close the three men had been, almost inseparable, about a possible plot among them that had somehow gone wrong. But then Hassan, the boy who kept the gate, had come forward to say that he had seen Elliott and Alawi ride off in the opposite direction.

The fame Somerville had failed to find in his lifetime did not come after his death either, though the cataclysmic manner of it, assumed as this had to be—no mortal remains were ever found—together with the expert testimony of Palmer, became elements in the general feeling of apocalypse that pervaded Europe in the months before the war, featured prominently in the press for some days, and provided material for at least one novel. Gaining any general belief in what had been found in the tomb itself was another matter, for the obvious reason that nothing of it was left. Palmer had taken photographs, so much was true, but photographs can be faked, as everyone knows; in terms of what could be recorded, there had been some interesting finds, certainly, but nothing so very remarkable. What chiefly remained was a story, sensational in its nature and so arousing skepticism in the sober world of Mesopotamian archaeology, of the last days of the last Assyrian king. But the story survived the skepticism, as such stories will; in the years that followed an aura of mystery and glamour continued to surround the ultimate fate of Sin-shar-ishkun.

Though cheated of the recognition he had wanted, Somerville achieved a sort of posthumous heroism in Edith’s eyes. She married again a few years later—a rising barrister, much resembling her father—but she always remembered how splendid John had been that afternoon, standing beside the skeletons that lay side by side in their coffin amid the scattered jewels, how he had compelled them all, even the odious Elliott. She was glad to think that she had praised him and kissed him on that last day of his life and that she had showed him her admiration for his great enterprise of retelling the history of Assyria. And as the years passed this gladness came to cast a more tender light on their marriage and she grew to believe that she had always supported him, always been staunchly at his side through all the ups and downs of his career.

Palmer and Patricia became Mr. and Mrs. Harold Palmer that summer. They were married in July, just two weeks before the German invasion of Belgium and the British declaration of war. Palmer surprised everyone—himself included—by volunteering for the army. After two years of war as an infantry officer he had his right kneecap shattered by shrapnel from an artillery shell, and the wound left him with a slight limp. He did not return to field archaeology, for which he had never felt much vocation, resuming his career at the British Museum, where he became a senior curator specializing in Akkadian and Babylonian inscriptions. His new translation of the Gilgamesh Epic was widely praised, and it was followed by a collection of Sumerian hymns. Patricia spent a good deal of time during the war years on committees of one sort or another, concerned with various projects to raise funds for the war effort. They had several children, who all grew up to exercise the vote, independent of gender. Sometimes, when some reference was made to the ill-fated excavation at Tell Erdek, Palmer would shake his head and say always the same thing: “Poor fellow, he was so afraid of the railway, but if it hadn’t been for that terrible accident he would have had all the time in the world to get the stuff out, he would have had the whole season.” And this of course was true; by the outbreak of war, which called a halt to it, the line had only got as far as Rais el-Ain, still a dozen miles away.

Ninanna never knew why Jehar failed to return to her. Her life seemed gray without him. The town of Deir ez-Zor soon lost its ravishing colors; only the warmth of his voice had kept them glowing and beautiful. The fat and greedy Pasha, the strangely haunted Englishman, the white minarets and green fields and fountains and birds, soon became like a dream only half remembered. She wept for Jehar, but he had made her a great gift before he went away: He had given her a love of stories. And when a group of Lutheran missionaries, escorted by fervent and heavily armed converts, came to the yards at Jerablus and spoke to people in Arabic, she found the story of Christ, with its drama of betrayal and sacrifice and resurrection, very gripping indeed, and she became a Christian. So devout was she, so eager for repeated tellings of this story, that they engaged her as a native helper and offered to take her back with them to their mission house at Mardin. The uncle opposed this, but since he could produce no evidence of legal right over her, his opposition was easily overcome. At the mission house they taught her to read. She was not a clever girl, but she tried hard and made progress. It was thought for a while that her experience of waiting at table might be put to good use in a very special hotel they were planning to build. But the war came, and the site they had chosen was the scene of great carnage when a regiment of Ottoman troops were taken by surprise and massacred almost to a man by an attack from the air. The site was devastated, pitted with craters made by the bombs. This in itself would not have been reason enough to abandon the plan—the ground might have been leveled out again; the corpses were soon devoured by vultures and crows, and anything of value carried off by looters—but the Society for Biblical Research was riddled with factions, and there was a sizable minority of members who maintained that the Swedes had made a gross blunder, that the site of the Garden of Eden was not in Mesopotamia at all but in Azerbaijan and that God had wished to reveal this error before the hotel could be built by sending a strong message. Passions ran high; there was danger of a schism. Moreover, the markets were uncertain in these postwar years, and the society was experiencing difficulty in raising the capital needed on sufficiently favorable terms. So in the end the idea was dropped.

Elliott and Alawi bade each other farewell when they reached Aleppo. Alawi stayed on there during the war years as an agent for various American business interests, among them the Chester Group. He prospered greatly, as these years saw an enormous expansion in American industry with a consequent need for raw materials from the Near East and for wider export markets—its exports rose tenfold in the course of the war. This vastly increased activity was also of great benefit to Elliott, who continued to work for the Chester Group when he returned to the United States. His report was duly delivered and provided an invaluable basis for preliminary estimates. His loyal service and the greatly increased value of his holding led in 1915 to his being invited to join the board of directors and increase his stock even further. By this time America had become one of the great creditor nations of the world. It was feared by some that this growing interest in the mineral resources of Mesopotamia would lead to political interference in the affairs of sovereign states and so to a policy of what was beginning to be called economic imperialism. But Elliott was too busy getting rich to think much about this.

Rampling learned in due course that Elliott had escaped the consequences of his treachery and had returned to his native land and the warm embrace of Standard Oil and the Chester Group. But Rampling was not a vindictive man, and he believed in the conserving of energy. The harm was done; there was no point in wasting further time on the matter. Disapproval of the American had been necessary during the time he was planning to have him killed. But if they had met now, he would have shaken Elliott by the hand and wished him well.

He was, in any case, extremely busy in these months, working out the financial terms for an agreement on the Baghdad Railway. He was on the brink of success when the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo.

Shared investment to protect, free competition, Rampling was always to maintain, might have saved the peace even then, had it not been for Austro-Hungarian arrogance and intransigence. But his true success, the accord for which he and his partners had been working in secret for several years, together with members of the government and the high military command, came in May 1916, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which defined British and French political and economic interests in the postwar period, when—as was hoped and believed—the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered. By this agreement Britain was to gain complete control over lower Mesopotamia from Tikrit to the Persian Gulf and from the Arabian boundary to the Persian frontier. This vast territory, which had never been home to a single nation, she was to rename Iraq.