Land of Marvels

3.

In late afternoon the foremen’s whistles sounded, and Somerville, accompanied by Palmer and by his secretary, Gregory, began the checking of the finds, moving from one gang to the next. Gregory had his own secretary in attendance, a proudly smiling boy named Yusuf, whose special duty it was to bear the pen and the large red account book. Bringing up the rear were two men, one with a wicker basket, the other with a number of small boxes, not regular jobs these, but assigned from day to day and much coveted—the standard rate was three piastres per man.

At his approach the groups stopped work and squatted in a line. He began always with the senior member, the pickman, first inquiring the name.

“Qasmagi?”

“Daud Muhammad.”

“What have you got?”

Daud Muhammad had the handle and lower part of a large terra-cotta pot with a crude design of crosses incised around the base, some very small pieces of copper beaten out flat, fragments of painted pottery, and the bone haft of a knife much chipped away.

The smaller things Somerville scrutinized briefly then cast aside, without regard for any hopes the pickman might have set on them. The bone implement went into one of the boxes; the pieces of pottery were placed in the basket. This done, he considered for some moments. It was general practice to pay baksheesh for objects found, in addition to the daily wage. It was an insurance against theft and encouraged the workpeople to keep their eyes open. And the possibility of some large reward appealed to the gambling instinct, strong in most Arabs. Baksheesh accounted for about 20 percent of the total wage bill. But it was always necessary to lend weight by a pause for consideration.

“Four piastres,” he said, in clear and distinct tones.

This was immediately repeated in a loud voice by the pickman, both as public acknowledgment and as an aid to memory. The pen and the account book were handed to Gregory; Yusuf crouched and presented his back so that the name and the amount could be entered. There were four Daud Muhammads working on the site, and some further name or distinguishing feature had to be added so as to avoid confusion. This one was Daud Muhammad the Pockmarked. At the end of the week Gregory would add up the amounts, a difficult and complicated feat of arithmetic, sometimes disputed by the men themselves if the total did not correspond to their memory of it.

Somerville repeated the procedure with the remaining members of the group before moving on. The basket people sometimes made small finds, beads, rings, seals—objects that had escaped the notice of the spademan when the baskets were being filled.

Moving from group to group, he worked his way up the side of the mound. There were more fragments of pottery, some lapis lazuli beads, an almost intact cylinder seal with a design of foliage on it. A better than usual day, nothing outstanding. The seal looked interesting, though it would need careful cleaning with a solution of alcohol before much could be known for sure about it.

“Where was this found?” he asked the spademan who had found it. The man pointed some yards to his right, on the eastern side of the mound, where a short lateral trench had been dug. It was in this area that the piece of ivory had been found.

Another group was working at the limit of this trench, and Somerville approached them now.

“Qasmagi?”

“Hassan Muhammad Ibrahim.”

“What have you got?”

But Hassan Muhammad did not answer at once, giving instead a broad and triumphant smile. There was a cloth at his feet as he squatted there, and he glanced down at this now, still delaying.

“What is it?” Palmer said. “What have you got?”

With the air of a conjurer the pickman drew the cloth away and lifted out with both hands a piece of stone, the shape of a narrow rectangle, broken at the edges, about a foot in length.

Somerville took it from him and looked down at it. It weighed less than he had expected, being no more than a couple of inches in thickness. Impacted clay obscured much of the detail, but he was looking at a fragment, part of some larger design, carved in low relief. He made out a descending curve, broken off at a point where it was growing steeper. A slight lump or protuberance, also broken off short, rested on the upper part of the curve. At a slightly lower level there was what looked like part of a two-stranded ring.

“Twenty-five piastres,” he said, and heard the sum repeated loudly by the jubilant pickman.

The rest of his rounds revealed nothing much, but he hardly noticed in any case, so taken up was he with thoughts of the stone. Could it have been quarried locally? It looked like gypsum, though the clay adhering to the surface made it difficult to be sure. Carved in relief, with that thickness, it could only have been part of a wall decoration…

He was still occupied with these speculations and the growing excitement that attended them when the workpeople began to disperse. The carving would have to be examined carefully before any conclusions could be reached, however tentative. He would have liked to set about this at once, but as always at the close of the day’s work there were various claims on his attention, small disputes to be settled, the finds to be taken to the house and laid out there. When these things had been seen to and he had washed and changed, it was time for dinner, which at this season took place in the dining room of the house, the evenings being still too cold after sundown to sit outside.

As almost always he was slightly late. A place had been left for him at the head of the table, facing the major, who sat at the foot, the same place he had occupied at breakfast. Somerville glanced around the table, saw that his wife was halfway down on the right, that his assistant and Patricia were side by side, as was now their usual practice.

This evening, however, he was not the last to arrive. He had barely taken his place when Fahir Bey, the commissioner appointed to report on the progress of the excavation, entered the room quickly and began shaking hands, bowing to the ladies, uttering apologies in his fluent and only slightly accented English for disturbing them at their meal. He had ridden over from Ras el-Ain, where his quarters were. He had intended to arrive earlier but had been delayed by official business at the last minute. He was introduced to the major, who responded stiffly and with what seemed to Somerville some increased bristling of the neatly trimmed mustache.

“Alas, our acquaintance will be short,” Fahir said. “You are leaving tomorrow, I understand.”

“How did you know that?”

Fahir had very dark eyes, and his eyebrows were jet black and arched in shapes so rounded and precise that they seemed artificial, as if painted on, giving him a theatrical look, strangely enhanced by the small, diagonal dueling scar on his left cheek. There was nothing theatrical now, however, in the way his smile faded and his eyes rested on the major’s face. “I was informed of it,” he said. “These are Ottoman lands, sir. A British officer, traveling here and there, seeking out the sheikhs, asking questions. Strange if we did not know when he arrived, when he is proposing to leave.”

“I am traveling with a pass issued by the Turkish authorities in Constantinople, sir. I am an officer of the Royal Engineers, engaged in the compiling of survey maps on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” Fahir said. “A very august body. For Damascus, is it not, by way of Palmyra and Homs? The Royal Geographical Society wishes to have survey maps of the desert?”

The major failed to reply to this, but the strain of his silence was relieved by Edith’s hospitable urging of the visitor to join them at table and the bustle of Ali, the houseboy, laying a place for him. The dinner was better than average this evening: a mutton broth, quite passable if somewhat too greasy; a salad of radishes and broccoli—plentiful at this season, though not for very long, in the riverbank gardens—followed by a brace of wild duck, shot that day by the cook himself, a man of uncertain temper named Subri. And they still, at this early stage, had a stock of Cypriot wine that had been brought down from Harran with other provisions at the beginning of the season.

Somerville thought it unlikely that Fahir would have done any better at home. He himself hardly noticed what he was served these days, distracted as he was by anxieties of one sort or another. But when there were guests or occasional visitors he felt in some measure responsible for the quality of the food, which quite often came out of tins. Fahir was to be regarded as a guest though he came at regular intervals, once every ten days or so. He had no need to come more often: He had abundant sources of information; any of the workpeople would be ready enough, for the sake of a few gurush, to tell him of significant finds. The site was leased in regular legal form, and the Ottoman state had given consent to the transport of antiquities out of imperial lands. But if objects of material value were found, it was uncertain how far this could be relied on; it was, after all, this same Ottoman state that had appointed Fahir to keep a careful eye on him. And then, of course, his lease counted for nothing, it was a useless scrap of paper, when set against the rights granted to the Germans in the railway concession, prospecting rights of twenty kilometers on either side of the line.

In an effort to drive away these thoughts, so painfully familiar, he glanced around the table. His wife was giving some instructions to Ali; Fahir was exchanging some smiling remarks with Patricia on his right; Palmer seemed to be saying something to the major, something about empires. The major himself had hardly spoken at all since Fahir’s arrival and their exchange of words. He had probably taken umbrage. Ridiculous if so, and extraordinarily arrogant. If a major in the Turkish Army, heavily escorted, were traveling about, questioning local chiefs and making maps in some part of the British Empire, some region of India, for example, he would have been at once arrested and locked up. Yet Manning assumed the right to do the same thing in Mesopotamia and seemed ready to take offense if the right was questioned. But of course he had a pass; that was the difference; anything could be bought in Constantinople these days, including licenses for spies.

There was a sudden lull in the conversation, and he could hear more clearly now what Palmer was saying: “A few centuries, yes, but that is not very long in the scale of things.”

It seemed he was referring to something Fahir had said earlier about the long subjection of Mesopotamia to Ottoman rule. Somerville saw Fahir look with sudden interest down the table. “But your British Empire is hardly more than a century old,” he said. “Too young to feel the touch of mortality.”

“Empires never do feel the touch of mortality, it seems to me,” Patricia said. “You might have individuals who see the writing on the wall, but the imperial power as such doesn’t seem able to read the signs, it hangs on for dear life and always ends in a bloody mess. I mean, look at the Romans.”

These remarks and the decided tone in which they were uttered and the way in which not only Palmer but her husband too gave them—and Patricia—their attention were all deeply provoking to Edith, further evidence of the girl’s presumption, her habit of intruding on the talk of men, not just with an expression of interest but with opinions of her own—and expressed with such definiteness, with such an absence of self-deprecation. It was so graceless. She had been too much indulged as a child, that was it, too much encouraged to show off; Edith had never liked to see little girls being trotted out to recite things and show how clever they were. She made up her mind to see less of Patricia’s mother when she got back to London.

Palmer raised his hands, made a gap between them, widened it slightly. “When it comes to empires,” he said, “a few centuries one way or another makes precious little difference. Anyone who excavates in this part of the world is likely to dig down through half a dozen, going back five thousand years at least.”

“And they all thought they’d last forever,” Patricia said, with an air of stoutly making her point.

“Only the most optimistic of my fellow countrymen would nurse such a belief at present.” Fahir smiled as he spoke but there was no intention of humor in his words. “We have too many friends, and they all want a piece of us,” he said. “Britain, France, Russia. The sick man of Europe, you call us. A term of contempt. But it also brings contempt on those who use it. What do you do with a man who is sick? Do you help him to get well or do you merely prop him up for long enough to go through his pockets, meanwhile uttering hypocritical expressions of goodwill? Only Germany is a true friend to us, and she has shown this in various ways, one of them the building of this railway.”

“Another is the training of your army,” the major said.

“So it is.” Fahir had been a cavalry officer, and he made no secret of the fact that he had completed his training in Germany, where he had also acquired the scar. “Now there is no need for our junior officers to go to Berlin,” he said. “The German instructors are here among us.”

The major tightened his mouth in a way more protracted than usual. “Britain is a friend to Turkey,” he said. “We are doing everything in our power to safeguard Turkey’s territorial integrity. You only have to look at the settlement signed by our governments last October, scarcely five months ago, when agreement was reached on a whole range of matters, the Baghdad Railway among them.”

“This whole range of matters were mainly concessions Turkey was obliged to make. As for the railway, you got what you wanted, the right to control the construction from Baghdad to Basra and the right of veto for any extension of the line to the Persian Gulf.”

“A triumph of diplomacy,” the major said.

“Some might find other terms for it. Diplomacy works best for those who have the strong cards. You British speak often of the sacrifices you are making for the sake of Turkey. What sacrifice have you made in order to obtain these rights in the railway? You have declared yourselves willing to increase by four percent the duties on goods entering the Ottoman possessions. Such staggering generosity. What other imperial power is obliged to permit foreign nations to determine her customs dues? Major Manning, we Turks do not deceive ourselves. We know we need foreign capital and foreign technical assistance. We know that we have to pay a price for these, that we risk losing control of our possessions in the Near East. We see that the British have designs on Mesopotamia as far as Basra, the French have their eyes on Syria, the Russians are seeking to absorb Armenia. He would be a great fool who did not know these things.”

A sudden anger had come into his voice with these last words, and Palmer, perhaps feeling himself to blame for having started this dispute, now made an attempt to shift the focus of the conversation. “Of course,” he said, “for an archaeologist only dead empires are interesting, and the longer dead the better.”

It was not the most tactful of interventions, and it came too late in any case. Somerville was beginning to say something when Manning cut across him. He was looking at Fahir with unconcealed hostility. “That is a gross misrepresentation of my government’s policies,” he said.

Fahir’s hostility was no less evident, but it came with a slight smile and a pretense of ironic detachment. “Your government’s policies are the same as those of any other government, to protect your interests and extend them where possible by any means available.”

Edith Somerville now—and rather belatedly—remembered the words of her mother. If there is disagreement at a dinner table and if this is tending to be expressed other than politely and urbanely, it is always the fault of the hostess. But she had been stimulated and in a way roused by this quarreling, which had something noble in it to her mind, being due not merely to personal antipathy but to patriotic feeling. There was passion in both men and it warmed her like a fire. In another age they might have fought a duel. She preferred the major’s repressed rage to Fahir’s irony, but that was a question of taste. And she was on the side of Britain anyway, and proud of the British Empire, which everyone knew was the greatest the world had ever seen. All the same, the two could not be allowed to go on looking at each other like this. She cast around in her mind for a way of smoothing things over.

“But this railway,” she said, “surely it only benefits those who have put their money in it and then hope to make a profit from the price of the tickets.”

It worked, as it generally did. Both Fahir and the major were immediately eager to enlighten her, as were the other men at the table, so much so that several spoke together. Fahir’s was the voice that prevailed, perhaps through a tacit recognition that he was the one most entitled to speak of the benefits to Turkey of a line that was designed to pass exclusively over Turkish imperial possessions.

He spoke eloquently of these benefits. With improved communications the huge resources of minerals and metals in eastern Anatolia could be fully exploited, the copper mines of Diabekir, the meerschaum quarries near Eskishehir—practically a world monopoly—the coalfields already producing half a million tons a year. Then there was the increased prosperity that would come from exploiting the agricultural resources of Mesopotamia, the foreign investment that would follow upon the large-scale irrigation projects. In remote antiquity the Land of the Two Rivers had been an important center of cotton production, and there was no reason why this industry should not be revived. The climate was ideal. Mesopotamia could be one of the world’s great cotton-growing regions. Grain too. Once the effects of irrigation and the railway were realized, Anatolia, northern Syria, and Mesopotamia, taken together, would export more grain than Russia…

“All this will come from the railway,” Fahir said. “It will be of the greatest benefit to everyone. The foreign powers will obtain concessions to prospect and develop, the Turkish state will have direct trade routes from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople and so to the Black Sea. The local populations will see their standard of living tripled within three years of the completion of the line.”

Fahir’s eyes glowed as he looked around the table. “A truly international enterprise,” he said. “Foreign investment, local industry, a process of mutual enrichment practically unlimited. The railway will usher in a golden age of prosperity to these lands.”

There was nothing forced or consciously exaggerated in these words, or so at least it seemed to Somerville, who had not seen this fervor in Fahir before and would not have believed it could exist in him. All his habitual irony had dissolved in this vision of paradise, this process of mutual enrichment, continuous, without end; it was as if his own words had transformed him even as he spoke them. A sense of marvelous possibility or a genuine belief that these things, in a Europe so divided, would come to pass? It was impossible to know; Fahir himself would not know. Perhaps no more than a dream of water to a man with a thirst. He was a servant of the Ottoman state, devoted in his way. Now, after the centuries of domination, the empire of the Osmanli Turks was slipping away. When our grip on power is loosening, we will fall back on what is second best, visions of cooperation and mutual benefit…

Somerville felt himself convicted of meanness and smallness. He could not share this hope in the future. The wealth was there and the lure of it was real enough. But those who financed and controlled the line were unlikely to have the well-being of local populations or the integrity of the Ottoman Empire high among their priorities. In any case, whatever the intricate pattern of desires and hopes that accompanied the railway, whatever wealth it might bring, his own view of it was starkly simple: It was threatening to put an end to his excavation and with that deal a mortal blow to his whole career.

“Quite a speech,” Palmer said a little later, after Fahir had retired for the night. “He forgot to mention a few things, though.” His face wore its usual expression of cheerful skepticism. “He forgot to mention one of the chief Turkish interests in the railway, which is to be able to move troops and munitions speedily to the head of the Persian Gulf and threaten British communications with India in the event of war. Quite a few things he forgot to mention, actually. There are substantial deposits of chrome ore in Cilicia, and the line passes close by them. If you have it in mind to manufacture armor-piercing shells, you need chrome.”

“Well, it’s the Germans who are building the line,” Patricia said. “I suppose they would like to get their hands on the chrome too. I mean, if Turkey needs foreign capital to help with her cotton industry, she needs it just as much to help her make jolly good hand grenades and stuff like that.”

Palmer and she were very much alike, Somerville thought, very well matched. They talked the same language. Both took a sort of glee in deflating high-flown sentiments. A glee not shared by Edith, who would find it mean-spirited and cynical, she would probably be striving to shut the girl’s words out. There were just the four of them now, after dinner; they had moved into the sitting room, where a wood fire was burning. Somerville and the younger people sat close to the hearth, and Edith was a little farther off, in her favorite armchair, reading by the light of an oil lamp on the table beside her.

“How did you know about this chrome business?” Somerville asked.

“Financial pages of the Times,” Palmer said. “If you want to know how things are going, keep an eye on the market for metals. Better than a hundred so-called authoritative editorials. The prices of certain metals have been increasing steadily for months now. All the international accords and treaties and high-sounding assurances haven’t made a scrap of difference. Lead, chrome, zinc, antimony in particular.”

He paused for a moment for effect, then straightened his back and adopted an oracular manner. “My friends, I put it to you, what have these metals in common? Bear with me, and I will tell you. They are all found in substantial quantities in Turkish Asia, and they are all very important for the manufacture of field guns and armor plate.”

Somerville glanced across at his wife, who had not looked up from her book during this conversation. She was rereading one of her favorite novels, Scott’s Rob Roy, one of a stock she had brought with her, all of which she had read before, not once but several times. The slightly flickering light cast by the lamp gleamed on her lowered head, the fair tresses at her temples. She was sitting with her legs drawn up beneath the long skirt of her dress. She never sprawled or slumped or adopted ungainly postures, unlike Patricia in this; some principle or instinct of grace informed all her movements. Grace and decorum together—the combination had moved him from the beginning, from the days of their courtship, with something dutiful in it, almost childlike, as if some silent appeal for approval were being made. He had the same feeling, though aware of a lack in logical connection, about her habit of reading novels that were already deeply familiar to her, a habit that she must have had already in adolescence.

The fire flared suddenly, distracting his attention. Fuel was brought to the house by an old man, slightly lame, who had somehow secured a monopoly. He brought dried camel dung, dead sticks from the undergrowth of the riverbanks, wood brought down in the winter floods, which he gathered and dried for them. Some of these pieces had lain in the swamps of pitch before being borne away, and this long ooze of pitch had penetrated to the heart of the wood. These pieces would flare up when the flame had devoured the outer part, and for some moments jets of pale blue and orange and gold would lick eagerly around them, as if in some fierce joy of release, a voracity short-lived but somehow startling.

“You promised to explain to me how the picture signs developed into writing,” Patricia said to Palmer, in the tone of one who is sure that a promise will be kept.

“So I did. We’ll need some paper and a pencil. Let’s sit over here.”

Edith Somerville raised her head to watch the pair seat themselves at the small square table that was sometimes used for bridge when there were people who cared to play. Then she looked at her husband and smiled, but it did not seem to Somerville there was much amusement in this smile or any warmth for him. More like resignation, he thought. He said, rather awkwardly, “I’d better get along, before I fall asleep by the fire. I’ve got one or two things to see to.”

The quality of his wife’s smile did not change with these words. She made no reply but nodded a little and after a moment returned to her book, leaving him with a vague sense of discomfiture at his own awkwardness, at the constraint that had settled between them, making him feel obliged to announce his purposes, as if he couldn’t get out of the room without doing so. He wondered if she had noticed it, his explaining of presences and absences, a sort of politeness that belonged to strangers rather than to man and wife. If so, she gave no sign. She was not herself more explanatory than before, and this too troubled him, like a lack of sympathy.

But as the door closed behind him, all thoughts of Edith, all sense of the scene he was leaving, were immediately erased from his mind, replaced by the image of the carved stone they had found that day, which he was on his way now to look at.

“I’ll try to give you an idea of the signs in a minute,” Palmer said. “But just to go into the background a bit, the key to it all is the cuneiform script.”

“I know that means wedge-shaped.” Patricia smiled and shrugged her shoulders a bit. “It’s just about all I do know.”

“The shape was accidental in a way. It’s all down to the humble reed, which is what they used for writing. It was cut on a slant, so the marks it made were wedge-shaped. Trace the development of cuneiform, and you follow the whole course of Mesopotamian civilization. The earliest examples we know of are in Sumerian and date to about three thousand years before Christ. We can read Sumerian now, but no one knows for sure where the language came from. Anyway, this way of writing spread very quickly and was taken over by people with languages entirely different from Sumerian, by the Hittites, for example, whose language was Indo-European, and by the Semitic invaders of Mesopotamia, the Akkadians, who passed it on to the Syrians and Babylonians. It was still being used at the beginning of the Christian Era. Three thousand years, not bad for a system of writing, is it? Empires die young by comparison. I should have pointed that out to Fahir. Are we disturbing your reading? If so, we can push off somewhere else.”

“No, not at all,” Edith said. “I wasn’t trying to read actually. I was listening to what you were saying.” They would be glad to be alone together, she knew that. “My eyes are getting tired in any case,” she said. “I am going to bed soon.”

“John must have told you all about cuneiform writing long ago.”

“Yes, but his main interest doesn’t lie there, as you know. That’s why he is so glad to have you with him. By nature he is a digger and searcher, a man of action really.”

She paused for a moment, aware of having spoken more in belittlement of Palmer than in any spirit of praise for her husband. “He can’t read the original inscriptions,” she said, “so he doesn’t get so excited about them as you do.”

In fact it had been Palmer’s lack of excitement that had struck her in listening. She had not taken much to him from the start, disliking his jocularity, which she thought rather common, his way of questioning and undermining things, the lack of fire in him. He saw everything from below, from ground level, toad’s level; there was no splendidness in him. His present behavior confirmed her in this opinion. The girl was hanging on his words; you only needed to look at her face to see that. He was the authority; he was in control; he had an intimate knowledge of what he was talking about. Yet he had not tried in the least to be fascinating, to exercise what Edith thought of as the male prerogative, the communication of power and strength and passionate certainty. Instead he had spoken with a sort of casual, confiding friendliness, as if he were telling her about a book he had read or a place he had been to and she hadn’t.

The man had devoted practically the whole of his adult life, all the years since leaving Oxford, to these studies that he spoke of now so flatly! She simply could not understand it. How different from John in the days of their courtship, when he had outlined his plans and ambitions to her. How inspiring he had been with his passion for Mesopotamia, carrying her along with him on a tide of great designs and bold projects, and how she had admired him for giving up that pettifogging business and devoting himself to his heart’s desire. She had responded to his ardor with all the ardor of her nature. Follow the dream, that was it. In the destructive element immerse. How true that was. Lord Jim was one of the novels she had brought with her. Palmer was too pedestrian, too lacking in impulse, to have even the merest notion of such a thing.

“Well, good night,” she said. “I’ll toddle off to bed.”

Palmer waited till the door had closed behind her, then took up the pencil and drew the sheet of paper toward him with an air of relief. “Well,” he said, “in the very earliest tablets, let’s say around 3000 B.C., the sign for a star was like this, sort of an asterisk made with six lines of equal thickness and length, scratched in the clay with some sharp instrument, no wedge shape at all. Come round the table a bit so you can see better. It’s what they call a pictograph, the picture represents the object. Now look at this, a few hundred years later, in what they call the Third Dynasty of Ur, the period of Akkadian domination. It still has the same form, still six lines, but the three upper ones end in wedge shapes. Now if we come to more recent times, say about 700 B.C., the great age of Assyria, it looks like this.”

The two were sitting shoulder to shoulder now, and Palmer’s pencil was busy.

“But it’s totally different,” Patricia said. “It’s nothing like a star now. Just a simple cross with the wedge shape on the side instead of at the top.”

“Yes, that’s right, it has turned through ninety degrees. All the cuneiform signs went through this change, for reasons that are not altogether clear to us. And at the same time they got more and more abstract, less and less like the original object. And they started to take on additional meanings. A bowl was still a bowl, but it could also mean food or bread, depending on the context. Two lateral lines meant a stream, but when they became vertical they could also mean a seed or a father or a son.”

“And what does this one mean now?”

“Well, it still means star, but it can also be read as sky or God.”

“I think the whole thing is absolutely fascinating,” Patricia said.

“Do you really?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Some people find it boring. Edith, for instance.”

“Well, I don’t. Edith doesn’t go into things very much, does she? She hasn’t got much concentration, have you noticed? The whole course of human thought is there in those signs, the whole process of learning. From object to symbol, it’s an essential step; we can’t emerge from childhood without making it. No child at school today could learn to read or add up without it.”

They were still sitting shoulder to shoulder, their upper arms touching. Palmer put the pencil down without shifting his position. For some moments he maintained a deliberate silence. Patricia did not look at him, but she did not move away. He felt love and desire gather within him, furthered by silence, indistinguishable one from another. Object and symbol, he thought. Yes. He had known this girl only three weeks. “I am glad you feel like that about it,” he said in a voice that was slightly husky. “It matters a lot to me. To tell you the truth, it has been my whole life up to now. Will you marry me?”

The piece of carved stone lay flat on the table where he had left it. He carried the lamp over and stood looking down. The carving was in shallow relief, and the incisions were impacted with clay, making the detail difficult to distinguish clearly. He noticed now that the clay was speckled with a grayish powder; in some places it was more than a speckling, it was a thick admixture, very hard to the touch. He took the eyeglass from his pocket and looked closely at this filling, which brought the cuts in the stone to the same plane as the surface. Something that had been compounded with the clay from the beginning perhaps… Then it came to him: It was the dust of wood ash, the same stuff he had found in the roots of the Nubian’s hair, in the eyes and the ears of the lion; that had been more bluish in color, but it was the same stuff.

It would not brush out, it was too hard packed. He went to the long table where various instruments and cleaning materials were laid out, returned with tweezers, a thin scalpel, a dentist’s pick. Slowly, very carefully, he began to scrape out the filling of clay. Some he put in a jar for laboratory analysis when they returned to London; they had no facilities for it where they were. The traces remaining in the incisions and in the texture of the surface he removed with a weak solution of hydrochloric acid and a soft cloth, working patiently and with great care.

It was well after midnight by the time he finished. He could see the line of the curve clearly now, and the forward-slanting protuberance at the top, where the stone was broken, not a boss, as he had thought at first, but the stump of something that had been longer. The double band of the ring was some nine inches to the left of this, slightly lower down. But it would be on a level, he thought, with the lower part of the curve if this were continued downward. The curve and the stump and the ring, taken together, reminded him of something…

Without much sense of decision, as if moving under some gently exercised propulsion, he got up and made his way across the near corner of the silent courtyard to the drawing office. Here he provided himself with a pencil, some sheets of plain paper, and a square of tracing paper. As he returned with these, the silence that hung over the courtyard and the unaccustomed lateness of the hour brought about a feeling of excitement in him, as if this were an escapade of some kind, something so far out of the common as to seem reckless, even illicit.

Seated again in the workroom, he laid the tracing paper over the stone and lightly traced out the lines of the carving, taking care to keep the spaces and proportions exact. This done, pressing down hard with his pencil, he made an impression on the first piece of paper, then drew in the lines. There before him were the curve, the stump, the ring. The curve descended gently, but at the point where the stone was broken off it seemed, for no more than half an inch, to become steeper, almost vertical. Still as if his movements were being directed, he took up the pencil again and continued the line down from this point, ending it with a hook. The stump he extended, following the line of the slant. He found himself looking, quite unmistakably, at the hooked beak and stiff heraldic crest of a hawk. What he had thought was a ring could not be so; the line below it swelled out a little; it was the beginning of an arm. The ring was a bracelet, and it was enclosing a human wrist.

Head of a hawk, arms and hands of a man. Into Somerville’s mind there came the memory of the picture that he had bought at the age of eighteen, which had hung first in his bedroom when he still lived with his father, then on the wall of his study in London, a copy of F. C. Cooper’s watercolor of the excavation at Nimrud in 1850, carried out by Henry Layard, depicting the entrance to the shrine of Ninurta built by Ashurnasirpal II in the ninth century before Christ. Later he had seen the originals brought to the Louvre from Khorsabad by Paul Émile Botta and to the British Museum, some years later, by Layard. But it was the painting that had fired his imagination. On either side of the portals and flanking the colossal human-headed bulls, three panels, one above the other, depicted the guardian spirits of the Assyrian kings, the middle one with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a man, right arm raised in blessing, wrist braceleted. The bracelet too was proof: Only gods and demigods and kings were empowered to wear bracelets.

What was it doing here, so far from the Tigris and the Assyrian heartlands, from Ashur and Nineveh, the great cities of Assyrian power? Somerville peered around him into the dim corners of the room, as if to interrogate all points of the compass, all quarters of the world.

Dawn was not far off when he finally succeeded in sleeping. He had lain awake through the hours of the night, possessed by the excitement of his discovery. The same tension of questioning fastened on him the moment he opened his eyes. The figure of the hawk-headed guardian came to him complete in every detail, as he had seen it first in Cooper’s painting, then among the sculptures brought back from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, slabs of gypsum carved in low relief, which had decorated the portals and walls of the palaces of Assyrian kings, scenes of hunting and warfare and ritual procession. Among them, recurring again and again, the beak, the crest, the human form, always in profile, always with its magical accoutrements, the right hand with its braceleted wrist raising a cone-shaped object toward the branches of a tree, the left lowered, holding a small bucket. Perhaps a sacred tree, the Tree of Life—no agreement had been reached on this, the time was too remote, the evidence lacking. The cone resembled a date spathe, the male flower used for fertilizing palms, but in the sculptures it was not always applied to trees, but sometimes to the king himself to give magical protection to his person, as it was in those portals of the shrine at Nimrud, built at a time when Assyria, under Ashurnasirpal, one of the cruelest and most magnificent of her kings, was about to embark on those wars of conquest that would see her, within two centuries, mistress of an empire greater in extent than any that the world had ever seen, stretching from the Taurus Mountains to the Persian Gulf and westward to Syria and Palestine and Egypt.

Nimrud—he kept coming back to that. Scene of those early spectacular discoveries of Henry Layard that had first fired him with the ambition to be an excavator in the Land of the Two Rivers and bring fresh marvels to light…

Somerville knew he should get up. He could hear his wife moving about in the adjacent bedroom. The major would be leaving early; it would be unmannerly not to be there to bid him farewell. But he lay for a while longer, in the toils of the story that had begun to knit together in his mind from the moment of recognizing the shapes in the stone. Kalhu, the ancient name, mentioned in the Bible as Calah, on the left bank of the Tigris south of Mosul, a city of great antiquity but not particularly important until Ashurnasirpal chose it for his new capital, setting thousands of men to work there and lavishing great wealth on the building of his palace. Why would he want to move away from Ashur, the old capital city, named after their father god? Pride? Fear of attacks from the desert tribes of the west? Impossible to know… Snatches from his royal inscriptions, read and reread in translation, came to Somerville’s mind as he began to make the first moves toward getting out of bed. I built a pillar over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins… A palace of cedar, cypress, juniper and tamarisk for my royal dwelling and for my lordly pleasure for all time I founded therein… The spoil of my hand from the lands which I had brought under my sway, in great quantities I took and placed there… For all time—he had thought his palace would last forever. All those precious woods, so boastfully enumerated, burned to ash by the Medes and Chaldeans allied together when the cities of Assyria were put to the fire and their empire collapsed.

Clapping his hands, calling across the courtyard from his window for Hassan to bring him hot water, he thought: No, not stone, stone might suffer charring but would not be reduced to ash. Perhaps at the very heart of a conflagration, even stone. Ivory, yes; fire would melt ivory…

He was only just in time to bid farewell to the major, who departed with his maps and his lists of friendly rifles and his escort of Shammar tribesmen. After breakfast he felt a certain reluctance to leave for the tell and see the work started—his usual practice. The foremen were well able to take care of this, he knew; it was merely a question of assembling the groups, allotting the work—the area of excavation would be the same. And perhaps it was this, the sameness, that unsettled him, a nagging sense that these recent, unusual finds required a breaking of new ground, a shift in tactics that he felt for the moment unable to direct.

With the idea of looking once again at the carving and at the lines he had traced and placing them side by side so as to examine them in the sober light of morning, he made his way to the workroom. There was no link between the stone and the ivory as far as he could see; at least there was nothing that could associate them through points of similarity; the ivory was not Syrian work, it came from the cities of the coast or from Egypt, it was a statement of power, not a plea for magical protection.

He found Palmer, who had not been at breakfast, there before him, seated at the table, microscope in hand, a lamp at his elbow in spite of the daylight. Before him, laid down on the table, loosely fitted together, were the pieces of a clay tablet found some days before among the thick debris of mud brick. He looked up as Somerville entered. “I was hoping to see you,” he said. “It took ages to clean these up and assemble them. This is the first time I’ve looked at them properly. I didn’t feel like going over to the dig this morning, not just yet.”

“Nor did I.”

There had been something disjointed in these opening remarks of Palmer’s, a lack of consequence unusual in him. His eyes looked wider open than usual and had a slightly staring look. “Yes, quite a job,” he said. “There are some gaps, of course.”

He was silent for several moments, still looking in a curiously detached way at Somerville. Then he said, “I didn’t think much of it when they turned up. I thought it would be the usual thing, you know, some scraps from a list, an inventory, some record of an exchange of goods, perhaps Hittite or Mitannian—they both traded in this region. I didn’t believe I’d be able to make it out. In any case, the surface looked too much damaged, it was impregnated with a mixture of wood ash and mud dust, devilishly hard to move.” He paused again, looked quickly down at the fragments as if to make sure they were still there. “But I was wrong,” he said. “Some of the cuneiform is as clear as when the marks were first made. The clay has been baked hard. Thank God for fire—there’s nothing like a good blaze for preserving inscriptions. This is in Akkadian, the dialect of it spoken by the Assyrians.”

There was silence between them for some moments. Their eyes met, fell away, met again. “Akkadian caused a lot of trouble at one time,” Palmer said. “But once they realized that it is a Semitic language akin to Babylonian, it was deciphered quite soon. What we are looking at here is part of an Assyrian royal inscription. Oh, by the way, Patricia and I are sort of engaged.”

Somerville found that his mouth had gone completely dry. “Congratulations,” he said. “You couldn’t do better. Is there any mention of Ashurnasirpal?”

“No, why? The name of the ruler is missing—we only have some pieces of the lower half. It seems to be a record of the capture of Memphis by an Assyrian force. There’s part of a name, but it is not Assyrian. Taha or Tark, it looks like.”

“Might be Taharqa—he was king of Egypt when Memphis was taken and sacked by the Assyrians. But that was much later, it was Esarhaddon who was the Assyrian king at that time.” He felt an obscure sense of disappointment. “Nothing to do with Ashurnasirpal,” he said.

“Why did you think it might be him?”

In as few words as possible Somerville explained what he knew he should have explained already as being due to a colleague but had been held back from doing so by a secrecy that had somehow grown with his disappointments. He told Palmer about the form he had traced out, the ash he had found in both the stone and the ivory.

“They used pitch for the lion’s eyes,” he said, “and on the points of the man’s hair. Pegs of ivory capped with pitch. This must have been partly melted in some fire before hardening again; it has formed what look like tears in the lion’s eyes, and it has run down into the roots of the victim’s hair. It is Egyptian work, or work influenced by Egypt. But they had no bitumen industry that we know of. So I thought, you know, that it might have come from somewhere not far from here, perhaps Hit on the Euphrates. There was a trade in bitumen there long before the Assyrians became a power in the region.”

“That’s right. At Tell Halaf the Germans have found pots that had been broken and repaired with pitch in the Ubaid period, a thousand years before Assyria was on the map at all.”

“So it seems likely that the Egyptians, or whoever it was, used imported bitumen when they fashioned the ivory plaque, which I think might have been part of a chair back. But in that case, how did it get here? Then I remembered that Ashurnasirpal took an Assyrian army on an expedition to the shores of the Mediterranean not long after he came to the throne—round about 875. He was the first in a long line of Assyrian empire builders.”

“The Great Sea, as they called it. He boasts about it in the annals. I washed the blood from my weapons in the Great Sea and made sheep offerings to the gods. Charming chaps, weren’t they? There would be rich pickings on that coast. The ivory could have come from there, somewhere like Byblos or Sidon—they had a lively trade with Egypt. I wouldn’t call him an empire builder myself, more a sort of large-scale raider.”

“Not easy to draw the line. It is more or less how we acquired our African colonies, isn’t it? I mean, what else would you call Cecil Rhodes? Anyway, it seems reasonable to think the plaque might be part of the booty they brought back.”

“He boasts about that too. The details of the loot are always very important in the annals. He came back with gold, silver, copper, linen garments, large and small monkeys, ebony boxes, things fashioned from the tusks of the walrus… Yes, I see what you mean, ivory, in other words.”

“And it was Ashurnasirpal who made his capital at Kalhu, on the other side of the Tigris, about the same time. And I think he was the first Assyrian king to use gypsum for sculptures not exposed to the weather. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think they used limestone before that.”

Palmer shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “Out of my line.”

“Gypsum is softer, you can get more detail. And the carved stone we found, that is gypsum, and so I thought, you know, there must be some connection, perhaps he is the link, perhaps there is some clue in the closeness of the dates that will help us to understand how these things got here. But now there is this business of Esarhaddon and the invasion of Egypt, and that was in the early seventh century, about two hundred years later.”

“Well, it’s still Assyria, isn’t it? This is the third year of excavation here, there has been no sign of an Assyrian presence before. These things have all been found recently and all in the same area, on the east side of the mound, where we have opened the new trench.”

Somerville felt a tightening of the chest. It was from the eastern side that you could look down on the railway buildings. This was where the German voices came from, the clatter of metal, the thumping sound of the open trucks as they passed along the rails. “We will go farther on that side,” he said. “We’ll keep some people on the trench where the things were found, and we’ll start a new one in sections, at right angles to it.”