Land of Marvels

7.

Somerville spent an extra day in Constantinople talking to colleagues at the Imperial Museum and examining some Hittite stamp seals recently discovered at Boğazköy in Anatolia, site of the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusas. There were also several sculptured reliefs from the King’s Gate that he had not seen before.

It was late when he arrived back; his wife was already in bed and he did not want to disturb her. The following morning, before breakfast, was the first opportunity for them to talk together. Edith was still in her dressing gown. She had had tea served to her, but she was slow to wake in the mornings and still had the slightly bemused, sleepy-eyed look that he had always found voluptuous and touching at the same time.

“Well, they have given me assurances of help,” he said. “I think I succeeded in convincing them of the importance of what we are doing here. I went into some detail about these recent finds, which point toward a substantial Assyrian presence.”

“Them? Who were the others?”

“A man introduced to me as Baron Rampling was also there. In fact it was at his house that we met. He was very affable and hospitable.”

“Rampling? The shipowner? What on earth was he doing there?” Surprise had taken the sleep from her eyes. “You didn’t recognize him, you didn’t know who he was?”

“No, why should I?”

It was now, with these words of his wife’s, that the first misgivings came to him. The Ambassador, he now recalled, had said very little about Rampling in the course of their chat afterward, only that he was wealthy and had influence in high circles. The warmth of his reception, the cordiality of his old school friend, the genial attention paid to him by the obviously powerful man who was his host… And then the matter was of such overwhelming importance to him it had seemed natural that even a grand and titled personage should be prepared to help, should lend his attention to such a threat, such an injustice. Now this cold breath, where warmth should have been. It is you, he thought, looking at his wife’s face. You take my faith away. Something close to hatred came into his heart for a moment, then was lost, merged in his doubt. “A beautiful house,” he said. “One of those old wooden houses on the Bosporus, looking straight out across the water.” He remembered how the light had grown stronger as he advanced, like an earnest of success.

“The gossip columns were full of his doings at one time,” she said. John never read these things anyway, she knew that. “Daddy once acted for him, something to do with export permits. Said he is an absolute so-and-so, do anybody down that got in his way.” Her adored father, after a highly successful career as a barrister, had recently been appointed a High Court judge. “I just can’t imagine why a man like that should take an interest in archaeology,” she said.

“He struck me as a fair-minded man. Very reasonable. We did a sort of deal.”

He told her then of the agreement they had made, a quid pro quo really, he explained: the geologist, this dynamic American, to be given a cover for his activities, and the full weight of the Foreign Office, supported by the influence of Lord Rampling, to be brought to bear on the railway company. “Naturally,” he said, “in this milieu of power politics, you have to give something if you want to get something, that is the way these things are conducted.”

A reply rose to Edith’s lips, caustic in nature, as she saw the look of worldly sagacity that had appeared on her husband’s face, but she repressed it; there was really no point. “Well,” she said in flat tones, “we shall have to hope for the best then, shan’t we?”

And that was exactly it, she thought a little later as she dressed. John is the one who is doing the hoping, they have already got what they wanted, they will get this American here, who sounds absolutely dreadful, and we will have to put up with him at mealtimes and see him every day for goodness knows how long. This was all it had come to, the exaltation of the parting. A fire soon doused. If only there had been nothing required in exchange, if Rampling had been there for John’s sake, instead of his own. Then he would have cut a dignified figure, whether or not they did anything about it. She herself did not care much about the railway, whether it went here or there. She had never understood how or why her husband had so convinced himself that the line would go bang smack into Tell Erdek. As far as she could see, there wasn’t much to lose; John could go and dig somewhere else. She hadn’t much in the way of historical imagination, and the finds they had made so far hadn’t impressed her greatly; a bit of ivory, a fragment of stone, a few scratches on a clay tablet, a stump of a wall—it couldn’t be thought to add up to anything very exciting. No, what mattered was the enterprise itself, the spirit of it, the going for what you wanted, the not being daunted. Again the thought came to her, unwelcome, painful even, but not to be held off: John was pathetic; he lacked what Daddy would have called a firm grip. That serious, slightly frowning air he had assumed, the man of the world pronouncing on power politics when he was really such a simpleton. She shouldn’t have married him; she had been taken in by that early boldness of his, that visionary quality, giving up everything to follow the dream. He had not lived up to it; it was as though he had cheated her, broken the contract. She had seen Rampling’s picture in the newspaper sometimes, elegant and portly, a big-nosed, bushy-eyebrowed, commanding face. Something predatory, almost savage, in the lines of the mouth. A brute of a man, Daddy had said. But someone who knew what he was doing, who went for what he wanted, who wouldn’t have the wool pulled over his eyes.

The morning, she felt, had begun badly, and it was to continue in the same way. She and Patricia were still working to fit together the pieces of Seljuk pottery that had been found in promising quantity and quite close together, instead of in the usual scattering. She had reached a point in the process that she always rather enjoyed; some curved pieces from the neck of a jar were laid out before her on cardboard, and with the aid of rubber gloves and a small sponge on a stick she was applying a weak solution of hydrochloride acid to the surfaces. She was watching with the usual pleasure the melting away of the encrusted dirt, the magical emergence of the softly glowing green and blue glazes, when Patricia, sitting opposite to her at the table, said with characteristic abruptness, “I’ve decided what I would like to do when we go back home.”

Well, Edith thought, that’s a step in the right direction. That is, if one had to have a career; she herself had never felt the need for one other than that of support and companion to a man of purpose. But Patricia’s restless wish for one, and her uncertainty about the choice, had cast a sort of drama over the business that irked Edith because it seemed so spurious.

“Oh, yes, what is it?” she said.

“I am going to work for the Women’s Social and Political Union.”

Edith stared, completely taken aback. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not this, the militant wing of the suffragette movement. She felt a gathering sense of outrage. It couldn’t be a sudden decision, not a thing like that. The girl had kept quiet about her sympathies—a treacherous silence, it seemed to Edith now. “What,” she said, “that appalling Pankhurst woman?”

Patricia laid down the piece she was holding, placing it very carefully on the table. “Mrs. Pankhurst is a very brave and dedicated woman,” she said, in a voice that had the steadiness of conscious control.

“But how can they possibly think blowing up post offices and setting fire to theaters and doing wanton damage to private property can serve any purpose?”

“It compels attention,” Patricia said.

“Attention to what?”

“Attention to the gross injustice of keeping women from participation in government by denying them the vote.”

Edith attempted a smile designed to show Patricia that she was merely being humored in these views. But the smile didn’t come well, and she felt the beginnings of an obscure distress. “Women are simply not fit for the rough-and-tumble of politics,” she said.

“A lot depends on which women we are talking about. I saw something of the Fen villages while I was at Cambridge. The women there get a pretty good training in rough-and-tumble.”

“Patricia, I must say that you astonish me. You are planning to marry, are you not?”

“Yes, when we go back to England.”

“You are planning to marry and at the same time proposing to take part in a movement that will have for its only result an increased disharmony and antagonism between the sexes.”

“Harold is entirely in favor of women being given the vote. We have discussed it. He is very progressive in his political views.”

“Is he indeed?” Her respect for Palmer, already diminished, plummeted further on her hearing this. A traitor to his own sex. She thought of her father, home after the stress of the courtroom, the lines of strain on his face, her mother’s care and support of him, her attention to him, which had not been servile or demeaning, only loving. It was such a companion that she herself had wanted to be to her husband, had failed to be. But she could not feel the failure to be her fault. What was there to support in John? Daddy had included them in his life; he had given them a sense of the great world; he had returned from the field of battle with triumphs and setbacks to relate, causes lost and won. She felt the distress gather in her breast as she looked across at Patricia. Once again she was visited by a sense of the girl’s duplicity. It was like looking at a stranger. As if seeing for the first time the full mouth, unexpectedly sensuous in that bony frame of the face, the jaw somewhat too prominent, the clear eyes. Behind the face a life of thoughts, beliefs, intentions—a cause, however wrong; this was the injury, this was the perfidy, that she should have a cause.

“The world of politics and business and law has been made by men,” Edith said. “It is men who understand it. This is a time when we should be united. Our empire is in peril, a firm grip and a balanced judgment are needed, a masculine judgment. To say that we should not have the vote is not to say that we are inferior. We women have tenderness, insight, moral influence, we can be strong in our own—” She stumbled on this, aware of unhappiness, afraid of betraying it. “These are things that belong in the private sphere,” she said.

“But surely these qualities of ours would be valuable in political life too,” Patricia said in a gentler tone. She had heard the quiver of feeling in the other woman’s voice, sensed a distress that seemed not entirely due to the topic of their talk but to something more obscure, something there all the time. She had always felt a little in awe of Edith because of her beauty, her physical grace, her self-containment, which had some suggestion of sardonic judgment in it. Beside her, Patricia had felt plain and clumsy and untried, and this had caused her to be more intrusive with her opinions than she might otherwise have been. But now she had the advantage of happiness. Those in love are said to be self-absorbed, blind to the rest of the world, but in this first serious love of her life Patricia had become kinder and more noticing. “Surely they would be of benefit in our national life,” she said. “The empire too. The influence of women, expressed through the vote, would make our institutions envied and imitated even more than they are now. We women could give so much. We should stand together instead of quarreling among ourselves.” She smiled as she spoke and leaned forward with a sort of eagerness, as if she might reach out toward the older woman. She saw Edith’s face stiffen into immobility, saw her draw back with a motion almost of wincing.

Somerville was aware of not having made the desired impression on his wife, aware of it with resignation, not any particular unhappiness. If she had any real sympathy for him in his plight, she would support him in his hope of success. It was too soon to be regarded as illusion; there was still a prospect in his own mind at least that the assurances made to him would be honored. It was beginning to seem to him now that Edith’s good opinion was an elusive hare and that he was too busy to chase after it. And the news he got from Palmer after breakfast confirmed him in this feeling. They had continued the wall eastward, cutting deeper into the side of the mound in order to follow the line. The wall had continued, still with its base of stone, for some yards; then, only the day before, they had come upon the beginnings of a platform of some kind, opening inward from the wall and running along beside it at the same level. Impossible to make out the flooring; the area was covered with a debris of rubble from the collapsed walls of some later building.

“There seems to be a layer of ash under the rubble,” Palmer said. “Pretty thick.”

“We must get there for the start of the work.” Somerville felt excitement gathering within him. “One of the foremen must be there all the time, no matter what else is going on, and only reliable people set to work there, no fools. They will have to clear the rubble without disturbing the ash, as far as it can be done. That section of the vertical trench will have to be widened so that the basket people can pass.”

But it was he himself, all that day and the two following, who remained there to supervise the work. At the end of that time they had cleared an area roughly two yards by five, and next day the delicate task of sifting through the ash was begun. Almost at once they began to find fragments of bronze-plated furniture, chips of ivory, and smashed tablets.

Somerville found it physically impossible to quit the scene while the work was in progress or even to take his eyes off it. He left the house early, taking a sandwich and a flask of water with him, and remained there till the onset of darkness. At the end of three days, standing alone there after the workforce had dispersed, he found himself lifting his face to the darkening sky in a sort of beatitude of knowledge. There had been some huge conflagration here, still mysterious in origin, but what they were uncovering was the floor of an anteroom, probably one of a series of connecting rooms, and it had once been furnished with the costliest of materials, cedarwood and ebony and ivory and bronze, materials that could only belong in the palaces of the very wealthy, provincial governors, high-ranking military commanders, people of power and consequence.

In the days that followed, as the ash was cleared to reveal a floor of blackened brick and the remains of a stone doorway were discovered and the bronze hoops of what had been a heavy door and the beginnings of a passageway that lay beyond, practically all his waking moments were concentrated in the effort to make sense of what they had found, what they were finding. It had been a fascination with the Assyrian kingdom, inspired by the astounding discoveries of his boyhood hero Henry Layard at Nimrud and Nineveh, that had turned him to archaeology, first as an absorbing interest, then as a choice of career. In youth he had read everything he could lay his hands on, avidly and unsystematically; later he had studied more methodically, relating the empire of the Assyrians to the various others that had flourished and withered before and after it in the long course of Mesopotamian history. But it was the Assyrians who had made a conquest of his imagination, theirs the empire that had seemed to him a paradigm of all empires. A lust for power had inspired them from the first, an energy of conquest that had taken them from a narrow strip of land on the left bank of the Tigris to domination of practically all of the world they knew and to the development of a ruthless militarism that had made their army the most feared and efficient fighting machine that world had so far seen. Their wealth and splendor and cruelty, the hatred they had aroused, the fires of destruction that had marked their amazingly sudden collapse. How terrible—and how marvelous—to be Ashurbanibal or Sargon or Sennacherib, hunting the lion in a park specially made for you, driving your chariot over the corpses of your enemies, washing the blood from your weapons in the Great Sea.

Everything they had found so far could be seen as lying within a period of little more than two centuries, between the reigns of Ashurnasirpal II and Esarhaddon, the first embarking in the early ninth century on a program of ruthless expansion, the second presiding in the early seventh over the empire at its fullest extent, from Cilicia to Egypt, from the Taurus to the Persian Gulf. It was in the former’s reign that a new kind of boasting appeared in the chronicles of victory, a vaunting of cruelty as an evidence of power. Echoes came to Somerville in the nights of his insomnia and colored his dreams. Many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears and their fingers… Their youths and maidens I burned in the fire… Their warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert land…

Some change in the human spirit here, not in the doing but in the telling, the pride, some ugly twist of soul toward a new idea of supremacy. How? From where? Why among these people at this time? Bred by conquest, like an appetite that grows from feeding? With the blessing of their god Ashur to lend them a sense of mission, bloodshed would become a form of devotion. Since Ashur was above all other gods and the king was his earthly embodiment, there would be a duty to impose his cult, carry light into dark places. The light they had carried had been cast by the flames of devastation. They too, the light bearers, had ended in that same fire.

It was in the evening, walking back from the mound to the expedition house, that the thought came to him, translated into conviction in the course of the next few steps. The weeping eyes of the lion, the compound of ash and clay so laboriously moved to reveal the curve of the beak, the braceleted wrist, now this layer of ash and the fragments muffled in it. The same fire, yes, but that was all they had in common. Because the ivory had come from elsewhere he had assumed the other things had too. But he had been wrong. They had not been brought here; they had been made here. And the demigod, the guardian spirit, could only have been made on the orders of a king and for a king’s protection.

Amid the grime and smoke of the yards, always with an eye out for the uncle, his voice sometimes obscured by the hiss of steam or the clangor of shunting engines, Jehar continued to tell Ninanna about the paradise of Deir ez-Zor. She loved the repetition of details and never got tired of them, however familiar they were, and so he always began with the look of the place, the white minarets, the bridge over the river with its stone pillars resting in the water, the green island in the midst of the stream, the gardens and palm groves along the banks. He enlarged also on the fabulous fatness and sloth of the Pasha in Baghdad because this always made her laugh. The Pasha wore a fez with a gold tassel, and he smoked a hookah, and the rings on his fingers got too tight and had to be filed off as they could not be removed in any other way. He ate halvah and baklava and cakes made of rice and honey, and he got fatter and fatter. It took the Pasha a long time just to raise an arm or turn his head. Jehar imitated, for the reward of her laughter, the palsied movements of this legendary landlord, owner of the gardens of as-Salhijjeh on the north side of the town, where they would rent their land and prosper through his neglect.

Things he had seen on his travels, his plans for making money, these too became part of the vision of life at Deir ez-Zor. Lower down on the Euphrates was the town of Hit, surrounded by swamps of the thick black tar they called bitumen. The principal occupations of the inhabitants of Hit were gathering the bitumen and building the boats they called sahatir, designed for river traffic. The materials they used for making the boats were wood and the pulp of the palm, and both the inside and the outside of the boat were coated with bitumen mixed with lime to make it stick. He had never made such a boat, but love filled him with confidence in his powers. He had seen it done; he knew how to do it; he could make one in a week. A boat like this could be sold for six Turkish pounds. You took it downriver and sold it at Karbala or you crossed over to the Tigris by the canal and sold it in Baghdad. You made a good profit, and this was because the people of those towns did not have the bitumen close at hand. There were also fields of it not far from where the Englishman was digging for his treasure, but these were too far from the Great River.

He had told her about this Englishman and his search and his vast wealth—hundreds toiled at his command—and his shorts and boots that made his legs look thin and his feet look big. He had told her too about the railway line that was heading for the place where the treasure was. The Englishman feared this line because he was one who always believed in his heart that he was a target for God’s anger. Because of this secret belief, he had a constant need for news, now more than ever, as he was beginning to find things. And for news he was willing to pay.

She listened to him without always seeming to, busy as she was. The uncle had paid something and had been allowed to fence off a small piece of land adjoining the shoulder of a nearby siding; a dozen hens and a rooster lived together in this small space, fluttering and squawking in alarm at the occasional hissing sound of compressed air released by the locomotives. When Ninanna came out to tend to them Jehar was able to keep her in talk for a little while. Here in the open she felt less constraint; she smiled more often at Jehar and sometimes asked him questions. The black fields of Hit engaged her imagination. It was like Gehennem, the place of fire and torment where the damned were sent. What did they look like, the swamps of pitch? Did people live among them? Were there also some at Deir ez-Zor?

No, no, he told her. Deir ez-Zor was all white and green and golden. It was true that the pitch fields of Hit resembled what the Holy Writings said about Hell; they were black as far as the eye could see, and they steamed and bubbled in places with the heat lying within and below. But sometimes these black fields could look beautiful. There were salt springs among them, and the salt water mingled with the pitch and made rainbow colors around the edges of the spring. In the evening sunshine these colors glowed, and it was as if they were cast upward into the sky, like a promise of paradise.

Love aided native talent to make him supremely eloquent. She listened spellbound. Her lips, which were beautifully formed, parted a little with the interest of it, wonder passing to laughter without pain of thought. No one had ever talked to her like this, brought such pictures to her mind. They came to her sometimes at night as she drifted into sleep, the minarets, the stream, the palm groves, the fez with its gold tassel. Now there were these black fields that could be both ugly and beautiful. He was handsome too, with his level brows and pale eyes, and his talk was full of fire and promise.

The bitumen was scooped up with palm leaves, he told her, and stored in large pieces. It was diluted with lime and sent downstream on rafts. It could be sold at al-Felluge, and from there you could bring back grape honey and a kind of rice the people there called tummen. By this trade one could make a lot of money, and with this money they would buy land and plant palms. A hundred trees they would have…

Sometimes, in his desire to impress her with the wealth that would be theirs, he might go too much into detail and exhaust her powers of attention. He might be explaining that the people of al-Felluge needed the pitch for sealing and waterproofing the great straw jars that they then weighted with stones and hung on their waterwheels to make them turn and so irrigate their fields, and in the midst of his words he would see a sort of stillness settle over her face, and he would know she had lost her way somewhere in this chain of causes and effects. Then he would go back to the marvels of Deir ez-Zor and get lost in his turn amid the thickets of what was real, what was exaggerated, and what was invented. Amid the gardens that belonged to the fabulously slothful and permanently absent Pasha there was a spring, and the water came out of it with so much force that it bubbled and sang as it flowed. There were times when the water burst forth so strongly that fish came leaping out with it. If you waited by the well, no fish ever gushed out, however long you waited. But if you were passing at the right moment, you would have your supper provided for you. For this reason the spring was named Abu Simac, Father of Fishes, by the people who lived there.