Authors: Barry Unsworth
“My husband told me that he had agreed with Lord Rampling, the financier, that you should come here.”
“That is correct, yes. I don’t know this Rampling personally, it’s just a job of work, you know. I get a fee. I don’t have anything to do with the financial side of it. They have just sent me here to follow up a few clues. I’ve been engaged in petroleum geology almost the whole of my working life.”
Once again he paused and looked at her. The closeness of his regard, that blaze of sincerity, was unsettling, as if he were requiring responses not altogether clear from his words. As before, she felt driven into speech. “It seems like rather a hit-or-miss business to me,” she said. “I mean, it’s just the presence of the oil seep and these springs, isn’t it? It could be just a very little oil, just a narrow little vein that has got gashed somehow and oozes up from close to the surface.” Like a hemorrhage, she thought, oozing out, black instead of red, weakening the body, sapping mother earth. “I mean, over all that time even a trickle of oil would make quite a big swamp, wouldn’t it?”
“Those are not the only things we have to go on. All those places I’ve been talking about—and this is true also of Dalaki, in Persia, where oil has been definitely discovered and drilling has begun—have one other thing in common. They are situated at the extreme edge of a gypsum foundation at the point where the gypsum is succeeded either by red sandstone or by fractured limestone, both of which are typical reservoir rocks.”
Glancing at her face, he saw that a certain stillness had descended on it and realized that she had failed to follow him in these details. “These are types of rock where the oil gets trapped,” he said. “It’s like the jar where the genie is kept prisoner. He is small when he is in the jar, that’s because he’s got these vast formations of sedimentary rock all around him. But once he is set free he swells up and gets huger and huger. If you could see a picture of the escaping genie in a storybook, it would look like a great cloud billowing up from the neck of the jar, filling all the sky. Instead of a cloud, think of a great flood of oil, like a million fountains all put together. Believe me, if you drill down through the walls of his prison, you will see how big he is, by jiminy you will!”
She would have asked him more. One cardinal piece of advice of her mother’s, secretly scorned but somehow still operating within her, was always to ask men about their work, this being the best way of freeing their tongues and also, as a secondary advantage, of securing a reputation for intelligence. But this man’s tongue needed no freeing. He was loquacious certainly, but this homely rhetoric of his turned everything into a story. She would have liked to go on with it a bit longer, though their tea was finished long ago. It was not like the genie, not really, because he was quite contained in his jar whereas the oil leaked all over the place, as it seemed. She did not understand how it could escape from these imprisoning rocks.
But manners prevailed now. She rang the little bell on the table beside her. “You must be tired,” she said. “You will need a rest. Mansur will show you to your room. I will tell him to bring water. This is a sort of common room, where we are now. We generally gather here for a drink a little after sundown, when my husband and his assistant are back from the excavation.”
But he must have slept long; he did not appear until it was nearly dark, just before dinner, when everyone else was assembled. Introductions were hardly over before they were on their way to the dining room. She had not failed to notice her husband’s air of distraction and the shortness of his words to the newly arrived guest. She knew these for signs of excitement in him. And Palmer had a look of briskness about him, a sort of extra alertness, which meant the same thing. But at first neither of them made any mention of the day’s work; the meal was half over before anyone spoke of it, and then it seemed that her husband was jolted into speech by a kind of rage.
Elliott proved no shyer in the enlarged company of the dinner table than he had been earlier over the teacups. The blaze of honesty, the hasty rhythms of his speech were the same. He was talking about the beginnings of the American oil industry and about a certain Colonel Drake, who wasn’t a colonel at all, but a drifting and impoverished entrepreneur.
“He used the title to impress the local population, all the couple of hundred of ’em. This was in the 1860s, a lumber town called Titusville in northwest Pennsylvania. Everyone knew about the rock oil that came bubbling up from belowground near the town—there was a place in the hills there called Oil Creek. But no one thought of drilling for it—except this Colonel Drake.”
Before that they had just scooped the oil from the surface or soaked rags in it then wrung them out. They might get four or five gallons a day like this—on a good day. That was how it had always been; that’s what their fathers and grandfathers had done. They thought Drake was crazy, colonel or not.
“Sure, he was a fake,” Elliott said, sitting back, smiling around the table. “But he was a man of vision, and that is kind of rare. He had no way of drilling for oil. He tried hiring salt drillers, but they turned out to be an unreliable body of men, they kept getting drunk or they just disappeared as soon as they had a few dollars in their pockets. So he set about constructing a steam engine to power the drill. But time was passing, the people back in New Haven who were financing him ran out of patience. They sent him a letter telling him to close down the operation. In the meantime he had found a driller, a man named Smith. He was a very big, strong guy. Everyone called him Uncle Billy Smith . . .”
Somerville listened with rising displeasure. The fellow was talking more than a newcomer should. But it was not this, the confidence, the manner too relaxed; it was not even the quality of attention being accorded him by Edith. He had come to the table with some momentous news of his own to announce, only to find the stage occupied by another, a stranger at that. And then, surely, someone here in the guise of an archaeologist should show an interest in the work they were doing, ask some questions, put himself in the position of listener, instead of droning on about oil. But he wasn’t droning, of course, and that made it worse; he was a good talker, with an easy manner and a command of vivid detail, qualities Somerville knew to be lacking in himself, his own habit of repression showing more clearly perhaps in this than anything else, causing him always to downplay everything, to understate, to avoid the dramatic. And now here he was, with conclusive evidence that the site had been a residence of Assyrian kings, sitting here and listening to talk of this Uncle Billy.
“This was August 1859,” Elliott said. “Drake had been there for more than two years already. The letter was delayed somehow, I like to think some angel of good fortune slowed it down. It still hadn’t arrived on the Sunday morning when Uncle Billy went out to have a look at the well. They had been drilling at about seventy feet. When he looked down into the pipe, he saw a thick black liquid floating on the top of the water. He lowered a tin cup in it and drew up a sample.” He paused for some moments. Then he said, “They had struck oil,” and there was on his face that look of rapt attention, almost of awe, that had made Edith think that he resembled one of the apostles at the moment of the summons. “All they had to do was pump it out,” he said. “I don’t know if Uncle Billy danced a jig right there and then, but I sure would have done so in his shoes. The first oil well in the U.S. And that means anywhere. The day they started pumping was the day the letter came, telling Drake to close down. Who knows? If it had arrived a couple of days sooner, there might have been no Standard Oil, and Rockefeller would have had to find some other way to make his millions.”
This final call on his sense of the miraculous was more than Somerville, irritated as he already was, could endure. “Well, Palmer,” he said, cutting in brusquely and ruining the speculative silence that Elliott had intended as the crown of his story, “shall we give out our little bit of news? Not much perhaps, but at least it is about people who once lived in the world and not about commodities.”
Quite why he called upon Palmer in this way was not altogether clear to him; Palmer himself seemed for the moment taken aback at the abruptness of it, recovering fairly soon, however, and restricting himself to his own part in the work. A clay tablet in good condition had been found near the remains of the stone doorway, and he had been able to decipher most of it.
“Baked hard,” he said. “Nothing like a good blaze. It’s in cuneiform and seems to be one of a series—we haven’t found any others yet. It contains two clauses of an agreement or treaty—demands for the allegiance of the desert tribes east of the Euphrates.”
“That is roughly the area where we are now.” Somerville sat back and glanced around the table in what seemed, at least to Edith—and she disliked herself for the thought—a sort of paler imitation of Elliott’s narrative style. “The tribes must have been causing trouble at the time,” he said. “That might help us to date the tablet.”
“The date is missing if there ever was one,” Palmer said. “But the tablet bears the name of Esarhaddon, who was king of Assyria in the early seventh century
B.C.
It seems reasonable to suppose that the inscription was made here on his orders.”
“He died in 670, on his way back from campaigning in Egypt, so the treaty must have been made well before that.” Somerville waited a moment to lend dramatic weight. Then he said, “Taken with the other things we have uncovered, it is conclusive proof that Tell Erdek was a residence of the Assyrian kings for a very considerable period of time.”
“It’s really exciting,” Patricia said. “Well, it is now anyway. Quite frankly, I was finding it fairly boring before.”
She had spoken directly to Elliott with some vague idea of including him, making it up to him. With the increased sensibility that had come to her with love, she had felt distressed at the snub he had received. “I often go with them now,” she added, rather lamely. “I had no idea it could be such fun.”
Edith too had registered her husband’s unmannerly brusqueness, the edge of contempt there had been in his words. It was unlike him. He was often distracted in manner and aloof-seeming, but this had been deliberate rudeness. Strange, when he was so clearly elated by these recent discoveries. But what was like him or unlike him she was no longer certain about; it was as if the structure of his character was loosening somehow into incongruous components. He looked exalted now, almost feverish, she thought, as he glanced about. She was about to repair the breach in manners by asking Elliott something more about oil, anything would do. But the American forestalled her. “I must take issue with you,” he said, “in this matter of people and commodities. It seems to me you are taking the wrong view.”
He was looking down the table at Somerville and on his face the blaze of sincerity seemed intensified. He had, Edith realized, been waiting all this while, all through the talk of Assyria, waiting to make this justified retort. She should have known he was not the man to take a thing like that lying down.
“Oh yes?” Somerville looked for a moment bemused, as if encountering some obstacle in a path he had thought was clear.
“It is a big mistake to separate the two. Gold is a commodity, people seek it and die for it. Tea is a commodity, hundreds of thousands of people in your British India get a living from it who would otherwise starve. In the African slave trade people were commodities, it was one and the same thing.”
He paused briefly, aware of a distinct dislike for this cold fish he was addressing. “Yes, sir, one and the same thing. What you are digging up is commodities, as I understand it, bits of pots and so on. Is that people? It is all a long time ago in any case. Oil is a commodity, right, but it is the future of humanity, it will change the lives of millions. Millions of
people
, sir. It will change the face of the planet. It will flow like the milk and honey we are told of in the Good Book, a blessing to the children of earth. Now I ask you, what is this Esarhaddon guy compared to that?”
With a gesture only half conscious Somerville raised his fingers to his temples on either side. The heavy, blurting falls of the speech had sounded in his ears like the pistons of a machine working with a rhythm that was relentless, inexorable, like the pounding blows of a hammer on metal. That was the future this interloper stood for, with his odious rhetoric, a future that would see it as virtuous to obliterate the human past and substitute for human speech a hideous, universal hissing and clanking . . . A feeling of desolation rose in him, like nausea. He got up abruptly from his place at the table. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need a breath of air.”
Without pausing further he quitted the room, walked out to the courtyard, and crossed to the gate, which he unbolted and passed through. He walked rapidly, wanting to put some distance between himself and the house, so that no one would be able to follow and find him.
As he walked, the agitation he had felt, the pounding of his nerves and the nausea that had come with it, grew less, and the silence of the night settled around him. After a while he stopped and stood still. He could feel that his hands were trembling slightly. There was no moon; but the night was clear, and the stars gave enough light to see by. There were lamps here and there in the village, and the distant sound of voices came to him. He felt no slightest kinship with the people of the place or with the land that stretched around him. All his ambition, all the passion of his nature were centered on the mound of earth that lay not far from him now; he could make out the dark shape of it, with its irregular crest, higher on the west side, where they had first started digging.