Land of Marvels (24 page)

“The first light of dawn entered the bedchamber and he still had not succeeded in opening the gown. All night the fever of love had been burning in his veins and now it started turning to real flames. He gave one last sigh, fire burst from his mouth, his heart was burned to a cinder, and his whole body turned to ashes.”

______

At a distance of one mile or so from where he thought the seepage of oil began, Elliott came upon a roughly circular, slightly sunken area of mingled earth and gravel, where the ground had apparently fallen in over a hollowed space below, whether natural or man-made. It seemed to be a fairly recent subsidence; the filling was compacted but still loose enough to be broken and shifted without too much trouble by the men with him, who, to add to the semblance of archaeological research, carried picks and shovels and grappling hooks and had leather baskets strapped to their backs.

After some hours of work they had succeeded in clearing a pit down to a depth of seven feet. It was narrow—no more than a yard or so across—but easily wide enough for a man to climb down into it, which Elliott now proceeded to do. It afforded him what he had been seeking for, a cross section of the rock formation immediately below the surface, to a shallow depth only, of course, and lacking in dimension, but possibly offering some clues nevertheless.

He was standing at the edge of the subsidence with his face against a wall of fractured limestone. The men had cleared away the earth and gravel that had lain against this, leaving it intact, though the picks had struck against it here and there, chipping a little of the surface and leaving whitish scars. Rock of this sort would be permeable enough to form a storage reservoir for oil, but the knowledge of this was no help in itself. The presence of oil could not be deduced merely from the presence of suitable reservoir rock. That would be too easy, Elliott thought; life is not like that.

His four companions stood looking down at him as if he were their captive. He became aware of a certain dampness in his feet. Glancing down, he saw that he was standing in a thin stream of water only just deep enough to lap against the uppers of his boots; a trickle of water was flowing down into this from a fissure low in the rock face against which he was standing, coming from goodness knew where, probably from a source far distant; this region of limestone would be riddled with underground watercourses—it was probably water that had caused this ground to subside in the first place.

There was a smell here, difficult to identify, not an earth smell. The stream at his feet, though very shallow, had a definite current; it disappeared into the rock at his back. The water was slightly milky in appearance. On an impulse he crouched down and wet his hands with it. He sniffed it first, then licked his wet fingers; it was heavily charged with salt. Nothing so surprising in that; the whole of this desert steppe between the tributaries of the Euphrates was dotted with salt springs.

He began hoisting himself up, seeking a toehold in the rock the more easily to do so. Two of the men came forward to help him. As he clambered out he saw something he had not noticed before, perhaps because the light had changed, perhaps because he was looking from a point slightly lower than usual. Immediately before him there was a rise in the ground, a very slight swelling that continued into the distance. It was not so much the incline itself—it was barely perceptible—as the look of smoothness in this slow curve, a look of uniformity, despite the greatness of the extent—two miles at least, he thought. It had the unbroken, organic appearance of a curve in some vast and sparse-haired human cranium.

When he was on his feet and standing straight, he looked again. The lay of the land seemed more fortuitous now, the rocks more scattered and random, but the sense of a single shape was still there. Through Alawi he gave the men instructions to build a pyramid of stones, high enough to be seen at a good distance.

12.
 

T
he presence at Tell Erdek of a newcomer, another archaeologist, was naturally reported to Fahir Bey, the Ottoman commissioner who was following the progress of the excavation. Also reported to him, in considerable detail, were the movements and activities of this newcomer, and they did not strike him as altogether consonant with those of a bona fide archaeologist, at least not of the kind he had observed at work before. This man was wandering far and wide; he was spending all his time in areas where there were no configurations of ground that might indicate previous human habitation. The men who accompanied him had been separately questioned, though not the interpreter—that would merely have served to put the American on his guard; they professed not to know what he was seeking, and this might be true. He was paying them well, it was enough. Fahir felt sure, however, that one or two well-chosen questions would be sufficient to establish whether he was what he claimed to be; with this end in view he chose a day to ride over and make the newcomer’s acquaintance.

By a rather singular coincidence the day he chose was also the day when Major Manning made a reappearance, accompanied as before by an escort of Shammar tribesmen, mounted and armed. He was still occupied with surveying and mapping the region, he explained, now officially commissioned to do so by Sir William Wilcox, in preparation for the important and extensive irrigation projects this great engineer had been appointed, with the full approval of the Ottoman government, to carry out in Mesopotamia.

So this evening, as darkness fell and the lamps were lit, it was, with the sole exception of Elliott, the same company that had sat down to dinner on the evening of the day when the piece of carved stone had been found, that depicting the guardian spirit of the Assyrian kings, which had first turned Somerville’s attention to the eastern side of the mound, where they were digging now.

Fahir lost no time in expressing his doubts directly to the one who was the cause of them, a policy in the main determined by his paradoxical position of being able to admonish, even to threaten, and at the same time feeling essentially powerless. Mesopotamia was full of foreign spies and impostors, who should all be sent packing. But his government felt it unwise to offend the United States or the European powers, even in small matters—and what seemed small might not prove to be so—because the former had made large investments in Anatolia and the latter, by an agreement among them, determined the level of customs duties on imported goods and Turkey desperately needed an increase in these to help shore up her ailing finances. That his country, with its vast imperial possessions—one of the greatest and most enduring empires the world had ever seen—could not set its own customs dues and was regularly blackmailed on this account was a source of private humiliation and rage to Fahir, though he took care not to let this show when he was in the midst of infidel foreigners. As a member of the Young Turk movement he was an infidel himself, but a Muslim infidel, which was something very different to his mind.

His feelings of resentment, as always, took the form of a rather elaborate courtesy. “They tell me,” he said, in his careful English, looking down the table at the American, “that you spend much time examining the surface of the ground. May I ask what it is that you are so earnestly searching for?”

“Sure you may,” Elliott said amiably. “Surface indications are of first importance. The surface offers valuable clues as to where it might be profitable to start digging.”

This seemed for a moment to Somerville, sitting at the head of the table, so audacious a statement of Elliott’s true aims that his breath caught a little. He was not sure he had heard properly; the accent was not always easy, words of two syllables sometimes came out as only one. Had he said “drilling”? The last thing he wanted was for the man to be unmasked now; it would seem to Fahir that by acting as host to one he knew for an impostor he had made himself a partner in the illegal enterprise, which, in a certain way, of course, was true. Then, in addition to the inexorable advance of the railway, which plagued his days and haunted his nights and from which his only relief was the excitement of the discoveries they were making, there would be a squad of Turkish soldiers posted on the site, watching every move, getting in the way. But no look of triumph, no change at all had appeared on Fahir’s face. His head was still inclined forward in the attitude of courteous attentiveness that always seemed ironic in him, like a parody.

“Well, yes,” he said now, “forgive my ignorance, but what kind of clues would be so valuable? We have understood from our friend Somerville that this Tell Erdek was the site of an Assyrian royal palace in the time of the Sargon dynasty. Are you looking for further evidence of this?”

“No, sir, not at all,” Elliott said. “I am not an Assyriologist. My colleagues”—and here he smiled benignly at Somerville—“sometimes tend to think the Assyrian presence in this region the only thing of interest, but there were other empires that preceded theirs. My area of expertise is the Hittite kingdom in the Late Bronze and Early Iron ages. Of course, it is well known that this kingdom was centered in Hattusas, which the Hittites knew as Hattusha, the site of the present village of Bo
azköy in central Anatolia. Now that is a long way from here, a very long way. But it has to be borne in mind that at its fullest extent, in about 1180
B.C.,
their empire included most of Syria and all of Mesopotamia, down to Babylon. That is a very considerable extent, sir, very considerable. In fact the Hittites were here first—it was the Assyrians who took over from them. There are Hittite remains scattered all over this region.”

He had spoken with an air of authority that secretly astonished everyone at the table but his questioner. Fahir raised his head. His face had lost all expression. He still persisted, however. “And what kind of remains would signify the presence of these Hittites?”

“Well now, that’s a mighty interesting question. Some consider the Hittites to be the first people to work with iron and thus the first to enter the Iron Age. This is disputed, but obviously any surface traces that could bear it out would be of immense importance. Then again, they were famous for their skill in building and using war chariots. The period when they went from sheathing the wood in bronze to sheathing it in iron is fairly reliably dated, but reinforcing evidence is always desirable. The smallest scrap of metal can be vital in indicating where to take a closer look. Then there are fragments of clay tablets that often lie quite close to the surface. They may bear traces of inscriptions. The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, as I am sure you know.”

“Yes, of course,” Fahir said. “May I ask who is employing you and financing these investigations? This is not mere idle curiosity on my part, you understand. I am required to furnish information of this sort in the reports I send to my superiors.”

Elliott smiled and nodded with an appearance of full understanding. “I am fortunate enough to have ample funds of my own,” he said. “I can indulge my passion independently. I consider it a great privilege and a great responsibility to be able to shed light on the past, to serve the interest of truth, to strive to add something to the sum total of human knowledge. An understanding of the past is of vital importance, not only for the way we live our lives now but for the way future generations will live theirs. As someone wiser than I has said, if we ignore the lessons of the past, we will be condemned to repeat our mistakes.”

A silence followed on this, rather prolonged, broken by Major Manning, who spoke now for the first time and was clearly as unafraid of anticlimax as he was of practically everything else. “There’s a lot of stuff very close to the surface,” he said. “For part of the way down here I followed the railway. The gravel they use for the bed of the track is full of broken pots.”