Land of Marvels (33 page)

What he needed to know was what Elliott, now some miles away, could have told him: that petroleum is generally less dense than the rock that surrounds it, that it will flow upward to the earth’s surface through whatever cracks and pores and fractures it can find, that it sometimes reaches a containing enclosure beneath a layer of impermeable rock and that as this sedimentary layer builds up it presses down on the fluid trap below, creating a condition known as overpressure. Elliott might also have added that such overpressured pockets often contain quantities of gas and might lie close to the surface, in which case they are unpredictable and liable to cause violent eruptions, and that the risk of this is even greater where rivulets of salt water through layers of limestone have dissolved the rock and over long periods of time created a hidden and unsuspected underground landscape of caves and corridors.

It was in happy ignorance of these facts that Jehar now began to position his fuses.

_____

Darkness was falling as Manning rode along the track that ran past the mound toward the German railway sheds. He was beginning to despair now; before long it would be impossible to see anything clearly. The swine had given them the slip; by morning he would be beyond pursuit.

Then, just ahead of him, he saw a figure in movement, head and shoulders only visible, the rest concealed below some dip or hollow in the ground. The figure appeared to be wearing an Arab headdress. Manning, his mind overheated by the violent reversals of the afternoon, remembered the towel Elliott had carried over his shoulder and came to the immediate conclusion that Elliott had used this same towel to disguise himself as an Arab and was now preparing an ambush. At once he dismounted and crept some yards forward, his rifle at the ready. When he came upon a low ridge that offered some cover he went down flat. The movements of the figure were inexplicable. He saw a brief glow of light, then another. “Elliott!” he shouted. “Stand still and come toward me with your hands up.” The contradiction in these orders was not immediately apparent to him. “I want that report!” he shouted.

But instead of obeying, Elliott began to run away, like the coward he was.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Manning shouted.

Jehar understood this; the earlier words had been incomprehensible to him. He understood his danger. But he could not obey because he had lit the fuses and they were less than the span of a man’s arm in length. So he went on running, and after a moment more Manning shot him.

Spahl, also lying flat, was close by. Following at a distance he had seen Manning dismount, and he had followed suit. He had been able to get near enough to hear the major’s shouted orders and the shot that shortly followed. Evidently Elliott had been hit. This assumption was confirmed a moment or two later when he saw Manning get up and move forward, obviously intending to recover the report. He was training his rifle on the major when a sound louder than any he had heard in his life before stunned and deafened him: A great gout of fire rose high into the air; fire from the base of this fountain streamed toward him like a river in spate, scorching his face and hands, half blinding him. He saw the major stand clear and distinct for one moment, enveloped, like a genie of the fire. Then he was no more. Spahl turned to run, but he could not see where he was going. He knew his clothes were on fire and he knew he was screaming. His rifle writhed and twisted where he had let it fall. The burning stream, traveling now at an appalling speed, caught him, engulfed him, seemed to lift him a little, then let the carbonized remains fall.

Somerville heard the tremendous roar of the gushing oil and gas without knowing what it was. It seemed in these first moments like the feared arrival of the locomotive train, multiplied a thousand times. He went through the aperture in the doorway, moved aside the boards that covered the entrance to the anteroom, and began to mount the steps he had discovered so recently and with such joy. The sound grew louder, deafening. He became aware of intense heat and a terrible stench of decay as if some huge creature were rotting somewhere in the night above him. Looking upward, he saw a flare of light half muffled in black smoke. He had some confused notion of retreating, as if to find safety in the tomb, but even as he turned to descend again the river of fire found the entrance to the shaft and the trenches, swooped down upon him in a threefold stream, consumed him in seconds as he stood there, swallowed up the god Marduk in the anteroom, surged through the opening in the stone doors, flooded into the burial chamber, melted the alabaster vases in the alcoves, swept stinking and shrieking into the sarcophagus, and—in less time than it would take a moth to die in a candle flame—put an end to the long and patient vigil of the bones.

Afterword
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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