Land of Marvels (34 page)

He was, in any case, extremely busy in these months, working out the financial terms for an agreement on the Baghdad Railway. He was on the brink of success when the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo.

Shared investment to protect, free competition, Rampling was always to maintain, might have saved the peace even then, had it not been for Austro-Hungarian arrogance and intransigence. But his true success, the accord for which he and his partners had been working in secret for several years, together with members of the government and the high military command, came in May 1916, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which defined British and French political and economic interests in the postwar period, when—as was hoped and believed—the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered. By this agreement Britain was to gain complete control over lower Mesopotamia from Tikrit to the Persian Gulf and from the Arabian boundary to the Persian frontier. This vast territory, which had never been home to a single nation, she was to rename Iraq.

A Note About the Author

Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for
Sacred Hunger
, was a Booker finalist for
Pascali’s Island
and
Morality Play
, and was long-listed for the Booker Prize for
The Ruby in Her Navel
. His other works include
The Songs of the Kings, After Hannibal
, and
Losing Nelson
. He lives in Italy.

Also by Barry Unsworth

The Partnership

The Greeks Have a Word for It

The Hide

Mooncranker’s Gift

The Big Day

Pascali’s Island
(published in the United States under the title
The Idol Hunter
)

The Rage of the Vulture

Stone Virgin

Sugar and Rum

Sacred Hunger

Morality Play

After Hannibal

Losing Nelson

The Songs of the Kings

The Ruby in Her Navel

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Barry Unsworth

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese,
an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.nanatalese.com

DOUBLEDAY
is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Unsworth, Barry, 1930–
Land of marvels : a novel / Barry Unsworth. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Archaeologists—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. British—Iraq—Fiction. 3. Geologists—United States—Fiction. 4. Americans—Iraq—Fiction. 5. Excavations (Archaeology)—Iraq—Fiction. 6. Petroleum—Prospecting—Iraq—Fiction. 7. Petroleum industry and trade—Middle East—History—Fiction. 8. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1910–1936—Fiction. 9. Iraq—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6071.N8L36 2009
823’.914—dc22
2008009201

eISBN: 978-0-385-52947-1

v1.0