Barry Unsworth - Land of Marvels

“Quite a speech,” Palmer said a little later, after Fahir had retired for the night. “He forgot to mention a few things, though.” His face wore its usual expression of cheerful skepticism. “He forgot to mention one of the chief Turkish interests in the railway, which is to be able to move troops and munitions speedily to the head of the Persian Gulf and threaten British communications with India in the event of war. Quite a few things he forgot to mention, actually. There are substantial deposits of chrome ore in Cilicia, and the line passes close by them. If you have it in mind to manufacture armor-piercing shells, you need chrome.”

“Well, it’s the Germans who are building the line,” Patricia said. “I suppose they would like to get their hands on the chrome too. I mean, if Turkey needs foreign capital to help with her cotton industry, she needs it just as much to help her make jolly good hand grenades and stuff like that.”

Palmer and she were very much alike, Somerville thought, very well matched. They talked the same language. Both took a sort of glee in deflating high-flown sentiments. A glee not shared by Edith, who would find it mean-spirited and cynical, she would probably be striving to shut the girl’s words out. There were just the four of them now, after dinner; they had moved into the sitting room, where a wood fire was burning. Somerville and the younger people sat close to the hearth, and Edith was a little farther off, in her favorite armchair, reading by the light of an oil lamp on the table beside her.

“How did you know about this chrome business?” Somerville asked.

“Financial pages of the Times, ” Palmer said. “If you want to know how things are going, keep an eye on the market for metals. Better than a hundred so-called authoritative editorials. The prices of certain metals have been increasing steadily for months now. All the international accords and treaties and high-sounding assurances haven’t made a scrap of difference. Lead, chrome, zinc, antimony in particular.”

He paused for a moment for effect, then straightened his back and adopted an oracular manner. “My friends, I put it to you, what have these metals in common? Bear with me, and I will tell you. They are all found in substantial quantities in Turkish Asia, and they are all very important for the manufacture of field guns and armor plate.”

Somerville glanced across at his wife, who had not looked up from her book during this conversation. She was rereading one of her favorite novels, Scott’s Rob Roy, one of a stock she had brought with her, all of which she had read before, not once but several times. The slightly flickering light cast by the lamp gleamed on her lowered head, the fair tresses at her temples. She was sitting with her legs drawn up beneath the long skirt of her dress. She never sprawled or slumped or adopted ungainly postures, unlike Patricia in this; some principle or instinct of grace informed all her movements. Grace and decorum together—the combination had moved him from the beginning, from the days of their courtship, with something dutiful in it, almost childlike, as if some silent appeal for approval were being made. He had the same feeling, though aware of a lack in logical connection, about her habit of reading novels that were already deeply familiar to her, a habit that she must have had already in adolescence.

The fire flared suddenly, distracting his attention. Fuel was brought to the house by an old man, slightly lame, who had somehow secured a monopoly. He brought dried camel dung, dead sticks from the undergrowth of the riverbanks, wood brought down in the winter floods, which he gathered and dried for them. Some of these pieces had lain in the swamps of pitch before being borne away, and this long ooze of pitch had penetrated to the heart of the wood. These pieces would flare up when the flame had devoured the outer part, and for some moments jets of pale blue and orange and gold would lick eagerly around them, as if in some fierce joy of release, a voracity short-lived but somehow startling.

“You promised to explain to me how the picture signs developed into writing,” Patricia said to Palmer, in the tone of one who is sure that a promise will be kept.

“So I did. We’ll need some paper and a pencil. Let’s sit over here.”

Edith Somerville raised her head to watch the pair seat themselves at the small square table that was sometimes used for bridge when there were people who cared to play. Then she looked at her husband and smiled, but it did not seem to Somerville there was much amusement in this smile or any warmth for him. More like resignation, he thought. He said, rather awkwardly, “I’d better get along, before I fall asleep by the fire. I’ve got one or two things to see to.”

The quality of his wife’s smile did not change with these words. She made no reply but nodded a little and after a moment returned to her book, leaving him with a vague sense of discomfiture at his own awkwardness, at the constraint that had settled between them, making him feel obliged to announce his purposes, as if he couldn’t get out of the room without doing so. He wondered if she had noticed it, his explaining of presences and absences, a sort of politeness that belonged to strangers rather than to man and wife. If so, she gave no sign. She was not herself more explanatory than before, and this too troubled him, like a lack of sympathy.

But as the door closed behind him, all thoughts of Edith, all sense of the scene he was leaving, were immediately erased from his mind, replaced by the image of the carved stone they had found that day, which he was on his way now to look at.

“I’ll try to give you an idea of the signs in a minute,” Palmer said. “But just to go into the background a bit, the key to it all is the cuneiform script.”

“I know that means wedge-shaped.” Patricia smiled and shrugged her shoulders a bit. “It’s just about all I do know.”

“The shape was accidental in a way. It’s all down to the humble reed, which is what they used for writing. It was cut on a slant, so the marks it made were wedge-shaped. Trace the development of cuneiform, and you follow the whole course of Mesopotamian civilization. The earliest examples we know of are in Sumerian and date to about three thousand years before Christ. We can read Sumerian now, but no one knows for sure where the language came from. Anyway, this way of writing spread very quickly and was taken over by people with languages entirely different from Sumerian, by the Hittites, for example, whose language was Indo-European, and by the Semitic invaders of Mesopotamia, the Akkadians, who passed it on to the Syrians and Babylonians. It was still being used at the beginning of the Christian Era. Three thousand years, not bad for a system of writing, is it? Empires die young by comparison. I should have pointed that out to Fahir. Are we disturbing your reading? If so, we can push off somewhere else.”

“No, not at all,” Edith said. “I wasn’t trying to read actually. I was listening to what you were saying.” They would be glad to be alone together, she knew that. “My eyes are getting tired in any case,” she said. “I am going to bed soon.”

“John must have told you all about cuneiform writing long ago.”

“Yes, but his main interest doesn’t lie there, as you know. That’s why he is so glad to have you with him. By nature he is a digger and searcher, a man of action really.”

She paused for a moment, aware of having spoken more in belittlement of Palmer than in any spirit of praise for her husband. “He can’t read the original inscriptions,” she said, “so he doesn’t get so excited about them as you do.”

In fact it had been Palmer’s lack of excitement that had struck her in listening. She had not taken much to him from the start, disliking his jocularity, which she thought rather common, his way of questioning and undermining things, the lack of fire in him. He saw everything from below, from ground level, toad’s level; there was no splendidness in him. His present behavior confirmed her in this opinion. The girl was hanging on his words; you only needed to look at her face to see that. He was the authority; he was in control; he had an intimate knowledge of what he was talking about. Yet he had not tried in the least to be fascinating, to exercise what Edith thought of as the male prerogative, the communication of power and strength and passionate certainty. Instead he had spoken with a sort of casual, confiding friendliness, as if he were telling her about a book he had read or a place he had been to and she hadn’t.