Barry Unsworth - Land of Marvels

Somerville nodded. This same morning scene was being enacted, with the same disputes, all over Mesopotamia, where French and German and British and American archaeologists were digging and tunneling into mounds pretty much like this one. Some were making important finds—and the recurrent awareness that he was not among these fortunate ones was like the intermittent throb of a sore tooth—but all were in haste, no matter what the place, Tell Halaf, Tell Chagar, Khorsabad, Nineveh, Babylon. Haste, in this spring of 1914, to get out of the earth as much as possible, before it was barred to them. Fear in this haste too, he thought: fear of the cataclysm, the abyss…

“They have no slightest reason for thinking one spot better than another,” Palmer said. “Not as things are at present. It’s a toss-up. But they go on making a fuss about it. It’s a form of superstition, I suppose.”

He had spoken with the cheerful skepticism that belonged to him, and he paused now, smiling at Somerville. “Or perhaps a form of gambling,” he said, noting the lines of strain and fatigue in the other’s face.

“Quite a few of them are eager to be sent over to the trench on the eastern side, which is scarcely begun yet, where that piece of ivory was found yesterday,” Somerville said. “But the thing was out of context. I don’t think there’ll be anything more. All the same, we will have to keep our eyes open for any fragments of the part missing.”

“It’s hard to know what it was doing there.”

They discussed it as they walked back to the house together. It had been one of the few interesting finds of the season so far, slightly more than half of a circular ivory plaque, broken across diagonally, showing the head and right foreleg of a lion, carved in relief against the background of what looked like papyrus flowers, the head lowered in a fashion almost dainty, fastidious, the teeth gripping into the throat of a man not supine but resting back on his arms, straddled by the beast, head raised, near death, the upturned face African in looks, the hair bunched in tight curls. It had been found in the vertical pit that went down from the summit, a little way along a trench on the eastern side.

“It can’t date from the level where it was found,” Palmer said. “It’s a thousand years too early. There was no ivory in circulation then, none that we know of.”

It was something of a mystery to both of them how carved ivory of sophisticated workmanship could have found its way to such a deep level; it had been lying amid mud-brick rubble and fragments of painted pottery dating back to the third millennium before Christ.

“It seems that there were elephants in Syria then,” Somerville said. “There might have been some local carving in ivory, though none has come to light. But I don’t think it is Syrian work in any case. It’s too refined, too ceremonious somehow.”

He enjoyed speculations of this kind, and his spirits had lifted by the time they were drawing near the house. “There will be a reason,” he said. “There is always a reason, if you can find it. Someone made it who was once alive in the world. And someone else brought it here.”

“The level needn’t be such a problem,” Palmer said as Hassan ran to open the gate for them. “It’s probably the doing of our little friend, the jumping mouse.”

This was an accustomed joke between them, the jumping mouse, or jerboa, being a creature that had reached legendary status, having bedeviled generations of archaeologists in the lands between the two tributaries of the Euphrates, the Belikh and Khabur rivers, by its habit of building its nest in very deep burrows—sometimes deep enough to reach the living rock—and in the process throwing up shards and flints from the deepest layers onto the surface. Palmer was convinced—or affected to be—that this little animal seized upon various more recent objects, anything that took its fancy, and bore them down into the depths of the earth, even things bigger and heavier than itself. In this two-way traffic the layers were jumbled up and the dawn of history confused with the day before yesterday.

The houseboys had laid the table on the shaded side of the courtyard, and the other members of the expedition had already started breakfast. Edith Somerville, sitting at the head of the table, saw Hassan, who had been squatting against the wall, scramble up to open the gate, saw her husband and his assistant enter side by side. They had been laughing together, but this laughter tailed off as they passed through the gate and came into the courtyard. She watched her husband come toward them though without seeming to look in their direction. And it was this, the habit of aloofness, something that belonged to him but was also assumed, especially when there was a group to be faced, greetings to be exchanged, that struck her anew as he approached, belied as it always was by something incongruously jaunty in his gait, a slight jerking upward motion of the feet, involuntary and almost pathetic when combined with his abstracted expression, as if he had suffered some blow and was exerting himself not to show the damage.

The impression was not new to her, nor was the dislike for it that followed immediately; she hated any flicker of pity in herself, felt it demeaning. But the mixture of feelings was strong on this occasion, seeming to sum up, in these few moments, all that was contradictory and unresolved in the relations between them. So much was this so that she glanced quickly at the other faces around the table, as if she might see a similar feeling registered there, at that of Gregory, her husband’s Armenian secretary, his sallowness in contrast with the dark red complexion of Major Manning beside him, who had arrived among them the day before, and of Patricia, sitting opposite her, fresh from Girton College, who was there for no particular reason except that she was the daughter of a London friend and had liked the idea of joining the expedition. None of these faces seemed any different, except that of Patricia, whose looks had brightened at Palmer’s appearance.

Then the two were at the table, apologizing for their lateness. She met her husband’s glance and smile, with its usual combination of irony and resignation, and returned to the enjoyment of her breakfast.

It was easily her favorite meal. The bread here, east of the Euphrates, had been new to her, quite a revelation in its way, cooked on an upturned cauldron with a fire inside, beaten thin so it came in large, crisp wafers. Accompanied by wild honey, dried dates, and goat milk cheese, it made a delicious breakfast. She enjoyed her food and unlike most of her women friends at home had never needed to take care of her weight. She was a tall, full-bodied woman, but at thirty-five she was as light and graceful as she had been at twenty.

Conversation during the meal mainly concerned the recent speech from the throne, news of which had been brought them by the major, who had been in Mosul the week before, staying as a guest at the consulate. A message of hope and more than hope, even confidence, that an accord with Germany and Turkey would be reached, was on the verge of being reached.

“Approaching a satisfactory issue,” Manning said. “Those were His Majesty’s words. He was speaking with particular reference to our commercial interests in Mesopotamia.”

He had a mannerism, fairly frequent, in the pauses between his words, an involuntary tightening of his lips, marked by a slight bristling movement of his fair, carefully clipped mustache, as if he were controlling an impulse to more violent speech.

“Approaching, well, yes,” Somerville said. “We are not standing still, so much is true. But approaches can be long or short, can’t they? No disrespect to King George, his speeches are designed to reassure the nation, but ‘satisfactory issue’ is a bit on the vague side, don’t you think?”