Barry Unsworth - Land of Marvels

Not love as we would understand it, not romantic love. But something no less potent. She had been faithful to the death. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was swept by mingled feelings of envy and grief. She had followed him through defeat and hazardous flight and through the years of obscurity and exile, a failed king… Together they had escaped the fire, and together they had lain inviolate here through the centuries. Through me they will be kept alive, he vowed to himself, alive and intact for all the time that is left for people to wonder at such things.

The sound of horses, as first Manning and then Spahl passed along the track, did not come to him down there.

The main problem for Jehar lay in choosing the right time to force the lock and steal the dynamite. The day he would do it was never in question; it was today, the first one, now. But he had to find an hour between the end of work at the sheds and the onset of darkness; he did not dare to show a light, there were people too close.

From a point on the eastern side of the mound he watched and waited. There was already some graining of darkness in the air when the last of the workmen left. By good fortune, the night guard’s shack was well behind the sheds, out of the way; he would not begin his rounds—if he began them at all—until night was well advanced.

He had taken the measure of the lock days before, even before making his proposal. He was armed with what he needed, a short spike with one end flattened and an iron bar. One of the few truthful things he had said to Somerville was that he had experience of breaking locks. A certain amount of noise was unavoidable. He hoped the watchman would not hear; if he did, and came to investigate, Jehar knew he would have to kill him, and for this purpose he had a third essential tool: the knife he wore at his belt below the loose-fitting smock.

But no mishap of this sort occurred. He sprang open the lock, entered the shed, and took what he needed without impediment. The dynamite was in boxes lined with thick cloth. He had a canvas bag slung to his body for the blasting caps and the fuses. There was still light enough to see by as he made his way to the preselected place, a shallow declivity immediately below the line of the sheds. He had already, the night before, covered from view by the forward bank of this ditch, worked patiently to make recesses in this bank where the dynamite, bound in bundles of ten sticks, could be inserted and packed around. Three of these holes he had made, at intervals of twenty paces. It was a heavy charge of explosive, but he was resolved to make a thorough job of it and so be sure of his money.

It was now, in a certain way, that Jehar began to pay the price for having turned his life into a story. He had not spoken the truth when he told Somerville that he had great experience in the laying of explosives. In fact he had none at all. It was like the boat building on the Great River that was to be the foundation of his and Ninanna’s fortunes; he had never done it, but more than once he had seen it done. He had watched while they inserted the blasting caps and while they placed the fuse into the neck of the cap when it was in place. He knew that the fuse had to be squeezed and crimped when this was done in order to ensure a tight fit. And he knew the dangers of this; he had once seen a man squeeze the explosive instead of the end of the cap and get his hand and forearm blown off. He knew too that the fuse had to be dry and cut level to avoid friction and that great care had to be taken to avoid cracking the outer covering. He did not know what was inside the blasting cap or the fuse or the explosive itself, but he did not need to know these things.

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.