Barry Unsworth - Land of Marvels

Tell Erdek was the one he had chosen. It had the advantage of water not far away that could be drunk after filtering and boiling, and the village was close by, giving access to a labor force. They had leased the land from the local sheikh, had a house built, kept relations good by promising him the house—palatial by local standards—as a gift when the work there was finished.

They had proceeded in regular fashion, cutting the trench from the top of the mound to a point well beyond its foot; at exact intervals, in descending order, the work gangs were positioned, each with a measured square to work in. Quite soon, in their first season there, they had come to the remains of walls running across the line of the trench. But this had led to nothing much except an immense labor of clearance. So far only the ground plans of two small houses had come to light. They had found no substantial remains below the raised area on the west side; the rampart, so promising at first sight, had proved a purely accidental configuration. It was true that their pit had descended through empires: Layers of Parthian, Byzantine, Roman occupation had been found, then a thousand years or so of apparent nonhabitation, then Aramaean potsherds, then evidence of devastation by fire. Below the ash of this conflagration were the chipped flint ax heads of Neolithic man, a time before recorded history began.

The sequence was impeccable. But in all this time of digging nothing of major interest had been found, nothing that did more than reinforce what was known already. There was this piece of ivory, which had no context—so far at least—and therefore no meaning; in the previous season they had unearthed a stone-built Sumerian shrine with the small, badly damaged statue of a worshiper, further proof that the influence of Sumer had extended into this northern region, a fact amply demonstrated by others before him.

It was not much to show for all the work and all the money. He had pinned his hopes on Tell Erdek. It was the first time he had been in charge of an expedition, after the years as assistant at different sites in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. He had not come to archaeology in the usual way, through the usual stages, as Palmer had: distinguished university career, postgraduate studies in ancient history and Semitic languages, an assistant curatorship. After his years at Rugby he had joined the family firm and worked with his father, who had made a modest fortune in the Manchester cotton trade; there had not been much choice in this, he was the only child. He had not been happy, but he had gone on with it while his parents lived, spending what leisure time he had on studies begun in early boyhood relating to the history and archaeology of the Near East.

It had been his consuming passion. In an age of explorers and empire builders his hero had been an archaeologist, Henry Layard, whose excavations had revealed to the world the glories of ancient Assyria. In 1830, at the age of twenty-two, Layard had given up his position in a London law office and traveled on horseback through Anatolia and Syria. He had excavated Nimrud, with its colossal human-headed, five-legged bulls, uncovered the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh and the many hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the archives of the Assyrian kings, an immense addition to human knowledge. And he was still not yet thirty! Somerville too, in conscious emulation, had given up everything for the sake of archaeology. His mother had died when he was still young. On his father’s death he had sold the business and the family home, invested the money, and offered himself as unpaid assistant to Sir William Forben, who was about to leave for Mesopotamia. He had always held to the similarity of circumstance between Layard and himself; their lives were connected by a bright and glittering thread; he too would become famous for his discoveries; he too would reveal to the world a splendor from underground, long unsuspected.

He was farther away from this now than ever. By the end of this third season, with the wages of two hundred workers to pay and the cost of transport to meet, he would be left with funds insufficient for another year. And now there was this sudden threat of the railway—for both sudden and insidious it had been. In 1912 and most of 1913, during the course of his first two seasons at Tell Erdek, the railway company had run into money problems; the line had been to all appearance abandoned. A branch line to Alexandretta had been completed and opened to traffic, but work on the Euphrates bridge had been suspended; the track had been halted just east of the river and might well have stuck there some years more. But in the previous December, while preparing to set out, he had learned from the Times that the Deutsche Bank had disposed of its holdings in the Macedonian Railways to an Austro-Hungarian syndicate and reinvested the funds thus obtained in the main line, confirming the company’s intention of taking it across Mesopotamia to Baghdad and Basra. He had had the proof of it this morning from the mouth of Jehar, who always looked at him so closely and intently, as if something more were expected, awaited, some inevitable end. Once again, with the same feeling of sickness, he was swept by the same question: Was it not he who was waiting for the end, for the line to come and pierce this bump of ancient ground and smash his hopes—hopes smashed already?

Jehar had watched the khwaja ascend to the summit of the mound and stand there looking toward the horizon, a motionless figure in his invariable dress of broad-brimmed hat and long-sleeved shirt and khaki shorts that came to his knees. It was important to keep the Englishman under observation as far as possible so as to know what progress was being made in the search for the treasure. There was of course no possibility of knowing what was passing through the other’s mind as he stood there, and Jehar did not speculate: better the vacant mind than the mind occupied fruitlessly. But he would not have been in the least surprised to learn that he himself was featuring in the Englishman’s thoughts; he was convinced that their two lives were closely intertwined; it was this man who had singled him out, sent him to Aleppo first and then Jerablus to report on the progress of the railway; and it was in the railyards of Jerablus that he had seen the girl who had changed the whole course of his life, made him a different man.

She was called Ninanna, a beautiful name, unusual for a Circassian girl, and she was fifteen years old. This he had discovered from the man who called himself her uncle and perhaps was. They were Muhammadan people from the Caucasus Mountains who had fled south from the Russian Cossacks and taken refuge in parts of northern Syria. The uncle ran a bar with a few tables in the yards of Jerablus. Customers were not lacking; work on the bridge had been going on for two years, and in that time a township of hovels and shacks had sprung up to house the men who came to work on the construction or in the sawmills and coal sheds and to entertain them and skim off their wages: brothels and bars and gambling houses and pits for dogfights and makeshift stalls.

But it was not there, amid the fumes and clamor of the shunting yards, that he had seen her first. She had been getting water from the pump near the offices of the German engineers, laughing and talking with two older women, and their eyes had met while the laughter was still in her face. He had known at that moment that she was for him. He had watched her walk away, with the tall jar held in place on its pad with one raised arm. And he had felt the deep disturbance of love at the sway of her walk, her beauty and strength and stateliness. Her head was covered by a scarf worn well forward, by which Jehar knew she was a respectable girl and unmarried, a fact confirmed when he spoke to the uncle, who was asking a hundred gold pounds for her.