Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

In St Petersburg we were kindly received by the celebrated bibliographer V. S. Sopikov, whose shop in Gostiny Dvor became my daily place of resort. *Then after a week or so, my companion, Mr Furnivall, was obliged to return to London, but I chose to remain. For I was bewitched by this extraordinary city of white and gold, entranced by its great public buildings and palaces, its wide vistas, its canals and churches. I found a set of rooms close to Nevsky Prospekt, began to learn the Russian language, and even embraced the fearsome winters with a kind of delight. Bundled in furs, I would often wander the streets at night, with the snow falling all about me, to stand contemplatively on the Lion Bridge by the Griboedova Canal, or watch the ice floating downstream on the mighty Neva.

Nearly a year passed before I began to set my sights homeward at last. Before departing, Mr Furnivall had requested, with some warmth, that I should come to see him at the Museum on my return, to discuss the possibility of my filling a vacancy in the Department that had recently arisen. As I had no other career in view, it began to seem an attractive prospect. I had been an exile from my native country for too long. It was time to make something of myself. And so, in February 1847, I quit St Petersburg, travelling leisurely westwards, occasionally deviating from my route as the fancy took me, and arriving at last in Portsmouth at the beginning of June.

Billick brought the trap to meet me off the Portsmouth coach at Wareham. Having heartily slapped each other on the back for a second or two on first seeing each other, we travelled back for two hours and more in complete silence, save for the sound of my companion’s incessant chewing on an old piece of tobacco, to our mutual satisfaction, until we arrived at Sandchurch.

‘Drop me here, Billick,’ I said, as the trap passed the church.

As he continued on his way up the hill, I knocked on the door of the little leaning cottage next to the church-yard.

Tom opened the door, spectacles in hand, a book that he had been reading tucked under his arm.

He smiled and held out his hand, letting the book fall to the ground.

‘The traveller returns,’ he said. ‘Come on in, old chap, and make yourself at home.’

And a second home it had once been to me, this low, dusty room tumbled from floor to ceiling, and up the stairs from ground to roof, with books of every shape and size. Its dear familiarity – the three-legged dresser supported by a groaning stack of mouldering leather folios, the fishing rods crossed above the fireplace, the discoloured marble bust of Napoleon on a little shelf by the door – was both poignant and painful. Tom, too, his long lined face shining in the fire-glow, his great ears with grey tufts growing out of them, his lilting Norfolk accent, brought a sense of childhood rushing in on me.

‘Tom,’ I said, ‘I believe you’ve lost what little hair you had when I last saw you.’

And we laughed, and there was an end of silence for the night.

On we talked, hour after hour, about what I had done and seen during my time on the Continent, as well as reminiscing over old times, until at last, the clock striking midnight, Tom said that he would get the lantern and walk up the hill with me to see me safe home. He left me at the gate beneath the chestnut-tree, and I entered the silent house.

After nearly nine years of wandering, I lay down that night in my own bed again, and closed my eyes once more to the sound of the eternal music of sea meeting shore.

The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal, and attempting a little work about the house and garden. But as autumn came on, I began to feel restless and dissatisfied. Tom would come and sit with me most days, and I saw plainly that he was troubled by my indolence.

‘What will you do, Ned?’ he asked at last.

‘I suppose I shall have to earn a living,’ I sighed. ‘I have used up nearly all my capital, the house is in a very bad state of repair, and now Mr More has written to say that, before she died, my mother borrowed a hundred pounds from him of which he now has need.’

‘If you still have nothing definite in view,’ Tom said after a pause, ‘I might venture to suggest something.’

Whilst travelling in the Levant, I had written to him of my new passion for the ancient civilizations of Asia Minor. Apprised of my imminent return to England, and unaware that I was considering the position at the British Museum, he had acted on my behalf to make some tentative enquiries concerning the possibility of my joining an expedition just then assembling to excavate the monuments at Nimrud.

‘It would be an experience, Ned, and a little money in your hands, and you could start to make a name for yourself in a growing field.’

I said that it was a splendid idea, and thanked him heartily for putting me in the way of it, though in truth I had some reservations about the plan. The gentleman leading the expedition, known to Tom through a relation, lived in Oxford; it was soon agreed that Tom would write to him immediately, to suggest that he and I go up there at the Professor’s earliest convenience.

It was several weeks before an answer came, but then, one bright and windy autumn morning, Tom called to say that he had received a reply from Professor S— in Oxford *who had expressed interest in receiving me in New College to talk over my candidature for the expedition.

The Professor’s rooms were crammed full of casts and fragments of bas-relief, inscriptions covered in the mysterious cuneiform writing that I had read about in Rawlinson’s account of his travels in Susiana and Kurdistân, †and carvings of muscular winged bulls in glowering black basalt. Maps and plans lay all about the floor, or were draped over tables and the backs of chairs; and on an easel in the centre of the room stood what I at first took to be a monochrome painting of an immense crowned king, bearded and braided and omnipotent in attitude, beneath whose feet crouched a captive enemy or rebel, frozen in abject surrender to the might of the conqueror.

On closer inspection, I saw that it was not a painting at all, but what the Professor, seeing my interest, described as a photogenic drawing – a technique invented by Mr Talbot, *a fellow student of the cuneiform texts. I stood amazed at the sight; for the image of the king – a gargantuan and looming stone presence standing in a waste of desert sand – had been made, not by some transient agent devised by man, but by eternal light itself. The light of the world; the sun that had once shone on ancient Babylon, and now struggled to light up the dreary October streets of Oxford in the nineteenth century, had been captured and held, like the slave beneath the king’s feet, and made permanent.

I tell you all this because the moment was a significant one in my life, as shall appear. Up until then, I had followed the familiar paths of knowledge that wound out from the safe harbour of the Liberal Arts. Now I saw that science, somewhat neglected in my education, held open possibilities of which I had not dreamed.

The Professor smelled a little overripe in the close confinement of his attic rooms, and seemed to think that standing very close to someone and talking loudly into their faces was the most convenient way of conducting an interview. He questioned me closely on my knowledge of Mesopotamia and the Babylonian kings, and on a variety of congeneric questions, whilst Tom hovered some distance off with a hopeful smile on his face.

It may well be that I passed muster. Indeed, I know it to be the case, for a few days after our return to Sandchurch, the Professor wrote to communicate his desire that I should return to Oxford as soon as it could be so arranged, in order to make the acquaintance of the other members of the proposed expedition.