Land of Marvels

by Unsworth, Barry

  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.

  The man had devoted practically the whole of his adult life, all the years since leaving Oxford, to these studies that he spoke of now so flatly! She simply could not understand it. How different from John in the days of their courtship, when he had outlined his plans and ambitions to her. How inspiring he had been with his passion for Mesopotamia, carrying her along with him on a tide of great designs and bold projects, and how she had admired him for giving up that pettifogging business and devoting himself to his heart’s desire. She had responded to his ardor with all the ardor of her nature. Follow the dream, that was it. In the destructive element immerse. How true that was. Lord Jim was one of the novels she had brought with her. Palmer was too pedestrian, too lacking in impulse, to have even the merest notion of such a thing.

  “Well, good night,” she said. “I’ll toddle off to bed.”

  Palmer waited till the door had closed behind her, then took up the pencil and drew the sheet of paper toward him with an air of relief. “Well,” he said, “in the very earliest tablets, let’s say around 3000 B.C., the sign for a star was like this, sort of an asterisk made with six lines of equal thickness and length, scratched in the clay with some sharp instrument, no wedge shape at all. Come round the table a bit so you can see better. It’s what they call a pictograph, the picture represents the object. Now look at this, a few hundred years later, in what they call the Third Dynasty of Ur, the period of Akkadian domination. It still has the same form, still six lines, but the three upper ones end in wedge shapes. Now if we come to more recent times, say about 700 B.C., the great age of Assyria, it looks like this.”

  The two were sitting shoulder to shoulder now, and Palmer’s pencil was busy.

  “But it’s totally different,” Patricia said. “It’s nothing like a star now. Just a simple cross with the wedge shape on the side instead of at the top.”

  “Yes, that’s right, it has turned through ninety degrees. All the cuneiform signs went through this change, for reasons that are not altogether clear to us. And at the same time they got more and more abstract, less and less like the original object. And they started to take on additional meanings. A bowl was still a bowl, but it could also mean food or bread, depending on the context. Two lateral lines meant a stream, but when they became vertical they could also mean a seed or a father or a son.”

  “And what does this one mean now?”

  “Well, it still means star, but it can also be read as sky or God.”

  “I think the whole thing is absolutely fascinating,” Patricia said.

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Some people find it boring. Edith, for instance.”

  “Well, I don’t. Edith doesn’t go into things very much, does she? She hasn’t got much concentration, have you noticed? The whole course of human thought is there in those signs, the whole process of learning. From object to symbol, it’s an essential step; we can’t emerge from childhood without making it. No child at school today could learn to read or add up wit
hout it.”

  They were still sitting shoulder to shoulder, their upper arms touching. Palmer put the pencil down without shifting his position. For some moments he maintained a deliberate silence. Patricia did not look at him, but she did not move away. He felt love and desire gather within him, furthered by silence, indistinguishable one from another. Object and symbol, he thought. Yes. He had known this girl only three weeks. “I am glad you feel like that about it,” he said in a voice that was slightly husky. “It matters a lot to me. To tell you the truth, it has been my whole life up to now. Will you marry me?”

  The piece of carved stone lay flat on the table where he had left it. He carried the lamp over and stood looking down. The carving was in shallow relief, and the incisions were impacted with clay, making the detail difficult to distinguish clearly. He noticed now that the clay was speckled with a grayish powder; in some places it was more than a speckling, it was a thick admixture, very hard to the touch. He took the eyeglass from his pocket and looked closely at this filling, which brought the cuts in the stone to the same plane as the surface. Something that had been compounded with the clay from the beginning perhaps . . . Then it came to him: It was the dust of wood ash, the same stuff he had found in the roots of the Nubian’s hair, in the eyes and the ears of the lion; that had been more bluish in color, but it was the same stuff.

  It would not brush out, it was too hard packed. He went to the long table where various instruments and cleaning materials were laid out, returned with tweezers, a thin scalpel, a dentist’s pick. Slowly, very carefully, he began to scrape out the filling of clay. Some he put in a jar for laboratory analysis when they returned to London; they had no facilities for it where they were. The traces remaining in the incisions and in the texture of the surface he removed with a weak solution of hydrochloric acid and a soft cloth, working patiently and with great care.

  It was well after midnight by the time he finished. He could see the line of the curve clearly now, and the forward-slanting protuberance at the top, where the stone was broken, not a boss, as he had thought at first, but the stump of something that had been longer. The double band of the ring was some nine inches to the left of this, slightly lower down. But it would be on a level, he thought, with the lower part of the curve if this were continued downward. The curve and the stump and the ring, taken together, reminded him of something . . .

  Without much sense of decision, as if moving under some gently exercised propulsion, he got up and made his way across the near corner of the silent courtyard to the drawing office. Here he provided himself with a pencil, some sheets of plain paper, and a square of tracing paper. As he returned with these, the silence that hung over the courtyard and the unaccustomed lateness of the hour brought about a feeling of excitement in him, as if this were an escapade of some kind, something so far out of the common as to seem reckless, even illicit.

  Seated again in the workroom, he laid the tracing paper over the stone and lightly traced out the lines of the carving, taking care to keep the spaces and proportions exact. This done, pressing down hard with his pencil, he made an impression on the first piece of paper, then drew in the lines. There before him were the curve, the stump, the ring. The curve descended gently, but at the point where the stone was broken off it seemed, for no more than half an inch, to become steeper, almost vertical. Still as if his movements were being directed, he took up the pencil again and continued the line down from this point, ending it with a hook. The stump he extended, following the line of the slant. He found himself looking, quite unmistakably, at the hooked beak and stiff heraldic crest of a hawk. What he had thought was a ring could not be so; the line below it swelled out a little; it was the beginning of an arm. The ring was a bracelet, and it was enclosing a human wrist.

  Head of a hawk, arms and hands of a man. Into Somerville’s mind there came the memory of the picture that he had bought at the age of eighteen, which had hung first in his bedroom when he still lived with his father, then on the wall of his study in London, a copy of F. C. Cooper’s watercolor of the excavation at Nimrud in 1850, carried out by Henry Layard, depicting the entrance to the shrine of Ninurta built by Ashurnasirpal II in the ninth century before Christ. Later he had seen the originals brought to the Louvre from Khorsabad by Paul Émile Botta and to the British Museum, some years later, by Layard. But it was the painting that had fired his imagination. On either side of the portals and flanking the colossal human-headed bulls, three panels, one above the other, depicted the guardian spirits of the Assyrian kings, the middle one with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a man, right arm raised in blessing, wrist braceleted. The bracelet too was proof: Only gods and demigods and kings were empowered to wear bracelets.

  What was it doing here, so far from the Tigris and the Assyrian heartlands, from Ashur and Nineveh, the great cities of Assyrian power? Somerville peered around him into the dim corners of the room, as if to interrogate all points of the compass, all quarters of the world.

  Dawn was not far off when he finally succeeded in sleeping. He had lain awake through the hours of the night, possessed by the excitement of his discovery. The same tension of questioning fastened on him the moment he opened his eyes. The figure of the hawk-headed guardian came to him complete in every detail, as he had seen it first in Cooper’s painting, then among the sculptures brought back from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, slabs of gypsum carved in low relief, which had decorated the portals and walls of the palaces of Assyrian kings, scenes of hunting and warfare and ritual procession. Among them, recurring again and again, the beak, the crest, the human form, always in profile, always with its magical accoutrements, the right hand with its braceleted wrist raising a cone-shaped object toward the branches of a tree, the left lowered, holding a small bucket. Perhaps a sacred tree, the Tree of Life—no agreement had been reached on this, the time was too remote, the evidence lacking. The cone resembled a date spathe, the male flower used for fertilizing palms, but in the sculptures it was not always applied to trees, but sometimes to the king himself to give magical protection to his person, as it was in those portals of the shrine at Nimrud, built at a time when Assyria, under Ashurnasirpal, one of the cruelest and most magnificent of her kings, was about to embark on those wars of conquest that would see her, within two centuries, mistress of an empire greater in extent than any that the world had ever seen, stretching from the Taurus Mountains to the Persian Gulf and westward to Syria and Palestine and Egypt.

  Nimrud—he kept coming back to that. Scene of those early spectacular discoveries of Henry Layard that had first fired him with the ambition to be an excavator in the Land of the Two Rivers and bring fresh marvels to light . . .

  Somerville knew he should get up. He could hear his wife moving about in the adjacent bedroom. The major would be leaving early; it would be unmannerly not to be there to bid him farewell. But he lay for a while longer, in the toils of the story that had begun to knit together in his mind from the moment of recognizing the shapes in the stone. Kalhu, the ancient name, mentioned in the Bible as Calah, on the left bank of the Tigris south of Mosul, a city of great antiquity but not particularly important until Ashurnasirpal chose it for his new capital, setting thousands of men to work there and lavishing great wealth on the building of his palace. Why would he want to move away from Ashur, the old capital city, named after their father god? Pride? Fear of attacks from the desert tribes of the west? Impossible to know . . . Snatches from his royal inscriptions, read and reread in translation, came to Somerville’s mind as he began to make the first moves toward getting out of bed. I built a pillar over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins . . . A palace of cedar, cypress, juniper and tamarisk for my royal dwelling and for my lordly pleasure for all time I founded therein . . . The spoil of my hand from the lands which I had brought under my sway, in great quantities I took and placed there . . . For all time—he had thought his palace would last forever.
All those precious woods, so boastfully enumerated, burned to ash by the Medes and Chaldeans allied together when the cities of Assyria were put to the fire and their empire collapsed.

  Clapping his hands, calling across the courtyard from his window for Hassan to bring him hot water, he thought: No, not stone, stone might suffer charring but would not be reduced to ash. Perhaps at the very heart of a conflagration, even stone. Ivory, yes; fire would melt ivory . . .

  He was only just in time to bid farewell to the major, who departed with his maps and his lists of friendly rifles and his escort of Shammar tribesmen. After breakfast he felt a certain reluctance to leave for the tell and see the work started—his usual practice. The foremen were well able to take care of this, he knew; it was merely a question of assembling the groups, allotting the work—the area of excavation would be the same. And perhaps it was this, the sameness, that unsettled him, a nagging sense that these recent, unusual finds required a breaking of new ground, a shift in tactics that he felt for the moment unable to direct.

  With the idea of looking once again at the carving and at the lines he had traced and placing them side by side so as to examine them in the sober light of morning, he made his way to the workroom. There was no link between the stone and the ivory as far as he could see; at least there was nothing that could associate them through points of similarity; the ivory was not Syrian work, it came from the cities of the coast or from Egypt, it was a statement of power, not a plea for magical protection.