Monsters in the Sand

by David Harris

  ‘Nimrud is two miles from the river.’

  ‘But last year, I saw masonry that must have been wharves beside Nimrud. The ancient River Tigris washed the walls of Nineveh, but centuries later the river shifted to its present course.’

  ‘That sounds like forcing the evidence to fit the theory.’

  ‘The prophet Jonah said the city of Nineveh was three days journey from what is now Mosul. Nimrud is about twenty miles south of Mosul. The average day of travelling with sheep and goats is about seven miles, so Nimrud is in the right place.’

  ‘Well, so be it. The Lion prefers to hunt alone.’

  Austen smiled. ‘A wager. Twenty bottles of fine shiraz that I find Nineveh first.’

  Botta shook his head. ‘I have a warship at Basra, unlimited money and an army of workers whenever I wish. What support do you have?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘I have the firmans, the permissions, from Paris and Constantinople and the full support of the pasha of Mosul. Do you have permission to dig anywhere?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Equipment?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Experience and training?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Do you know who to bribe, and the going rates in Mosul?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it hardly seems a fair wager.’

  ‘Are you afraid of losing?’

  Botta laughed. ‘Let the race begin.’

  Chapter 12

  ‘Here are your orders.’ Sir Stratford Canning slid a single sheet of paper across the polished oak table. Was the look in his eyes a warning – or pity? His features were as fine and flawless as if they had been sculpted in marble and Austen couldn’t read his expression.

  Austen picked up the sheet of paper, read his orders and disbelief turned into horror. ‘Prince Danielo? But he’s in Cettigne, near Bosnia.’ That was way up in the far north-west corner of the Ottoman Empire – at least one thousand five hundred miles from Nineveh and two thousand from Castle Tul.

  ‘We have hopes that Prince Danielo will assist us.’ Sir Stratford was politely insistent.

  Austen knew he’d just been given an instruction to obey, not challenge, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Prince Danielo’s a barbarian. When he invited me to play billiards, he had twelve Serbian heads on sticks around the table and twenty-five bleeding Turkish heads in the hallway. The smell was appalling. It almost put me off my game.’

  Sir Stratford’s face set hard. ‘The prince is also the Bishop of Montenegro. He has the power to shift opinion in our direction and so it is of the utmost national importance that you persuade him to support Britain.’

  Then he relaxed and gazed thoughtfully at Austen. ‘I understand your obsession with Nineveh, but events are at flashpoint in Bosnia. Prince Danielo insists on dealing only with you. He likes and trusts you. Apparently, you are the only person known to have beaten him at billiards – and lived.’

  Austen remembered lining up the last ball, with a gun to his head and the distraction of a bodyguard sharpening a stick.

  ‘I’m sorry, Layard. You leave in the morning. Nineveh will have to wait.’

  Chapter 13

  Footsteps sounded on the stone stairway. Austen slipped behind a pillar and took out his dagger. Water dripped from the mossy roof and plopped into the underground pool. Ripples spread over the sunken head of Medusa, her green snake hair wriggling under the surface. She stared at Austen with mad eyes, as if she still had the power to change him into stone.

  The footsteps stopped and a man whispered, ‘Dolmabahçe.’

  ‘Yasak bölge.’ Austen kept his dagger visible when he moved from behind the pillar.

  The hooded figure held out an envelope and Austen noticed that his clothes smelt of burnt hash. Austen tensed. Hash was smoked by assassins before killing.

  His dagger ready, Austen reached out for the envelope and put it between his teeth. Then he handed over a small bag. The hooded figure snatched it, ran up the stairs and disappeared.

  Austen sheathed his dagger and tore open the envelope. There were two small pages, folded separately. He held the first to a beam of pale light that fell through a hole in the roof. In code, the words read, Return immediately to the embassy in Constantinople.

  The second page was hastily scrawled in French. Nineveh is found. I win our bet. Paul.

  Chapter 14

  Austen galloped through the night. Nineveh is found. The words repeated themselves endlessly in his mind. Villages, forests and icy rivers passed in a dream. When he reached a staging post at dawn, his horse steamed in the cold air. He took the next mount and raced on towards Constantinople. It was past midnight when the streets of the city closed around him.

  At the embassy, a light still shone from Canning’s office window. The sentry opened the gates and Austen hurried straight to the office.

  ‘Come in, Layard.’ Canning was at his desk stacked with files tied in red tape. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

  Austen turned to the other man, Major Henry Rawlinson, who was at a table littered with sheets of paper. Rawlinson stood up and gave a quick, nervous smile. He was just over thirty years old, but his eyes were aged with tiredness.

  Austen glared from one to the other. He didn’t yet trust himself to speak.

  Rawlinson picked up some sheets of paper and held them out to him. ‘Botta sent you copies.’

  ‘They are, of course, top secret.’ Canning coughed quietly. ‘They’re for the French government’s eyes only, but he smuggled these here for you.’

  Austen was almost afraid to look and was sick with disappointment, but he took the papers from Rawlinson.

  Beautiful, terrifying monsters advanced out of the past. Giant bulls with human heads and eagle’s wings guarded palace doors. Priests with eagle’s faces carried baskets of offerings. A king or general rode in a chariot drawn by horses which trampled dying men. Bodies, impaled on poles, hung limply and smiling jinns worshipped a sacred tree. The lost civilisation of Assyria, barbaric and wonderful, was discovered.

  ‘The beauty, the mystery.’ Austen’s voice choked.

  ‘The French think they’ve won,’ said Rawlinson. ‘But have they?’

  ‘What? Of course they’ve won. Here’s the proof.’

  ‘Proof of what, exactly?’ Rawlinson rubbed his hands together. ‘Think about it. Botta can’t be sure of what he’s found, because he can’t translate the Assyrian language. He has a history he can’t describe, dates he can’t calculate and a city he can’t name.’

  Austen blinked, and tried to speak, but no words came.

  ‘Just for once, you seem lost for words.’ Canning was actually smiling. ‘Botta can dig up as many cities as he wishes, but all his results are guesswork until the cuneiforms are deciphered. And we have Rawlinson.’

  ‘Here, I have something to show you.’ Rawlinson found a page on his desk. ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to a column of letters. ‘I’ve got the beginnings of their alphabet. It’s taken years, but at last the cuneiforms are yielding their secrets. Now I know how Champollion felt after more than twenty years slaving away on the Rosetta Stone. But this time, we can beat the French. Botta may have a palace, but has he got Nineveh?’

  ‘What can I say? Of course, congratulations. Your Assyrian alphabet will be an international sensation.’

  ‘Hm, yes, when I’ve more letters. But –’ Rawlinson frowned and wouldn’t meet Austen’s eye. ‘I’m afraid there’s some dreadful news.’ He had trouble going on. ‘When Botta loosened the palace walls at Khorsabad, he held them in place with wooden struts. The walls, as you can guess, were carved with priceless sculptures and inscriptions. But thieves took the wooden struts during the night and the walls fell and smashed into a thousand pieces.’

  Austen flinched.

  ‘Botta was cursed with bad luck.’ Canning opened a drawer in his desk and took out a bottle of whisky. He poured a large measure into three cut-crystal glasses and handed one to Auste
n. ‘He loaded a winged bull onto a cart to carry it from the mound to a raft on the river. His plan was to float the colossus down to Basra, where the French warship waited. But the cart broke in half about a mile from the river and he had to abandon it. That night, peasants from farms along the banks stacked wood around the limestone bull and burnt it to make gypsum for their crops.’

  Austen had to lean one hand on Rawlinson’s desk to support himself.

  ‘There was another catastrophe,’ Rawlinson said. ‘Botta sawed another winged bull into pieces and loaded it onto a raft. He also piled on slabs of wall inscriptions and chests of art treasures for the Louvre. But the raft was caught in a fast current and capsized. Everything sank to the bottom of the Tigris and is buried there – deep in mud. Unrecoverable.’

  Austen’s moan was the only sound in the room.

  Canning added, ‘Botta is no longer the darling of the French. The word opium is whispered in the corridors of power.’

  ‘If I hired twelve workers, paid each of them four piastres a day for two months, and if I bought food, purchased equipment and lived in a tent –’ Austen seemed to be talking to himself. ‘I could find Nineveh for only sixty pounds.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’ve worked it all out.’ Canning’s eyes twinkled.

  ‘Believe me, I know exactly how I’d excavate Nineveh.’

  ‘Which Nineveh?’

  ‘Nimrud.’

  Canning swallowed whisky noisily and smacked his lips.

  ‘Sixty pounds.’ Austen threw the words down like a challenge.

  ‘You may be aware,’ Canning sounded annoyed, ‘that I’ve squandered my own money and almost emptied the bank trying to move the Halicarnassus mausoleum to London. I’m excavating the third wonder of the ancient world, and nobody in London wants to know about it.’

  ‘I only need two months.’

  ‘It would be rather nice to have our own Assyrian palace to play in,’ Rawlinson said to no one in particular. ‘Tweak a Gallic nose or two.’

  ‘Sixty pounds, you say?’ Canning drummed his fingertips on the desk. ‘You’d need another twenty, at least, for expenses. And the pasha who rules Mosul is another problem. He’s rotten to the core and the French will almost certainly bribe him to stop any British archaeological work.’

  ‘Ah, but I’m not going as an archaeologist.’ Austen felt his strength returning. ‘I’ll be an English gentleman on a hunting trip. I’ll have a pack of greyhounds and an armoury of guns on my raft, all set to bag a few gazelle near Nimrud. And because of my amateur interest in antiquities, I may happen to pick up a few odds and ends here and there.’

  ‘Such as a palace or two.’ Rawlinson quaffed his entire glass of whisky in one gulp. ‘Just make sure you find me a palace with an enormous library.’

  Canning topped up his own glass. ‘I’ll arrange letters of support, and put a flea in the ear of the directors at the British Museum, mention that the French are threatening to beat us again. They may find some funds to assist you, but I must warn you that they take until doomsday to make a decision, unless the subject is Egypt. I’m sad to say, archaeology is afflicted with Egypt fever. Mummies are heaped up like corncobs in Cairo, while my wonderful Halicarnassus relics languish in southern Turkey.’

  He reached for a memo sheet and began to write. ‘I’ll draw a bank note for your expenses, authority to withdraw cash at Mosul. And that reminds me. I’ll write to our vice-consul in Mosul, a reliable man called Christian Rassam. He runs a construction business, so he should be able to supply you with a raft, tents, spades and whatnot. I’ll instruct him to look after you.’

  Canning topped up all their glasses and raised his. ‘A toast, gentlemen. To Nineveh.’

  Chapter 15

  ‘Hunting, Mr Layard?’ The pasha of Mosul absent-mindedly scratched at a smallpox scab on his cheek. His face was as ugly as his soul. One ear had been torn off and the eyelids flapped loosely over the empty socket of his left eye.

  ‘Here are my letters of permission from the supreme sultan in Constantinople and from the British ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning.’

  ‘I am of course, the servant of the supreme sultan, but does he know what you are hunting?’

  In the streets outside the palace, guns fired and people screamed. The pasha’s soldiers were once again on a killing spree, punishing ‘tax evaders’.

  The pasha belched softly. ‘Our friends, the French, beat you in the race to find Nineveh. And our good friends, the French, have also won our licences to dig in other Assyrian cities.’

  Behind the throne, the new French vice-consul smiled coldly at Austen. Since Paul Botta had been sent home in disgrace, the French had begun digging at fifteen more archaeological sites in Iraq. Austen missed the friendly rivalry with Botta, who still sent letters insisting he was owed those twenty bottles of shiraz.

  The pasha’s fingernail picked off the smallpox scab on his cheek and he examined it. ‘You, Mr Layard, have our permission to hunt gazelles and other game at Nimrud. You do not have our permission for hunting of another kind. Beware of my wrath.’

  Chapter 16

  Thunder sounded across the River Tigris as a slab of cliff, undercut by whirlpools, crashed into the water. Muddy spray rose into the air, hung for a moment, then splattered down.

  Waves surged towards Austen’s raft and the boatman shouted prayers as he leant against the long rudder.

  The onrushing wave pushed the raft upwards. Ropes creaked, poles clattered and splintered. Austen’s four greyhounds yelped and scrabbled for balance. Bundles of luggage slipped and the raft almost split in half on the wave’s crest. It wallowed down, slewing out of control as the second wave hit. Austen hung onto the ropes around the long box of guns and ammunition.

  The raft groaned as it settled. Only twelve feet by eight, it was held up by inflated sheepskins under the decking, but it was settling too far to the left. Water flowed over the poles along that edge and the boatman leapt into the water, grasped the neck of a deflated sheepskin and blew into it hard. But one skin would not stop the whole raft from sinking lower.

  ‘Secure the baggage!’ Austen yelled to his assistant, Hormuzd. Then Austen tore off his Bedouin headdress and cloak and slid over the side. He found another flat skin and puffed hard into it too. When it was full of air, he held the neck tightly and re-tied the cord to bind it shut. Skin by skin, he and the boatman raised the listing side.

  Hormuzd was dragging boxes and chests back to the centre of the raft. His cheeks were pink with the effort and sweat trickled down the thin beard. Only seventeen years old, he was proud of the narrow line of beard along the jawbone and around under his chin. He began to sing a love song of his people – the Yezidis, also known as the devil-worshippers.

  Austen smiled at the singing. Hormuzd was a good choice for an assistant – as if there had been any choice. The young man had shadowed him around the Rassam house in Mosul. ‘Please can I come with you? I want to be an archaeologist too. My brother, Christian, says it’s all right. I won’t get in the way. I’ll work hard,’ he had begged. ‘You’ll need the vice-consul’s brother with you for respect and protection.’

  Panting hard, Austen hauled himself back onboard and stared inland at the hill of Nimrud. It was moving slowly in circles against the sunset sky, until the boatman climbed back and took control of the rudder. Gradually, Nimrud found its rightful place, running north-south, with the tall pyramid shape rising at the northern end.

  Nineveh’s wonders, mystery and glory were as close as breathing. Years of dreaming, hoping, sufferings came down to this moment of arrival.

  Reeds parted as they nosed in to land, and when the raft bumped against the mud, Austen leapt onto dry ground. For a moment, he remembered the pasha’s warning not to dig at Nimrud, but he had letters from Constantinople. One treacherous, corrupt pasha at Mosul was not going to frighten him away. The pasha fully understood the close alliance between his supreme sultan and Sir Stratford Canning. He’d never risk the wrath
of two empires.

  While the boatman and Hormuzd hammered spikes into the riverbank to anchor the raft, Austen ran for sheer delight up to the top of the bank. A putrid smell like burnt rubbish drifted on the evening air. Why were no camels or horses drinking at the river?

  Dreading what he’d see, Austen ran along the riverbank. High reeds hid his view, until he rounded a bend and saw the village. The roofs had fallen in, walls were blackened by fire and no sound of life came from the ruins. Branches of dead fruit trees like skeleton fingers scratched at the darkening glass of the sky. There was no human movement.

  Where were the men who would be his workers? He and Hormuzd could never dig through thousands of tons of rubble. Nimrud was five miles around the base. He was here at last, but how could he unearth Nineveh?

  Chapter 17

  Austen had not waited this long and come this far for nothing. Nimrud was so close he couldn’t just turn his back on it and go away.

  He scrambled down into the ancient riverbed that was now just dry sand. How strange to walk where fish had swum and boats had sailed two thousand five hundred years ago! The last of the sunset faded and he stumbled over the uneven ground. But he forged ahead, guided by Saturn shining above the high pyramid that loomed against the Milky Way. The pyramid was probably the ruins of some ziggurat like the Tower of Babylon that had challenged heaven.

  Was this a trick of the eye, or an after-image of Saturn? There was a light twinkling at the base of Nimrud. His boots crunched and squeaked on the sand as he walked towards it. When he drew closer, the flickering became bars of light between the shabby timbers of a hovel.

  Austen went to the open door, looked in and screams of terror burst out into the night. Three women and two small children in rags cringed away from him and huddled in a corner. A man with ragged turban and grey beard struggled to his feet and stood between the stranger and his family. Two thin greyhounds, tails curled between their legs, limped towards Austen, but were too weak to attack. He held his hands down for them to sniff his skin and one dog licked his fingers. Behind the dog’s ears and around its neck, fleas clustered like spilt pepper.