by David Harris
Abraham aimed a gun at the river, where bodies floated face-down.
Chapter 37
Austen worked his way down the cliff, kicking toeholds and digging his fingers into the sheer side. Chips of alabaster tumbled out with the soil, and hanging by one hand he scratched away at the earth. His fingernails scraped on hard rock. A broken brick. He climbed back to the top, using the holes he’d dug.
‘My Lord, be careful.’ The sheik knelt at the top and reached down with one hand.
Clambering onto the roof of Kuyunjik, Austen stamped his foot. ‘We start here.’
The sheik cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Over here!’ he shouted.
In the distance, on the Mosul side of the mound, their team of workers waved and moved towards them. The men of Selamiya carried spades and baskets on their shoulders. The taller men from Mirkan lugged crowbars and mattocks. They took a zigzag way among shallow trenches that had been dug by the French. When the surface flattened out, instead of walking straight towards Austen and the sheik, the group circled a long way around.
Austen couldn’t have walked across there either. Too disturbing! How horrible it must have been for them. Three years ago, in that place, a hundred refugees – devil–worshippers – had huddled together. Armed soldiers moved in and there was no escape. In any case, citizens of Mosul had broken the bridge of boats, so none of them could get into the city. The soldiers opened fire, while along the city walls, Christians and Muslims stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the slaughter.
Austen’s workers turned their heads aside as they passed by the ghosts of the families. His men were too far away for him to see their faces, but those from Mirkan were devil-worshippers, and they were armed with crowbars. Except for Abraham, who also carried a musket over one shoulder. He would’ve known some of those who were shot.
Something must’ve been said, because the group stopped. Mohammed Emin went close to Abraham and faced him, but neither of them shifted his weapons or moved quickly.
The sheik began to chant a prayer.
Then the men continued walking, and to Austen’s relief, they stayed together as a group. His friends, his other family had not turned upon each other.
‘Allah be thanked.’ The sheik was close to tears.
The group came silently towards Austen. What had Abraham and Mohammed Emin said back there?
Mohammed Emin shrugged. ‘Abraham and I will break into the palace tonight and steal roses from the garden.’
‘What? But the penalty for that is death.’
‘That makes it more fun.’
‘May I ask why you will do this?’
‘We will both put rose petals on the place, back there.’
What was that expression in Abraham’s eyes?
The sheik cleared his throat. ‘To work, then.’ He bustled over to the place Austen had chosen.
They all gathered around to inspect the spot and Austen said, ‘You know what to do. Dig two shafts straight down for twenty feet, thirty if necessary, until you find the foundations. But be careful, I want you all safe to share our meal tonight.
‘Ya bey.’ Mohammed Emin stripped off his cloak, spat on his hands and gripped his spade. ‘We will find at least two palaces by midday.’
But Kuyunjik was not co-operative. The men dug three, then four shafts, but found only rubbish, which crumbled into grey ash.
The sheik clicked his tongue and Mohammed Emin growled, but they began another shaft.
Austen prowled back and forth on the surface. Exhausted by lack of sleep, weak with dysentery, he was unexpectedly pestered by doubts. What if he had been wrong from the start – what if everybody was wrong? Perhaps Nineveh never had been a city, but merely a district big enough to hold Khorsabad to the north, Kuyunjik here in the centre and Nimrud to the south. Imagine if all this time he’d been searching for a place that didn’t exist, had never existed. And what if he dug out nothing but burnt alabaster? It was possible that what lay beneath was only the charred ruins of just another city.
Across the river, guns were firing in Mosul. More food riots. No foreigner was safe now that the American Christian mission station had been wiped out. Austen wondered how long it would be until even his faithful friends had to leave him and flee to safety.
He stared at the city walls and grieved for Tahya, who’d died suddenly. The scholarly, coffee-addicted, kindly old man was gone, and with him had gone the last of law and order. Chaos and violence ruled again.
Enough of sorrows and doubts. Austen opened his new sketchbook labelled, Kuyunjik, Folio 1. The beginning of a new one always gave him a thrill of anticipation. He took his pencil from his waist bag, pinched the point and tried to pull the lead out. It was so hot back at Nimrud that the lead had slipped from the wood. Opening his sketchbook, he wrote the first page number, 1,371, to keep the sequence of drawings correct. How long ago it seemed, that he had handed a sketchbook to Au Kerim in a valley near Castle Tul.
The sheik appeared at the top of a shaft. ‘A floor, My Lord, and –’
‘Tunnel along to the wall.’ Austen felt a surge of relief.
With his head and shoulders above the surface, the sheik finished his sentence. ‘Something’s in the way. It’s not a wall.’
Austen put his sketchbook aside and climbed down the ladder. Thirty feet down, in dim light, the sheik’s turban bobbed about. ‘A bull’s head.’ He waved his hands excitedly. ‘We have the first palace!’
A palace? Let it have bas-reliefs of King Sennacherib on a hundred walls. Let it have the name ‘Nineveh’ carved above every door!
Chapter 38
Two palaces later, Austen entered a tunnel at dawn. Something or somebody was slumped in a corner. Austen drew his dagger and crept towards a man, either asleep or dead, who was covered in a riding cloak. Stealthily, he moved closer, with his dagger at the ready. Then he saw the face. ‘Henry Rawlinson!’
‘What the devil?’ Rawlinson’s bleary eyes focused on the dagger.
‘Sorry! I didn’t know you were here.’ Austen put his weapon away.
Rawlinson sat up and pulled a bag from under his cloak. ‘Two days and nights of riding. I could’ve beaten my record, if I’d kept going to Baghdad.’ He put his hand inside the travel bag. ‘You’re a betting man?’
Austen thought of Paul Botta and their race to find Nineveh. But a warning bell rang in his mind. Never bet with and never try to outride or outdrink Major Henry Rawlinson.
‘What’s the bet?’
‘I need your fob-watch.’
His father’s watch? Austen remembered his father’s knobbly hand holding the gold watch out to him. Could he wager that?
‘No, you idiot! The watch is not the bet.’ Henry took a page from the bag. ‘Here’s your copy of some cuneiforms you found somewhere here. I give you a single quick look at them, and you get one minute by your watch to find the matching cuneiforms.’
‘What’s the wager?’
‘A scented letter from a certain Khanumi. If you find the cuneiforms, you win her letter. If you fail, I read the letter aloud to all the gloating, drunken guffaws at the next embassy Christmas party.’
‘Huh. I’ve copied thousands of cuneiforms here. We’ve found six hundred wall panels, seventeen chambers, ten winged bulls, and I suspect we’ve broken into a third palace – perhaps the most important one. It has grooves in the floor, like sunken railway lines. I think they would’ve been for a huge trolley on wheels to carry hot feasts into the king’s great hall. With this maze of tunnels, it’s not physically possible to reach the right cuneiform in one minute. So, to make it a fair bet, give me just one clue.’
‘Your watch first, if I’m to time you.’
Austen handed the watch over and Rawlinson opened it.
‘Right – your clue. Think of a king, described as a wolf attacking sheep in their fold.’
Austen’s ears hummed with the rush of blood. ‘You’re joking.’
‘This could be it.’ Rawlinson beame
d. ‘The one moment you’ve been waiting for. Or you could be the laughing stock of the embassy and then the world’s newspapers.’
Austen snatched the page and studied it.
‘That’s enough.’ Rawlinson grabbed it back. ‘Go!’
Crouched over, Austen tried to run fast. The king could only be Sennacherib. Which chamber was it? He’d found five pairs of bulls guarding palace rooms and it could be any one of them. Think, think – what were the cuneiforms for the king on the Black Obelisk of Nimrud? He’d always thought that king was Sennacherib.
‘Thirty seconds,’ Rawlinson shouted, close on his heels.
Austen skidded to a halt at a crossroads. Casually, to tease Rawlinson, he looked along each of the four tunnels in turn, then bellowed into the last, ‘Sheik Awad, Abraham Aghar, Hormuzd, Mohammed Emin.’ His voice soaked into walls like water on dry earth. But the sheik walked into sight at the far end of one tunnel.
‘Bring the others!’ Austen yelled. The glory of Nineveh was theirs as much as it was his.
‘Fifteen seconds, thirteen, ten –’
Austen followed two grooves in the floor, walked between two guardian bulls, turned left and pointed to the third panel along. ‘The top four lines.’
Rawlinson held the page to the writing on the wall. He cleared his throat. ‘How will you feel if you are wrong about Nineveh being at Nimrud?’
‘Nineveh?’
‘Perhaps you’d like to see my translation of these cuneiforms?’
Austen held out his hand.
But Rawlinson hesitated. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I won’t be ready to publish this as definitive until there’s conclusive corroborating evidence. But I think we should be in a better position in only three or four years. Oh – one other thing.’ He took a small package from his bag. It was spongy, as if it held a soft gift as well as a letter. He sniffed it and screwed up his nose. ‘Phew! Your winnings, I believe. That’s right, you muttonhead, you’ve got Nineveh!’
Chapter 39
‘This has arrived from Bombay, sir.’ Hormuzd passed an envelope across the breakfast dishes, but he turned aside to hide his feelings.
The envelope was marked Bombay.
Their bull and raft-load of treasures must’ve arrived in Bombay, so why was Hormuzd looking as if he was at a funeral?
Austen skimmed the letter. The English clergyman at Bombay had taken his congregation to the docks, where the Nimrud collection was stored. He had forced open the lids of crates and held up artefacts as proof that the Bible was literally true. Then he had given a lecture about the wicked geologists who were challenging the date of Creation as noon, on the 23rd of October, 4004 BC. This attack on God’s Word was threatening the foundations of Christian civilisation. The congregation had helped themselves to vases and ivories to decorate their dining tables. Many treasures had been damaged then dumped back in the crates. The labelling was scattered and jumbled. Objects had not been re-wrapped in felt. The Nimrud collection had been loaded onto the ship and was on the high seas.
Chapter 40
Austen stood alone on Kuyunjik, watching a full moon touch the rim of the desert. As the moon sank into the desert sand, sunlight burst above the hazy peaks of the Zagros Mountains. He tied the purple headscarf, the gift from Khanumi, to his belt. By now she’d be in Teheran, taking gifts to Hussein, who was still a hostage in the eunuch’s palace.
One more minute. It was so hard to turn away from the mountains. But he had to go to London and open those crates from Bombay. Then he’d fight the museum directors for funds to return. And he’d be forced to endure endless formal dinners and mindless social gossip, be polite to the hopeful young women his mother had invited to tea. And after all that, he’d somehow survive Aunt Sara’s punishing program of ‘Celebrity Appearances’. Austen Henry Layard – the Lion of Nineveh.
If he’d actually found Nineveh …
Rawlinson was still cross-checking translations. Austen took once last glance southwards, towards Nimrud, then, with his Bedouin cloak wafting behind him, he strode across the top of Kuyunjik.
At the base of the mound, Sheik Awad held the reins of his horse. When Austen approached to mount, the sheik gripped his hand to help him up. Tattered red silk ribbons hung from his turban and down over his eyes, concealing them.
‘Ya bey, you be careful of bandits.’ He wriggled Austen’s musket deeper into its holster. Keeping his head down, the sheik said, ‘May Allah, the light of heaven and earth, bring you back safely, my son.’
Hadla and Masoud ran from the shadows and took hold of Austen’s feet in the stirrups.
Hormuzd hung back.
‘You take care of Nineveh until I return,’ Austen called out to him. ‘There is still so much to discover.’
About twenty feet above him, on the side of the mound, stood Abraham Agha, Mohammed Emin and the rest of his workers. At the very moment Austen shook the reins, the men raised their muskets. As his horse stepped forward, they fired. Rose petals burst into the sky and drifted down over him.
The sheik held the bridle and ran with the horse. The children, holding onto the stirrups, trotted along until they had to let go. But the sheik refused to stop until he began to stumble.
‘Sheik Awad,’ Austen said, ‘we will always be only one breath apart.’
The sheik released his grip on the bridle and stood there alone, watching, until Austen’s small figure was swallowed by the sands.
THE TIMES
LONDON, 16 JUNE 1994
SENSATION AT CHRISTIES AUCTION
Tuckshop decoration sold for $US11.9 million.
The small object, covered in whitewash, had hung near a dartboard in the tuckshop of Canford School, in Dorset, England.
Julian Reade of the British Museum, identified the piece as genuine, despite experts in 1957 dismissing it as a plaster copy.
It was, in fact, a fragment of a basrelief from a wall of the Palace of Ashurnasipal II, a King of Assyria in the ninth century BC.
In 1847, Austen Henry Layard, who discovered Nineveh, presented the small bas-relief to a friend, Sir John Guest, of Canford House, who’d helped sponsor Layard’s return to Mesopotamia.
Layard discovered Nineveh at Kuyunjik, a mound near the city of Mosul, on the Tigris River. During his five years in Iraq, Layard, an amateur archaeologist, unearthed eight palaces, hundreds of tons of antiquities, several miles of walls decorated with cuneiforms and sculptures, and found among other extraordinary treasures, the Library of King Ashurbanipal – 26,000 tablets revealing the history, religion, art, politics, medicine, literature, mathematics, food, astronomy, science and thousands of details about the life in one of the greatest empires of the ancient world.
Layard was rewarded for his years of work by being offered an unpaid job as a minor official in the British Embassy at Constantinople. Public outrage caused him to be sent back to continue his work at Nineveh. Prime Minster Disraeli later appointed Sir Austen Henry Layard as Ambassador at Constantinople — the beginning of a glittering and at times tumultuous diplomatic career.
Praise for Time Raiders #1 Blood of the Incas
If you love adventures, this book is for you. I especially love the part where Hiram puts his negotiating skills to the test with the cannibals in order to avoid the most disgusting things. Could the mystery meat be human flesh? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
A great excuse for keeping your nose stuck in a book, as it could pass for homework (this is history, but not as you know it). This was one of the most exciting books I’ve ever read – I couldn’t put it down (just ask my mum)!
– Travis, Wollongong Academically Gifted Class
If you’re looking for action, this is the book! Within the first sixteen pages the intrepid adventurer and historian Hiram Bingham has faced a rock slide, almost fallen off a cliff, raced a terrible storm … and jumped a chasm on a mule in the dark. This is a book boys 8 – 12 years will especially love and any child fascinated by early history will equall
y enjoy it.
– Reading Stack
A great novel for young readers aged 9 upwards, who loved Indiana Jones and who adore a gripping adventure.
– Robert, age 11
David Harris’s fictional retelling of Bingham’s adventures is beautifully crafted and the author’s lively storytelling and well-honed attention to detail bring Bignham’s stirring travels to life like a return to the Boys Own adventures of yesteryear. Highly entertaining.
– Magpies
I’ve always wanted to be an archaeologist and go on adventures like these. But, I couldn’t eat another person.
– Joel, age 10.
I was really surprised that Hiram was still scared of falling off cliffs.
— Thomas, age 12
I laughed a lot at Castillo and thought, ha, ha, this time he’s screwed.
– Jonathan, age 14
Everyone in the room sort of leaned in to hear what happened next.
– Will, age 12
I had two serious options. Turn the page, or shut the book and never know what happens when you walk off the edge of the map.
–Aaron, age 15
Copyright
The ABC ‘Wave’ device is a trademark of the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used
under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.
First published in Australia in 2009
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © David Harris 2009
The right of David Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
