by D J Mcintosh
Shaheen’s phone buzzed a few times. After taking one of the calls he said, “Strange vibes all around today. You ever heard of Samarra?”
“One of the oldest cities in Iraq, pre-Mesopotamian with unique pottery. I think that’s where the great mosque is, isn’t it? With the famous minaret like a high cone curling in a spiral. Why?”
“Big battle there yesterday. So ironic.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, you know the story. A Baghdad merchant hears a prediction he’ll die and flees to Samarra to cheat the prophecy, only to realize that’s where his death is supposed to take place. So saying you have an appointment in Samarra is like saying you’ve got an appointment with death.”
The approach to Kutha cut through farmers’ fields of flax and corn, the remnants of the harvest pale and brittle in the weak late autumn sun. In the distance two low hills rose about twenty feet high from a barren expanse of earth and scrub surrounded by a few trees, more fields, and scrubby bushes. When we reached the site we pulled off the road into a slight dip at its edge.
A wide depression separated a smaller mound from the larger fan-shaped Tell Ibrahim, the site of Kutha. The depression marked a canal that had once extended all the way from the Euphrates to the Tigris, an astounding example of Mesopotamian engineering. Ali negotiated the route slowly, trying to mitigate the damage to the site and limit the view of our vehicle from the road. The Humvee bumped along behind us.
The atmosphere was disturbingly quiet, its apparent peacefulness anything but benign. Not even the drone of insects could be detected, with one exception. Large clusters of flies. It was as if the god of the underworld still ruled here, and all life, save the buzzing harbinger of death, had abandoned this territory to him.
Shaheen and the other men unloaded a small arsenal from the cars. “Who would ever believe we’d find hell on this dusty ground in the middle of nowhere? Lead on, Madison, you’re our expert—so far as we have one.”
As a kid I’d dreamed of one day doing field work like my brother and felt a burst of pride knowing they were relying on my knowledge alone. “The site hasn’t been investigated by archaeologists since the mid-nineties,” I said. “Both mounds produced very antiquated material. The smaller one, Tell Qadir, includes pre-Mesopotamian objects.” I pointed at the smaller mound where the workings of an old archaeological dig were still evident. “Iraqi antiquities officers along with an American team found a buried temple here with some remarkable wall paintings. Artifacts on Tell Ibrahim are a little younger but still date back six thousand years. Neither produced abundant material in recent excavations. Don’t expect to find one of Nebuchadnezzar’s palaces. Looters pick richer sites although with the total absence of security, they’ve probably hit this one as well.”
As the other three men were out of earshot I said, “Speaking of security, why use contractors instead of bringing regular soldiers with us?”
Shaheen jerked his thumb toward them. “I’m used to working with them. Those guys are worth a whole squad, believe me.”
“We don’t know for sure whether Loretti and Hill found the weight here,” I said, “but if they did, it wouldn’t have been just lying on the ground. After two months, signs of any digging will be hard to spot. All the same, that’s pretty much our only hope. Let’s circle the perimeter.”
Shaheen kicked at the dirt and crouched down, brushing his hand over the soil. When he got up, he took a good look around. “One thing’s clear anyway. This was no hidden bioweapons site even if they concealed the entrance cleverly. The earth would be covered with ruts and tire marks otherwise.”
“Should we continue on then?”
“No choice. I’ve got to find the source of the spindle whorl. Can’t return empty-handed.”
I took them back to our starting point. While Shaheen got two spades out of the trunk I checked the ground. Kutha was three-quarters of a mile long; we began at the lowest point of the mound and went in a westerly direction to take advantage of the better light on that side. If that didn’t turn up anything, we’d have to climb the mound in concentric circles.
We didn’t find what I expected. No holes hacked in the soil, not even small ones. Shaheen and I used the tips of our spades to sift through some surface soil and found nothing but rubble and small, loose stones beneath.
It was like searching for a needle in a whole country of haystacks. As we moved on we grew more dispirited. The place looked completely untouched. We did spot a few perforations. Those could easily have been made by water runoff.
Shrubbery dotted the landscape and all of it had to be checked in case the vegetation obscured any pits. In this location too the earth looked undisturbed. The bright blue of the sky softened rapidly and grew dusky. We’d lost good visibility. A village appeared in the distance as we rounded a curve in the mound. Not unusual for eastern archaeological sites. Entire neighborhoods occupied part of the site at Nineveh. Neither Shaheen nor I wanted to go any farther; the risk of being seen was too great. We decided to leave the section to the last if all else failed.
Shaheen took a swig from his water bottle. “So how do you explain this? Thought you said all the known sites were being attacked by looters.”
I looked toward the village and thought about his question for a minute, suddenly realizing what had happened. “They were afraid to. It’s the domain of the underworld. Even thousands of years later, people fear this place. It still has a powerful impact on them.”
Despite the lack of evidence of recent excavations we decided to finish the search. As evening came on Shaheen argued for returning to Baghdad. Ali disagreed, saying that it was best to stay off the highways as much as possible. Since our vehicles were black and covered with dust, he said they’d be nearly invisible if we parked them here at night. I wanted to rise the minute the sun popped over the horizon to begin looking again. Shaheen reluctantly agreed to stay.
We drank cans of soda and munched on cold cheese sandwiches we’d bought at the base that tasted like slices of latex between slabs of wallpaper paste. I joked that the line from the poem “where dust is their nourishment and clay is their food” described our supper perfectly.
The contrast between the ancient grandeur of this site and the deserted wasteland of today stirred my imagination. Kutha was once a powerful cult center. Daily rituals would have been observed at a richly decorated temple—the house of a great god. The Mesopotamians called it the dark house—Irkalla. And I wondered whether the canal that once bisected it, now a dry bed, held deep meaning, like the River Styx, a boundary between the living and the dead. Nergal, originally a sky god, was condemned to fall to earth and inhabit the underworld after quarreling with the other deities. Another ancient story recycled in Christian lore.
We leaned against the car and traded swigs of scotch from my flask while Shaheen and Ali shared stories about growing up in Baghdad. They’d been fast friends from an early age.
I had some pretty hair-raising stories of my own but Shaheen wanted to hear more about the mythology of this place. While the stars began to appear in the night sky, I told them about Ishtar’s terrifying descent into the underworld.
“She passed through six gates,” I said. “At each one a demon stripped the goddess of her belongings—lapis lazuli beads around her neck, egg-shaped beads on her breast, even her mascara. By the time she reached the seventh gate she was naked and the demon Namtar brought her into the throne room to face her sister, Ereshkigal.
“Ereshkigal herself was a frightening sight.” I paraphrased the old poetry. “Her breasts sagged, she had nails like a pickaxe and hair bunched up like leeks. Out of spite, she showered the beautiful Ishtar with diseases.”
Shaheen and the other men chuckled at this description. All the same, I picked up on a nervous edge to their laughter. Most people have a superstitious side even if they never confess to it. And although none of us would admit it, this place, dedicated to the worship of the king of the underworld, felt ominous. As ni
ght fell and we huddled together, the dark aura of Kutha stole over us.
“What happened next?” Shaheen prompted me. “Come on. You’ve got to tell us the ending.”
“Ishtar’s carcass was hung on a hook to rot. After she died, the earth became barren. Ea, the God of Wisdom, fashioned two beings like demons who took on the form of flies, to travel to the underworld and persuade Ereshkigal to let her sister live again.
“Ishtar revived and traveled back to the land of the sky gods, but Ereshkigal demanded a substitute to replace her in the underworld. The goddess chose her husband, Dimmuzi, who’d been enjoying himself thoroughly in her absence and hadn’t missed her at all. So in the end, the prince rescued his lover just like in the old fairy tales.”
The night air grew chilly. We were all tired. Ali and the other two men did sentry duty while Shaheen and I each took a back seat in one of the vehicles to get some sleep. Despite the drugs, my cold had grown a lot worse. All the exertion hadn’t helped. I quaffed a couple more painkillers and immediately dropped into a deep slumber.
I’m not sure what woke me. I remember the clear view out the Jeep window and my awareness of the dead silence outside. I couldn’t see Ali, Ben, or the other man anywhere. My headache had returned with a painful throbbing at my temple. That wasn’t what alarmed me.
I couldn’t move.
Forty-Seven
December 7, 2003
Tell Ibrahim, Iraq
I was fully awake but my body had shut down. My heart rate zoomed into the stratosphere. I summoned all my energy to break out of it. My limbs finally responded and I bolted upright, drenched in cold sweat. It had been the aftermath of a nightmare; I couldn’t recall the details. Still, it left me with a deep sense of foreboding.
It was at that point I noticed the muted strains of music, the notes at once gentle and pervasive, as if the air itself had filled with sound. Had I not known differently I would have thought it came from the car radio. The tones of some kind of flute were immediately recognizable, a mournful melody. An elegy or lament.
I cracked open the door and stepped outside. Almost immediately Ali was beside me.
“Do you hear that?” I asked.
“What? I heard only you coming out of the Jeep.”
“Listen.” The song rippled through the air again. Barely perceptible now. Sweet, haunting notes.
“You must still be in your dreams,” Ali said. “You need coffee to wake up but the café is still closed.” He laughed softly.
The sound shifted away from us and now emanated from somewhere farther down the shallow depression. In the east, the skies had lightened into a flat non-color, neither blue nor the deep indigo of night but something more muted, in between the two. The light that heralds dawn. “Wake Shaheen,” I said to Ali. “We have to get moving.”
Shaheen was up by the time I’d drunk from the water canteen. I handed him the rest to finish. He shook his head to dispel his drowsiness. “What’s this about music?” he asked.
“Maybe just a villager,” I said. “Sound travels far when it’s this quiet.”
They stopped talking and strained to listen. “Don’t hear a thing,” Shaheen said.
“It’s coming this way.” I began walking down the shallow gully. The music pulled me forward, seducing me. Memories of Khalid’s words about the evil jinn returned, the demon from desert waste-lands who lured innocent travelers with their pipes.
The melody abruptly stopped about one hundred feet down the depression. Although the light was still low, I could see signs of digging halfway up the rise to my right. We got to work sifting through every hole and cavity, repeating the search in case we’d missed something. Nothing of any interest turned up, nor did I hear any more music. Once or twice a truck barreled down the road and slowed as it neared the site but soon sped away. We’d been fortunate not to have been spotted so far. Our luck wouldn’t hold for much longer.
“You’re hearing things now,” Shaheen joked. “You’re not long for the funny farm I’m guessing.”
Normally I’d zing one back at him. This time I felt too dispirited. I descended the slope, stopping just short of the bottom. A collection of small rocks had been piled around a shrub as if they were anchoring it. Beside them was the faint outline of a boot. I bent down to examine the imprint more closely. There was only one footprint and the surrounding soil was relatively smooth and free of rubble, as if it had been swept clean.
I kicked one of the rocks and realized it was actually a clod of reddish earth.
Shaheen squatted beside me. “Anything here?”
“Probably nothing but it doesn’t hurt to check.” The two of us heaved the hunks of hardened earth away. A large pile of debris had accumulated when the remaining clods collapsed inward. We could hear them tumbling down some recess. It sounded like stones falling down a cistern.
A hole not much bigger than a groundhog tunnel opened up. Shaheen shouted for Ali to bring the gear. He and Ben ran back to the cars for our equipment. If Loretti and Hill had picked up some toxin here, no one had any intention of suffering the same fate. Pulling on hazard suits and gloves, we began chipping away at the packed soil forming the tunnel sides. After almost an hour of this we’d cleared a deep depression to a diameter of about two and a half feet.
“If this is the entrance to hell,” I said in frustration, “it sure is a damn anticlimax.”
“It’s probably just a rabbit hole or something.” Shaheen waved toward the fields in the distance. “With all that corn and flaxseed out there, there’re likely lots of critters around.”
“You’re probably right.” I stood up and slammed my spade down in frustration.
A dull crack like a rifle shot sounded. It felt as though the ground were under pressure, as if it had been subjected to a powerful tectonic thrust. Buckets of earth cascaded into emptiness below. The opening itself hadn’t grown a lot; still, we could tell that under the surface it widened into a bigger area. We couldn’t see much when we peered into the abyss.
“I think you just struck gold.” Shaheen slapped me on the back. “Well done!”
Shaheen and I carried empty Gore-Tex knapsacks and donned our helmets. We kept the spades with us, as well as strong jacklights. The satphones would be useless underground so Shaheen took communication devices from the Jeep. We’d be connected to each other and to Ali, who would stay as sentry aboveground.
“Having second thoughts?” Shaheen asked.
“I don’t know. The cavity might be really unstable.” I tried to make a joke out of it. “It’s not that I’m not afraid of death—I’d just rather not be there when it happens.”
“You and Woody Allen,” Shaheen laughed. “All right, my friend. Let’s get moving. Down the rabbit hole.” He squeezed through first on his stomach because he had a thinner build than the rest of us. The older guy stayed on top with Ali; Ben came with us.
I almost called a stop to the whole thing then and there. We were damaging an important historic location and I felt extremely guilty. My brother would have been scathing about our hacking into a sacred site. Despite knowing this, I felt compelled to continue. We’d come so far, after all.
We had no idea what to expect or whether the tunnel would close in ahead. Shaheen turned his light on as I shimmied after him. His head and upper body wriggled comically as he propelled himself along, wormlike. I could hear Ben crawling along behind me. He moved more slowly because he was carrying a length of cable.
At this point the tunnel was barely a foot higher than our supine bodies although wide enough to give us a decent amount of room. Bowels of the earth would be a good description of the environment we pushed ourselves through; it reminded me of the tunnels in ant colonies. My greatest fear was the whole thing collapsing in on us.
Soon we arrived at a square opening framed in stone. Shaheen got through easily. My bigger shoulders and chest made it a harder go for me. Ben, brawnier still, almost got stuck. The tunnel here hadn’t widened any but it was
higher and changed from natural earth to manmade mud brick. I flashed my light on the surface. It seemed to have been smoothed out somehow, as if it had been planed or sanded. “I think we’re in a culvert of some kind,” I said. “These bricks have been smoothed by water flow.”
Several times we passed large cavities in the sides of the tunnel. Shaheen flashed his light into them. Beyond a few feet the gaps appeared dead-ended. We made slow progress for more than half an hour before Shaheen suddenly quit moving.
We heard his voice through the communication system. “There’s a void ahead,” he told us. “Hold on.” A few minutes later he asked Ben to run a length of cable over to him and told both of us to grip it. There were no projections in the walls of the tunnel to tie it to and we feared the stone wall would split if we hammered a spike into it.
Shaheen grasped the rope. I saw him sit up and direct his light down. The cable tugged hard as he slipped off the edge. When it went slack I shifted my body sideways and carefully inched over. The mud bricks dropped offsharply. I trained the light down.
He grinned up at me from a space about thirty feet deep. I tossed my light down to him and rolled onto my stomach, easing myself over the edge. Ben grunted as he braced himself, trying to cope on his own with my weight.
The room had clearly been constructed by human hands. The chamber floor and walls were surfaced with compact rows of baked brick, glazed to create a polished effect. A mosaic of a Babylonian griffin in red, white, black, and blue had been affixed to the back wall. Cut into the fourth wall, a sizable opening acted as an entrance to a flight of stairs. Rubble sealed the lower part of the stairs. We both stared at what lay on top of the rubble. Heaps of human bones.
“Would this have been a tomb?” Shaheen asked.
“Likely part of a building of some kind, not a tomb per se,” I said. “These mounds were built on repeatedly over thousands of years. When new structures were erected over old ones and they themselves disintegrated, rubble hid what lay underneath. But someone has cleared this out. Loretti and Hill wouldn’t have had the time or equipment to do it so it was probably looters from long ago.”