Land of Marvels

by Unsworth, Barry

  Sometimes, in his desire to impress her with the wealth that would be theirs, he might go too much into detail and exhaust her powers of attention. He might be explaining that the people of al-Felluge needed the pitch for sealing and waterproofing the great straw jars that they then weighted with stones and hung on their waterwheels to make them turn and so irrigate their fields, and in the midst of his words he would see a sort of stillness settle over her face, and he would know she had lost her way somewhere in this chain of causes and effects. Then he would go back to the marvels of Deir ez-Zor and get lost in his turn amid the thickets of what was real, what was exaggerated, and what was invented. Amid the gardens that belonged to the fabulously slothful and permanently absent Pasha there was a spring, and the water came out of it with so much force that it bubbled and sang as it flowed. There were times when the water burst forth so strongly that fish came leaping out with it. If you waited by the well, no fish ever gushed out, however long you waited. But if you were passing at the right moment, you would have your supper provided for you. For this reason the spring was named Abu Simac, Father of Fishes, by the people who lived there.

  8.

  It was late in the morning and the sun was high when Mansur, who was her personal servant, came to tell Edith that strangers were approaching the house: three men, two on horseback, the third riding a camel. She followed the procedure laid down by Somerville in the event of visits during his absence, telling Mansur to summon two men, make sure they were armed, and wait with them inside the gate until these people were near enough to state their business and be clearly distinguished. She herself waited in the common room, whose windows gave a view across part of the courtyard but not the part that included the gate.

  After a short while Mansur returned to say that the men were now two, the third having retired to the nearby village; it seemed he had acted as guide to the others. One of these was a white man; the other was an Arab, or at least spoke Arabic as if it were his own tongue, but he was not from these parts, he was a man of the city. “The other speak to him in English, tell him what he have to say,” Mansur said, and smiled brilliantly, Edith was not sure why or whether there was any reason. He had not seen any arms about the Arab, but the white man had a rifle in his saddle holster and a revolver at his belt. “He say name Hellhot, sound like.”

  “You can open the gate to them,” she said, accompanying this with a gesture of one unlocking and opening. She went to the hall, took her sun hat from the peg, put it on without looking in the mirror, then opened the door and stood waiting just outside it.

  Elliott’s eyes were strained from the hours of riding in a light stronger and harsher than he was used to, and sunlight was reflected from the white walls of the house, confusing him further. As he crossed the courtyard he saw a tall, full-breasted woman in a long white dress, her face shaded by the wide brim of her hat. She did not move as he approached. He removed his hat as he drew near. “Elliott, ma’am,” he said. “This is my interpreter, Alawi.”

  His voice was deep, slightly nasal, with an accent she thought of vaguely as belonging to the American West, and it was drawling and sudden at the same time, as if his words were uttered on impulse.

  “Edith Somerville.” She extended her hand and felt it gripped with considerable firmness. The interpreter was retreating already, in company with Mansur, avoiding thus the undue familiarity of a handshake with the lady of the house.

  This left the two of them standing together. “You will be the geologist,” she said.

  Sight restored, he was able to see that she was beautiful, the mouth full but delicate in its molding, the eyes a tawny color, set wide apart. “Your husband told you then?” he said.

  “Yes, of course. Naturally he told me.” He was very tall; she was aware of raising her eyes to his face. His head was still uncovered, and the thick fair hair glinted in the sunlight. The same glint of gold was on his face, and she saw now that there was a short bristle on his cheeks and jaws and around his mouth—he had not shaved, not that day, perhaps not the day before. His eyes were blue, and in the tanned face they had a steadiness of regard, an absence of shyness, that astonished her rather. “Well, come in,” she said. Her mother’s unfailing remedy for occasions of social strain came to her. “I expect you’d like some tea?”

  “That would be just dandy.”

  Afterward she was to reproach herself at not having thought more about, inquired more closely into, his immediate needs; he would have been tired from the journey, he might have preferred to be shown immediately to the room that had been prepared for him, where he could wash away the dust of travel and rest for a while. But she had wanted to talk to him, perhaps listen to him rather, wanted it from the first.

  “So you know I am a fake then,” he said, with the same effect of suddenness, when they were seated together.

  “Well, I know you are not an archaeologist.” Anyone less like a fake it would have been difficult to imagine, she thought, as he sat there rather awkwardly, his long body inclined forward in his chair; with his straight regard, the irregular rhythms of his speech, at once drawling and impulsive-seeming, he bore sincerity with him like a lighted torch. “I suppose you are a genuine geologist?” she said.

  He laughed at this. “You mean I might be something else? Two layers of disguise instead of only one? It wouldn’t be so strange, I guess. Mesopotamia seems to be full of people engaged in some business that is not the one they tell the world about. No, nothing so interesting, I’m afraid. I’m just a feller that knows something about old stones. Correction, something about old stones that act as hosts to petroleum. Jailers would be a better word.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there are some types of rock that keep the oil imprisoned.” He smiled at her suddenly, an attractive smile, wide and exuberant. “You know, kind of like the genie that got trapped in the bottle. He’s been there a very long time, millions of years. We want to let him out, let the poor devil get up to the air.”

  “So you can trap him all over again and put him in some other kind of bottle.”

  “No, ma’am, we don’t aim to do that. Once you take the stopper out you can’t put it back again—no one can.” He raised large hands to make a shape in the air, a gesture that seemed almost worshipful to her, as if he were holding up a chalice full of blessings. His smile died, and there was suddenly a naked look of seriousness about his face, something rapt, as if he might be one of the apostles at the moment of being called. “He is right here below us, waiting for the word of release. It’s not like the story. This genie isn’t vindictive or vengeful, he is a benefactor, he is the greatest boon ever bestowed on the human race. He will bring prosperity and ease of life to millions of people who have never heard his name. He will light their lamps, warm their houses, drive their engines. This genie will be the harbinger of a golden age.”

  There was a quality of rhetoric in this, a rhythm in his words that seemed practiced. These were things he had said before. But the habit of talking in bursts, like pulses in a flow, saved him from seeming pompously oratorical. And she was attracted by the throb of the feeling in the words and the way they came out, not like a lesson learned and oft repeated but with a warmth that seemed natural to him.

  He had lowered his hands now, and something of the smile had returned, though chastened. “I guess I’m talking too much, Mrs. Somerville,” he said. “It’s a bad habit of mine, especially when it comes to the subject of petroleum. We hardly know each other yet, and that makes it a whole lot worse. But I felt from the beginning you were a lady I could talk to.”

  This had come too easily, or perhaps too soon; some slight warning bell sounded in her mind. Despite this, she felt pleased by it. In accents she took care to make as neutral as possible, she said, “You are going to be here with us for some time, I believe. We don’t stand much on formalities. Please call me Edith.”

  “My name is Alexander. My friends call me Alex.”

  This s
aid, they sat and looked at each other for a moment or two. It came to Edith that something—anything—needed imperatively to be said. “But why have they sent you here? I mean, to this particular area?”

  “The reasons are technical. Do you really want to hear them? Rule number one for visiting geologists pretending to be visiting archaeologists is to wait at least twenty-four hours before you start boring your hostess with stuff about rocks.”

  “No, really, I’d like to know.”

  “Right, here we go. At Hit on the Euphrates and a few miles south of Mosul on the Tigris there are springs of bitumen coming up from belowground. Bitumen is a kind of tarry substance, it is one of the components of petroleum. These springs, or fountains you might call them, are dotted around for miles, quite small, nine or ten inches across at most. The thing about them is that the bitumen that comes out is almost pure, unlike practically anywhere else in western Asia—in most other places the bitumen comes out swimming on the back of the water, if you get me. Now we already know there is oil there, we don’t know how much exactly, but we know it is a lot. We know that for certain. But not very far from where we are sitting right now, a few miles to the east, there is an extensive oil seep and a number of fountains, some putting out salt water and bitumen mixed, some putting out an almost pure bitumen. We have reports on it and some maps, but the area has never been properly prospected for oil. It’s going to be my job to have a good look round and make some reports of a more detailed kind.”

  He paused here and looked at her for some moments in silence. She was interested, he could see it in her face; it was no mere polite attention she was giving him. Wonderful eyes she had, wide apart like a cat’s. Easy to tell her things, easy to say too much . . . He said, “I am working for the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was formed two years ago in 1912. That is, I am working for the British interests in the company.” She would know this already, from her husband. She would know who had sent him. “We have to go carefully,” he said. “The company has not yet received a charter from the Turkish government. When they get that, they will be first in the field. They need to know as much as possible beforehand so as to keep a step ahead. That’s where I come in.”

  “My husband told me that he had agreed with Lord Rampling, the financier, that you should come here.”

  “That is correct, yes. I don’t know this Rampling personally, it’s just a job of work, you know. I get a fee. I don’t have anything to do with the financial side of it. They have just sent me here to follow up a few clues. I’ve been engaged in petroleum geology almost the whole of my working life.”

  Once again he paused and looked at her. The closeness of his regard, that blaze of sincerity, was unsettling, as if he were requiring responses not altogether clear from his words. As before, she felt driven into speech. “It seems like rather a hit-or-miss business to me,” she said. “I mean, it’s just the presence of the oil seep and these springs, isn’t it? It could be just a very little oil, just a narrow little vein that has got gashed somehow and oozes up from close to the surface.” Like a hemorrhage, she thought, oozing out, black instead of red, weakening the body, sapping mother earth. “I mean, over all that time even a trickle of oil would make quite a big swamp, wouldn’t it?”

  “Those are not the only things we have to go on. All those places I’ve been talking about—and this is true also of Dalaki, in Persia, where oil has been definitely discovered and drilling has begun—have one other thing in common. They are situated at the extreme edge of a gypsum foundation at the point where the gypsum is succeeded either by red sandstone or by fractured limestone, both of which are typical reservoir rocks.”

  Glancing at her face, he saw that a certain stillness had descended on it and realized that she had failed to follow him in these details. “These are types of rock where the oil gets trapped,” he said. “It’s like the jar where the genie is kept prisoner. He is small when he is in the jar, that’s because he’s got these vast formations of sedimentary rock all around him. But once he is set free he swells up and gets huger and huger. If you could see a picture of the escaping genie in a storybook, it would look like a great cloud billowing up from the neck of the jar, filling all the sky. Instead of a cloud, think of a great flood of oil, like a million fountains all put together. Believe me, if you drill down through the walls of his prison, you will see how big he is, by jiminy you will!”

  She would have asked him more. One cardinal piece of advice of her mother’s, secretly scorned but somehow still operating within her, was always to ask men about their work, this being the best way of freeing their tongues and also, as a secondary advantage, of securing a reputation for intelligence. But this man’s tongue needed no freeing. He was loquacious certainly, but this homely rhetoric of his turned everything into a story. She would have liked to go on with it a bit longer, though their tea was finished long ago. It was not like the genie, not really, because he was quite contained in his jar whereas the oil leaked all over the place, as it seemed. She did not understand how it could escape from these imprisoning rocks.

  But manners prevailed now. She rang the little bell on the table beside her. “You must be tired,” she said. “You will need a rest. Mansur will show you to your room. I will tell him to bring water. This is a sort of common room, where we are now. We generally gather here for a drink a little after sundown, when my husband and his assistant are back from the excavation.”

  But he must have slept long; he did not appear until it was nearly dark, just before dinner, when everyone else was assembled. Introductions were hardly over before they were on their way to the dining room. She had not failed to notice her husband’s air of distraction and the shortness of his words to the newly arrived guest. She knew these for signs of excitement in him. And Palmer had a look of briskness about him, a sort of extra alertness, which meant the same thing. But at first neither of them made any mention of the day’s work; the meal was half over before anyone spoke of it, and then it seemed that her husband was jolted into speech by a kind of rage.

  Elliott proved no shyer in the enlarged company of the dinner table than he had been earlier over the teacups. The blaze of honesty, the hasty rhythms of his speech were the same. He was talking about the beginnings of the American oil industry and about a certain Colonel Drake, who wasn’t a colonel at all, but a drifting and impoverished entrepreneur.

  “He used the title to impress the local population, all the couple of hundred of ’em. This was in the 1860s, a lumber town called Titusville in northwest Pennsylvania. Everyone knew about the rock oil that came bubbling up from belowground near the town—there was a place in the hills there called Oil Creek. But no one thought of drilling for it—except this Colonel Drake.”

  Before that they had just scooped the oil from the surface or soaked rags in it then wrung them out. They might get four or five gallons a day like this—on a good day. That was how it had always been; that’s what their fathers and grandfathers had done. They thought Drake was crazy, colonel or not.

  “Sure, he was a fake,” Elliott said, sitting back, smiling around the table. “But he was a man of vision, and that is kind of rare. He had no way of drilling for oil. He tried hiring salt drillers, but they turned out to be an unreliable body of men, they kept getting drunk or they just disappeared as soon as they had a few dollars in their pockets. So he set about constructing a steam engine to power the drill. But time was passing, the people back in New Haven who were financing him ran out of patience. They sent him a letter telling him to close down the operation. In the meantime he had found a driller, a man named Smith. He was a very big, strong guy. Everyone called him Uncle Billy Smith . . .”

  Somerville listened with rising displeasure. The fellow was talking more than a newcomer should. But it was not this, the confidence, the manner too relaxed; it was not even the quality of attention being accorded him by Edith. He had come to the table with some momentous news of his own to announce, only to find the stage occupied by
another, a stranger at that. And then, surely, someone here in the guise of an archaeologist should show an interest in the work they were doing, ask some questions, put himself in the position of listener, instead of droning on about oil. But he wasn’t droning, of course, and that made it worse; he was a good talker, with an easy manner and a command of vivid detail, qualities Somerville knew to be lacking in himself, his own habit of repression showing more clearly perhaps in this than anything else, causing him always to downplay everything, to understate, to avoid the dramatic. And now here he was, with conclusive evidence that the site had been a residence of Assyrian kings, sitting here and listening to talk of this Uncle Billy.

  “This was August 1859,” Elliott said. “Drake had been there for more than two years already. The letter was delayed somehow, I like to think some angel of good fortune slowed it down. It still hadn’t arrived on the Sunday morning when Uncle Billy went out to have a look at the well. They had been drilling at about seventy feet. When he looked down into the pipe, he saw a thick black liquid floating on the top of the water. He lowered a tin cup in it and drew up a sample.” He paused for some moments. Then he said, “They had struck oil,” and there was on his face that look of rapt attention, almost of awe, that had made Edith think that he resembled one of the apostles at the moment of the summons. “All they had to do was pump it out,” he said. “I don’t know if Uncle Billy danced a jig right there and then, but I sure would have done so in his shoes. The first oil well in the U.S. And that means anywhere. The day they started pumping was the day the letter came, telling Drake to close down. Who knows? If it had arrived a couple of days sooner, there might have been no Standard Oil, and Rockefeller would have had to find some other way to make his millions.”