Land of Marvels

by Unsworth, Barry

  Once more in London, in his Park Lane mansion, Rampling began to give serious consideration as to what to do about the traitorous Elliott.

  There was much else to claim his attention at the time. A meeting was planned for early April to discuss among other things the further financing of the Baghdad Railway and the route it was to take. Germany and Russia and Austro-Hungary, as well as France, would be sending representatives to this, and the financial group Morgan Grenfell, of which he was an associate, would have a considerable part to play in the negotiations and needed to be well primed as to the conditions of British involvement. There were also to be preliminary discussions sometime in April at government level, between Britain and France, though very few knew of this and agreement about time and place had been delayed for reasons of secrecy, the subject being the delicate one of settling the territorial lines to be drawn between the two powers in the Near East in the event of war and consequent dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Some progress had been made: It was agreed in principle that the French should have Syria, and the British the land between the Two Rivers. But they were still at loggerheads over Mosul and the oil fields of northern Mesopotamia.

  So he had enough to engage him without double-dealing geologists. But the business of Elliott’s duplicity rankled with him. He had been hoodwinked; that was the only word for it. The thought was unwelcome to him. That he never fully trusted anybody did nothing to mitigate his displeasure, nor did the knowledge that there was no one to blame but himself; it was he who had made the appointment, there was no denying that, though of course there had been glowing recommendations. It was precisely the source of these recommendations that troubled him now; they had all come from high-ranking officials of Standard Oil. If Elliott was so much lacking in basic morality as to double his fee in this way, he might easily have tripled it by making some agreement with the Americans before leaving; if so, it would probably be with the Chester Group, which had lately been increasingly active in seeking concessions in the region. And then there was the further possibility that as an American he intended to favor these people by falsifying his reports to the others. With a delinquent character like that one could not be sure of anything.

  It was a moral issue really. It was a question of what could be regarded as pardonable. There were degrees in everything, balance and moderation in good as in ill. But Elliott’s turpitude went beyond all bounds. It was pardonable, it was even meritorious, for a man who was really a geologist to pose as an archaeologist in order to explore for oil on behalf of the British government. In lands not under British rule imposture was necessary before the activity could be carried out at all; and it was an activity that would bring profits to individuals, certainly, but that would ultimately add to the power and wealth of Britain, enhance her prestige, maintain her ability to rule the waves and enable her to extend the bounds of empire. These were worthy aims, and Elliott, though an American, had made them his own at the moment of accepting his fee and signing the contract. Quite otherwise were the greed and perfidy he had displayed in accepting a fee from the Deutsche Bank, and possibly also from an American cartel, to do the same job. This was to strike a blow at the foundations of commercial practice on which European civilization was based; the man had doubled, possibly trebled his reward while reducing practically to zero the value of his reports, even if they proved to be genuine; there was little advantage in obtaining advance information if it was to be shared among all the interested parties.

  There was only one thing to do with Elliott, a solution urged equally by justice and logic. Too much was at stake to be sentimental about it. He would hardly have had time yet to do much in the way of compiling reports, let alone communicating them. If someone could be sent now, at once, he might get there in time. He could carry a letter under government seal, authorizing him to take into his care whatever notes the American had made, any maps or indications of findings. These once secured, he could arrange for something to happen to Elliott. The Arabs of the desert fringe were given to shooting at strangers; not much in the way of bribes would be needed. Or he could be shot and the Arabs given the blame. But who to employ in the business? Time would be saved if it were a local man, someone recruited by the British Resident at Baghdad, for example, or a professional assassin from Aleppo or Damascus. But this would leave too much to chance. No private agent could be fully trusted; being mercenary, he would be lacking in the spirit of service, probably, and without much in the way of patriotic feeling. Besides, there would be the danger of blackmail. Someone from the Secret Service, perhaps. But on what pretext, in what disguise could they get him to a remote archaeological site in Mesopotamia? And it would take too long to arrange things, to obtain his release; the red tape in that department could be measured in miles. No, it would have to be an army man, someone in military intelligence, used to taking orders, with a sense of honor, who knew Arabic, if possible knew the terrain, might even have been in the region before, someone whose arrival would not arouse much question.

  He resolved to ask for the help of Johnny Westerfield at the Ministry of Defense, who owed him a favor from some years back when he had underwritten a deal between the ministry and a civil contractor for the sale of provisions to the army, five hundred tons of stewing steak, obtaining very favorable terms on the grounds, naturally not made public, that the meat had passed the date by which it was due to be consumed, though by less than a week, a purely technical matter.

  ______

  Somerville was unable to investigate the mystery of the vanishing circle any further on the following day. It was the time of the month when the wages of the workpeople fell due, and the nearest banking agency they had been able to establish was at Shiritha, a full day’s journey from Tell Erdek, necessitating a strong escort, an overnight stay, and a late return home next day.

  After dinner on the day of his departure, Elliott walked about in the courtyard for a while in the light of the lanterns set in the walls. He smoked two cheroots in the course of this, and then he saw what he had been hoping to see. Edith came out, though it seemed she did not intend to linger there long; the night air was cool, and she still wore the white cotton dress she had worn at dinner, with nothing over her shoulders.

  He came forward to meet her and spoke at once, without any preliminary greeting, as soon as he was near enough. “If you have a mind to ride out tonight, later on, there is something I think it would interest you to see.”

  “What is that?” she said.

  “I’d like it to be a surprise. Will you come?”

  “You mean, alone, just the two of us?”

  “Yes.”

  Edith hesitated for a long moment, aware that her breathing had quickened. Then she laughed, but less certainly than she had intended and would have wished. “You can’t be serious,” she said, knowing he was. She could see little of his face, which was in shadow, but there was a lantern on the wall behind him, and light from it lay slantwise on his head and gleamed on his blond hair like a halo worn at a rakish angle. “You must be mad,” she said. “In the middle of the night?” It was unprecedented, imprudent in just about every way it could be.

  “You see it best in the dark,” he said.

  “It must be quite something.”

  He made no reply to this but stood there still and attentive. And this attentiveness of his, this silent waiting on her unwisdom, seemed suddenly to Edith like the waiting that had attended on her all her life and had always been disappointed, the gathering for a plunge she had never made. “In the middle of the night?” she said again. There would be people about, there was Hassan at the gate . . .

  Some tutelary spirit, the god of schemers, kept Elliott from speech now. If he had tried to persuade her, if he had begun to urge his case, she would have found reasons for refusing. But he kept her in silence, and in this silence exhilaration swept through her. “Yes, all right,” she said. “Why not?”

  In the agitation of her feelings she barely comprehended the
rest of what was said. They would meet at midnight in the compound beyond the courtyard, where the stables were. They could leave by the gate of the stockade that enclosed the compound. This gate was barred from inside by a wooden bolt. They would have to leave it unbolted, but no one would notice any difference, not at that hour. If they were quiet they would not be seen. She was to wear dark clothes, something to cover her head. It was a clear night; they would see well enough by starlight; he knew the way.

  On this they parted. Edith waited through the time in her room. At intervals she thought she would not go, but each time, after the voice of caution, there came that slightly breathless, reckless sense that she was awaited, expected, not just by Elliott but by all the presences in the night outside. Well before midnight she changed into jodhpurs and a jersey of black wool and wrapped a dark scarf around her head. And after this change of clothes she had no more second thoughts about going.

  Elliott was waiting in the compound. He had already saddled two horses, both blacks. He showed no sign of gladness that she had come, as if he had never been in any doubt about it. She saw that he had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a cartridge belt across his body. Together they led the horses out and, at a distance of some yards, mounted.

  He had been right; the stars gave light enough to see the track. He rode ahead at an easy pace, she following behind. As the night closed around them, her excitement, the sense of escape, grew less; she was not afraid, but she felt the enormity of what she was doing, the departure from all custom and propriety.

  The rhythm of the riding, the faint light in which no landmarks could be distinguished, combined to take from her all measurement of time. At one point she thought she could make out, in the distance, paler levels that might have been floodwater, and some time after this the need for silence lessened for a while because the outcry of frogs filled the spaces of the night, a sound at once multiple and single, like a vast, protracted belching after some unimaginably rich feast.

  They veered away, began to mount a long slope toward higher ground. The clamor of the frogs grew less. Above her, above the crest of the rise, Edith saw that the sky was lit with a fan-shaped rose-violet glow. She could hear the frogs still, but the sound was different now, more murmurous, like a sort of droning or humming, seeming to rise and fall. The glow of light was low in the sky, and it too was not steady but dilated and shrank as if in time to this chorus. Elliott dismounted well below the summit at a ridge of rock where they could tether the horses. They went the rest of the way on foot, scrambling now and again, disturbing loose shale. She saw now that the flare in the sky varied in color also, though only slightly; there was a sort of pulsing or throbbing in it, from violet to saffron to pale rose. The sound was not being made by the frogs: it came from somewhere beyond the crest, it sounded like singing.

  The ground flattened as they drew near the top. Elliott lay prone here, full length, and motioned her to do the same. From this position he began edging up the last few feet, and she followed him. The singing was louder now. The rocks they were looking down over were lit by a warmer light than could have come from the stars. She heard Elliott utter a low exclamation. He spoke close to her ear as she drew level with him: “Keep your head down. I didn’t bargain for this.”

  She covered the last few inches and looked down. The breath caught in her throat. Below them the ground fell away steeply to a rocky plateau. Close to the center of this a cone of fire rose into the sky, gushing rainbow colors, showering fiery particles that lived only briefly. The amazing energy of the flames, the way they wavered and swayed to currents she could not feel took all her attention in the first moments, but then she saw that there were figures surrounding this pulsing column of light, moving in a circle, now forward, now back. Elliott spoke again, muttering close to her face: “I didn’t bargain for people down there. I saw it in the daytime, there was nobody. Alawi learned of it and told me, that’s my interpreter. Thank God I heard the singing, we might have had our heads blown off.”

  She scarcely heeded him. The sparks were like seeds, she thought, like a sperm of fire that died in the air. The people were dressed in white, and they were singing or chanting as they moved. The voices seemed to pulse in time to the flames, so that they were the same thing, voices and fire. It was like nothing she had ever seen before, a living thing, frightening and beautiful, with a shape that was constant yet endlessly blurred with change. She saw how it softened as it fused with the surrounding air, rose and fell back, ended in a zone that was neither fire nor sky, a corona of light.

  “Fire worshipers, thrown in free of charge,” Elliott said in low tones. “It is an escape of gas, you know.”

  His face was very close to her own; she felt the warm breath of his words on her cheek. The daring of it all, the dangers of the escapade, the shock of the fire, came to her now in a wave of reaction, made her tremulous, loosened her limbs. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful,” she said. “How would it start? I mean, what would make it start to burn like that?”

  “Anything could do it, any accidental spark. It comes out as a mixture of oil and gas—very inflammable. Or perhaps a flash of lightning. This one is quite recent, they tell me. They can go on forever, once they start. I thought you might like to see it.” He paused a moment, then said, “Perhaps we’d better go, we are not so very safe here.”

  But she did not move and did not draw away from him and after a moment he kissed her cheek and the side of her neck and she turned her face to him so as to be kissed on the mouth. She saw him move back to unsling the rifle and take off the cartridge belt. Then his arms were around her and she still saw the fire through closed eyes, and the beauty of the fire was in everything she felt and did.

  11.

  “To tell you the truth, I am rather worried about Somerville,” Palmer said. “He is behaving strangely, I can’t make him out.”

  He and Patricia were sitting in the common room at opposite sides of the fireplace, where a fire of wood scraps and dried camel dung was burning. They were grateful for it—the evenings were cold still—and they were glad to be sitting here together, talking companionably, with the house quiet around them and no one else about. Also conducive to talk was the fact that they were sitting at some distance apart; if too close together—and alone—they would fall to embracing and kissing, and this was good but also frustrating, as it could go no further for the time being. Palmer, whose studies had not left him much time for girlfriends in the past, had believed at first that this ache of unsatisfied desire was entirely his, entirely male, and he had admired Patricia even more than before when she, in her capacity of modern young woman who did not mince words, had informed him that the symptoms might be different in women but were no less physiological. Now, as he looked across at her, at the mobile features that changed with her thoughts, the generous mouth, the eyes full of life and intelligence, he thought once again how lucky he was. “It’s very unsettling,” he said, and for a moment or two he was not sure whether he meant his worries about Somerville or the desire to lay hands on Patricia.

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, his mind seems to be somewhere else half the time—he looks as if he is watching or listening to something. He is secretive too, in a way. I mean, take tonight for example. He comes back late from collecting the money for the wages. He’s been riding all day and he is completely fagged out. Then he tells me he wants me to go with him to the mound at crack of dawn tomorrow morning because he wants me to look at something. He doesn’t tell me what it is. All he will say is that he wants me to be up there, already standing up there at sunrise.” He glanced at his watch. “That’s about six hours’ time,” he said. “Hardly worth going to bed.”

  Patricia smiled at him. He didn’t like early hours, she knew that, but it didn’t matter because she didn’t mind them. Once she was awake she wanted to be up and about. When they were living together, she would get up, she would start things moving . . . “I don’t think h
e is very well,” she said. “In his state of mind, I mean. He looks feverish to me, quite done up. He needs looking after, and Edith doesn’t exactly excel in that department, does she?”

  “Then there is this business of the line. He doesn’t talk about it anymore, but he is convinced that the line is going to go smack through the dig. I mean, the Germans are not fools, are they? Why should they take on a gradient like that when they can stay on the flat? I think he honestly believes that they are intending to use dynamite on it and flatten it out that way. Why should they? What is to stop them going round the other side of the village? It’s a matter of half a mile, if that. I just can’t understand why he is so pessimistic about it.”

  Patricia was silent for some moments. She was in love with Harold, and she admired him too: his steadiness, his kindness of heart, his brand of vigilant skepticism, a sort of critical acuteness in which there was no malice, the lightness with which he bore his very considerable learning. But pessimism, at a time when Freud and his circle in Vienna were publishing papers on pathological states both individual and collective! No, she couldn’t let it pass. She wanted him to be a success, and she was ready to help him. But she also wanted to be a success herself, and success began at home, like charity: It lay in the freedom to differ, even to reprove and correct, and this was something that had to be established early.

  “I know you are fond of John,” she said. “You got on well from the start, didn’t you? I think your concern for him is making you take a rather superficial view.” She saw some startlement come into his eyes; it could not be often that he was accused of this. “It’s natural enough,” she said quickly. “It makes you reluctant to think that there might be something more seriously amiss with him. I mean, when you talk about pessimism, you are implying it is a sort of mood, something he can be jollied out of. But this is something more than that: He has convinced himself without much in the way of evidence. That’s another way of describing obsession. You can’t be so easily jollied out of an obsession, can you?”