Land of Marvels: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

  Strolling together side by side in the spring sunshine, they said the necessary things, made the necessary assurances. Solidarity and common interest were what they both were concerned to express, sentiments somewhat forced on the German side, though naturally Kruckman gave no indication of this. Only the previous week, in London, his bank had finally been obliged to recognize southern Mesopotamia, as well as central and southern Persia, as exclusive fields of operation for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the British government had a controlling interest. This had opened the way for the formation of an Anglo-German syndicate to organize the newly formed Turkish Petroleum Company for the exploitation of the vilayets of Mosul and Baghdad. The controlling interest in this would still be British, through the National Bank of Turkey, in which Rampling had a substantial holding, but a 25 percent share would be offered to the Deutsche Bank. Agreement on this, a united front, was essential if they were to succeed in obtaining a charter from the Ottoman government.

  Rampling returned to his hotel convinced that this accord would hold. The Germans had little choice; they had come too late into the field to gain any more commanding position; they must see that the best interests of German industry would be served by securing this quarter share. The potential profits were huge, and they constituted a force for peace, as he had not failed to point out to Kruckman. For who would want to hazard benefits like these on the doubtful outcome of war?

  So cheered and invigorated was he by these thoughts, by his restored hope in the workings of capital, that he had decided to get some girl brought in to take her clothes off and do what she was told. But the packet that had been delivered by courier in his absence brought an abrupt end to this mood of celebration. It contained the information that the geologist Elliott had been closely watched while in London, a fact that he already knew, as it had been done on his orders. But the watching, it seemed, had not been careful enough. Elliott had succeeded at least once in escaping it—a proof of guilt in itself. He had visited the German Embassy. A security guard there, beset by gambling debts and in fear of bodily harm from his creditors, had come forward belatedly—and at a price. He had seen a handshake, heard a name. A meeting with a secretary at the embassy and two others not employed there, both Germans. He would have thought nothing of it, but next morning he had heard the name again. A man had come and asked him questions about visitors, politely, not like a policeman. He had said nothing at the time, not knowing the purpose of these questions, but the man had left a card with an address, an office just off the Strand. After some days it had occurred to him that this might be something he could sell . . .

  It took Rampling no more than a few minutes to read this report. It took him less time to come to the only possible conclusion. Elliott had taken a risk in going so openly to the German Embassy, but of course he could not afford to seem secretive to the Germans, could not afford to rouse suspicion that there might be competitors; they must believe, as he himself had been tricked into believing, that the American was serving only one master. Elliott must have realized he was being shadowed and succeeded in throwing his tracker off the scent somewhere not so very far from the embassy—hence the questioning next morning. He had gone calmly on to keep his appointment; the man had nerve, obviously. The detective agency had slipped up; it certainly would not receive the balance of its fee . . .

  Something more drastic than this would have to be done about Elliott. Elliott had betrayed his trust. Elliott, no doubt for a substantial sum of money, had made a deal to report his findings also to the Deutsche Bank.

  This was a day different from any other in Jehar’s life, the day of his great idea, the day when he became, instead of a man who waited on the whims of others, one who shaped his own destiny.

  For most of its course the day resembled all others that he spent at Jerablus. In the morning he found three hours’ work hoisting coal in wicker baskets from the stockpile onto the waiting trucks, which were to carry it over the river and down the line. After this, standing in the yard at the kitchen doorway, hens scrabbling and stretching their necks nearby, two ragged men shouting in argument on the other side of the track, he watched Ninanna making coffee on the makeshift stove and added further details to the paradise of their future life together.

  At Deir ez-Zor, he told her, beyond the lands of the fat and indolent Pasha, the banks of the Great River were well wooded and beautiful. That he had never set eyes on them did nothing to detract from the fullness of his description. There were wide meadowlands bounded by green hills, and the river wound among them, glittering in the sunshine. Yellow daisies grew there, and dark blue irises, and in the clear pools there were floating lily pads that gave off a scent of great sweetness. Just now, at this time of the year, the almond trees would be flowering, and in the strips of land adjoining the river the watermelons would be showing the first leaf, the seed leaf. In places the banks were steep and tangled with brushwood; wild boars littered there, and ducks took refuge, also the beautiful bird called the Aleppo plover. Red geese came to make their nests in these banks, where they were high and rocky. A man with a good rifle could provide his family with game all the year round. He, Jehar, had such a rifle, a bolt-action, breech-loading Enfield rifle of most recent design. He kept it hidden, wrapped in an oily rag, below the boards of the shack where he slept, but he did not tell Ninanna this, nor did he tell her how he had acquired it, which was by the ambush and murder, in company with some others, of a small contingent of Turkish troops. They were hated as occupiers, and hatred was just cause for killing and theft in Jehar’s eyes, even if the hatred was borrowed for the occasion; he had no particular animosity toward the Turks, had merely coveted one of the rifles they were issued with. He was a crack shot, he told her; he could hit a piastre piece flung high in the air.

  She listened to him with attention, keeping an eye on the pan, waiting to spoon in the coffee and the sugar when the water came to the boil. Sometimes, in the interest of the narrative, she would be in danger of forgetting her duties; she would look closely at him, her mouth a little open, her dark eyes full of wonder as she tried to picture these lands he spoke of, so different from the world of the yards that surrounded them, the flowery meadows, the shining stream, the birds flying overhead. She looked forward to his visits and tried in the midst of her tasks to make occasions for them. Jehar felt his power over her, and in the absence of touch between them it stirred his loins with a sense of conquest; it was as if by subjugating her with his words, he were laying hands on her body. He had been away for some days, but the story had reached such a plenitude of promise that it could be resumed at any time; it had no breaks in it and no beginning and no ending. And Ninanna knew that he brought the story to her as a tribute, an offering laid before a queen by a subject chieftain. She knew she had empire over Jehar, and the knowledge gave her a certain right to call him to account.

  “I missed you,” she said. And then, though she knew the answer: “Why did you go away?”

  “I had to see the Englishman. I had to tell him . . . The line, they have started laying the track on the other side, beyond the bridge. They are almost halfway to the Belikh River.”

  She nodded. She had no interest at all in the progress of the line, whether it went here or there. “I missed you,” she said again.

  “I had to go. He gives me money for the information I bring him. I am his news bearer, I am the one he trusts. The money he gives me I put to the money I have saved already. When I have the hundred pounds, I will take it to your uncle and he will give you to me.”

  “Then we will be married and we will go to live at Deir ez-Zor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it be long?”

  “No, not very long.” This he tried to say with the ring of reassurance in his voice. It was important that Ninanna should believe it. But in fact his stock was growing painfully slowly. He had lost weight in his efforts to save expenses on food. And lack of trust in the uncle was robbing him of sleep.


  The work of the yards at Jerablus, the extension to Tchoban Bey, the building of the great steel bridge, the rail link to Alexandretta, the construction of storage depots and houses and offices for the employees of the company, all this had brought in its wake a great number of people, many of whom had no intention of seeking work on the line or doing honest work of any kind. Various nationalities commingled in this improvised township of canvas and tin canisters and scrap timber. Turk and Arab and Kurd rubbed shoulders here, along with an assortment of footloose Europeans and Americans, a good number of whom were fugitives from justice. However diverse in race and origin, all were driven by the same prospect of easy money. There were bars and gambling dens and makeshift stalls. Drunkenness and violence were common. There were also brothels. These were mostly for the benefit of the German railway employees and for off-duty Turkish noncommissioned officers, people with the money to pay. Mostly, but not entirely: a pocket picked, a purse snatched, a win at dice, some surplus of wages that did not go on drink—anyone might find himself waiting in line for his turn with one of the girls. It was a constant demand, there was a lot of money in it, and it was Jehar’s growing fear that the uncle would grow tired of waiting for the bride-price and force Ninanna into whoredom. It was done commonly enough, and it didn’t take long. She would be kept locked up for a while, violated a certain number of times free of charge . . . The first move the uncle made in this direction would be the last he ever made on earth. But what if the thing was done while he was away on the site of the excavation, carrying reports back to the Englishman? The uncle would not live to profit from it, but it might be too late to save Ninanna. Fears of this played tricks with his senses. As he lay awake, it sometimes seemed to him that amid the nighttime sounds of quarrel and riot he could hear Ninanna screaming.

  These fears he sought to dispel by dwelling on those of another. “The Englishman is afraid of the railway,” he said. “That is why he pays me for telling him that the line draws nearer. He expects only bad news. It is in keeping with his demon that the news should be bad. But he thinks that by paying he can somehow keep the line at bay. The line is like a fierce dog to him. Paying me is like throwing meat to it.”

  Ninanna’s eyes widened as she looked at him. The threat of the line became real to her at that moment. The Englishman who was digging for treasure had joined the fat Pasha, creatures half real, half legendary. “How can that be?” she said. “The money, he gives to you, not to the people of the railway.”

  “It is how people think about money,” he said. “And about time also. The Englishman is near to the finding of the treasure. He thinks that if he pays it might be granted him to possess the treasure before the line reaches him.”

  He told her then of the things he had learned on this last visit of his: how they had started digging on the far side of the mound, the side that looked down over the German railway buildings; how they had found a wall and then rooms, palace apartments under a layer of ash. The wall continued; they would follow it. Perhaps they would go below this floor to a lower level, where the treasure might be; so far only fragments of small value had been found, but if they were granted some weeks more . . .

  “He tries to hide it from me, to show nothing. This is because he thinks I am lesser than he. For that race it is a bad thing to reveal your feelings to a lesser person, they think it is a cause for shame—”

  He was interrupted here; she had to leave, the coffee was cooling. Jehar was obliged to move away because she gave him a backward glance as she passed into the café, narrowing her eyes in a way that had become a signal between them, and he knew from this that the uncle had entered from the door on the other side.

  But this day was not destined, like all the others, to end sadly for Jehar in longing for the girl and distrust of the uncle. It was like the finger of Allah, as he afterward thought of it, pointing him the way. Lately he had kept away from bars, not wishing to squander any of his savings. This evening, however, a certain mood of depression, a sense that he was losing his battle with circumstance, led him to a drinking place, no more than a shed, roughly timbered, roofed over with canvas, with a narrow bar, no space for seating and no one to serve you; customers had to jostle through the crowd to get to the counter. The drink was raki, made from crushed grain and fermented in open pans in the hot sun of the previous summer, raw to the taste and very potent.

  The men surrounding him were of every kind, but there were some there who had a look in their eyes that he knew; they were men who had survived harsh toil but still lived with those who had not survived it, men who had worked on the line for years and given up their strength to it day by day, from the high Anatolian plateau to these banks of the Euphrates, through the Taurus and the Cilician Gates and the Amanus Mountains, where there were no natural passes, where the hills had to be pierced by blasting and tunneling. Many men had died in these ten years of labor—by falls in precipitous places, by sickness in that harsh climate, by accidents occurring in unloading the rails and sleepers or coupling the trucks, by attacks from mountain tribesmen hostile to the line. Two of the convicts released along with Jehar to work under the guns of the guards had died, one under a fall of rock, one when a shattered leg had turned gangrenous.

  Perhaps it was recognizing this haggard companionship with death printed on some faces there that set Jehar talking now, with two drinks inside him and the third in his hand, set him telling a story of death to those standing near him. At least there was no other reason he was aware of.

  It had happened during his early days of working on the railway. A charge of dynamite, a powerful charge designed to bring down a steep and rocky escarpment ahead of the line, had been laid. They used Armenian conscripts, Jehar said with a chuckle, because being subject to military law, they could be shot if they refused and because they were half starved and so light enough to be lowered down in a basket over the cliff face without the rope breaking. The fuse was shorter than it should have been, and it was shortened further by the charge having been set in the overhang on the farther side of the cliff. The Armenians had to light the fuse, then be hauled up and then run for their lives. Jehar acted it out, eyes staring, mouth open, arms working like pistons. But one of the two had stumbled and fallen and in falling done some hurt to his leg. The other—and this was the point of the story—instead of making good his escape, had paused to help his companion get to his feet and had tried to bring him to safety. This doomed, shambling run of the pair Jehar also acted, within the confines of the space allowed him by his listeners. But the charge had detonated; they were too close. Killed by the blast, stoned to death by flying splinters of rock—Jehar spread his hands; the manner of it was not important. The point was the folly of it, two men dying when only one needed to die.

  He was smiling as he finished, warm with the raki, glad to be alive. But in fact he always felt some unease in the telling of this story, in spite of his chuckles and headshakes, because there was something in it that baffled him, something that defied common sense and mockery alike. The man had paused, but there had not been time for anything like decision; instinctively he had risked himself . . . Now, as he was raising his glass to drink, in that moment of indecision and unease, in the presence of a mystery, he felt the touch of Allah, and the idea came to him, at first like a distant strain of music, a promise of harmony. Then it came nearer, and it was a clash of cymbals, it was the song of a thousand throats. A hundred pounds, all at one stroke!

  ______

  Somerville’s insomnia became a settled condition during this period of discovery. He would fall asleep almost the moment that his head touched the pillow and sleep profoundly through the first part of the night, untroubled by any dreams vivid enough to remain with him on waking. Invariably he would open his eyes in the darkness, long before dawn, with the cold knowledge that sleep would not return to him.

  This lack of sleep combined with his anxieties and the excitement of the discoveries they were making to give a quality o
f slight hallucinatory disorder to his days. From time to time he had a sense of movement at the edges of his vision, glimpses of some bright flickering motion, like small tongues of fire, seen from the corners of his eyes but never evident to his direct gaze. Sometimes he seemed to hear, in the far distance, beyond the verge of sight, a faint, repeated striking of metal on metal, and there were times when this became indistinguishable from the pulse of his own body.

  In the hours of wakefulness, lying motionless while he waited for daylight, he elaborated the story he had begun to tell himself from the moment of finding the piece of carved ivory. This story began with the second Assyrian king to be called Ashurnasirpal, the first of them all to boast of his power to inflict suffering, the first to make this power the symbol and test of kingship, the first to aim not merely at conquest and plunder, as had his forebears, but at the permanent subjection of the conquered peoples, changing the very nature of the state, from one rich and strong within its borders and content to be so to one that gloried in dominion, ruthless in its greed for territory and vassalage, a policy that was to be followed by all his successors down to the last days, down to the fires in which the empire perished.

  Mysterious in its workings this alchemy of empire, a change of chemistry in the body of the state, a thirst that once created was never slaked. He thought of the limestone statue of Ashurnasirpal, found in the temple of Ninurta at Kalhu, the hooked nose, the stony gaze, the rigid pose of the despot, the mace and curved spear in his hands. This king, early in the ninth century before Christ, invaded Syria, skirted Mount Lebanon, conquered the cities of the Great Sea, and brought back stores of booty, among which was an ivory plaque showing the lion of empire with its teeth embedded in the throat of a male victim, a Nubian, the throat offered in ultimate submission. That is why he took it. It had pleased him to take possession of this symbol of another’s dominion, to take the power of it into himself. Like capturing the enemy’s gods, another practice of the Assyrians. He had taken it back with him to Kalhu on the Tigris, a new palace, a new city, rich and splendid, built by slave labor to his order. There it had stayed for a period of time unknown. Who had brought it here? In the long line of kings that followed he had found record of one name only, Esarhaddon, who inherited the throne some two centuries later on the murder of his father, Sennacherib.