In fact it had been Palmer’s lack of excitement that had struck her in listening. She had not taken much to him from the start, disliking his jocularity, which she thought rather common, his way of questioning and undermining things, the lack of fire in him. He saw everything from below, from ground level, toad’s level; there was no splendidness in him. His present behavior confirmed her in this opinion. The girl was hanging on his words; you only needed to look at her face to see that. He was the authority; he was in control; he had an intimate knowledge of what he was talking about. Yet he had not tried in the least to be fascinating, to exercise what Edith thought of as the male prerogative, the communication of power and strength and passionate certainty. Instead he had spoken with a sort of casual, confiding friendliness, as if he were telling her about a book he had read or a place he had been to and she hadn’t.
The man had devoted practically the whole of his adult life, all the years since leaving Oxford, to these studies that he spoke of now so flatly! She simply could not understand it. How different from John in the days of their courtship, when he had outlined his plans and ambitions to her. How inspiring he had been with his passion for Mesopotamia, carrying her along with him on a tide of great designs and bold projects, and how she had admired him for giving up that pettifogging business and devoting himself to his heart’s desire. She had responded to his ardor with all the ardor of her nature. Follow the dream, that was it. In the destructive element immerse. How true that was. Lord Jim was one of the novels she had brought with her. Palmer was too pedestrian, too lacking in impulse, to have even the merest notion of such a thing.
“Well, good night,” she said. “I’ll toddle off to bed.”
Palmer waited till the door had closed behind her, then took up the pencil and drew the sheet of paper toward him with an air of relief. “Well,” he said, “in the very earliest tablets, let’s say around 3000 B.C., the sign for a star was like this, sort of an asterisk made with six lines of equal thickness and length, scratched in the clay with some sharp instrument, no wedge shape at all. Come round the table a bit so you can see better. It’s what they call a pictograph, the picture represents the object. Now look at this, a few hundred years later, in what they call the Third Dynasty of Ur, the period of Akkadian domination. It still has the same form, still six lines, but the three upper ones end in wedge shapes. Now if we come to more recent times, say about 700 B.C., the great age of Assyria, it looks like this.”
The two were sitting shoulder to shoulder now, and Palmer’s pencil was busy.
“But it’s totally different,” Patricia said. “It’s nothing like a star now. Just a simple cross with the wedge shape on the side instead of at the top.”
“Yes, that’s right, it has turned through ninety degrees. All the cuneiform signs went through this change, for reasons that are not altogether clear to us. And at the same time they got more and more abstract, less and less like the original object. And they started to take on additional meanings. A bowl was still a bowl, but it could also mean food or bread, depending on the context. Two lateral lines meant a stream, but when they became vertical they could also mean a seed or a father or a son.”
“And what does this one mean now?”
“Well, it still means star, but it can also be read as sky or God.”
“I think the whole thing is absolutely fascinating,” Patricia said.
“Do you really?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Some people find it boring. Edith, for instance.”
“Well, I don’t. Edith doesn’t go into things very much, does she? She hasn’t got much concentration, have you noticed? The whole course of human thought is there in those signs, the whole process of learning. From object to symbol, it’s an essential step; we can’t emerge from childhood without making it. No child at school today could learn to read or add up without it.”
They were still sitting shoulder to shoulder, their upper arms touching. Palmer put the pencil down without shifting his position. For some moments he maintained a deliberate silence. Patricia did not look at him, but she did not move away. He felt love and desire gather within him, furthered by silence, indistinguishable one from another. Object and symbol, he thought. Yes. He had known this girl only three weeks. “I am glad you feel like that about it,” he said in a voice that was slightly husky. “It matters a lot to me. To tell you the truth, it has been my whole life up to now. Will you marry me?”
The piece of carved stone lay flat on the table where he had left it. He carried the lamp over and stood looking down. The carving was in shallow relief, and the incisions were impacted with clay, making the detail difficult to distinguish clearly. He noticed now that the clay was speckled with a grayish powder; in some places it was more than a speckling, it was a thick admixture, very hard to the touch. He took the eyeglass from his pocket and looked closely at this filling, which brought the cuts in the stone to the same plane as the surface. Something that had been compounded with the clay from the beginning perhaps… Then it came to him: It was the dust of wood ash, the same stuff he had found in the roots of the Nubian’s hair, in the eyes and the ears of the lion; that had been more bluish in color, but it was the same stuff.
It would not brush out, it was too hard packed. He went to the long table where various instruments and cleaning materials were laid out, returned with tweezers, a thin scalpel, a dentist’s pick. Slowly, very carefully, he began to scrape out the filling of clay. Some he put in a jar for laboratory analysis when they returned to London; they had no facilities for it where they were. The traces remaining in the incisions and in the texture of the surface he removed with a weak solution of hydrochloric acid and a soft cloth, working patiently and with great care.
It was well after midnight by the time he finished. He could see the line of the curve clearly now, and the forward-slanting protuberance at the top, where the stone was broken, not a boss, as he had thought at first, but the stump of something that had been longer. The double band of the ring was some nine inches to the left of this, slightly lower down. But it would be on a level, he thought, with the lower part of the curve if this were continued downward. The curve and the stump and the ring, taken together, reminded him of something…
Without much sense of decision, as if moving under some gently exercised propulsion, he got up and made his way across the near corner of the silent courtyard to the drawing office. Here he provided himself with a pencil, some sheets of plain paper, and a square of tracing paper. As he returned with these, the silence that hung over the courtyard and the unaccustomed lateness of the hour brought about a feeling of excitement in him, as if this were an escapade of some kind, something so far out of the common as to seem reckless, even illicit.
Seated again in the workroom, he laid the tracing paper over the stone and lightly traced out the lines of the carving, taking care to keep the spaces and proportions exact. This done, pressing down hard with his pencil, he made an impression on the first piece of paper, then drew in the lines. There before him were the curve, the stump, the ring. The curve descended gently, but at the point where the stone was broken off it seemed, for no more than half an inch, to become steeper, almost vertical. Still as if his movements were being directed, he took up the pencil again and continued the line down from this point, ending it with a hook. The stump he extended, following the line of the slant. He found himself looking, quite unmistakably, at the hooked beak and stiff heraldic crest of a hawk. What he had thought was a ring could not be so; the line below it swelled out a little; it was the beginning of an arm. The ring was a bracelet, and it was enclosing a human wrist.