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“We were approached by a ghazwa of the Shammar people,” he said. “A dozen men. They followed us for some miles and fired at us. We killed one and they fled, the cowards.”

There was nothing in the attentive faces around him that could be taken to confirm or deny this story. Next time he spoke of it the Shammar raiding party would be fifty strong at least, the deaths five or six, and the encounter would already belong to the realm of legend.

“Now we will be pestered by his relatives with demands for blood money,” Somerville said.

“No, no, they did not know us.” For the first time Jehar glanced around at his companions, who all shook their heads.

“Well, we shall see. Now that the bridge is completed, have they started immediately to lay the rails on this side of the river?”

“No, lord, there will be some delay. New rails have come from the steelworks in Germany, they have come by sea to Beirut. Now they wait for the unloading of the rails and the transporting of them to Aleppo and so to Jerablus. They will bring the rails and the coal into the yards in Jerablus. All this will take time, perhaps ten days. Also, they lack timber. It must be brought from the north, from Urfa. This I was told by one whose word can be trusted. For this very precious information I gave him money from my own purse.”

“But they had already laid some miles of track on this side of the river, even before they started work on the bridge. They were already engaged on it in my first season here, three years ago. Then the work was abandoned, the rails were left to rust. Now there are German surveyors and engineers here, they have rented houses in the village, they have taken some of our workpeople to build their storage sheds.”

He paused, aware of having spoken too rapidly, with too much emphasis, aware of Jehar’s eyes on him. There was always something unsettling in the man’s gaze, something too intent. “Under our noses,” he said. “They brought the stuff downriver.” In fact the warehouses had been there already when he arrived in mid-February. The sight of them, the presence of the Germans, had been a grievous blow to him; before that it had been possible to hope that they intended to take the line farther north, toward Mardin. He said, “The sheds are stacked to the roof. Strange they should be waiting for supplies at Jerablus when they have the timbers and the rails stacked up here.”

“But they are intended for this part of the line,” Jehar said with extreme simplicity. “A railway is made in stretches, like a garden. When you grow palms, you plant here because the ground is easy. In another place you wait until you can make the ground better. Twenty piastres I gave him.”

“I am not carrying any money,” Somerville said. “I did not expect to meet you here. But I will remember what is owed. Four Turkish pounds as usual. We agreed at the beginning that I would not be responsible for your expenses.”

He did not believe that Jehar had disbursed any of his own money, but in any case it would have been a great mistake to undertake to meet costs of this kind; he knew Jehar well enough to know that the costs would multiply. It was little enough he gave them anyway; how much Jehar would keep he did not know, but thought it probable that the others might get half the money to share among them, a meager amount but they found it sufficient; this job of escorting Jehar was much coveted, he had been told. “Well,” he said, “in view of the delay at Jerablus you can take some days for your own business before setting out again. But I must be informed when they start again with the laying of the track.”

On this, with low bows, the men retired to where their horses waited and turned toward the village. But Somerville was not given time to ponder the news. His two foremen were approaching, and behind them came the first of the workpeople, talking and laughing together. He moved forward to greet the two men, deriving comfort, as always, from the air of competence they carried with them, like an aura; they were united in it in spite of the physical dissimilarity between them. Elias, who was from Konia and Greek by birth, he had known for some years now. They had been together on a dig at Hamman Ali, south of Mosul, in the days when Somerville had been still an assistant. He had been delighted—and flattered—when Elias offered his services here. He was stout of build and corpulent, though quick and sure-footed on the ground of the site, with a round, good-humored face that could turn to fury with fearsome speed when he found something amiss, some slackness in the work. The other, Halil, was a Syrian, tall for an Arab and sinewy, with a stentorian voice and an expression of severity and melancholy.

Somerville had complete confidence in both and knew that they could be safely left to organize the groups and set the people on to work; there would in any case be little change from previous days in the distribution of the labor and the areas of excavation: Most of the people would be employed at different levels of the pit, which in three seasons of excavation they had dug down to a depth of sixty feet; others would be extending the lateral trenches in the hope of finding some remains of connecting walls. Walls were of utmost importance, even if no more than a few inches of them were left. They could lead to rooms, to gates and portals, to temples and palaces. So far, however, they had found nothing but the foundation lines of humbler and more recent habitations, Roman and Byzantine, not greatly interesting.

He was about to start making his way back to the expedition house when his assistant, Palmer, arrived, a sturdy figure in his white cotton suit and soft-brimmed white hat.

“I thought I’d come and see the work started,” he said. “I didn’t know you were here. Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

Somerville assented to this but without much conviction. He liked Palmer and knew he was lucky to have an assistant who, in addition to knowing something of field archaeology, was an acknowledged expert on Assyrian and Sumerian inscriptions. But there were occasions when he wished—irrationally—that Palmer’s looks might sometimes betray some faltering, even some hint of dismay, something to correspond to the extremely disappointing nature of their excavation so far. But no, he was always equable, his eyes gentle and shrewd behind the glasses, ready for the momentous discovery just around the corner. Of course Palmer was young, only twenty-seven, eight years younger than himself. And it wasn’t Palmer’s money that was draining away…

Together they watched as the villagers were assembled into their work parties of six. This was a more noisy and complicated procedure than any not accustomed to the ways of the Bedouin and the group dynamics of large-scale excavations might have expected, and it called for firmness and tact in equal measure on the part of the foremen. Quarrels would flare up, a dispute over nothing, and words lead to blows sometimes and blows to knives and knives to feuds. Previous trouble of this sort would have to be remembered, and the men set in different groups at the next assembly. Then the pickman, the most important member of the group since it was he who cut into the ground, or sometimes the spademan, his second-in-command, whose pay was slightly less, would object to the inclusion of a particular basketman in his group on the grounds of laziness or stupidity or because of some former fault or simply out of dislike, and this could lead to heated dispute. And as all the men, in addition to a daily wage, were paid baksheesh for anything of interest or value they found, there was always keen competition for the areas of the mound rumored to be more productive.