Everything they had found so far could be seen as lying within a period of little more than two centuries, between the reigns of Ashurnasirpal II and Esarhaddon, the first embarking in the early ninth century on a program of ruthless expansion, the second presiding in the early seventh over the empire at its fullest extent, from Cilicia to Egypt, from the Taurus to the Persian Gulf. It was in the former’s reign that a new kind of boasting appeared in the chronicles of victory, a vaunting of cruelty as an evidence of power. Echoes came to Somerville in the nights of his insomnia and colored his dreams. Many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears and their fingers… Their youths and maidens I burned in the fire… Their warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert land…
Some change in the human spirit here, not in the doing but in the telling, the pride, some ugly twist of soul toward a new idea of supremacy. How? From where? Why among these people at this time? Bred by conquest, like an appetite that grows from feeding? With the blessing of their god Ashur to lend them a sense of mission, bloodshed would become a form of devotion. Since Ashur was above all other gods and the king was his earthly embodiment, there would be a duty to impose his cult, carry light into dark places. The light they had carried had been cast by the flames of devastation. They too, the light bearers, had ended in that same fire.
It was in the evening, walking back from the mound to the expedition house, that the thought came to him, translated into conviction in the course of the next few steps. The weeping eyes of the lion, the compound of ash and clay so laboriously moved to reveal the curve of the beak, the braceleted wrist, now this layer of ash and the fragments muffled in it. The same fire, yes, but that was all they had in common. Because the ivory had come from elsewhere he had assumed the other things had too. But he had been wrong. They had not been brought here; they had been made here. And the demigod, the guardian spirit, could only have been made on the orders of a king and for a king’s protection.
Amid the grime and smoke of the yards, always with an eye out for the uncle, his voice sometimes obscured by the hiss of steam or the clangor of shunting engines, Jehar continued to tell Ninanna about the paradise of Deir ez-Zor. She loved the repetition of details and never got tired of them, however familiar they were, and so he always began with the look of the place, the white minarets, the bridge over the river with its stone pillars resting in the water, the green island in the midst of the stream, the gardens and palm groves along the banks. He enlarged also on the fabulous fatness and sloth of the Pasha in Baghdad because this always made her laugh. The Pasha wore a fez with a gold tassel, and he smoked a hookah, and the rings on his fingers got too tight and had to be filed off as they could not be removed in any other way. He ate halvah and baklava and cakes made of rice and honey, and he got fatter and fatter. It took the Pasha a long time just to raise an arm or turn his head. Jehar imitated, for the reward of her laughter, the palsied movements of this legendary landlord, owner of the gardens of as-Salhijjeh on the north side of the town, where they would rent their land and prosper through his neglect.
Things he had seen on his travels, his plans for making money, these too became part of the vision of life at Deir ez-Zor. Lower down on the Euphrates was the town of Hit, surrounded by swamps of the thick black tar they called bitumen. The principal occupations of the inhabitants of Hit were gathering the bitumen and building the boats they called sahatir, designed for river traffic. The materials they used for making the boats were wood and the pulp of the palm, and both the inside and the outside of the boat were coated with bitumen mixed with lime to make it stick. He had never made such a boat, but love filled him with confidence in his powers. He had seen it done; he knew how to do it; he could make one in a week. A boat like this could be sold for six Turkish pounds. You took it downriver and sold it at Karbala or you crossed over to the Tigris by the canal and sold it in Baghdad. You made a good profit, and this was because the people of those towns did not have the bitumen close at hand. There were also fields of it not far from where the Englishman was digging for his treasure, but these were too far from the Great River.
He had told her about this Englishman and his search and his vast wealth—hundreds toiled at his command—and his shorts and boots that made his legs look thin and his feet look big. He had told her too about the railway line that was heading for the place where the treasure was. The Englishman feared this line because he was one who always believed in his heart that he was a target for God’s anger. Because of this secret belief, he had a constant need for news, now more than ever, as he was beginning to find things. And for news he was willing to pay.
She listened to him without always seeming to, busy as she was. The uncle had paid something and had been allowed to fence off a small piece of land adjoining the shoulder of a nearby siding; a dozen hens and a rooster lived together in this small space, fluttering and squawking in alarm at the occasional hissing sound of compressed air released by the locomotives. When Ninanna came out to tend to them Jehar was able to keep her in talk for a little while. Here in the open she felt less constraint; she smiled more often at Jehar and sometimes asked him questions. The black fields of Hit engaged her imagination. It was like Gehennem, the place of fire and torment where the damned were sent. What did they look like, the swamps of pitch? Did people live among them? Were there also some at Deir ez-Zor?
No, no, he told her. Deir ez-Zor was all white and green and golden. It was true that the pitch fields of Hit resembled what the Holy Writings said about Hell; they were black as far as the eye could see, and they steamed and bubbled in places with the heat lying within and below. But sometimes these black fields could look beautiful. There were salt springs among them, and the salt water mingled with the pitch and made rainbow colors around the edges of the spring. In the evening sunshine these colors glowed, and it was as if they were cast upward into the sky, like a promise of paradise.
Love aided native talent to make him supremely eloquent. She listened spellbound. Her lips, which were beautifully formed, parted a little with the interest of it, wonder passing to laughter without pain of thought. No one had ever talked to her like this, brought such pictures to her mind. They came to her sometimes at night as she drifted into sleep, the minarets, the stream, the palm groves, the fez with its gold tassel. Now there were these black fields that could be both ugly and beautiful. He was handsome too, with his level brows and pale eyes, and his talk was full of fire and promise.
The bitumen was scooped up with palm leaves, he told her, and stored in large pieces. It was diluted with lime and sent downstream on rafts. It could be sold at al-Felluge, and from there you could bring back grape honey and a kind of rice the people there called tummen. By this trade one could make a lot of money, and with this money they would buy land and plant palms. A hundred trees they would have…
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.