“My name is Alexander. My friends call me Alex.”
This said, they sat and looked at each other for a moment or two. It came to Edith that something—anything—needed imperatively to be said. “But why have they sent you here? I mean, to this particular area?”
“The reasons are technical. Do you really want to hear them? Rule number one for visiting geologists pretending to be visiting archaeologists is to wait at least twenty-four hours before you start boring your hostess with stuff about rocks.”
“No, really, I’d like to know.”
“Right, here we go. At Hit on the Euphrates and a few miles south of Mosul on the Tigris there are springs of bitumen coming up from belowground. Bitumen is a kind of tarry substance, it is one of the components of petroleum. These springs, or fountains you might call them, are dotted around for miles, quite small, nine or ten inches across at most. The thing about them is that the bitumen that comes out is almost pure, unlike practically anywhere else in western Asia—in most other places the bitumen comes out swimming on the back of the water, if you get me. Now we already know there is oil there, we don’t know how much exactly, but we know it is a lot. We know that for certain. But not very far from where we are sitting right now, a few miles to the east, there is an extensive oil seep and a number of fountains, some putting out salt water and bitumen mixed, some putting out an almost pure bitumen. We have reports on it and some maps, but the area has never been properly prospected for oil. It’s going to be my job to have a good look round and make some reports of a more detailed kind.”
He paused here and looked at her for some moments in silence. She was interested, he could see it in her face; it was no mere polite attention she was giving him. Wonderful eyes she had, wide apart like a cat’s. Easy to tell her things, easy to say too much… He said, “I am working for the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was formed two years ago in 1912. That is, I am working for the British interests in the company.” She would know this already, from her husband. She would know who had sent him. “We have to go carefully,” he said. “The company has not yet received a charter from the Turkish government. When they get that, they will be first in the field. They need to know as much as possible beforehand so as to keep a step ahead. That’s where I come in.”
“My husband told me that he had agreed with Lord Rampling, the financier, that you should come here.”
“That is correct, yes. I don’t know this Rampling personally, it’s just a job of work, you know. I get a fee. I don’t have anything to do with the financial side of it. They have just sent me here to follow up a few clues. I’ve been engaged in petroleum geology almost the whole of my working life.”
Once again he paused and looked at her. The closeness of his regard, that blaze of sincerity, was unsettling, as if he were requiring responses not altogether clear from his words. As before, she felt driven into speech. “It seems like rather a hit-or-miss business to me,” she said. “I mean, it’s just the presence of the oil seep and these springs, isn’t it? It could be just a very little oil, just a narrow little vein that has got gashed somehow and oozes up from close to the surface.” Like a hemorrhage, she thought, oozing out, black instead of red, weakening the body, sapping mother earth. “I mean, over all that time even a trickle of oil would make quite a big swamp, wouldn’t it?”
“Those are not the only things we have to go on. All those places I’ve been talking about—and this is true also of Dalaki, in Persia, where oil has been definitely discovered and drilling has begun—have one other thing in common. They are situated at the extreme edge of a gypsum foundation at the point where the gypsum is succeeded either by red sandstone or by fractured limestone, both of which are typical reservoir rocks.”
Glancing at her face, he saw that a certain stillness had descended on it and realized that she had failed to follow him in these details. “These are types of rock where the oil gets trapped,” he said. “It’s like the jar where the genie is kept prisoner. He is small when he is in the jar, that’s because he’s got these vast formations of sedimentary rock all around him. But once he is set free he swells up and gets huger and huger. If you could see a picture of the escaping genie in a storybook, it would look like a great cloud billowing up from the neck of the jar, filling all the sky. Instead of a cloud, think of a great flood of oil, like a million fountains all put together. Believe me, if you drill down through the walls of his prison, you will see how big he is, by jiminy you will!”
She would have asked him more. One cardinal piece of advice of her mother’s, secretly scorned but somehow still operating within her, was always to ask men about their work, this being the best way of freeing their tongues and also, as a secondary advantage, of securing a reputation for intelligence. But this man’s tongue needed no freeing. He was loquacious certainly, but this homely rhetoric of his turned everything into a story. She would have liked to go on with it a bit longer, though their tea was finished long ago. It was not like the genie, not really, because he was quite contained in his jar whereas the oil leaked all over the place, as it seemed. She did not understand how it could escape from these imprisoning rocks.
But manners prevailed now. She rang the little bell on the table beside her. “You must be tired,” she said. “You will need a rest. Mansur will show you to your room. I will tell him to bring water. This is a sort of common room, where we are now. We generally gather here for a drink a little after sundown, when my husband and his assistant are back from the excavation.”
But he must have slept long; he did not appear until it was nearly dark, just before dinner, when everyone else was assembled. Introductions were hardly over before they were on their way to the dining room. She had not failed to notice her husband’s air of distraction and the shortness of his words to the newly arrived guest. She knew these for signs of excitement in him. And Palmer had a look of briskness about him, a sort of extra alertness, which meant the same thing. But at first neither of them made any mention of the day’s work; the meal was half over before anyone spoke of it, and then it seemed that her husband was jolted into speech by a kind of rage.
Elliott proved no shyer in the enlarged company of the dinner table than he had been earlier over the teacups. The blaze of honesty, the hasty rhythms of his speech were the same. He was talking about the beginnings of the American oil industry and about a certain Colonel Drake, who wasn’t a colonel at all, but a drifting and impoverished entrepreneur.
“He used the title to impress the local population, all the couple of hundred of ’em. This was in the 1860s, a lumber town called Titusville in northwest Pennsylvania. Everyone knew about the rock oil that came bubbling up from belowground near the town—there was a place in the hills there called Oil Creek. But no one thought of drilling for it—except this Colonel Drake.”
Before that they had just scooped the oil from the surface or soaked rags in it then wrung them out. They might get four or five gallons a day like this—on a good day. That was how it had always been; that’s what their fathers and grandfathers had done. They thought Drake was crazy, colonel or not.
“Sure, he was a fake,” Elliott said, sitting back, smiling around the table. “But he was a man of vision, and that is kind of rare. He had no way of drilling for oil. He tried hiring salt drillers, but they turned out to be an unreliable body of men, they kept getting drunk or they just disappeared as soon as they had a few dollars in their pockets. So he set about constructing a steam engine to power the drill. But time was passing, the people back in New Haven who were financing him ran out of patience. They sent him a letter telling him to close down the operation. In the meantime he had found a driller, a man named Smith. He was a very big, strong guy. Everyone called him Uncle Billy Smith…”