Ninanna had taken off her long calico apron and thrown back the scarf she wore over her hair while serving. The sun was low and shone directly onto her as she stood there, gleaming on her hair and brows and on the long-skirted cotton dress that was loose at the waist but still revealed the shapeliness and sturdiness of her body, the surge of her breasts and the curve of her hips. The light that shone on her came through manifold impurities of air—the acrid haze of the steam, the fumes of kerosene lamps in the cabins of the engines, the smoldering heaps of refuse here and there along the sidings—but in Jehar’s eyes it lay on her like a primal blessing, like the light of God on the first woman.
The story he told her was that of Kerem, the handsome son of the Shah of Ispahan, who fell in love with the daughter of an Armenian priest, a beautiful girl indeed and unfortunate in her father, as the story would show. No, he was not her father, he was her uncle… Jehar paused here, nodding significantly. “An evil man,” he said.
“What was the girl’s name?”
“Her name was Aslihan. The priest, being a fanatical Christian, did not want her to marry a Muslim, even though Kerem was a prince. But he was too afraid to refuse, so he gave his consent and named the wedding day. When the day came, there was a royal procession through the city, with banners of crimson silk and the music of golden trumpets. All the people of the town, dressed in their best, joined in this procession.”
He paused again here, to enlarge upon the splendor of the procession, the sumptuous clothes, the richly caparisoned horses, swaying his head and spreading his hands to indicate the pomp of it all. But Ninanna, though not a girl much troubled by thought as such, was becoming more and more sensitive to stories, and she already had a premonition of the doom hanging over this match, a doom made all the more grievous for these colorful preliminaries.
“Something bad happened,” she said.
“Kerem stopped the procession when they drew near the priest’s house and went on alone to claim his bride. But he found the house deserted, all the doors swinging open. The priest had taken Aslihan and fled with her, no one knew where.”
He made a break here for the sake of dramatic effect, and she waited in stillness, knowing this could not be the end of the story. “He went to look for her,” she said at last.
“Yes, you are right. It is what I would have done in his place, though not a prince, not by birth at least. I would go to the ends of the earth for you, I would dare anything. Now this Kerem was a poet, a singer. He began to sing to the belongings of his beloved, her sandals, her embroidery frame, the coverlet of her divan, and they sang back to him. He wandered far and wide with his lute in the simple dress of a minstrel, asking news of Aslihan from hills and clouds and flying birds, and they answered him in song. After many adventures he found her in a town in Anatolia, a town called Sivas. He sang to the chief people of that town, and they were enchanted by his singing. They forced the uncle to give his niece to Kerem in marriage. But he was in league with Shaitan and versed in black arts. He fashioned a gown for Aslihan to wear on her wedding night with buttons that went from the neck right down to the hem of her skirt. Once she had put this gown on these buttons could not be opened, not by any means, not by anyone at all. Kerem took his magic lute and sang to the buttons, and in this way he succeeded in persuading them to open, one after the other, down to the bottom. But before he could remove the gown the top buttons started closing up again.”
At this point Jehar looked at Ninanna in a lingering and expressive manner. “It was torture,” he said. “It went on like that all night.” All his own torment was in these words, all the times he had watched the girl moving about, the straight shoulders, the sway of the buttocks, the clear gaze of her eyes that would widen in wonder or laughter. How often he had cursed his own constancy, the fixity of his desire, just as Kerem must have done in his long search. Well, he had his idea now; the money would be his; he would not burn to death.
“The first light of dawn entered the bedchamber and he still had not succeeded in opening the gown. All night the fever of love had been burning in his veins and now it started turning to real flames. He gave one last sigh, fire burst from his mouth, his heart was burned to a cinder, and his whole body turned to ashes.”
At a distance of one mile or so from where he thought the seepage of oil began, Elliott came upon a roughly circular, slightly sunken area of mingled earth and gravel, where the ground had apparently fallen in over a hollowed space below, whether natural or man-made. It seemed to be a fairly recent subsidence; the filling was compacted but still loose enough to be broken and shifted without too much trouble by the men with him, who, to add to the semblance of archaeological research, carried picks and shovels and grappling hooks and had leather baskets strapped to their backs.
After some hours of work they had succeeded in clearing a pit down to a depth of seven feet. It was narrow—no more than a yard or so across—but easily wide enough for a man to climb down into it, which Elliott now proceeded to do. It afforded him what he had been seeking for, a cross section of the rock formation immediately below the surface, to a shallow depth only, of course, and lacking in dimension, but possibly offering some clues nevertheless.
He was standing at the edge of the subsidence with his face against a wall of fractured limestone. The men had cleared away the earth and gravel that had lain against this, leaving it intact, though the picks had struck against it here and there, chipping a little of the surface and leaving whitish scars. Rock of this sort would be permeable enough to form a storage reservoir for oil, but the knowledge of this was no help in itself. The presence of oil could not be deduced merely from the presence of suitable reservoir rock. That would be too easy, Elliott thought; life is not like that.
His four companions stood looking down at him as if he were their captive. He became aware of a certain dampness in his feet. Glancing down, he saw that he was standing in a thin stream of water only just deep enough to lap against the uppers of his boots; a trickle of water was flowing down into this from a fissure low in the rock face against which he was standing, coming from goodness knew where, probably from a source far distant; this region of limestone would be riddled with underground watercourses—it was probably water that had caused this ground to subside in the first place.
There was a smell here, difficult to identify, not an earth smell. The stream at his feet, though very shallow, had a definite current; it disappeared into the rock at his back. The water was slightly milky in appearance. On an impulse he crouched down and wet his hands with it. He sniffed it first, then licked his wet fingers; it was heavily charged with salt. Nothing so surprising in that; the whole of this desert steppe between the tributaries of the Euphrates was dotted with salt springs.
He began hoisting himself up, seeking a toehold in the rock the more easily to do so. Two of the men came forward to help him. As he clambered out he saw something he had not noticed before, perhaps because the light had changed, perhaps because he was looking from a point slightly lower than usual. Immediately before him there was a rise in the ground, a very slight swelling that continued into the distance. It was not so much the incline itself—it was barely perceptible—as the look of smoothness in this slow curve, a look of uniformity, despite the greatness of the extent—two miles at least, he thought. It had the unbroken, organic appearance of a curve in some vast and sparse-haired human cranium.