He brought the same spirit of patience to his dealings with the Englishman. The idea that had possessed his mind almost to the exclusion of all else since that night in the bar when he had related the story of the two Armenian conscripts, he had not gone running to the khwaja with it at the first opportunity, brilliant as it was. No, he had watched and waited for the right moment.
It came now. He had known about the discovery of the tomb shaft; the work of excavating it was already under way when he arrived. He had known when they had uncovered the section of brick vaulting, but still he had waited. Now, today, they had come upon the beginnings of a stairway, leading down. There could only be one reason for steps under the ground: They led to a burial place. It was there that the treasure would lie; soon now the khwaja would be feasting his eyes on it.
Somerville was alone when he saw Jehar approach, Palmer having gone some distance off to take measurements, and he was lost still in the discoveries they had made that day. Stone steps, a vaulted chamber—it gave every sign of being the entrance to a royal tomb.
“Yes, what is it?” he said. He spoke sharply, reluctant to leave this elation of discovery for the ugly shapes of danger and doubt he knew from experience this messenger would bring. Jehar was a carrier of anguish and a vendor of it.
“Lord, I have come from the track of the railway. It is getting close, they have reached the village of Arattu. The people say that within one week they will reach Ras el-Ain.”
He paused a moment, then said, “They will come through this way, they will smash the tell.” He drove the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left to make a smacking sound of impact. “Much crushing and damage,” he said, “many ancient and valuable things all smashed up. Also, the people here, below us here, they will start soon, maybe in two or three days, to transport the rails and sleepers and links they have been storing in their sheds here, to the railhead at Arattu and to some other places. The purpose of this is to avoid delays in continuing the line. This I have been told by very trustworthy people, whose word cannot for one single moment be doubted.”
For some moments Somerville regarded the man before him without speaking. He did not believe this last statement, did not believe, in fact, that Jehar numbered any trustworthy people among his acquaintance. It had been the flourish of the habitual liar, the sort of bravura that would always give Jehar away and that he would never be able to resist. But that the Germans below would start moving materials to the railhead very soon, any day now, was entirely probable, certain, in fact. A sudden weariness descended on him, replacing the elation of earlier. Only a few short weeks had elapsed since he had appointed Jehar as his messenger on the scant qualifications of speaking some German and having worked on the railway in the mountains of Anatolia. But it seemed a lifetime now that he had been anguished by the news Jehar brought him and by the very sight of his face, with its light eyes and straight brows and fiercely serious expression—a fanatical face, but with an unsettling innocence in it too… “Well,” he said, “we’ll have to hope for the best. I’m tired of paying you to bring me bad news. I’ve had enough of it. In fact we can consider our agreement at an end from this hour forth.”
Jehar drew a breath. His moment had come. “No,” he said, “Jehar brings you good news this time, news of the best. He brings you no less than the solution to this problem of the railway. I, in my time of working on the line in Turkey, became very familiar with dynamite.”
“Did you indeed?” Jehar’s face wore a look he had never seen on it before, an expression of great happiness, almost of beatitude. It came to Somerville that he might be under the influence of hashish. “Dynamite, eh?”
“It is true, please believe me. I used it every single day. The Germans, they have dynamite in a shed below us here. I have watched, I have seen it. It is used to make gravel for the bed of the track. This shed is kept locked, but a lock can be broken. I also have experience of breaking locks.”
“Are you actually proposing to steal their dynamite? Apart from being a crime, what good would it do? I can only think that you are joking.”
“Lord, the joke will be against them. We will blow up their sheds before they can start transporting the rails. We will use their own dynamite to do it, that is a good joke, no? It will be much better than blowing up the track. The line cannot proceed without these materials. It will take them weeks to replace them, as many weeks as it took to bring them here. If you will promise Jehar one hundred gold pounds, he will do this for you, he will save your treasure. You have but to say the word, and it is done.”
13.
Somerville could never afterward recollect the exact words with which he had rejected this outrageous proposal; he knew only that they had been angry and emphatic. The proposal itself, on the other hand, remained in his mind with total clarity: all the circumstances of it; Jehar’s words and the eagerness with which he had uttered them; the look of joy his face had worn. All this remained vividly present to him in the time that followed, as he supervised the work of clearing the steps that were now seen to give access to a vaulted chamber.
It was during this period too that further visitors arrived, unexpected and unannounced, all on the same day, first a Swedish couple, man and wife, who smilingly introduced themselves as seekers after truth and were members of the Society for Biblical Research, which had links all over the world, they said. They were always grateful, as they also said, for the generous hospitality they had invariably found on their travels. They had come from Abu Kemal on the Euphrates, where there was a Swedish mission house. Then, some hours later, a Swiss journalist arrived. He had been commissioned to write an article about Mesopotamian archaeology and in particular about the men and women engaged in it, the successors to the great figures of the mid-nineteenth century, Botta, Layard, Rassam. He was hoping, he said, to interview Somerville and anyone else who cared to talk to him at Tell Erdek. He had a camera, and he was proposing to include photographs in his article—photographs of the people and the places.
It was thus a strange and ill-assorted company that sat down to dinner that evening, the newcomers in their different ways adding to the incongruities already existing, the Swedish couple effusive in manner and frequently exchanging smiles, the softly spoken, gentle-mannered Swiss waiting patiently for the time when Somerville, who grew more and more secretive as his discoveries promised to be important, would grant him an interview. A certain atmosphere of constraint hung over the table, with the major seeming more stiff and bristling even than usual, Elliott silent and preoccupied, Somerville prey to a temptation still unadmitted, Edith absorbed in thoughts of how appearances could deceive: Who could have ever suspected that Major Manning, such a perfect type of British army officer, as she had thought, could be in the pay of a foreign power and working against the interests of his own country, was little better than a spy, in fact. And the Russians, of all people, so backward and savage.