On this note they parted, Palmer to resume the study of some cuneiform inscriptions that had been found on fragmented clay tablets at a depth of twenty feet, Somerville to return to the tell and see how the work was going. Before setting off, however, he looked in on his wife, who, together with Patricia, was busy in the smaller, adjoining workroom. They were occupied with assembling and trying to fit together some sizable fragments of pottery that had been found lying close together not far below the surface. It was Islamic ware, dating to the period of domination by the Seljuk Turks and beautiful in its coloring, with an opaque bluish and green glaze that had stayed fresh through the eight hundred years or so of its life. For Somerville it was too recent to be of great interest, medieval, in fact. Such pieces were common throughout the area; you sometimes kicked against them as you walked, the pots having been made in considerable quantities not far away, at ar-Raqqah, a prosperous trading center until it was destroyed in the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.
For Edith, he knew, the age of the pieces had no slightest importance. The main thing was the promise of beauty, the achievement of a finished form that would crown the work, restore the original vessel complete in every part. The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. She continued her efforts in spite of all disappointments. In broken pots as such, those at the deepest and most ancient levels, fragmented and dispersed beyond all possibility of restoration, she took no smallest interest; they were meaningless to her. Life had to glow with promise; there had to be a fire of purpose. She had been disappointed in this too, without losing belief in it. And Somerville, as he stood watching her, knew himself to be part of that disappointment.
She had looked up and smiled at his entrance but returned almost at once to the work. Her fingers were deft as she handled the pieces. Some hair had escaped from her headband and hung in tendrils over her brow. Patricia’s movements were slower; her lips were parted a little in the effort of concentration, and she held her head low as if it were burdensome. Not long, he thought, since she had sat thus on a bench in a lecture room. They did not get on very well, these two; he had no sense that he was interrupting anything like a conversation between them. But he had been too preoccupied with his own troubles to give much thought to what might divide them. It came to him now that Edith might simply be resentful of the girl’s presence there, that she would have wished to be the only woman in the company. The thought was strangely displeasing to him. Suddenly he felt like an intruder in the silence here, and he turned away and left without speaking.
2.
The mound presented a very different picture now from that desolate one of earlier. The men were working in their groups; voices resounded; there was the regular sharp impact of metal on stone and the softer sound, all-pervasive, as if the whole mound were afflicted by a scraping thickness of breathing, of the earth and rubble being shoveled into the baskets to be borne away. Two files of people were in constant movement, one mounting with baskets already emptied, the other descending, stooped to take the weight of the loaded baskets on their shoulders.
Only now, as he felt within him the resumption of a steadier breathing and a greater sense of the open sky, did Somerville become properly aware of the tension he had felt, disguised from others, not fully acknowledged to himself, since early morning and the receiving of Jehar’s report. He began to mount the slope on the southern side, that facing toward the expedition house, making his way among low crags of granite and the rubble of ancient habitations.
The summit on this side was his preferred viewing place. He stood still here and looked toward the horizon across the long sweep of the steppelands, dressed now in their spring green. It was the third time, standing here in the same place, that he had witnessed this brief tide of green. At the beginning it had accompanied his hopes, augured well for the momentous discoveries he had hoped to make here. Now it seemed a cheat to him, as did everything he looked at, the huddled mud-brick houses of the village, the dark tents of nomad herdsmen in the far distance, the scattered heaps where communities of people had once lived. He could see the glint of the streams that marked the upper reaches of the Khabur River and, at the farthest limits of vision, brief enough to seem illusionary, the occasional gleam elicited by the sun from the swamps of pitch. Sets like rock, Palmer had said. Only strong heat could have put those tears in the lion’s eyes. Might the pitch for the eyes have come from somewhere here?
Beyond this, far beyond, still to westward, lay the imagined banks of the Great River, as Jehar had called it. Suddenly, disagreeably, he remembered the way the man had watched him, that predatory intentness. How far away was the left bank of the Euphrates, where the piles of the bridge now rested? A hundred miles, perhaps a little more. When they started work again, how long would they take to reach him? Fifteen days, twenty? In certain lights, on the verge of the horizon, he could persuade himself that he saw, luminous and fleeting, the steel of the girders, the green of the palms that lined the banks. It appealed to his imagination as strongly now as ever to think of the powers that had marched and countermarched across this land of the Two Rivers: Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, all bent on conquest, all convinced they would last forever, building their cities and proclaiming their power, empires following one upon another, their only memorial now the scraps that lay belowground, which he and his like competed in digging for.
Now, to replace these invading hosts, there was the railway. With this thought, perhaps the cause of it, he became aware of shouting voices, a sudden clangor, as if sheets of metal were being thrown down. The sounds were familiar; they came from below, from beyond the eastern slope of the mound, ground invisible to him here, where he had never set foot, where the railway people had built their storage sheds and stacked the timbers for the line. Like a garden, Jehar had said. A railway line is built in patches, like a garden. He was clever with comparisons as liars often were. Not a liar exactly, he didn’t know the difference; truth, falsehood, it was all the same ground to him, he could step where he liked.
A series of muffled hammer strokes reached him, and the run of wheels on the light track the Germans had built for transporting the rails. Once again the question came to him, sickening in its quality of irresolution: Was he not a much worse liar, a real liar, one who told lies to himself? Deep within him did he not really want this railway track to come crashing through his mound, or close enough at least to put paid to any hope of further excavation? Convenient, a salve to his pride, if he could lay the blame for his failure on the incursion of the line. If the failure were seen to be his, it would reduce his chances—already not great—of finding a sponsor, raising money for other digs. His own money was running out; there would not be enough for another season…
The mound had seemed so promising. Higher than most, more than a hundred feet from ground level to summit, surmounted by a long ridge running east to west, the western end bumped up higher by a dozen feet, as if to indicate some more important edifice lying beneath, citadel or palace or the tower of a temple, stone perhaps, leaving a debris more substantial than the sun-dried mud brick generally used in this land of abundant alluvial deposit. Close to the base, exposed by the thousands of years of wind and water, they had come upon fragments of painted pottery of the late Ubaid period, which Somerville had thought might have been imported here, perhaps from as far away as Uruk, a great city in its day, whose ruins lay on the Tigris between Baghdad and Basra. This, if it were so, would argue a considerable degree of commercial importance as early as the sixth millennium before Christ.