Palmer raised his hands, made a gap between them, widened it slightly. “When it comes to empires,” he said, “a few centuries one way or another makes precious little difference. Anyone who excavates in this part of the world is likely to dig down through half a dozen, going back five thousand years at least.”
“And they all thought they’d last forever,” Patricia said, with an air of stoutly making her point.
“Only the most optimistic of my fellow countrymen would nurse such a belief at present.” Fahir smiled as he spoke but there was no intention of humor in his words. “We have too many friends, and they all want a piece of us,” he said. “Britain, France, Russia. The sick man of Europe, you call us. A term of contempt. But it also brings contempt on those who use it. What do you do with a man who is sick? Do you help him to get well or do you merely prop him up for long enough to go through his pockets, meanwhile uttering hypocritical expressions of goodwill? Only Germany is a true friend to us, and she has shown this in various ways, one of them the building of this railway.”
“Another is the training of your army,” the major said.
“So it is.” Fahir had been a cavalry officer, and he made no secret of the fact that he had completed his training in Germany, where he had also acquired the scar. “Now there is no need for our junior officers to go to Berlin,” he said. “The German instructors are here among us.”
The major tightened his mouth in a way more protracted than usual. “Britain is a friend to Turkey,” he said. “We are doing everything in our power to safeguard Turkey’s territorial integrity. You only have to look at the settlement signed by our governments last October, scarcely five months ago, when agreement was reached on a whole range of matters, the Baghdad Railway among them.”
“This whole range of matters were mainly concessions Turkey was obliged to make. As for the railway, you got what you wanted, the right to control the construction from Baghdad to Basra and the right of veto for any extension of the line to the Persian Gulf.”
“A triumph of diplomacy,” the major said.
“Some might find other terms for it. Diplomacy works best for those who have the strong cards. You British speak often of the sacrifices you are making for the sake of Turkey. What sacrifice have you made in order to obtain these rights in the railway? You have declared yourselves willing to increase by four percent the duties on goods entering the Ottoman possessions. Such staggering generosity. What other imperial power is obliged to permit foreign nations to determine her customs dues? Major Manning, we Turks do not deceive ourselves. We know we need foreign capital and foreign technical assistance. We know that we have to pay a price for these, that we risk losing control of our possessions in the Near East. We see that the British have designs on Mesopotamia as far as Basra, the French have their eyes on Syria, the Russians are seeking to absorb Armenia. He would be a great fool who did not know these things.”
A sudden anger had come into his voice with these last words, and Palmer, perhaps feeling himself to blame for having started this dispute, now made an attempt to shift the focus of the conversation. “Of course,” he said, “for an archaeologist only dead empires are interesting, and the longer dead the better.”
It was not the most tactful of interventions, and it came too late in any case. Somerville was beginning to say something when Manning cut across him. He was looking at Fahir with unconcealed hostility. “That is a gross misrepresentation of my government’s policies,” he said.
Fahir’s hostility was no less evident, but it came with a slight smile and a pretense of ironic detachment. “Your government’s policies are the same as those of any other government, to protect your interests and extend them where possible by any means available.”
Edith Somerville now—and rather belatedly—remembered the words of her mother. If there is disagreement at a dinner table and if this is tending to be expressed other than politely and urbanely, it is always the fault of the hostess. But she had been stimulated and in a way roused by this quarreling, which had something noble in it to her mind, being due not merely to personal antipathy but to patriotic feeling. There was passion in both men and it warmed her like a fire. In another age they might have fought a duel. She preferred the major’s repressed rage to Fahir’s irony, but that was a question of taste. And she was on the side of Britain anyway, and proud of the British Empire, which everyone knew was the greatest the world had ever seen. All the same, the two could not be allowed to go on looking at each other like this. She cast around in her mind for a way of smoothing things over.
“But this railway,” she said, “surely it only benefits those who have put their money in it and then hope to make a profit from the price of the tickets.”
It worked, as it generally did. Both Fahir and the major were immediately eager to enlighten her, as were the other men at the table, so much so that several spoke together. Fahir’s was the voice that prevailed, perhaps through a tacit recognition that he was the one most entitled to speak of the benefits to Turkey of a line that was designed to pass exclusively over Turkish imperial possessions.
He spoke eloquently of these benefits. With improved communications the huge resources of minerals and metals in eastern Anatolia could be fully exploited, the copper mines of Diabekir, the meerschaum quarries near Eskishehir—practically a world monopoly—the coalfields already producing half a million tons a year. Then there was the increased prosperity that would come from exploiting the agricultural resources of Mesopotamia, the foreign investment that would follow upon the large-scale irrigation projects. In remote antiquity the Land of the Two Rivers had been an important center of cotton production, and there was no reason why this industry should not be revived. The climate was ideal. Mesopotamia could be one of the world’s great cotton-growing regions. Grain too. Once the effects of irrigation and the railway were realized, Anatolia, northern Syria, and Mesopotamia, taken together, would export more grain than Russia…
“All this will come from the railway,” Fahir said. “It will be of the greatest benefit to everyone. The foreign powers will obtain concessions to prospect and develop, the Turkish state will have direct trade routes from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople and so to the Black Sea. The local populations will see their standard of living tripled within three years of the completion of the line.”
Fahir’s eyes glowed as he looked around the table. “A truly international enterprise,” he said. “Foreign investment, local industry, a process of mutual enrichment practically unlimited. The railway will usher in a golden age of prosperity to these lands.”
There was nothing forced or consciously exaggerated in these words, or so at least it seemed to Somerville, who had not seen this fervor in Fahir before and would not have believed it could exist in him. All his habitual irony had dissolved in this vision of paradise, this process of mutual enrichment, continuous, without end; it was as if his own words had transformed him even as he spoke them. A sense of marvelous possibility or a genuine belief that these things, in a Europe so divided, would come to pass? It was impossible to know; Fahir himself would not know. Perhaps no more than a dream of water to a man with a thirst. He was a servant of the Ottoman state, devoted in his way. Now, after the centuries of domination, the empire of the Osmanli Turks was slipping away. When our grip on power is loosening, we will fall back on what is second best, visions of cooperation and mutual benefit…
Somerville felt himself convicted of meanness and smallness. He could not share this hope in the future. The wealth was there and the lure of it was real enough. But those who financed and controlled the line were unlikely to have the well-being of local populations or the integrity of the Ottoman Empire high among their priorities. In any case, whatever the intricate pattern of desires and hopes that accompanied the railway, whatever wealth it might bring, his own view of it was starkly simple: It was threatening to put an end to his excavation and with that deal a mortal blow to his whole career.