Land of Marvels Read Free

Chagar, Khorsabad, Nineveh, Babylon. Haste, in this spring of 1914, to get out of the earth as much as possible, before it was barred to them. Fear in this haste too, he thought: fear of the cataclysm, the abyss . . .
    “They have no slightest reason for thinking one spot better than another,” Palmer said. “Not as things are at present. It’s a toss-up. But they go on making a fuss about it. It’s a form of superstition, I suppose.”
    He had spoken with the cheerful skepticism that belonged to him, and he paused now, smiling at Somerville. “Or perhaps a form of gambling,” he said, noting the lines of strain and fatigue in the other’s face.
    “Quite a few of them are eager to be sent over to the trench on the eastern side, which is scarcely begun yet, where that piece of ivory was found yesterday,” Somerville said. “But the thing was out of context. I don’t think there’ll be anything more. All the same, we will have to keep our eyes open for any fragments of the part missing.”
    “It’s hard to know what it was doing there.”
    They discussed it as they walked back to the house together. It had been one of the few interesting finds of the season so far, slightly more than half of a circular ivory plaque, broken across diagonally, showing the head and right foreleg of a lion, carved in relief against the background of what looked like papyrus flowers, the head lowered in a fashion almost dainty, fastidious, the teeth gripping into the throat of a man not supine but resting back on his arms, straddled by the beast, head raised, near death, the upturned face African in looks, the hair bunched in tight curls. It had been found in the vertical pit that went down from the summit, a little way along a trench on the eastern side.
    “It can’t date from the level where it was found,” Palmer said. “It’s a thousand years too early. There was no ivory in circulation then, none that we know of.”
    It was something of a mystery to both of them how carved ivory of sophisticated workmanship could have found its way to such a deep level; it had been lying amid mud-brick rubble and fragments of painted pottery dating back to the third millennium before Christ.
    “It seems that there were elephants in Syria then,” Somerville said. “There might have been some local carving in ivory, though none has come to light. But I don’t think it is Syrian work in any case. It’s too refined, too ceremonious somehow.”
    He enjoyed speculations of this kind, and his spirits had lifted by the time they were drawing near the house. “There will be a reason,” he said. “There is always a reason, if you can find it. Someone made it who was once alive in the world. And someone else brought it here.”
    “The level needn’t be such a problem,” Palmer said as Hassan ran to open the gate for them. “It’s probably the doing of our little friend, the jumping mouse.”
    This was an accustomed joke between them, the jumping mouse, or jerboa, being a creature that had reached legendary status, having bedeviled generations of archaeologists in the lands between the two tributaries of the Euphrates, the Belikh and Khabur rivers, by its habit of building its nest in very deep burrows—sometimes deep enough to reach the living rock—and in the process throwing up shards and flints from the deepest layers onto the surface. Palmer was convinced—or affected to be—that this little animal seized upon various more recent objects, anything that took its fancy, and bore them down into the depths of the earth, even things bigger and heavier than itself. In this two-way traffic the layers were jumbled up and the dawn of history confused with the day before yesterday.
     
    The houseboys had laid the table on the shaded side of the courtyard, and the other members of the expedition had already started breakfast. Edith Somerville, sitting at the head of the table, saw Hassan, who had been squatting against the wall, scramble up to