Page 17 of There Are Rivers in the Sky

—O— ARTHUR

By the River Thames, 1857

T he first time King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums passes the grand portico of the British Museum, he feels so small and out of place that it takes every muscle in his body to stop himself from turning around and running away. Up close the building is far more majestic and imposing than he could ever have imagined. With its enormous stairs, concrete floors, four vast wings and Ionic columns, it rises above the surrounding terraced rooftops like a secular temple. Upon arrival, each visitor is greeted by a sculpture in the pediment depicting the progress of humankind – a linear journey, it seems, from its primitive state to one of glowing civilization.

The boy strides in, slowly and purposefully, even as his heartbeat quickens. This morning, clad in his new clothes, he has emerged from his house like a moth breaking out of its chrysalis, but now, as he tries to hold up his chin, he is awkwardly self-conscious. He mulls over all the answers he has prepared in case someone inquires where he is going. He wonders if the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities is still working here, and, if so, whether he will remember the exchange they’d had years back and perhaps be kind enough to show him around. Yet he cannot muster the courage to ask after the scholar, hoping he will appear of his own accord from behind one of the lofty columns.

Fortunately, just then, Arthur spots a group of students, more or less the same age as him, though clearly from another part of society altogether. He falls in step with the group. They do not seem to mind his presence; immersed in a sullen silence, they are shepherded around by a teacher who rarely glances over his shoulder to check who is following. For a while Arthur walks on their heels as they troop through the most popular sections in the museum – Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt.

After a while, feeling emboldened, Arthur breaks away from the others and explores the building on his own. In the next room, he runs into a museum employee.

‘Sir, I am looking for the lamassus from Nineveh – are they still here?’

‘Where else would they be, lad?’ says the man. ‘Did you expect the winged creatures to have flown away?’

Arthur stutters. He does not belong in august institutions, and he worries that people can sense it. It occurs to him, in that moment, that poverty has its own scent, an odour that emanates from his pores, easily detected. It is an awful, debilitating thought. Drawing in a sharp breath, he turns around and hurries in the direction he assumes to be the exit. The man calls after him, perhaps in sympathy, but the boy does not wait.

The divisions that make up class are, in truth, the borders on a map. When you are born into wealth and privilege, you inherit a plan that outlines the paths ahead, indicating the short-cuts and byways available to reach your destination, informing you of the lush valleys where you may rest and the tricky terrain to avoid. If you enter the world without such a map, you are bereft of proper guidance. You lose your way more easily, trying to pass through what you thought were orchards and gardens, only to discover they are marshland and peat bogs.

Anxious to get out of the building, the boy quickens his pace. But the room he turns into does not lead to the exit, instead joining on to a long corridor. He scuttles down one passage after another, each sucking him deeper into the bowels of the museum, every hall opening on to another more baffling than the last. He is terrified that he may be trespassing into areas closed to visitors, but, having no better plan, he keeps going – until he finds himself in a chamber stacked high with wooden boxes and crates on all four sides.

There is an eerie quiet here, less an absence of noise than a stillness that absorbs everything and claims it for its own. Stored in vitrines and arranged on shelves are thousands of clay slabs. Broken, fractured. Some still bear traces of the earth from which they were extracted. Stepping closer, Arthur notices that they all have the same narrow, wedge-shaped impressions on their surface. Craning his head this way and that, he examines the mysterious signs, which are unlike anything his eyes have hitherto beheld.

‘Are you looking for something?’

Snapped out of his reverie, Arthur turns around. It is another museum official, watching him curiously, though not unkindly.

‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, I was just –’

‘You’re with the school, yes? Did you get lost?’

Arthur pauses. ‘Umm, I am afraid I have.’

‘Ah, I thought so. Your classmates are upstairs, with the Roman antiquities, boy – you are in the Nineveh section.’

‘I’ll go and join them,’ says Arthur, but he cannot help asking, ‘So all these bits of clay, they were brought over with the lamassus ?’

‘Well, we have thousands of tablets under this roof. They are not all from one single excavation, but, yes, they came from the same region as the lamassus , if that is your inquiry.’

Arthur nods thoughtfully. A spiderweb hangs suspended from one of the cases, and he watches it as it catches the light, dazzled by its geometry. He says, ‘The marks on them – is it some ancient scripture?’

The man shrugs. ‘Ancient bird tracks or chicken scratches, for all we know. Only a few can read them.’

‘But there are patterns …’ murmurs Arthur.

‘You think so? Probably, yet many tablets are smashed, as you can see. Impossible to decipher this kind of gallimaufry.’

Their talk is interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming from the other side of the hallway. The schoolboys are back from their tour, looking bored.

‘Are you not going to join your friends?’ the man asks.

‘Oh, yes, thank you, sir.’

With a final glance at the treasures of Nineveh, the boy hastens to leave the room. This he cannot explain to the man, not even to himself, but an odd excitement has taken hold of his heart. The signs on the tablets are not bird tracks or chicken scratches , random scribbles or decorative motifs. He is certain that what he has seen is a system of writing.

The next day Arthur is back at the British Museum, and the day after that. He has made a swift calculation in his head. His lunch break lasts fifty minutes, starting and ending at the same time every afternoon. From the printer’s office to the treasures of Nineveh there are 2,103 steps, including the stairs of the museum, all of which takes him eighteen minutes to traverse one way and another eighteen minutes to return. This leaves him with fourteen minutes to spare. It is not much, but it is not nothing. In this way, provided he can walk fast enough and manage to consume his lunch on the move, he can study the marks on the tablets for fourteen minutes every day and get back to work before anyone notices his absence.

So it begins. Rain, snow or hail, Arthur abides by his new routine. Now more familiar with his surroundings and much less nervous, he rushes through the halls of the museum, an unbidden excitement growing deep inside of him. He crosses galleries where ancient artefacts are displayed on marble plinths, in glass cases or plan cabinets, but, being on a strict schedule, he gives them only a cursory glance, a silent salute. And then, like a lover late to an appointment with his sweetheart, he hastens to meet the Mesopotamian tablets.

Owning only one set of smart clothes, he has no choice but to wear the same suit every day, though he makes sure it is buffed with a brush and freshly aired. He is convinced that he has to be spotlessly dressed, his boots polished to a soldier’s shine. His obsession with hygiene renders life difficult both for him and his mother. Once a week he asks her to help him to prepare a bath. Together they collect scraps of coal and wood dropped in the streets, light a brazier and heat water. Ordinarily, Arthur would have to wait for his father to have the first soak, his mother second, and only then would it be his turn, after which his brother might also use the same water. But his father rarely comes home any more, and his mother lets Arthur wash before anyone else. To save her trouble, the boy visits the local bath house, but the place is so squalid he regrets the decision.

For a person who sets great store by personal cleanliness, London is littered with traps. No matter how hard they work – the pure-finders collecting dog faeces to sell to tanners, the dustmen scraping up cinders and ashes to trade as fertilizers, the crossing-sweepers with their brooms – piles of mud and dung accumulate hither and thither, making it difficult to hasten from one place to the next on foot. Once, as Arthur is nearing Great Russell Street, he sees a carriage hurtling towards him, its wheels churning up muck, and, though he pulls back, he cannot avoid his clothes being splattered. Another day, distracted by a group of musicians playing barrel organs and hurdy-gurdies, he slips on a vegetable peel, falling sideways into a heap of refuse. On both occasions, he wastes precious time trying to clean himself with water trickling from a nearby pump, but he still turns up at the museum for the few minutes remaining to him.

The rules of etiquette, too, add to Arthur’s challenges. Just as a lady ought to slightly raise her dress with her right hand when traversing the street, making sure to show nothing above her ankle, a gentleman must make way for a woman, and adolescents for the elderly. Such codes of behaviour inevitably slow him down.

Meanwhile, the staff at the British Museum are puzzled by this startled bird of a boy who comes every day, panting with exertion, his hair tousled by the wind. They watch him give a timid nod to the clerk at the entrance before he scampers to the Assyrian Gallery, where he stops in front of the tablets, stock-still, as if he were a statue himself, his face so close to the vitrines that his breath mists the surface of the glass. After precisely fourteen minutes he sprints out in indecent haste. They wonder if the lad is soft in the head, poor thing, and, if so, how they can gently deter him from his peculiar and increasingly irritating routine. A few of them debate whether they should inform the police and put an end to this unseemly spectacle. Eventually, they decide to notify their superiors. The matter is referred to the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities.

Thursday afternoon, at the usual hour, when the boy dashes into the Assyrian Gallery, he finds Dr Samuel Birch waiting for him, his eyes burning dark against the silver-white of his hair.

‘Good afternoon, young man.’

Arthur’s face brightens, though he registers the scholar has not recognized him. He returns the greeting with a tentative nod, torn between reminding him of the conversation they had had years back and, more practically, taking this exchange no further. He has barely thirteen minutes left and, as much as he would love to talk to the renowned antiquarian, a chat is a distraction he can ill afford.

‘My staff have been telling me about you. They say you seem quite taken with the cuneiform – the markings on the clay tablets from Mesopotamia.’

‘They are mesmerizing, sir.’

The man squints at Arthur as if trying to gauge the sincerity of these words, the skin around his eyes crinkling. ‘I am intrigued by the intensity of your interest. Quite extraordinary, indeed, especially for a young person – although I fear you are arousing nervousness amongst my colleagues. Perhaps you would be so kind as to acquaint me with your intentions.’

‘Why would that be?’ Arthur asks, without tearing his eyes from the tablets.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Why do I make them nervous?’

‘Oh, well … umm, because, as a general rule, people are afraid of those who are, or appear to be, different , and you, my boy, fall neatly under that description.’

Slowly, Arthur drags his gaze away from the vitrines and casts a searching glance at the older man. ‘It was you who invited me to come over to see the stone beasts from Nineveh.’

‘It was I?’

‘Yes, sir, four years and fourteen weeks ago, plus one day – on the afternoon a pair of lamassus were borne in and towed up the stairs of the museum – that’s when we spoke. The 26th of November – it was a Friday.’

The man is silent for what feels like an age. ‘It had slipped my mind, but now I recollect that curious little boy.’ He regards the youngster, taking in the fuzzy beginnings of a moustache on his upper lip and downy sideboards. ‘You have grown much taller.’

Arthur shifts his weight from one foot to the other. ‘I am sorry, I do not mean to be impolite, but I have only nine minutes left.’

Without waiting for the man’s response, he switches his attention back to the tablets. They all exhibit the same wedge-shaped impressions – some horizontal, some vertical, others diagonal. Arthur is certain by now that this is a way of writing very distinct from an alphabet. It does not generally have letters representing single sounds or phonemes. Instead it has characters made up of several marks that divide the text into syllables, but, there being no visible gaps between the words, it is hard to establish where one finishes and another begins. Some signs, however, seem to stand for whole words, and that helps him to find their meaning. Leaning over the vitrine, he pores over the artefacts, all his senses quiveringly alert.

The Keeper of Oriental Antiquities watches Arthur, amazed to see that the boy’s concentration is so profound that he has quite forgotten him. The boy’s lips begin moving, and so does his finger, tracing the lines on the tablets through the barrier of glass. To the scholar’s surprise, he is not just staring at the tablets but reading them. This gangling youth in ill-fitting clothes too light for the weather is deciphering what only a handful of privileged scholars have been able to decode before. Time stills. It feels as if nothing moves or breathes – or perhaps they all do in perfect harmony, the humans and the artefacts in the room, everything falling into a rare synchrony.

Arthur, back from his trance, straightens up his shoulders and sighs. His duty done for the day, he makes for the door.

‘You are leaving?’

‘Oh, I am terribly sorry,’ says Arthur, startled to find the man still there when he turns around. ‘I must return to my employer.’

‘Wait, please. You were … were you really …’ The man pauses, tries again. ‘Can you read the tablets, boy?’

‘Only a few words here and there, sir,’ replies Arthur truthfully.

‘Will you be kind enough to show me how you do that?’

The boy checks the clock. He will have to sprint to get back to the office on time, but he does not want to be rude. Besides, a part of him wishes to share his discovery, so he nods his agreement.

He begins by listing the experts he has studied in his free time. There is Edward Hincks, the Irish parson, and Jules Oppert, the French–German–Jewish scholar, and G. F. Grotefend, the grammar schoolteacher, but primarily he has benefited from the works of Sir Henry Rawlinson. He explains that by piecing together clues from their findings he has been able to draw his own conclusion: that the cuneiform is not an alphabet exactly but a collection of syllables.

Arthur takes a breath before continuing. ‘I have come to realize that each group of strokes on the clay is a symbol and each symbol represents a particular sound, or, to be precise, a syllabic sound. And that may be purely phonetic, or it may stand for a thing. I have learnt, for example, how “King Ashurbanipal” is written – hence my interest in this tablet over here, which I believe was a letter.’

Together they lean over the glass case, peering inside.

‘A letter composed by the king himself?’

‘No, sir. Rather by someone close to him. Look at this cluster of signs over there. My guess is it is pronounced as ub , which, together with the next, lugal , could be read as “royal adviser”. I have therefore reason to conclude that this letter was composed by the chief counsellor in the palace in Nineveh.’

His thick eyebrows raised in astonishment, the elderly scholar fumbles for words. ‘And, umm, to whom might it have been sent?’

‘Well, that is the part that confuses me. It seems to have been addressed to Ashurbanipal’s brother, but I was not able to make further progress. Were the two brothers at cross purposes? Enemies, perhaps? Was the chief counsellor upset at Ashurbanipal? I would need to spend more time with the tablet to be sure.’

Interpreting the ensuing silence as an indication of the man’s disbelief, the boy lowers his gaze. His mood shifts from pride to incipient panic. A sheen of sweat dampening his forehead, he walks towards the exit.

‘I must get back to the office. Good day, sir.’

‘No, wait – please.’ The Keeper of Oriental Antiquities sheds his formality, hastening after him. ‘It is remarkable, what you have just done.’

Arthur inhales sharply.

‘We have been looking for someone to help us put the tablets in order. As you must have noticed, they are haphazardly organized, if at all. Some are still encrusted in earth. They need to be sorted and arranged – not that we have come up with a system yet. I was wondering, given your interest and your unusual talent, would you like to help us? We could offer you some emolument for your troubles.’

Slowly, the frown that has descended on Arthur’s brow softens. He glances up at the scholar, his mouth slightly agape, trying to decide whether he is serious or teasing him, and, when he is convinced of the man’s sincerity, a smile spreads over his face.

‘Yes, sir, I’d like that very much.’

In his excitement, Arthur has accepted the offer without thinking it over properly. Only after he leaves the British Museum does he grasp the full implications of what he has agreed to. How will he manage to work two jobs at the same time? There is no question in his mind that he cannot afford to lose his apprenticeship at Bradbury & Evans, which, besides paying him a regular wage, is a good place to expand his knowledge. But, equally, he cannot decline the British Museum’s offer and the chance to hold in his hands the tablets from Nineveh. The only solution he can think of is to give up his coffee breaks – one in the morning and one late in the afternoon – and request that the extra time be added to his lunch break. He will then have to forgo eating altogether and, at the appointed hour, sprint the distance from the office to the museum. This is the only way he can perform both his duties: he will run as fast as his legs can carry him. To test if it is doable, he times himself. It takes him eight minutes and twenty seconds to arrive at the museum gates and eight minutes and twenty-four seconds to race back – provided he manages to avoid any accidents or incidents on the way.

That spring, the pedestrians and pedlars in Covent Garden are surprised to see a youngster hurrying past them, darting across busy roadways and through dingy alleyways, bounding over piles of garbage, weaving past hawkers plying their trade on the pavements, gentlemen sauntering along dressed in top hats and breeches, and ladies in swelling crinoline skirts, tight bodices and dainty bonnets – apologizing profusely to whomever he has unwittingly bumped into as he hurtles along.