Page 31 of There Are Rivers in the Sky
—O— ARTHUR
By the River Tigris, 1872
T he distance from Constantinople to Mosul is almost 900 miles – four times the length of the River Thames. The journey is taxing, and Arthur is not the most well-equipped traveller. The longer he spends in Mesopotamia, the deeper his surprise at its complexities. Its many religions, creeds and sects bewilder him. People from the same area, even from the same town, can be stunningly different.
But there are also things that feel oddly familiar from his readings on ancient civilizations. He recognizes certain continuities: the irrigation canals, the unchanging landscape, the bullrushes on the riverbanks … Especially in the south, both houses and boats are made of reeds, and sometimes the same materials are used and reused – houses into boats, boats into houses. If he closes his eyes, he can easily imagine himself in the days of King Ashurbanipal. In some ways it is as though hardly any time has passed, and thousands of years were a mere puff of wind. The past, no matter how remote or unknown, is not bygone. It is alive. The past is a clay tablet, worn and chipped, but hardened by the heat of centuries.
He traverses forests and floodplains. After a while, nowhere feels foreign to someone who has woken, day after day, in unfamiliar rooms and unknown places. Closer to the River Tigris, he spends the night at a hostelry called Jacob’s Inn, where he is served a meal of charred potatoes and a fowl so overcooked it crunches when he tries to bite into it. A Levantine merchant he has befriended on the way cranes his head and winks across the table.
‘Congratulations, my friend, you have found your first antiquity – this poor bird must have been left behind by the Ancient Mesopotamians. Take it to a museum.’
The Orient. The term confuses him – where exactly does it start, where does it end? Arthur has read about Napoleon – the first, that is, the Little Corporal, the Nightmare of Europe, the Man of Destiny, the Corsican General – whose final wish was to be buried on the banks of the River Seine, though the British had him interred instead on the volcanic island of Saint Helena, until the body was exhumed and carried to France. What intrigues Arthur is how extensively Napoleon researched the Middle East. Modelling himself on Alexander the Great – the warrior who marched into battles with artists and philosophers by his side – Napoleon gathered painters, sculptors, linguists, writers, engravers, art historians, geographers, zoologists, geologists, engineers, botanists, cartographers, mathematicians, musicians … when he launched his expedition to Egypt. A hundred and fifty men of letters joined his military campaign. The forces of the Enlightenment versus the benighted Orient. The superiority of the West had to be established not only via warfare but also via science, art and literature. The French army consisted of thousands of soldiers, heavy artillery and horses, coupled with the latest technological equipment and navigational instruments. They brought along a printing press with Arabic type to communicate with the locals. Napoleon’s massive flagship contained a spectacular library that specialized in volumes from the Ancient and Modern Middle East, and was given, aptly, the same name as the vessel it was borne on – L ’ Orient .
‘ We must go East. All the great men of the world have there acquired their celebrity. ’
Just as a flame requires darkness to exist and expand, the idea of European supremacy needed its Orient imbued with deprivation and despair. Napoleon saw it as his mission to liberate the people of the region from their destiny and restore them to the grandeur of their ancestors. In this way everyone would benefit – the invader and the invaded. Emboldened by this conviction, he gave orders to amass antiquities. Taking them back to the Louvre, however, would not be easy. For they were not alone in their ambition. The British were also in the throes of Egyptomania.
On the first day of August 1798, L ’ Orient , weighing almost 3,000 tons and carrying 120 cannons, along with scores of soldiers, sailors and scholars, arrived at the mouth of the Nile. There were also a few women on board – wives, maids, laundresses and stowaways. At Aboukir Bay, the British and the French navies met in battle. As far as the eye could see, the water was covered with vessels of all sizes, their masts tall and proud. The river swirled, not used to this much blood. Those who witnessed the explosion of L ’ Orient say the sky and the sea fused into one brushstroke of orange from the ensuing blaze. The debris – wood, metal, canvas, ballast stones and human flesh – was hurled in all directions. And the ink from thousands of books and manuscripts dissolved in the Nile. It is still down there, the wreckage of the flagship. Bronze mortars, scientific instruments, gold coins and, somewhere in the silt and ooze, covered in moss and rearranged into new words by the undercurrents, consonants from a printing press with Arabic lettering.
Arthur knows the Tigris is a different river altogether, and it holds its secrets close. The Nile floods often but predictably, and thus its damage is less severe. The Tigris, however, in refusing to follow any patterns, mercurial all the way, takes everyone by surprise each time it rises, bringing disaster. If the clue to Ancient Egypt’s secrets is in its great monuments, Ancient Mesopotamia’s are woven into its silences – the gaps in stories. This, here, is the land of fragmented tablets and fractured poems.
The Tigris is an old river and like everything that has lived for that long, it is liquid memory. ‘Fast-moving’ in Old Persian, ‘arrow-like’ in its inexhaustible agility. The Ancients called it ‘the tiger’. Idigna in Sumerian, Hiddekel in Hebrew, Dijlah in Arabic, Ava Mezin in Kurdish – ‘the Great Water’. One of the four streams believed to have flowed out of the Garden of Eden, it gleams with unearthly light, frightening and beautiful and mysterious, nurturing life above and below the ground. Rising in the highlands of Anatolia, fed by fertile tributaries, falling rain and melting snow, it surges as if impatient to be somewhere else, and, at times, it swells with disastrous consequences. Bold and boisterous, if angered the tiger turns into a mortal enemy.
It scares Arthur, travelling by river. The vessel sways, its timbers creaking under the pressure, and it unsettles him, the velocity of the flow, foaming with wrath. Along the way he spots destitute villages. Poverty has a topography all of its own. It rises from the ribs of the earth, stretching its naked limbs against the sky, its features dry and gaunt, sore to the touch. Poverty is a nation with no borders, and he is no foreigner in it but a native son.
Downstream, on each side, he sees caves burrowed high up in the rocks. His guide tells him that for centuries persecuted communities have sought shelter in these hollows. Clouds of gnats swarm the boat, and the current carries them forward. Arthur has never experienced so much fear, thrill and anticipation, all at once. The mosquito bites on his legs itch and bleed. He can feel the skin on his face tightening in the wind and the sun, his features reshaped. He listens as the waves strike and retreat from the bow, admiring the resilience of the rough-hewn vessel as it withstands the might of the water.
If he closes his eyes he can imagine an utterly different view from thousands of years back and see his surroundings as if looking through cut glass: gardens lush as paradise, palms and grape vines, edible and ornamental plants; pine, olive, juniper, cypress, pomegranate and fig trees all around. Parrots gliding about amongst the branches, while tame lions roam below. Fruit of all kinds, luxurious orchards and, spreading far out into the distance, grain fields on four sides. All of it possible because thousands of slaves, their bodies tattooed with the identification marks of their owners, laboured with pickaxes carving channels to bring water into this barren landscape, diverting the river from the mountains all the way into Nineveh. They were here, the kings and the canal builders. It all happened here – the ambitious dream of King Sennacherib, continued and expanded by his grandson King Ashurbanipal.
Two days after he arrives in Mosul, Arthur is invited to a banquet by the pasha. The man has a full-jawed, fleshy face, and, sunk deep in their sockets, one of his eyes is brown and the other pale grey. He is visibly upset that the Englishman did not pay him a visit immediately upon arrival; and, by offering to host him nonetheless, he is indirectly chiding him for his lack of manners. But Arthur does not understand the coded message.
After dinner, the men smoke narghiles while Arthur shifts about on his cushion, yet to master the art of sitting cross-legged for long stretches of time. That is when a male dancer appears, a frilled skirt with brass bells wound around his waist. As Arthur watches the young man sway and twirl, he feels sad. He remembers a jewellery-box ballerina he saw on Regent Street, one of those figurines you encounter when you open the lid, instantly sprinting into a cheerful caper. He has always suspected that as soon as the lid is closed, the same figurine would sink back into the box, head down, shoulders hunched.
The pasha, observing him closely, says, ‘You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself, Mr Smyth.’
The clapping stops, a tense silence descending on the room.
The Levantine merchant coughs. ‘My master, forgive him. He survived a fire in Constantinople. He is still quite shaken.’
The pasha nods, though his eyes remain cold. But Arthur does not glance at the man, powerful and assertive as he is. He looks only at the young dancer, who returns his gaze, and Arthur knows then without a doubt that he is not the only one wishing to be elsewhere.
After they leave the house, the merchant catches up with Arthur.
‘The pasha is a dangerous man and you offended him – that’s not good. He was already mistrustful of you.’
‘Why so?’
‘He thinks you are here to dig for gold. He suspects that is your real aim and archaeology is a pretext.’
‘I am searching for the missing lines of a poem. Why is that so hard to understand?’
The merchant inhales sharply. ‘My friend, maybe you are the one who doesn’t understand. If you go to other people’s lands to take their things, you cannot get upset at them for questioning your motives.’
The words, so unexpected, hit Arthur hard. Has he descended on other people’s lands to carry off what is rightfully theirs? He firmly believes he is here to help excavate and preserve antiquities that will surely be better off in the hands of Europeans rather than the natives. He has seen nothing on his travels that can rival the grandeur of the British Museum, its cavernous and cool display rooms, its foreign treasures under the watchful eye of honest guards and subject to the expert scrutiny of diligent curators. This is not an issue of ownership, as far as he is concerned, but of who is in a better position to appreciate and protect historical heritage. Otherwise, he has never thought of the tablets of Nineveh as belonging to anyone other than the ghosts of the past.
Whatever doubt seizes him does not last long. His excitement is so great that he has no room in his heart for anything else. Finally, he is in the land of the Flood Tablet. This is the home of Gilgamesh. And this is the moment for which he has been waiting since he first saw the giant human-headed, bird-winged bulls being carried through the doors of the British Museum.
From Mosul to the ruins of Nineveh they ride in the dark on horseback. It is a short trip, but it is getting cold, and the wind is relentless. Arthur consults the map. It seems there is a village nearby. It is called Zêrav.
‘We could break the journey there,’ Arthur suggests.
The guide says, ‘There’s another village further down south.’
‘What is wrong with the first one? It is much closer.’
‘That place is no good. We should not go there.’
Arthur’s expression hardens. ‘Unless you provide an explanation, I must insist that we do. I am too exhausted for a longer journey.’
‘As you wish,’ says the guide, turning his face away. ‘But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Zêrav is home to devil-worshippers.’