Page 35 of There Are Rivers in the Sky

—O— ARTHUR

By the River Tigris, 1872

O n a mound in Nineveh, shielding his eyes from the sun, Arthur takes a sip from a canteen fastened to a strap round his chest. The water is warm and tastes slightly bitter, but he does not mind. The earth, parched and pale, is pitted with trenches and holes dug by previous teams of archaeologists. Tons of rubble have been piled to one side, creating a second, artificial hill. From time to time, local people have demolished some of the ancient walls, using the pit as a quarry to obtain stone for their houses. As a result everything is in disarray. It is sheer madness to search in this jumble for a fragment of a poem.

There are thirty men under his supervision, some excavating, others clearing the debris. They start early in the morning, just as the sun is ascending. This is the time of the day that Arthur loves best. The rhythm of their shovels and pickaxes pierces the air, a steady sound that reminds him of the rattle of a speeding train. Save for a brief coffee break, they keep at it, sweat trickling down their tanned necks and sinewed arms. During lunch, Arthur retreats to a makeshift tent – which does little to protect him from the mosquitoes or the relentless heat – and studies the tablets. When the sun descends, work resumes. It is an exhausting rhythm, and he is worried that the money with which he has been provided to pay the labourers will soon run out. In the evenings, tired and thirsty, he returns to the Yazidi village.

Once, out of curiosity, Arthur peers into a burrow left by a fennec fox, only to find down below the remains of an ancient boatyard. Underneath this arid landscape bleached of colour are the skeletons of sunken boats and hardy fishermen. Long-forgotten harbours are now covered by caravan routes, trodden by hooves and worn by dust storms. Ships that ferried cargoes of grain, figs and gems lie moored and motionless for the rest of time. Should you take a handful of sand and let it run through your fingers, you can hear the sighing of the sails and the singing of the sailors. Roiling under the bare desert, still alive, is the spirit of water.

When Ashurbanipal’s palace was first discovered, with its hundreds of rooms, its walls adorned with scenes of lion-hunting and racing chariots, it was the statues and bas-reliefs that caught everyone’s attention. The tablets attracted little public interest. Although a few scholars passionately argued that someday these broken slabs of clay would be prized more highly than even the sculptures, no one believed them. While pictures brought the past closer, an extinct writing system seemed of no value, and thus the library kept its secrets. It is those secrets that Arthur is now determined to unravel.

Yet he is also beginning to sense that unearthing a forgotten poem does not immediately mean saving it from oblivion. He is shocked and saddened to learn that many precious objects have been lost or destroyed accidentally in the past. The excavations of the earlier British teams have been chaotic at times. Artefacts have suffered unnecessary harm, and valuable specimens have gone missing, some of which have disappeared in Bombay en route to England. The tablets were not treated with proper care: tossed into baskets, they were sent down the river on rafts, sustaining irreparable damage.

For decades two European countries had excavated in the same area, side by side yet in fierce competition: the French to the south, the British to the north. When the wind shifted, it carried the sounds of one team to the other. If work came to a stop at one location, it was almost always bad news for the other. For they usually downed tools when they made an important discovery.

The groups sometimes ran into each other. A civil nod, a tense smile, an unconcealed animosity. For they were racing to be the first to carry off Mesopotamian antiquities to Europe. People in Paris and people in London were waiting. Interest was not limited to the public and newspapers. So taken was Queen Victoria with Assyrian artefacts that she commissioned a set of jewellery inspired by them. Her favourite was a blue piece, which she named her ‘Nineveh brooch’. How she adored the colour, the way it reflected the light! On a visit to France, she gave it as a present to Empress Eugénie – a subtle message meaning the British were now rivals.

And so, on a day like this, the French team were rushing to send their spoils from Nineveh to Paris. The artefacts were loaded on to wooden barges, buoyed by inflated sheepskins, and dispatched from Mosul to Basra, where they were to be transferred to larger vessels. Among the precious cargo were four colossal statues: two genies and two lamassus . The latter were tied to rafts, travelling separately. Altogether, the rivercraft bore more than 235 crates, containing thirty tons of Mesopotamian spoils. But, between Baghdad and Al-Qurnah, they were attacked by bandits. One boat capsized. The marauders boarded the others, killing the crew. The bodies were tossed into the waters. The Tigris rose and roared, running faster. Meanwhile, seizing the helm, the raiders tried to steer the vessels in the opposite direction but lost control. And so the crates, full of priceless antiquities, sank to the bottom of the river. They are still there somewhere. The Tigris took them and never gave them back.

Now, as Arthur roams these shores, he wonders where they are, though he knows there is little point – they have been swept away by the currents and are impossible to locate, let alone salvage. In the depths of the Tigris are stone giants – human, bull and bird – resting on the silty riverbed, their eyes wide open as the waters wash over them.

Whilst many Western travellers have arrived in Nineveh with a sense of superiority, the place has the exact opposite impact on Arthur. He feels confused, humbled. Every morning, as he walks the distance from the Yazidi village to the mound that was once Nineveh, his mind is absorbed by the ruins beneath his feet. The remains. When we are gone – kings, slaves or scribes – what is left of us?

Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever. A shared expectation that tomorrow the sun will rise again, the earth will remain fertile, and the waters will never run dry. A comforting delusion that, though we will all die, the buildings we erect and the poems we compose and the civilizations we create will survive.

Arthur knows they were frightened of death, even the mightiest rulers. It was the one thing they had no control over. He also knows that not far from here, on a day like this, thousands of years back, people of all ages lined the streets to watch the funeral of a Mesopotamian king. Leading the procession were the king’s favourite wife, the king’s youngest wife, the king’s favourite son, the king’s barber, the king’s storyteller … Also accompanying them was a retinue of soldiers, servants, musicians bearing harps and lyres, and members of the court, clad in dazzling garments adorned with carnelian and lapis lazuli. They marched in silence, each carrying their own small cup.

When they arrived at the place designated for the royal grave, one by one, they drank the poison in their cups. They were all to be buried in the very same tomb, just so the king would still have his barber and his servants to serve him and his musicians to play him songs and his storyteller to tell him stories in the afterlife. That afternoon they all killed themselves as arranged, simply so that a man accustomed to power would not have to face his own mortality alone.

Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities. The irrigation system was Nineveh’s glowing achievement – but how many lives were squandered in its construction? There is always another side, a forgotten side. Water was the city’s greatest asset and defining feature, yet it was also what undermined it in the end. The large amounts of salt deposited by torrent and tide wrecked the soil. Rivers raised, rivers razed. Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your worst weakness.

Every night Arthur returns to the Yazidi village with more questions on his mind. He likes it there. The children and their trusting eyes, the sheikh and his quiet wisdom, Dishan and his quick wit, but, most of all, the faqra , with that deep and mysterious serenity flowing around her like a secret river … There are those who say the Yazidis are heretical Muslims or renegade Christians. Others claim they are apostate Jews, or an odd Zoroastrian sect lost in the folds of history. Some insist that their caste system must have been derived from Hinduism. There is a widespread assumption that the Yazidis are an ersatz version of an original creed, a stray offshoot. Arthur disagrees. More and more it seems to him that their lineage, as rooted in the soil as the native trees, can actually be traced back to the time of the Ancient Mesopotamians.

He wants to defend them against all slander and opprobrium. The vilification of Yazidis is not limited to the local Muslim tribes. Arthur finds out that an Anglican Church missionary who arrived here a few years back claimed ‘a great lewdness secretly prevailed’ amongst them. Arthur is certain the man had no idea what he was talking about, but the damage, once inflicted, cannot be undone.

Whenever he has free time, Arthur converses with the sheikh, or learns from Dishan how to drape skeins of newly dyed yarn over a wall, or helps an elderly woman to lay piles of fluffy sheep’s wool to dry in the sun, or whittles wooden birds for the children. If his father were here, he would be pleased to see him employing his craft at long last. His own talents do not mean much to the villagers. They find him kind but odd, hunching over illegible markings. But, much though Arthur enjoys these activities, nothing compares with spending time with the faqra . Leila has a remarkable ability to play both wind instruments and percussion. Arthur shows her the qanun he brought from Constantinople, offering it to her as a present. At first she refuses it, too proud to accept gifts from a foreigner, and it is only when she sees how eager the children are to hear her play that she relents – after that, working in his room many days, Arthur listens to her gently strumming the strings, mesmerized by her ability to open up herself to music. Like one of those sunflowers that grows along the bank, tilting its head towards the first rays of light, Arthur cannot help but turn towards Leila whenever she is around. He admires her quiet resolve, smiles when he sees her smile. There is a delicateness in her strength, a gentleness in her movements. He watches her as she lovingly feeds mulberry leaves to caterpillars that one day soon will turn into butterflies.

Often in the evenings, the villagers gather to listen to the faqra. She tells stories from olden times, tales as ancient as the river itself. As moths flutter about the lanterns, she speaks softly but distinctly, this woman who hears voices from other realms. Try as he might to follow every word through the interpreter, Arthur is certain that he is missing important parts. What he does glean, however, leaves him craving to learn more. Most of the faqra ’s stories are about water in some form. Curious to enter her liquid world, Arthur starts studying Kurdish, his boyhood ability to pick up languages fast now reinvigorated. For he wants to capture everything that Leila says. Having dedicated his life at first to the publishing of books and then to the translation of cuneiform, it fascinates Arthur that the Yazidis do not have a sacred scripture. He is endlessly baffled as to how a culture can sustain itself with the spoken word alone. Stories and poems and ballads seem to be the mortar that keeps them together, keeps them alive.

Many a night, as he is working on a tablet by the light of an oil lamp, a part of him anxiously waits to hear Leila’s footsteps. She frequently wanders out in her sleep, though she never leaves the confines of the village. Always in these moments, Arthur is overcome by a sense of bliss, as if her presence were some kind of benediction. Even when his mind is busy deciphering the cuneiform, his senses are alert to the smallest signals – the crack of a twig under her feet fusing with the swishing tides of the Tigris in the distance. The sounds blend so seamlessly that he could almost believe she was walking into the river, that she herself was made of flowing water.