Page 49 of There Are Rivers in the Sky

—O— ARTHUR

By the River Tigris, 1876

A s he lies dying in a shepherd’s hut, Arthur’s eyes flicker open briefly. He blinks, trying to understand where he is. An air of extreme poverty pervades the room. In one corner there is a pile of rags and a wooden bucket, and by his side a cup of tea gone cold. He reaches out from under the sheepskin. His fingertips brush the spine of his journal. He is surprised to find it tossed on the floor, its pages open at random. Breathing with difficulty, he gropes around for a stub of pencil, pulls the notebook over and manages to scrawl these lines:

Everyone in this world has some bent or inclination which, if fostered by favourable circumstances, will colour the rest of his life.

His own life has been coloured by the love of poems and the pursuit of words. He has spent his youth arranging and printing them in books, and then deciphering, translating and studying them on tablets. He has devoted himself to an ancient epic, finding joy in piecing it together verse by verse.

Ever since he was a boy, people told him he had an extraordinary talent. His mother believed this wholeheartedly, his father only when it suited him. His colleagues concurred, though his own wife probably not. But Arthur is convinced that everyone has a gift. Given a chance and a modicum of support, anyone can elevate their skill. In the end, perhaps what separates one individual from another is not talent but passion. And what is passion if not a restlessness of the heart, an intense yearning to surpass your limits, like a river overflowing its banks?

Gilgamesh, the cruel and arrogant king who embarked on journeys, experienced loss and defeat, and learnt humility. Ashurbanipal, the remorseless and cultured king, prided himself on his magnificent capital, palace and library, all of which were razed to the ground. And he, Arthur, King of the Sewers and Slums, so named by a band of good-hearted toshers, miles away from home, has lost the certainty of his convictions.

Tears well up in his eyes. He would have liked to have been a better father to his children, to have spent more time with them, to have seen them grow up. His wife deserved a better husband. There is an immense loneliness in his heart, where there should have been intimacy. He carries within him desires suppressed, secrets withheld. Love is a puzzle in cuneiform, one he has not been able to solve. In truth, he has always been happiest when working on an ancient tablet. With a clarity that is almost painful, he recognizes that only when studying the past has he felt at home, only when sorting broken shards has he felt complete.

Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them. The blue tablet is exceptional, but, as he ruminates about it, his own fallibility hits him. To whom does the object belong – the itinerant bards who recited the poem, travelling from city to city; the king who ordered it to be put in writing; the scribe who laboured in setting it down; the librarian who scrupulously stored it; the archaeologist who unearthed it centuries later; the museum that will keep it safe – or does it belong only to the people of this land, and, if so, will minorities like the Yazidis ever be counted amongst them? He has gifted Leila one of the tablets he found, but should he have given them all to her?

Arthur hopes that the Epic of Gilgamesh will be read, appreciated and studied by enthusiasts on every continent. They might not have much in common at first glance, except for an inexplicable pull towards a fragmentary tale in an extinct language. The lovers of the story will probably always be a curious bunch, walking under the spell of a poem three thousand lines long and more than three thousand years old. Incomplete and fractured, with its flawed hero, inherent uncertainties, shifting moods and refusal to offer easy optimism, it is a narrative that mirrors an imperfect world.

We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, ‘Remember us.’ It is our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too. Each historical artefact, therefore, is a silent plea from ancestors to descendants, ‘Do not judge us too harshly.’ We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend.

He closes his eyes, sinking back into a drowsy torpor. Unlike Gilgamesh, he is at peace with his mortality. The faqra taught him that death is less an end than a new beginning, an opening to the unknown, and Arthur, timid and shy though he has been all his life, is not afraid.

So it is that on this day in August 1876, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums – the boy born on the banks of the River Thames into poverty and hardship, raised in the tenements of lower Chelsea; student in a ragged school; apprentice to a leading printer and publisher; decipherer of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum; a reluctant celebrity thrust into the centre of a fierce debate on religion versus science, Creation versus Evolution; scholar, explorer, archaeologist and savant; father and husband and a man with a secret love buried in his heart – breathes his last on the shores of the River Tigris, in the confines of a dilapidated mud hut, no different from those of the Ancient Mesopotamians, whose poetry and stories defined his life.

Mahmoud comes back with a doctor by his side. It is too late. They load the body on to a cart and take it to Castrum Kefa. A woman is waiting for them at the entrance to the ancient city. She wears a long, white dress. Leila now has a tiny tattoo on her forehead – the three wedge-shaped marks that Arthur once etched on the bark of a pomegranate tree. She has never forgotten him. She is the only person who has ever begun to understand his full being, both the boy and the man, his humanity, his courage, his solitariness, his fervour and his frailty … And he has kept his word. He has returned.

Arthur will be buried in the Castle of the Rock, one of the oldest continuous settlements in history, in a cemetery bordering the Yazidi village. On his tombstone they will write:

King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums

Born by the River Thames 1840

Died by the River Tigris 1876