Free Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth

African colonies, isn’t it? I mean, what else would you call Cecil Rhodes? Anyway, it seems reasonable to think the plaque might be part of the booty they brought back.”
    “He boasts about that too. The details of the loot are always very important in the annals. He came back with gold, silver, copper, linen garments, large and small monkeys, ebony boxes, things fashioned from the tusks of the walrus . . . Yes, I see what you mean, ivory, in other words.”
    “And it was Ashurnasirpal who made his capital at Kalhu, on the other side of the Tigris, about the same time. And I think he was the first Assyrian king to use gypsum for sculptures not exposed to the weather. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think they used limestone before that.”
    Palmer shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “Out of my line.”
    “Gypsum is softer, you can get more detail. And the carved stone we found, that is gypsum, and so I thought, you know, there must be some connection, perhaps he is the link, perhaps there is some clue in the closeness of the dates that will help us to understand how these things got here. But now there is this business of Esarhaddon and the invasion of Egypt, and that was in the early seventh century, about two hundred years later.”
    “Well, it’s still Assyria, isn’t it? This is the third year of excavation here, there has been no sign of an Assyrian presence before. These things have all been found recently and all in the same area, on the east side of the mound, where we have opened the new trench.”
    Somerville felt a tightening of the chest. It was from the eastern side that you could look down on the railway buildings. This was where the German voices came from, the clatter of metal, the thumping sound of the open trucks as they passed along the rails. “We will go farther on that side,” he said. “We’ll keep some people on the trench where the things were found, and we’ll start a new one in sections, at right angles to it.”

 
    4.

    J ehar found himself spending more time in the rail yards at Jerablus than he had ever intended. He had returned there in the company of a trading party, eager to gaze at Ninanna again and to pick up something further about the progress of the railroad that he could sell to the Englishman. But after that great leap of the bridge there had been what seemed like a pause for breath; work on the left bank had not begun; they were still waiting for the rails to come from Aleppo. It had occurred to him that he might invent some story of the line to take back with him, a strike among the workforce, a large-scale ambush by the desert Arabs with great loss of life. Storytelling came naturally to him, he had a gift for it, and the stories became true to him as he told them, as he embroidered them with detail. However, an elementary caution remained: He was held back by the fear that his employer might find the stories contradicted by others and so would cease to trust him and therefore cease to pay him for the information he took back.
    Meanwhile, instead of adding to his stock of money, he was experiencing difficulty in holding on to what he had. He kept his eyes open, watching the movements of goods about the yards, the guard that was kept on the warehouses and storage sheds, the hours of opening and closing in the offices of the German surveyors and engineers, the quality of the locks, the fastening of the windows. There were moments of inattention, and one had to be ready for them. He succeeded on different occasions in stealing some pick handles, a tool kit in a leather holster, a three-gallon drum of kerosene. These things he sold for what he could get in the shanties that had sprung up in the area of the docks and by the riverside. The town had swollen greatly with the coming of the railroad and held now a good many people who did not ask where things came from. Sometimes he took serious risks for Ninanna’s sake. The police were not much in evidence here, but