Chapter 7. The Man at the Window

I think I’d better make it clear right away that there isn’t going to be any local colour in this story. I don’t know anything about archaeology and I don’t know that I very much want to. Messing about with people and places that are buried and done with doesn’t make sense to me. Mr Carey used to tell me that I hadn’t got the archaeological temperament and I’ve no doubt he was quite right.

The very first morning after my arrival Mr Carey asked if I’d like to come and see the palace he was – planning I think he called it. Though how you can plan for a thing that’s happened long ago I’m sure I don’t know! Well, I said I’d like to, and to tell the truth, I was a bit excited about it. Nearly three thousand years old that palace was, it appeared. I wondered what sort of palaces they had in those days, and if it would be like the pictures I’d seen of Tutankahmen’s tomb furniture. But would you believe it, there was nothing to see but mud! Dirty mud walls about two feet high – and that’s all there was to it. Mr Carey took me here and there telling me things – how this was the great court, and there were some chambers here and an upper storey and various other rooms that opened off the central court. And all I thought was, ‘But how does he know?’ though, of course, I was too polite to say so. I can tell you it was a disappointment! The whole excavation looked like nothing but mud to me – no marble or gold or anything handsome – my aunt’s house in Cricklewood would have made a much more imposing ruin! And those old Assyrians, or whatever they were, called themselves kings. When Mr Carey had shown me his old ‘palaces’, he handed me over to Father Lavigny, who showed me the rest of the mound. I was a little afraid of Father Lavigny, being a monk and a foreigner and having such a deep voice and all that, but he was very kind – though rather vague. Sometimes I felt it wasn’t much more real to him than it was to me.

Mrs Leidner explained that later. She said that Father Lavigny was only interested in ‘written documents’ – as she called them. They wrote everything on clay, these people, queer, heathenish-looking marks too, but quite sensible. There were even school tablets – the teacher’s lesson on one side and the pupil’s effort on the back of it. I confess that that did interest me rather – it seemed so human, if you know what I mean.

Father Lavigny walked round the work with me and showed me what were temples or palaces and what were private houses, and also a place which he said was an early Akkadian cemetery. He spoke in a funny jerky way, just throwing in a scrap of information and then reverting to other subjects.

He said: ‘It is strange that you have come here. Is Mrs Leidner really ill, then?’

‘Not exactly ill,’ I said cautiously.

He said: ‘She is an odd woman. A dangerous woman, I think.’

‘Now what do you mean by that?’ I said. ‘Dangerous? How dangerous?’

He shook his head thoughtfully.

‘I think she is ruthless,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think she could be absolutely ruthless.’

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ I said, ‘I think you’re talking nonsense.’

He shook his head.

‘You do not know women as I do,’ he said.

And that was a funny thing, I thought, for a monk to say. But of course I suppose he might have heard a lot of things in confession. But that rather puzzled me, because I wasn’t sure if monks heard confessions or if it was only priests. I supposed he was a monk with that long woollen robe – all sweeping up the dirt – and the rosary and all!

‘Yes, she could be ruthless,’ he said musingly. ‘I am quite sure of that. And yet – though she is so hard – like stone, like marble – yet she is afraid. What is she afraid of?’

That, I thought, is what we should all like to know!

At least it was possible that her husband did know, but I didn’t think anyone else did.

He fixed me with a sudden bright, dark eye.

‘It is odd here? You find it odd? Or quite natural?’

‘Not quite natural,’ I said, considering. ‘It’s comfortable enough as far as the arrangements go – but there isn’t quite a comfortable feeling.’

‘It makes me uncomfortable. I have the idea’ – he became suddenly a little more foreign – ‘that something prepares itself. Dr Leidner, too, he is not quite himself. Something is worrying him also.’

‘His wife’s health?’

‘That perhaps. But there is more. There is – how shall I say it – an uneasiness.’

And that was just it, there was an uneasiness.

We didn’t say any more just then, for Dr Leidner came towards us. He showed me a child’s grave that had just been uncovered. Rather pathetic it was – the little bones – and a pot or two and some little specks that Dr Leidner told me were a bead necklace.

It was the workmen that made me laugh. You never saw such a lot of scarecrows – all in long petticoats and rags, and their heads tied up as though they had toothache. And every now and then, as they went to and fro carrying away baskets of earth, they began to sing – at least I suppose it was meant to be singing – a queer sort of monotonous chant that went on and on over and over again. I noticed that most of their eyes were terrible – all covered with discharge, and one or two looked half blind. I was just thinking what a miserable lot they were when Dr Leidner said, ‘Rather a fine-looking lot of men, aren’t they?’ and I thought what a queer world it was and how two different people could see the same thing each of them the other way round. I haven’t put that very well, but you can guess what I mean.

After a bit Dr Leidner said he was going back to the house for a mid-morning cup of tea. So he and I walked back together and he told me things. When he explained, it was all quite different. I sort of saw it all – how it used to be – the streets and the houses, and he showed me ovens where they baked bread and said the Arabs used much the same kind of ovens nowadays.

We got back to the house and found Mrs Leidner had got up. She was looking better today, not so thin and worn. Tea came in almost at once and Dr Leidner told her what had turned up during the morning on the dig. Then he went back to work and Mrs Leidner asked me if I would like to see some of the finds they had made up to date. Of course I said ‘Yes,’ so she took me through into the antika-room. There was a lot of stuff lying about – mostly broken pots it seemed to me – or else ones that were all mended and stuck together. The whole lot might have been thrown away, I thought.

‘Dear, dear,’ I said, ‘it’s a pity they’re all so broken, isn’t it? Are they really worth keeping?’

Mrs Leidner smiled a little and she said: ‘You mustn’t let Eric hear you. Pots interest him more than anything else, and some of these are the oldest things we have – perhaps as much as seven thousand years old.’ And she explained how some of them came from a very deep cut on the mound down towards the bottom, and how, thousands of years ago, they had been broken and mended with bitumen, showing people prized their things just as much then as they do nowadays.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘we’ll show you something more exciting.’

And she took down a box from the shelf and showed me a beautiful gold dagger with dark-blue stones in the handle.

I exclaimed with pleasure.

Mrs Leidner laughed.

‘Yes, everybody likes gold! Except my husband.’

‘Why doesn’t Dr Leidner like it?’

‘Well, for one thing it comes expensive. You have to pay the workmen who find it the weight of the object in gold.’

‘Good gracious!’ I exclaimed. ‘But why?’

‘Oh, it’s a custom. For one thing it prevents them from stealing. You see, if they did steal, it wouldn’t be for the archaeological value but for the intrinsic value. They could melt it down. So we make it easy for them to be honest.’

She took down another tray and showed me a really beautiful gold drinking-cup with a design of rams’ heads on it.