Читать книгу The Treasure of the Tigris: A Tale of Mesopotamia - A. F. Mockler-Ferryman - Страница 4

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First of all, I must explain how it happened that I, Walter Henderson, whom, I have every reason to believe, my masters regarded as a very ordinary kind of boy, should have blossomed within a couple of years of leaving school into a person of some importance. I say this with all modesty, though my enemies will doubtless cast it in my teeth that no modest man would write a book about himself.

On events which prevented my getting a commission in the Army, after nearly having completed my course at Sandhurst, I do not propose to dwell. At the time I considered the whole affair to be an error of judgment, though my father ascribed it to lack of brains and too much cricket. Be all that as it may, the fact remains that before I was twenty, all my military ambition had been nipped in the bud, and I was incarcerated in the back premises of that imposing but dreary-looking old building, the British Museum. My uncle, Professor Ambrose Wentworth, had taken compassion on me, and had appointed me his private secretary, at a nominal salary. It was not at all the sort of life that I had mapped out for myself, as I had fully made up my mind to be a soldier, as most of my ancestors had been; and, as a matter of fact, had it not been for my mother's entreaties, I should have enlisted directly I left Sandhurst.

My uncle's particular line was Babylonian history, and probably no living man knew more about history tablets, cylinder seals, and such like things, than did he. As was, perhaps, only natural in a man whose whole existence was wrapped up in deciphering cuneiform inscriptions and hieroglyphics, he wrote an almost illegible hand, and it was my duty to make fair copies of all his letters and documents—a task which I found not only most uncongenial but also decidedly difficult. However, I did my best, and my uncle was always kind and considerate; but I could see that he was disappointed that he had been unable, at the end of a year, to make me enthusiastic in the matter of his hobby. At last came the day when I really thought that I could stand the life no longer. It was towards the end of November; we had had a fortnight of dreary fogs and drizzling rain, during which time I had worked by artificial light continuously, and as I took my seat at my desk I made up my mind that this day should be my last at the British Museum. Whether my uncle observed my dejection, or whether his archæological researches had produced in him the faculty of seeing through a brick wall, I cannot say, but when he entered the room in which I was at work, he came up to me and laid his hand gently on my shoulder.

"Walter, my boy," he said, "you don't like this sedentary life, I can see."

"It is the weather, uncle," said I. "I think it has got on my nerves."

"Well," said my uncle, "I have been meaning to speak to you for some time. You have stuck to your uninteresting work for months without a murmur, and you have proved to me that you have plenty of grit. I can now offer you a change. Mr Jenkins and I have been talking matters over, and we want someone to go to Babylon for us. We have come to the end of our arm-chair researches, and we can do nothing more without a man on the spot. If you like to undertake to study hard for six months, we will send you out on a voyage of discovery for us. You will have to make up your mind to real hard work, but I promise you that you will have a thoroughly interesting trip, and will see a good deal of the world. I will tell you plainly what you will have to do. In the first place, you must be able to read cuneiform inscriptions and translate them readily; secondly, you will have to learn a certain amount of Arabic, so as to be able to converse with the natives; and lastly, you will be required to go on an expedition to Babylon by yourself, and follow up the work that Layard and others commenced. You can think it over for twenty-four hours, and let me know whether you will undertake it, or whether we shall have to look out for someone else."

I need, perhaps, hardly say that, as I was only too keen to travel, I accepted the offer, and I began my six months' course of instruction forthwith. It was hard work, as my uncle had foretold, and nearly nine months passed before I was considered fit to start on my voyage of discovery. But, at the end of that time, my study had resulted in making quite an enthusiast of me, and I was most eager to get away to the land which had already given to the world so many historical treasures.

Then arrived the eventful evening when I was to receive my final instructions, and I was closeted with my uncle and Mr Jenkins for several hours, listening to the great scheme that I was intended to attempt to carry through. Up till then I had had no inkling that my trip was to be anything more than an ordinary digging undertaking, in the hope of finding something new; but when I entered my uncle's sanctum, I soon saw that he and his assistant had something important to discuss with me.

"Well, Walter," my uncle began, "the time has come at last; you are off to-morrow, and now we are going to tell you the great secret that is known only to Mr Jenkins and myself. If either of us were young enough to undertake the work, you may be sure that we should not have let you do it. But it wants a young and an energetic man to carry it through, and that is why we have gone to the trouble of training you. What we are going to disclose to you is absolutely in confidence; you must reveal it to no one; for, as you will see, on the keeping of the secret depends the whole success of your expedition."

My uncle now unlocked a safe, from which he took a tin despatch-box. Then, unfastening a bundle of papers, he began:—

"THE GIRDLE OF SOPHANA, THE GREAT QUEEN. That is what we want you to find. It exists, or it did a few years ago, beyond a doubt. If you can discover it and bring it to England, you will be a made man. If you fail, we shall not blame you. But I will tell you what we know about it. Mr Jenkins and I have devoted years to the matter, and, from what we have been able to gather from scraps of information, collected from history tablets and other sources, we know that Queen Sophana was possessed of a girdle of solid gold. Exactly what it was like we do not know, though several life-like snakes are said to have been embossed upon it, and it was supposed to have been possessed of certain magic properties. We have not much to go upon, but we will not keep anything from you, and you shall hear how we have put two and two together. In the first place, the ancient representations, on cylinder seals and such like things, of the queen, always show the girdle or belt round her waist; secondly, the old writers, in describing the queen, frequently refer to the magic belt; thirdly, on a fragment of a history tablet we have found clear evidence that, on the death of the queen, her favourite handmaiden dressed her mistress in pure white clothes and carefully fastened on the girdle before the corpse was laid in the coffin of baked clay.

"Then there are several other tablets on which mention is made of the girdle; and we have copies of all these things ready for you to take with you. But we should never have thought of trying to unearth this treasure, had it not been for information of a much more recent date that has come to us. Barely sixty years ago, some members of an Arab tribe ransacking the ruins of Babylon, found, bricked up in a solid wall many feet underground, a substantial tomb; inside the tomb were several coffins, and within one of these, encircling a shrivelled corpse, lay a belt of golden snakes—massive and of great weight. Now comes the difficulty; for, according to the story which the Arabs relate, the finders of the treasure, from the moment that they took possession of it, suffered every species of calamity. But of all this you must read in the manuscripts which we are handing over to you; it is too long a story to go into now, and I need only tell you the end. The golden girdle was eventually buried in the place where it had been found, by the sole survivor of a family of the Shammar tribe, in whose possession it had been for some years; and, in order that no one should notice that the ground had recently been turned over, the man obliterated all trace of his work by setting fire to the scrub jungle far and wide. Lastly, we have the climax; the Arab committed suicide on the bank of the Euphrates, by falling on the point of his broken spear.

"What you have to do is to endeavour to find out the spot where the man buried the girdle; dig it up, and bring it home. Mr Jenkins and I have written down our views as to how we think this can best be done; but you must consider what we have written as mere suggestions, and you must be guided by circumstances. We do not pretend to be anything more than students and theorists; and, unhappily, such men as Layard and Rawlinson, who could have helped us, have long since passed away. In reading through your papers, you will, of course, come across a deal of Eastern superstition; but I think that you are matter-of-fact enough to pay no attention to the supposed magical properties of the girdle, or any nonsense of that kind."

The remainder of the conversation it is unnecessary to give. I received lengthy instructions as to the voyage, as to secrecy, and as to more commonplace matters of business—how I was to draw money for my expenses, and so forth. No detail had been forgotten by my uncle and his assistant, who, I discovered, were staking their reputations on the success of my quest.

I was handed a despatch-box containing, as I was told, all papers bearing on the object of my journey; and then, like many another, I, Walter Henderson, buoyed up with hope and puffed up with pride, left the Museum under the impression that I was fairly on the road to fame.