expedition just then assembling to excavate the monuments at Nimrud.
‘It would be an experience, Ned, and a little money in your hands, and you could start to make a name for yourself in a growing field.’
I said that it was a splendid idea, and thanked him heartily for putting me in the way of it, though in truth I had some reservations about the plan. The gentleman leading the expedition, known to Tom through a relation, lived in Oxford; it was soon agreed that Tom would write to him immediately, to suggest that he and I go up there at the Professor’s earliest convenience.
It was several weeks before an answer came, but then, one bright and windy autumn morning, Tom called to say that he had received a reply from Professor S— in Oxford* who had expressed interest in receiving me in New College to talk over my candidature for the expedition.
The Professor’s rooms were crammed full of casts and fragments of bas-relief, inscriptions covered in the mysterious cuneiform writing that I had read about in Rawlinson’s account of his travels in Susiana and Kurdistan,† and carvings of muscular winged bulls in glowering black basalt. Maps and plans lay all about the floor, or were draped over tables and the backs of chairs; and on an easel in the centre of the room stood what I at first took to be a monochrome painting of an immense crowned king, bearded and braided and omnipotent in attitude, beneath whose feet crouched a captive enemy or rebel, frozen in abject surrender to the might of the conqueror.
On closer inspection, I saw that it was not a painting at all, but what the Professor, seeing my interest, described as a photogenic drawing – a technique invented by Mr Talbot,* a fellow student of the cuneiform texts. I stood amazed at the sight; for the image of the king – a gargantuan and looming stone presence standing in a waste of desert sand – had been made, not by some transient agent devised by man, but by eternal light itself. The light of the world; the sun that had once shone on ancient Babylon, and now struggled to light up the dreary October streets of Oxford in the nineteenth century, had been captured and held, like the slave beneath the king’s feet, and made permanent.
I tell you all this because the moment was a significant one in my life, as shall appear. Up until then, I had followed the familiar paths of knowledge that wound out from the safe harbour of the Liberal Arts. Now I saw that science, somewhat neglected in my education, held open possibilities of which I had not dreamed.
The Professor smelled a little overripe in the close confinement of his attic rooms, and seemed to think that standing very close to someone and talking loudly into their faces was the most convenient way of conducting an interview. He questioned me closely on my knowledge of Mesopotamia and the Babylonian kings, and on a variety of congeneric questions, whilst Tom hovered some distance off with a hopeful smile on his face.
It may well be that I passed muster. Indeed, I know it to be the case, for a few days after our return to Sandchurch, the Professor wrote to communicate his desire that I should return to Oxford as soon as it could be so arranged, in order to make the acquaintance of the other members of the proposed expedition.
But by then my heart had found a new desire. That glorious imprisonment of light and shadow, which I had observed in the photogenic image of the great stone king, began to consume me, and all thought of digging with my finger-nails in the heat and dust of the Mesopotamian desert was driven out. And besides, I had had enough of travelling. I wished to settle, find some congenial employment, and master the photographic art, which perhaps might one day furnish a means of earning my living.
To Tom I said nothing, but I skilfully contrived excuses for not returning to New College, as requested by the Professor, and, by feigning a slight but temporarily debilitating sickness, managed to keep myself close in the house for several days.
On the first day of my pretended illness, the rain came down hard from the south, and remained beating in from the Channel until darkness edged across the cliff-top and enveloped the house. In the morning, I had settled down with Buckingham’s
After supper, I began to think about practicalities. There was much that I needed to do in order to establish myself in a firm and permanent way of success, lacking, as I did, a University degree. Until Tom’s intervention on my behalf, I had determined to sell the house and move to London, to see what I could try there in the way of some work that would draw on my capacity for intellectual application. I had planned, first of all, to take up the invitation of Mr Bryce Furnivall to put myself forward for the vacancy in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum. It remained a congenial prospect; the bibliographical fire burned strong within me, and I knew that a whole life of useful work could be found in this – for me – absorbing study.
Whichever way I went – to Mesopotamia or Great Russell-street – I should need ready money to support myself in the beginning. A start would also have to be made on reviewing and arranging my mother’s papers, for I had been lax in this regard, and they had lain for the past eleven years, undisturbed and reproachful, in bound heaps on her work-table. That task, at least, could now be commenced. I therefore proposed to myself that I would begin looking over them first thing in the morning, lit up a cigar (a bad habit that I had acquired in Germany), pulled my chair close to the fire, and prepared to take my evening’s ease with a neat little edition of Lord Rochester’s poems.
But as the flames flickered, and the rain continued to hammer against the window, I put the book down and began to stare at the yellowed and curling piles of paper on the work-table.
On the wall flanking the table was the set of shelves, made by Billick, housing my mother’s published works, in two and three volumes, dark-green or blue cloth, their spines and blocked titles gleaming in the firelight, assembled in strict order of publication, from
It was a landscape of paper, with little peaks and shadowed troughs, tottering sheer-sided gorges, and here and there the aftermaths of little earthquakes, where a crust of curling sheets had slid across the face of its fellows beneath, and now leaned crazily against them. The mass of paper that lay before me contained, I knew, working drafts and fragments of novels, as well as accounts and other items relating to the running of the household. My mother’s curious system had been to parcel up little battalions of sheets and other pieces relating to a particular category, before binding them together with string or ribbon or thin strips of taffeta. Then she would stack them up, unlabelled, roughly in the order in which they had been created, one on top of the other. The effect, where it remained intact, was rather like a model of the battlefield of Pharsalus* that I had once seen, with massed and opposing squares and echelons. Nestling in the midst, surrounded on three sides by the encroaching walls of paper, was the space, no wider than a piece of foolscap, in which she had worked.
There were, too, a number of small, perfectly square note-books with hard, shiny black covers, each closed up by delicate silk ribbons of the same hue, which used to draw my fascinated eye as a child because of their