They Came to Baghdad

I

It proved fairly simple on the following morning for Victoria to go out by herself with few explanations. She had inquired about the Beit Melek Ali and had learnt it was a big house built right out on the river some way down the West Bank.

So far Victoria had had very little time to explore her surroundings and she was agreeably surprised when she came to the end of the narrow street and found herself actually on the river bank. She turned to her right and made her way slowly along the edge of the high bank. Sometimes the going was precarious – the bank had been eaten away and had not always been repaired or built up again. One house had steps in front of it which, if you took one more, would land you in the river on a dark night. Victoria looked down at the water below and edged her way round. Then, for a while, the way was wide and paved. The houses on her right hand had an agreeable air of secrecy. They offered no hint as to their occupancy. Occasionally the central door stood open and peering inside Victoria was fascinated by the contrasts. On one such occasion she looked into a courtyard with a fountain playing and cushioned seats and deck-chairs round it, with tall palms growing up and a garden beyond, that looked like the backcloth of a stage set. The next house, looking much the same outside, opened on a litter of confusion and dark passages, with five or six dirty children playing in rags. Then she came to palm gardens in thick groves. On her left she had passed uneven steps leading down to the river and an Arab boatman seated in a primitive rowing boat gesticulated and called, asking evidently if she wanted to be taken across to the other side. She must by now, Victoria judged, be just about opposite the Tio Hotel, though it was hard to distinguish differences in the architecture viewed from this side and the hotel buildings looked more or less alike. She came now to a road leading down through the palms and then to two tall houses with balconies. Beyond was a big house built right out on to the river with a garden and balustrade. The path on the bank passed on the inside of what must be the Beit Melek Ali or the House of King Ali.

In a few minutes more Victoria had passed its entrance and had come to a more squalid part. The river was hidden from her by palm plantations fenced off with rusty barbed wire. On the right were tumble-down houses inside rough mud-brick walls, and small shanties with children playing in the dirt and clouds of flies hanging over garbage heaps. A road led away from the river and a car was standing there – a somewhat battered and archaic car. By the car, Edward was standing.

‘Good,’ said Edward, ‘you’ve got here. Get in.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Victoria, entering the battered automobile with delight. The driver, who appeared to be an animate bundle of rags, turned round and grinned happily at her.

‘We’re going to Babylon,’ said Edward. ‘It’s about time we had a day out.’

The car started with a terrific jerk and bumped madly over the rude paving stones.

‘To Babylon?’ cried Victoria. ‘How lovely it sounds. Really to Babylon?’

The car swerved to the left and they were bowling along upon a well-paved road of imposing width.

‘Yes, but don’t expect too much. Babylon – if you know what I mean – isn’t quite what it was.’

Victoria hummed.

‘How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore and ten,
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.’

‘I used to sing that when I was a small child. It always fascinated me. And now we’re really going there!’

‘And we’ll get back by candlelight. Or we should do. Actually you never know in this country.’

‘This car looks very much as though it might break down.’

‘It probably will. There’s sure to be simply everything wrong with it. But these Iraqis are frightfully good at tying it up with string and saying Inshallah and then it goes again.’

‘It’s always Inshallah, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, nothing like laying the responsibility upon the Almighty.’

‘The road isn’t very good, is it?’ gasped Victoria, bouncing in her seat. The deceptively well-paved and wide road had not lived up to its promise. The road was still wide but was now corrugated with ruts.

‘It gets worse later on,’ shouted Edward.

They bounced and bumped happily. The dust rose in clouds round them. Large lorries covered with Arabs tore along in the middle of the track and were deaf to all intimations of the horn.

They passed walled-in gardens, and parties of women and children and donkeys and to Victoria it was all new and part of the enchantment of going to Babylon with Edward beside her.

They reached Babylon bruised and shaken in a couple of hours. The meaningless pile of ruined mud and burnt brick was somewhat of a disappointment to Victoria, who expected something in the way of columns and arches, looking like pictures she had seen of Baalbek.

But little by little her disappointment ebbed as they scrambled over mounds and lumps of burnt brick led by the guide. She listened with only half an ear to his profuse explanations, but as they went along the Processional Way to the Ishtar Gate, with the faint reliefs of unbelievable animals high on the walls, a sudden sense of the grandeur of the past came to her and a wish to know something about this vast proud city that now lay dead and abandoned. Presently, their duty to Antiquity accomplished, they sat down by the Babylonian Lion to eat the picnic lunch that Edward had brought with him. The guide moved away, smiling indulgently and telling them firmly that they must see the Museum later.

‘Must we?’ said Victoria dreamily. ‘Things all labelled and put into cases don’t seem a bit real somehow. I went to the British Museum once. It was awful, and dreadfully tiring on the feet.’

‘The past is always boring,’ said Edward. ‘The future’s much more important.’

‘This isn’t boring,’ said Victoria, waving a sandwich towards the panorama of tumbling brick. ‘There’s a feeling of – of greatness here. What’s the poem “When you were a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave ”? Perhaps we were. You and I, I mean.’

‘I don’t think there were any Kings of Babylon by the time there were Christians,’ said Edward. ‘I think Babylon stopped functioning somewhere about five or six hundred BC. Some archaeologist or other is always turning up to give lectures about these things – but I really never grasp any of the dates – I mean not until proper Greek and Roman ones.’

‘Would you have liked being a King of Babylon, Edward?’

Edward drew a deep breath.

‘Yes, I should.’

‘Then we’ll say you were. You’re in a new incarnation now.’

‘They understood how to be Kings in those days!’ said Edward. ‘That’s why they could rule the world and bring it into shape.’

‘I don’t know that I should have liked being a slave much,’ said Victoria meditatively, ‘Christian or otherwise.’

‘ Milton was quite right,’ said Edward. “‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” I always admired Milton ’s Satan.’

‘I never quite got around to Milton,’ said Victoria apologetically. ‘But I did go and see Comus at Sadler’s Wells and it was lovely and Margot Fonteyn danced like a kind of frozen angel.’

‘If you were a slave, Victoria,’ said Edward, ‘I should free you and take you into my harem – over there,’ he added gesticulating vaguely at a pile of debris.

A glint came into Victoria ’s eye.

‘Talking of harems –’ she began.