“I am inclined to agree with you.” Graham smiled intentionally and heard a rustle from the next table. He also heard an exclamation of disgust from the Frenchwoman. He was annoyed to find that the sound made him feel guilty.
“You seem,” said Haller, “to have earned some disapproval. It is partly my fault. I am sorry. Perhaps it is that I am old, but I find it extremely difficult to identify men with their ideas. I can dislike, even hate an idea, but the man who has it seems to be still a man.”
“Have you been long in Turkey?”
“A few weeks. I came there from Persia.”
“Oil?”
“No, Mr. Graham, archeology. I was investigating the early pre-Islamic cultures. The little I have been able to discover seems to suggest that some of the tribes who moved westward to the plains of Iran about four thousand years ago assimilated the Sumerian culture and preserved it almost intact until long after the fall of Babylon. The form of perpetuation of the Adonis myth alone was instructive. The weeping for Tammuz was always a focal point of the pre-historic religions-the cult of the dying and risen god. Tammuz, Osiris and Adonis are the same Sumerian deity personified by three different races. But the Sumerians called this god Dumuzida. So did some of the pre-Islamic tribes of Iran! And they had a most interesting variation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamish and Enkidu which I had not heard about before. But forgive me, I am boring you already.”
“Not at all,” said Graham politely. “Were you in Persia for long?”
“Two years only. I would have stayed another year but for the war.”
“Did it make so much difference?”
Haller pursed his lips. “There was a financial question. But even without that I think that I might not have stayed. We can learn only in the expectation of life. Europe is too preoccupied with its destruction to concern itself with such things: a condemned man is interested only in himself, the passage of hours and such intimations of immortality as he can conjure from the recesses of his mind.”