Now the smiling land is a waste. When Layard found these relics of a glorious past, the descendants of those who builded and carved were wanderers over the face of the desert, nomads, barely civilized, living in mud huts and tents. The difference between the past and present of Mesopotamia is stupendous, almost incredible.
Before Layard started digging at Nimroud, relics of Assyria practically did not exist. All that were known might have been carried about comfortably in a kit-bag. In a short two years he crowded discovery on discovery. The past was revealed at his touch as if by magic.
Even the Arabs realized the wonder of it. “God is great! God is great!” exclaimed an aged sheik to Layard. “Here are stones which have been buried ever since the time of the holy Noah—peace be with him. Perhaps they were underground before the Deluge. I have lived on these lands for years. My father, and the father of my father, pitched their tents here before me; but they never heard of these figures. For twelve hundred years have the true believers been settled in this country, and none of them ever heard of a palace underground. Neither did they who went before them. But lo! here comes a Frank, from many days’ journey off, and he walks up to the very place and he takes a stick, and makes a line here, and makes a line there. ‘Here,’ says he, ‘is the palace; there,’ says he, ‘is the gate;’ and he shows us what has been all our lives beneath our feet, without our having known anything about it. Wonderful! Wonderful! Is it by books? Is it by magic? Is it by your prophets that you have learnt these things? Speak, O Bey! Tell us the Secret of Wisdom.”
The passing of the years has not diminished the wonder. All the time Layard carried his life in his hand. He took risks no native of the country would face. Once he was hunting a wolf, when his horse slipped and threw him right on top of the animal he was hunting. Layard picked himself up, by which time the startled wolf had made off. Often he rode boldly into the tents of unfriendly Arabs, and came out unharmed. With his imperious words he brought insolent chiefs to heel, made them feel the strength of his personality, and sometimes the strength of his arm.
He lived a strenuous life, slaving on far into the dreadful heat of summer, erecting a bower of branches beside the river to sleep in. The ruins were infested with scorpions, yet he escaped their sting. He was not so lucky with the mosquitoes. Nothing alive could escape these winged pests. He had attack after attack of malaria. Often he was so stricken with fever that he found it impossible to work at all. In spite of all these drawbacks and difficulties, he triumphed.
Once when he was investigating the ruins of Babylon, a Turkish governor presented him with an unruly lion! Another time he was travelling over the desert under the escort of an Arab chief, when a thief stole two of his horses. Taking the blame on himself, the chief vowed solemnly to recover the animals, no matter how long it took, even if it meant going to the ends of the earth. Layard parted from the chief at the end of his journey, and gave no further thought to the incident. For six weeks the chief relentlessly tracked the stolen horses from place to place, and one day he quietly rode into Layard’s encampment and left the two horses for their owner. Without waiting for thanks, he rode swiftly away.
Extraordinary results were achieved by Layard with the little money at his command. Certainly his scale of wages would not now be considered very extravagant. He paid his diggers sixpence a day; those who filled the baskets fourpence a day, the labourers threepence, and the boys twopence. It seems little enough, but the tent-dwellers had no rent, rates or taxes to pay, and in those days they could buy 240 lb. of corn for two shillings. To many of them, living on the border line of starvation, a settled wage of two or three shillings a week meant affluence.
Layard himself had a host of duties to perform, not least of which were sketching the sculptures as they were revealed and making immediate copies of all inscriptions found. Such work had to be done at once for fear the stone crumbled to pieces, for much of it only lasted a short time after being uncovered.
At Kouyunjik he found the palace of Sennacherib, buried 30 feet deep under an accumulation of debris and soil, so deep, in fact, that it was quite impossible to open trenches from the top, owing to the prodigious quantities of soil to be removed. Layard met this difficulty by driving tunnels, and the whole mound was in time honeycombed with his gloomy passages. Occasionally a shaft was opened to the top to let in light, and the faint glimmer that filtered down lit up the most astounding sculptures ever seen by human eyes. Thus was Nineveh found lying in its grave, so overwhelmed that Layard had to mine a way into it.
Once Layard gained enormous prestige among the Arabs, by telling them that the sun would be eclipsed, and the day grow dark. Sure enough the sun began to grow dim, and the Arabs, who thought that devils had caught hold of the planet, took up all the pots and pans they possessed, and nearly knocked the bottoms out of them in their endeavours to frighten the evil spirits away!