They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [60]
‘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