“G-good luck!” Braithwaite called out, looking as if he knew the Scorpion might need it.

Place of the Tombs

Place of the Tombs

STARS FILLED THE DOME of night as though it had snowed diamonds on the sky. High over the distant Sar Mosque floated a perfect crescent moon, gleaming like a shaving from a new silver coin. The crescent was upturned, horns pointing at the Milky Way, a silvery bowl to catch stars. The minarets of the mosque were shrouded in scaffolding like cobwebs. The Scorpion remembered the scaffolding from the time when he was a small boy and his father had taken him to see the ancient Place of the Tombs. The repair work was still going on and might go on yet for centuries. It didn’t really matter how long it took. God was in no hurry.

The Scorpion stood in one of the shallow graves opened by archaeologists and trained his binoculars at the campfire. He had carefully piled the bones to one side so he wouldn’t step on the skeleton and reveal his presence by cracking any of the brittle bones. He didn’t think whoever’s grave it was would mind. The skeleton had been in the dry earth for thousands of years, since the days of the fabled kingdom of Dilmun.

Long ago in humanity’s springtime, Dilmun was said to be an earthly paradise. Some even claimed it was the Garden of Eden. It was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first narrative ever written. According to the story, the Sumerian King Gilgamesh crossed the sea from Mesopotamia to Dilmun in his quest for the “flower that makes men immortal,” so old are mankind’s dreams, he mused. Perhaps the skeleton had lived in that happy kingdom, of which the tablets say:

The land of Dilmun is holy,

The land of Dilmun is pure.

In Dilmun the raven utters no cry,

The wolf snatches not the lamb.

Now, nothing remained of the dream but the ancient words and tens of thousands of mounds in the desert. Squatters lived in cardboard and tin-can shacks among the mounds. They dug holes in the sides of the mounds and used them for open kilns to make cheap pottery, feeding the fires with cast-off lumber from the construction projects around Manama. The night was illuminated by the firelight from the ovens, as though from thousands of red eyes, lighting the darkness with a twilight glow. It gave the Scorpion excellent visibility, as well as shadowy cover; ideal conditions for a surveillance.