It was no easier to find than the monastery.
“Did we pass it?”
“Did we pass it yet?”
“Which bright building is it?”
“Was that uphill enough?”
It didn't help to that our driver was a petulant child. He grumbled in Kurdish- something about foreigners with their maps, among other complaints and useless comments. Suddenly, though, “the clues came together nicely” as J put it. We saw the bright building, the road inclined upward noticeably, and J saw what could pass as a dirt road. These clues were spot on! Of course, the driver wouldn't believe us so we ended up driving on for another half mile before he obliged us map-touting foreigners and turned around to follow the dirt road. It turned out to the be the wrong dirt road, but the right one wasn't that far off, and we managed to find it, thank heavens.
As the cab crept over the narrow dirt path, jostling our guts with every bump and hole on the unpaved surface, Oscar the Grouch grumbled:
“I bet we're the first ones to ever set foot in this place.”
It wasn't true of course. Obviously, Mr. Clarry had set foot here in the recent past. But really, Oscar probably wasn't too far off from the truth, from the look of the place. We were creeping along a dirt path in the middle of an enormous, endless field of wheat under an enormous sky. It truly felt like uncharted territory, and the only thing we could think was...”what's an aqueduct?” What in the world were we even looking for? A bridge of some sort? What was it made of? How big was it? Was there still water there? Questions and doubts flooded each explorer's head until-
“There it is, I see it!” T said suddenly, pointing.
“Where? Where? You mean in the fields? Oh, I see it! Oh my god! Wow!...” First we saw a pile of stones. And then the stones grew more numerous and orderly. We got out of the cab and stared. A few local teenage boys stared back at us. They had been lounging around on top of the beginnings of the stone structure as they probably did every day, and suddenly a band of foreigners had appeared.
“First one to find the cuneiform inscriptions wins...(wins what?)!”
We all scrambled to begin the search, plowing through scratchy plants and colonies of huge ants going about their daily business, and keeping our eyes peeled for inscriptions in the stone.
“Found it!” ND cried several times and laughing in jest as we looked up the first time, startled and fooled.
“You should sound a lot more excited if you've really found it, you know,” I told her the next time she cried foul. Two minutes later, J, who'd been exploring the very end of the long structure along its side, cried out,
“Oh my god, I've found it!” I jumped down and joined her and cried out in excitement “Oh my GOD! This is SO COOL!”
Of course, ND wouldn't believe us. But we weren't lying. There, inscribed onto the surface of dozens of the large, block-like gray stones, were cuneiform scripts, a writing system invented 5000 years ago, employed by Akkadians and Assyrians and Babylonians during the beginning of human civilization, and by King Sennacherib, nearly 3000 years ago, in order to record details onto the surface of this aqueduct. What sort of details, I had no clue, since I had only studied this script for a few months a couple years ago. People had made fun of me for studying such a useless language. I had made fun of myself! Now, I wish I had studied more. Who knew I'd be in the cradle of civilization two years later, standing in the middle of a field of thistles and ants before an ancient set of stones inscribed with my useless, dead language?
We took pictures of our amazing find. As I mentioned, I nearly killed our driver because he touched me, and all-too-soon, we were heading back to the car. T and I looked back and oohed and ahhed at a strip of sky just above the horizon, burning a fiery, iridescent yellow and orange. Above this firelight strip, the rest of the enormous sky, blue and wet-looking and full of clouds hung over the dry yellow and orange plains, some of the clouds pulling downward toward the plains like cobwebs hanging down from the sky.
“The sky looks quite angry, doesn't it?” commented J.
“Like our driver,” I replied, “Angry sky, angry driver.”
Around us, birds chirped merrily and sheep grazed in the distance, and the acres and acres of wheat, now golden with the light of sunset, made me think of Sting's “Fields of Gold”, which was not a part of Corbin's imaginary world either. As we were going back down the stone blocks of the aqueduct, ND's picked up her phone, and I heard her say to the person on the other end of the line: “Oh my god, we went to the most amazing place ever.” I laughed and shook my head. This is how she described every place that she ever went to. If we'd found a one-room shack with a filthy hole-in-the-ground toilet inside with flies buzzing around the decaying feces in these fields instead of an aqueduct with ancient cuneiform writing on it, she'd still tell anyone who asked that it was the most amazing place she'd ever seen.
I wouldn't say it was the most amazing. It's hard to compare when you've seen so many amazing things. What would you rate as more amazing, cuneiform inscriptions on an ancient aqueduct older than the famous Roman ones, or an ancient 4th century monastery atop a mountain with an amazing view and a really nice monk inside? Which would you rate as more amazing, that monastery, or a huge, limestone cave where 9 Neanderthal remains were unearthed, also with an amazing view? That cave, or an ancient thousands-of-years-old citadel in the middle of a bustling city with beautiful views of sunset? It's hard to say...
What's easy to say is that the experience of seeing these cool sites in Iraq far outweighs anything I've seen in other countries (except maybe Oman...they had water! Beautiful waters and cave pools and secluded desert beaches). Even Egypt with its ancient pyramids and hieroglyphs and glorified cemeteries couldn't match up to our discoveries in Iraq- because of exactly that reason. In Iraq, we were discoverers; few others have ever seen what we were seeing, nothing was mapped out with tourist maps and road signs and guides, no site was swarming with tourists. We were like true pioneers, hunting for things that others were telling us didn't even exist, and others still were wondering how we even knew about these things when even the villagers one village over had no clue. We were showing the local, middle-aged taxi driver places he'd never even knew existed in his own country. We were true pioneers, paving the way for tourism in Northern Iraq. According to the locals, we were a bunch of crazy foreigners. According to the taxi driver, we were fools, but fools who you could actually lend some credence to as he found out. Still, his grouchiness barely waned by the end of the trip.
“He hates us,” ND said again as he bellyached once again, even as we were heading home. “Don't worry,” I reassured her, “that's his way of showing happiness and gratitude. Ten years later, he'll really thank us because he'll be the only one who knows how to get to these places.” We passed by the Arbella/Gaugamela battlefield again.
“There's the battlefield again.”
Wow, how ever did she recognize it from all the other fields? We pondered strange things in the car while the sky grew dusky, then dark. Like how we had been only 30 km from the most dangerous city in Iraq. Or the difference between “long” and “tall”. Or how sheep never look the way they're portrayed in cartoons. T nearly hugged Grumpy at one point. Grumpy only got grumpier. The constant complaining continued right up to our doorstep, as he demanded more than the agreed-upon sum. Well, at least you couldn't say he wasn't constant in one way or another. We tossed in another few thousand dinars just to mollify him (he thanked us by saying it wasn't enough), and walked into our apartment complex, another day gone, and tomorrow we had school.
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