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mask and seeing gold, they broke the surrounding altar to free the mask.
    “Tomb robbers,” his father had called them. “In minutes, they destroyed an ancient altar and crushed underfoot vases and clay figurines that have survived wars and the wrath of the elements for three millenniums. All because of their stupidity.”
    His father understood their motive.
    The five were not professional tomb robbers but simple men who hungered for a better life. They and their families had little more than the clothes on their backs and a few possessions in their mud huts. Their only income came from picking dates from the trees near the river and herding communal goats and camels. The amount of money they would divide between them from a Baghdad antiques dealer buying the mask was small, no more than a month’s wages for a city worker. But to these men who had so little of material value, a few coins in their pockets were a fortune.
    When Hussein took the mask from them and turned it over to the authorities, he made blood enemies of the men.
    “They are destroying our history,” Hussein told his son after he had notified the National Museum of Antiquities of Baghdad of the find. “Our poverty does not entitle us to become thieves and destroy our history. The Iraqi people have a proud history going back thousands of years. We have been the crossroads of the great religions and cultures of half of the world.”
    He shook his finger at Abdullah. “An antiquity is not a treasure to be stolen and sold. It is a piece of our history that belongs to all the people of Iraq. Foreigners have already stolen much of our history. We must salvage what remains for our people.”
    An excited museum curator who came to collect the mask explained it to him.
    “Your people have found the death mask of Sammu-ramat, the great warrior-queen of Assyria.”
    “What is a death mask?” Abdullah asked.
    “A cast made of a person’s face after death. The find is especially important because Sammu-ramat is believed to have built Babylon as her capital.”
    “And the Gardens,” Abdullah’s father added.
    “Yes. She had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon created as a wedding present for her son’s new wife. The Gardens are one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”
    Abdullah’s father knew some legends about the queen. “Sammu-ramat brought bad luck to everyone but herself.”
    The curator nodded in agreement. “She was the mistress of a general. When the king saw her great beauty, he fell in love with her and had the general killed. Forced to commit suicide, it’s said. But this woman had a lust for men besides her husband. When the king found out she was bedding her guards, she killed him and took over the throne. After she became queen, she took a different man to bed every night, having each killed the next day so another could take his place that night.”
    ***
    At the river, Abdullah tried to ignore the men’s shouting and concentrate on watering the camels. A very thirsty camel could hold up to a hundred quarts of water, but sometimes they had to be coaxed to drink. As he walked between the animals, stroking and scolding them, a wind suddenly arose and he tensed.
    Two winds were the bane of Iraq: the Shamal from the north and the poisonous Simoon wind that shrieked out of the southern deserts. The Shamal was predictable, a hot, dry wind coming from the north during the summer months. The Simoon struck without warning. “Like a scorpion,” his father said. Hot and oppressive, it seared across the deserts and plains, sometimes appearing as a whirlwind of dust.
    The dreaded Simoon was the wind that rose now as Abdullah worked with the camels. The beasts brayed and nervously stamped their hooves as the hot blaze suddenly struck.
    An ill omen
, Abdullah thought. The Simoom was the scourge of the desert people, from Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter to Syria’s Plain of Akkar. It could blind cities, turn sand as hot as lava, and bury