There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

So it is that on this day in August 1876, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums—the boy born on the banks of the River Thames into poverty and hardship, raised in the tenements of lower Chelsea; student in a ragged school; apprentice to a leading printer and publisher; decipherer of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum; a reluctant celebrity thrust into the center of a fierce debate on religion versus science, Creation versus Evolution; scholar, explorer, archeologist and savant; father and husband and a man with a secret love buried in his heart—breathes his last on the shores of the River Tigris, in the confines of a dilapidated mud hut, no different from those of the Ancient Mesopotamians, whose poetry and stories defined his life.