by Graham Brown
She followed the path, came around a turn, and all of a sudden she was there.
CHAPTER 36
Hawker followed Danielle’s lead, chasing her across the mudflats, desert, and scrubland, slightly annoyed at the pace she kept. His aggravation came not because it was nearly impossible to keep up with her—which it was—or because he and Sonia had spent twenty minutes eating sand—which they had—but because separated as they were he had no way to communicate with her. They couldn’t use a radio without facing the same risk of detection as the airliners that had flown overhead during their ride across the swamp. And if anything went wrong Danielle would never know until she stopped and wondered where he and Sonia had gone.
He did his best to keep up, having better luck once they were in the wadi. Five minutes on he saw her race around a half-buried dead tree. He followed, with Sonia holding tight. On the other side he found Danielle stopped—parked at the edge of a deep pit.
He slammed on the brakes and the ATV skidded. The wheels dug into the sand, Sonia’s weight pressed against him, adding to his own, and they almost went over.
The ATV stopped with Hawker hanging over the handlebars and peering down into a five-story drop. A massive void lay before them. It was like standing at the edge of an open-pit mine. The far wall might have been half a mile away.
At the bottom, sand piled up in sloping heaps against three of the four walls. He guessed that showed the direction of the wind. In the center, raised up almost to their level, lay a flattish table perhaps the size of a dozen football fields.
Stone ruins covering one section appeared to be mostly crude structures. On the far edge lay a much larger structure, one that seemed to protrude into the ground.
The ATV slipped a bit. Realizing he was still hanging over the edge, Hawker pushed off the handlebars, straightening up. With his hand on the clutch he walked the ATV back a few steps, flipping up the night-vision goggles as he went.
“A little warning next time,” he suggested.
“Like you gave me in Paris?”
There was not much he could say to that.
Danielle smiled. “Would you like a drink?” she said. “You must be thirsty after eating so much dust.” She was obviously enjoying the moment.
“Didn’t know you were such a comedian.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
That much was true. Maybe someday.
Behind him, Sonia stepped off the ATV.
“Is this it?” she asked.
Danielle nodded. She pointed to the walls of the pit, the moat that surrounded the structure in the middle like a castle.
“If this whole theory is right, we’re looking at the land of Havilah, ‘the table or stretch of sand,’ closely related to the name used in the Bible and ‘completely surrounded’ by the river Pishon.”
Sonia pulled off her helmet and shook out her hair.
“And in the middle?” Hawker asked.
“The first and the last of the Miraculous Gardens of Life,” Danielle said. “The Garden of—or in—Eden.”
It seemed both correct and wrong. The place was barren, quiet, and deserted. It seemed the opposite of life in its current state and yet the stars above were so brilliant in their intensity, it almost felt as if God were watching.
“How is it no one ever found this place?” Hawker asked. “Especially if this Bashir guy has been looking for it all his life?”
“Because,” Danielle said, “until a few years ago, when Saddam drained the swamps, this whole area was underwater. Since then it’s been kind of a war zone.”
That made sense. Too bad for Bashir, maybe for the rest of the world, too.
Sonia reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. Scratched into the paper was a drawing of a large, lush area surrounded by water and walls.
“This was drawn up from a Sumerian description of the place where life flowed.”
She held it out at an angle. It didn’t really match, but with imagination Hawker could kind of see the resemblance.
“So now what?”
“Down inside,” Sonia said. “If they still exist, what we’re looking for will be in the main building.”
They tied a rope to one of the ATVs, climbed down into the moat, and crossed the open area. Making their way up to the platform was far more difficult but eventually they reached the first tier.
Strange rows of rocks stood piled and aligned in places, but most of it was a jumble. Since the water had drained away, the area had become bone dry. The only erosion had come from the wind. Like the sites at Ur or the pyramids of Giza, what hadn’t been disturbed by man lay pretty much as it once had.
They crossed the lower, outer platform and scaled a crumbling ten-foot wall onto the main level of the platform.
Sonia moved toward the main building, appearing for all the world like she knew what she was looking for.
“The people who lived here predated the Sumerians,” she said. “Some scholars call them the Elamites.”
“Elamites—Edenites,” Hawker said. “Got to be the same.”
“We call them the Elamites,” she said. “We have no idea what they called themselves.”
Danielle laughed and leaned in to Hawker. “She’s too smart for you. She should date McCarter instead.”
Hawker had to laugh. He was enjoying the moment. No one was shooting at them or trying to blow them up, Sonia seemed to be glowing as she neared the end of her quest, and every jealous bone in Danielle’s body had begun to act up.
“Never thought you’d be the jealous type,” he replied.
“Just trying to save you some heartache.”
They followed Sonia through the broken remnants of the large structure. Here and there she looked at parts of the ruins, eventually coming to an opening that led underground.
“Can I use the light?” she asked.
So far they’d been maneuvering by moonlight, but to go where she was going required artificial illumination.
Hawker nodded. “Just keep it covered until you’re inside.”
Sonia pulled her flashlight out and stepped to the edge. She made it down a foot or so and then turned on the beam, covering it with her hand.
Danielle and Hawker moved up to the edge.
Hawker followed Sonia’s light and Danielle came in behind him. They moved into an empty room that looked like it might have been hollowed out of the rock itself to make a storehouse. Most of it was filled with sand, but like the moat outside, some sections seemed to have been sheltered. Or cleared.
Hawker bent close to Sonia as she ran her hand across one of the stones.
“What are you looking for?”
“Growing stones,” she said.
“What’s a growing stone?”
She explained. “According to the Sumerian part of the legend, the life-giving tree bore two kinds of fruit: the seedless kind that was consumed, and on rare occasion a seeded bud. They were so valuable and few, that upon their reaching fullness, they were plucked, surrounded in wax, sealed into a ball of gold, and then placed inside bricks of mud and clay. The clay was then baked at a very low temperature until it hardened into tablets. Tablets upon which the story of their existence was carved.”
“So the seeds aren’t in the mud,” Hawker noted.
“They are,” she said. “It’s just the mud is now a brick.”
“Look at this,” Danielle said.
They turned her way. With the edge of her knife she was scraping off soot and creosote from the stone walls. Shining the flashlights around what was left of the structure showed the same soot everywhere, baked into the stone.
“There was a fire here,” Danielle said. “Big enough, hot enough to heat these rocks and scar them.”
She scraped off a bunch more of the soot, filling a small plastic bag.
“What, are you with CSI now?”
“McCarter wanted samples so he could try to carbon-date the place.”
&nbs
p; “What does he think about all this?”
“He read the scroll,” she said. “It says two people were kept here to tend the Garden. They were given everything by the king but were never allowed to leave. They partook of the seedless fruit from the Tree of Life and thus lived for ages.”
“Sounds familiar,” he said.
“It parallels very nicely,” she said. “Apparently the keepers of the Garden weren’t permitted to know of the outside world. They were born here, told that this was the entire world, and made to live all their lives here. They were given food and wine and other treasures. Everything a person could want, but they were never allowed to leave.”
“Because if they left, they could tell someone where the Garden was,” Hawker guessed, assuming that was one thing the king couldn’t have.
“Exactly.”
“Bashir told my father the scroll was found in the grave of the first one,” Sonia said. “Adam.”
She looked around. “A long way from here, though.”
“The scroll says they were tricked into leaving by one of the king’s guards,” Danielle explained. “According to McCarter, it doesn’t mention anything about knowledge of good and evil but it does mention knowledge of a wider world.”
“And once they left and gained this knowledge?” Hawker asked.
“Can’t go home again,” Danielle said. “Once they’d left, the king needed to find and kill them, lest they tell anyone about his garden.”
“ ‘So now you will suffer death,’ ” he said, quoting Genesis.
She nodded. “They had eternal life and everything a person could want and now the king, the one who had provided them with everything, sent orders that they be killed. Life in the Garden, death outside.”
“So the king becomes God in the text,” Hawker said.
“A different kind of God,” Sonia said.
“Different than the Abrahamic God?” Danielle asked.
“Not by name,” she said. “But by actions. If you read Genesis carefully, you’ll see a different character from the all-knowing, all-powerful God we meet in the rest of the Bible. He often seems surprised by things, like the serpent tricking Adam and Eve. Sometimes he seems confused or even afraid. When he comes to see Adam and Eve after they’ve eaten the apple, they hide and he doesn’t know where they are. He demands that they show themselves. He doesn’t know who told them they were naked. He asks them if they’ve eaten from the tree he told them not to. And when they say yes, he asks them why, what made them do that?”
“Religious people will tell you that’s not what He meant,” she added. “Usually right after they tell you to read the Bible literally, but that’s what it says.”
It felt odd to Hawker. Even though he considered the Garden of Eden a metaphor, there was some natural resistance to anyone offering a different view of the Bible. He felt it himself this moment, even though he had his own different views.
“Is this why Savi was upset when I called it a metaphor?” he asked.
“She was hoping you would see it our way,” Sonia said.
In hindsight he could see it that way. He didn’t necessarily agree with it, but his mind was open. In fact one thing he’d always wondered jumped out at him—if Adam and Eve were the people from whom all others came, how come they ran into other humans shortly after they left the Garden? If anything, that seemed to suggest a more earthly and different reality, more like what was being told in the copper scroll. People who had no knowledge of the outside world might think they—and the king who came around—were the only ones who existed. At least, that is, until they stepped into that outside world and ran into more people.
“Ever wonder what would have happened if Adam had refused to eat the fruit after Eve had taken a bite?” Hawker asked, thinking it sounded like Eve might have left, snuck off this castle/island, and then returned to tell Adam of the outside world. And then perhaps Adam went, too.
“Or if Eve had killed herself like Judas, before luring Adam in,” Sonia said.
There was an odd tone in Sonia’s voice, made odder by the way it echoed around beneath the stone outcropping.
“Either way, Adam would have been awfully lonely at night,” Danielle said.
Hawker had to agree. “Better to die with love than live without it.”
“The thing is,” Danielle said, “according to the scroll, the keepers of the Garden, this first one and his wife—whether it was Adam and Eve or not—they did try to come back here, only to find the Garden in flames. War had broken out between the king and the traitor who tricked the keepers of the Garden and as their swords clashed, the last of the miraculous gardens burned.”
As Danielle scraped another smudge of black carbon off the stone walls, Hawker wondered if the image of this garden in flames while men fought over it was the source of the Bible verse that told of God preventing humans from returning to Eden by stationing mighty angels with flaming swords at its entrance.
Fire, swords, no return; maybe, or maybe he was just trying to fit those puzzle pieces together again. To see a picture where there wasn’t one.
Danielle tucked her sample away and scanned around the ruins. “McCarter asked for samples of wooden beams and things like that, but I don’t see any.”
Hawker followed her gaze. The whole structure was stone, cut and laid precisely. He remembered McCarter telling them about stone blocks and how, without mortar, they’d hold themselves in place far longer than cemented structures.
The weight of the stones did the work. And with no mortar or cement to dissolve, the structure would last as long as the stone itself. That’s why the great pyramids around the world still looked relatively close to their original shape.
He’d said if humans disappeared from the earth today, a visitor five thousand years later might find no sign of the modern world, and yet the pyramids of Giza would still stand.
Hawker glanced at Sonia. She was studying the layer of soot as Danielle had, but she’d moved from the walls to what looked like a threshing stone on the floor. She examined it for a moment and then moved on.
One by one she studied each and every block and mud brick as if she was looking for clues. Finally, after pulling one heavy stone out of the ground, she stopped. Her eyes fixated on something underneath it.
Hawker looked. It appeared to be another rectangular brick about the size and shape of a cereal box. In the glare of Sonia’s light, he saw markings.
Sonia began to scrape away the dirt and then stopped, looking disappointed.
“This isn’t what we’re looking for,” she said.
“How do you know?” Hawker asked. “Can you read it?”
“No, but I’m looking for the sign.”
“What sign?”
Danielle answered from another section of the ruin.
“This one.”
Hawker and Sonia turned. Danielle was pointing to another of the flat, rectangular bricks. Like the one Sonia had looked at, it lay one level down, beneath another stone.
A carving appeared in its center. The mark looked like a rectangle, surrounded by a larger square, surrounded by a circle with hash marks pointing out in four directions, like a compass rose.
Sonia moved toward her. “That’s the one.”
“You guys want to let me in on your little secret?” Hawker asked.
They exchanged glances and smiled. Suddenly it was a girls’ club, like best of friends, with him on the outside.
Sonia dropped to the ground and began digging around the edges of the tablet. Danielle turned to Hawker.
“When McCarter translated the writing on the copper scroll, he found a symbol at the bottom of each column. It was the only symbol written the same in all three languages,” she said.
“That symbol,” Hawker guessed.
“Exactly,” she said. “It is a combination of the Sumerian symbol of life and”—she looked around—“a representation of this place.”
Hawker thought about that. The platform in t
he middle, the larger, sunken platform surrounding it, the curving sides of the pit surrounding the square shape of the platform: It certainly made sense.
“What are the lines branching out from the circle?”
“The four rivers of Eden,” Danielle said. “Or in reality, the four canals. They controlled the water to the pit, keeping it level, keeping it a certain depth and temperature. Because if McCarter and Gilgamesh are right, the Tree of Life didn’t grow on the land, it grew in the water, on the lower terrace.”
“It’s as if the story took on different forms,” Danielle continued. “The Garden of Hesperides to the Macedonian Greeks. The plant under the water in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis.”
“And what’s this place?” Hawker asked. “This building. I don’t recall Adam and Eve doing any construction work.”
“Like anything, we’re talking about a legend that traveled the known world seven thousand years ago. It might have been written down in a few places like these tablets or the copper scroll, but those types of things were far too valuable to move around.”
“Not to mention heavy,” Sonia said, still digging at the edges of the tablet, trying to pull it loose from the ground.
“Besides,” Danielle added, “at the time, ninety-nine percent of the people wouldn’t have been able to read them anyway.”
“So the story changes,” Hawker said.
“McCarter told me that myths form like that,” she added. “Stories begin as basic truth, but over time concrete things are replaced by the idealistic. Buildings and clothing no longer figure in the narrative because the Garden is no longer a working garden but has become a paradise. The work of men and women to till the land and shape the ground and divert the water is replaced by the power of God.”
“He should really be here,” Hawker said.
Danielle smiled. “He probably should.”
Hawker looked around. Despite being submerged for the last few centuries, the place was empty. It resembled many ruins in the modern world: picked over and barren. For all he knew the smoke and soot were not from the previous age but from Bedouins who might have camped here six months ago. Or before the swamp covered it.
