A dusty array of buckled timber beams jutted slightly from the floor of the cave. No, they were the floor of the cave.
Adam felt as if he were far beneath the ocean, weighted down and wading in slow motion through the deepest, darkest waters. The beam of his torch picked out the half-collapsed remains of a creaking apparatus that might once have been stairs. Dust motes swam in the shafts of light that he and Meryam played across the beams, like plankton floating past undersea. Then the wind howled at the mouth of the cave and the timbers creaked again and the illusion of the ocean bottom vanished. His mouth and skin felt dry and his head throbbed and he stared.
Meryam released his hand and took a step forward, and the tilted cave floor groaned underfoot. Flinching, she looked down and Adam followed her gaze to see that her boot had pressed down upon another timber.
“Holy crap,” Adam whispered, frozen.
He swept his torchlight to the right, revealing thick, rough-hewn wooden columns, partly blackened by thick smears of pitch. Short walls that might have been the walls of animal pens blocked parts of his view, but there were other withered, desiccated piles of bones, large and small. Most of the mummified remains belonged to animals, but his torchlight danced across two shapes that might once have been human. He shone his light upward and saw the lattice of beams that still held a second floor, perhaps a third.
Not floors, he thought. Decks. God help me, they’re decks. The animal bones alone told the story but none of them thus far had been willing to say it aloud. Tremors of giddy joy shook his body.
Meryam took several more shuffling steps, dry timber sighing at the shifting of her weight. “It’s real.”
“Or it’s the greatest hoax ever,” Adam said. But no, it felt too real. Too quiet and ancient and looming, as if the ark itself had some impossible presence and awareness, like it knew they had come. Like it had been waiting. It even smelled real, though he couldn’t have described what that meant to him.
“This way!” Hakan called, reminding Adam that Feyiz had been beckoning to them and they’d ignored him.
Adam peered into the darkness of the deeper cave and saw the flicker of Feyiz’s flashlight beam. They’d have to learn what he wanted, but with Hakan so much closer—sixty feet away, investigating the western wall of the cave—Adam started in his direction first. Meryam blew air out between her lips, one hand on her belly.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Not important.”
With torch beams lighting their tilted path, they walked carefully over to Hakan. Adam felt the soft, dry, ancient wood beneath his feet and slid back into the strange, waking dream that had enveloped him the moment he had seen the collapsed timbers and the animal bones. Now the combined light from their three torches seemed to generate enough illumination that a patch of darkness shimmered into haunting golden life. Meryam came to a halt twenty feet from Hakan, but Adam managed several steps farther before he understood what had brought her up short.
So close to the cave wall, Hakan’s flashlight beam exposed a broad circle to detailed examination. The timbers were like long bones, almost as if they had climbed into the belly of an enormous whale, nothing but its skeleton remaining. Jonah, four thousand years on. The seams had all been treated with bitumen pitch to seal water out.
“I’m not an archaeologist—” Hakan began.
“Neither are we,” Adam interrupted. “Probably a mistake not getting that degree, right?”
Hakan turned, forgetting himself for a moment as he included Meryam in his gaze. “This is not a cave at all. The whole cave is the ark. Buried all this time.”
Adam could find no words.
“Smashing,” Meryam said, a grin spreading across her features. Then she punched Adam in the shoulder. “What are you doing, love? Get the bloody camera rolling!”
Adam swore. Exhausted and in awe, he’d completely forgotten. Laughing in amazement at the days and weeks—hell, the months—ahead of them, he dug out the camera and started filming, beginning on those beams sunken into the wall.
“It’s extraordinary,” he said.
Something shifted in the darkness to their right, farther into the cave. Adam whipped the camera around, its light revealing an unsmiling Feyiz. He had gone pale and looked like he might be ill.
“You think that’s something?” Feyiz began, shielding his eyes from the glare of the light, staring into the camera. “Come and have a look at this.”
Meryam started to ask if he was all right, but Feyiz turned his back on them. The beam of his torch led the way along a long passage, past a row of large stalls. Adam caught it all on film as he followed Meryam and Feyiz, with Hakan taking up the rear. The wind that howled outside did not seem to reach this far inside the cave—inside the ark, he reminded himself. Outside the temperature had fallen dramatically, but here in the recesses of the ark the air began to feel close and stagnant and strangely warm. Adam’s stomach gave a queasy rumble but he kept the camera steady as they followed the slanting passage all the way to what appeared to be the rearmost section of the ark, what had once been its outer wall.
“Here,” Meryam said, pointing to a mummified corpse propped against an upright beam. Its teeth were bared in something never intended to be a grin, mouth lipless, eyes nothing but powdery holes in a face more like papyrus than flesh.
“Naamah,” Adam said quietly. The wife of Noah. The name had popped into his memory and then to his lips. Odds were whoever built this ship had not been called Noah, nor his wife Naamah, but the names didn’t really matter.
“This is impossible,” Meryam muttered, glancing around as if entranced. “No flood could rise this high. And even if… if somehow this is real… it couldn’t be this well preserved.”
“You’re standing in it,” Adam reminded her.
He couldn’t argue her points—they were simple truth. And yet here they were. This ship was not evidence the biblical story had been a precise record, but it did prove the flood had taken place and that there had been a Noah—whatever his name might have been. No, the names didn’t matter. Noah would be fine enough, and so they might as well call this one Naamah.
“What’s this?” Meryam said.
Adam panned the camera away from the corpse, found Meryam, and let the lens follow her focus to a place on the floor where her flashlight had picked out a scattering of gleaming black stones.
“Volcanic?” he asked.
Hakan moved into the video frame, frowning as he knelt to pick up one of the stones. “Ararat is a volcano, yes… but no eruptions for almost two hundred years.”
Meryam kept searching with her torch. “This thing has been here a lot longer than two hundred years.”
“It’s not volcanic rock,” Feyiz said from the shadows ahead.
Meryam lifted her torch and shone it in his direction. Adam followed with the camera, spotted Feyiz’s flashlight on the floor, shining its light into a pile of dust and black stone. He had set the torch down, but now the camera’s own light joined with Meryam’s and Hakan’s to zero in on Feyiz. The bright lights and strange shadows made the bearded young guide appear almost two-dimensional, as if he’d been transformed from a man into a portrait painted on the air in front of them.
“It’s hardened pitch,” Feyiz went on.