His interest lay in what they’d found inside the ark.
The ark—if that was really the word for it—had been buried within Mount Ararat like a tumor nested in a human body, just waiting to be discovered. Walker would have said locating Noah’s ark on Ararat was impossible after all the time and money people had spent searching for it over the years, but now he stood inside it.
They’d had a short introductory tour to the basic structure of the ark. Lights had been strung throughout but they seemed only to offer small pools of illumination. There were generators supplying power to small space heaters in some of the stalls that lined the three decks and the lights offered some warmth, but there were no fires allowed. With timber this old, the members of what was now being called the Karga-Holzer Ark Project—KHAP—had to be damn careful not to burn the whole thing to cinders. It was damned cold, and even deep inside the warren of stalls and walkways, the mountain chill spread with every gust of wind.
A quick visual inspection had confirmed what he’d seen from the chopper. The leftmost, or western, end of the cave showed that the avalanche had exposed the entirety of that side of the ark, from top to bottom. On the right, however, the rock and soil that had been in place for thousands of years still partly covered the ark, leaving some of the outer wall timbers still in place. On that side—the east—the opening angled down to a gap of perhaps ten feet. It would make that side of the ark’s interior much darker, but Walker knew it would be a little warmer and less drafty on that side as well.
After the introductions, Meryam and Adam guided Kim Seong and Father Cornelius up to level three. Walker hung back on the first, stopping to watch a team of archaeologists at work around a dusty collection of human bones hung with gray remnants of both skin and clothing—human hide and animal hide were indistinguishable from each other. He noticed one of the bodies had a thick leather cord around its neck, a sharp chunk of black rock hung from it like some kind of charm. Studying the other cadaver, he thought there might be another necklace on that one.
“Two bodies?” he asked, because there seemed to be more limbs than there ought to be.
One of the archaeologists lifted her head, blinking in surprise, so entrenched in her toil that she had not realized their work was being observed.
“Three. Two adults, one child,” she said in a British accent.
Walker winced at the mention of a child, then admonished himself. These remains were thousands of years old. In ancient days, children had lost their lives for any number of reasons. If a flood in any way similar to the one described in the Bible had actually taken place, countless children would have perished. Reacting to the news of this one child made him feel like a rookie, new to the kind of tragedy the world had always offered.
The flood, he thought, mentally tracking backward, surprised that he’d accepted the concept so readily. Could this be real?
He’d encountered monsters before, things that would make an ordinary person scream just from learning they existed, but all of them had turned out to have a solid, scientific explanation. Unnatural, perhaps, but not supernatural. Yet the very presence of this ship, buried in the side of a mountain, implied that there was truth at the core of one of the most widely known myths of world religions. Walker had made some hard choices where his family and his life were concerned and, in doing so, he’d lost faith in himself. Now, he was here, looking for something to believe in.
Christ, he thought. All you need now is a bottle of beer and a sad country song on the jukebox. He forced himself to focus on the archaeologists as they worked to preserve the ancient remains.
They were four thousand meters above sea level. All kinds of theories had been put forward regarding real events that might have inspired the original tales of the great flood. Some of those theories came from crackpots and others from respected researchers, but Walker had not seen a single nonreligious theory that would explain the ark landing at this elevation.
Yet here it had landed.
The ark lay at an angle, tilted toward the mountain. At some point it had come to rest on a mountain ridge and centuries of landslides had covered it, filled the ridge, packed rock and dirt around the ship. Meryam had said that her team believed there might be a crevasse beneath the ark, so they should all be treading carefully.
“Sorry, who are you, exactly?” the archaeologist asked.
When he introduced himself, she frowned, maybe wondering why the United States would send someone from the National Science Foundation—someone whose inability to identify aged human remains marked him as clearly not an archaeologist. Or maybe she’s wondering why nobody told her the project was getting new blood.
“A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Walker,” she said. “I’m Helen Marshall. Marginally in charge of the archaeological team. They dragged me out of Oxford for this. This is Polly Bennett, my right hand among the group of graduate students I shanghaied for this project.”
Tall and muscular, Polly had a spray of birds in flight tattooed on the back of her neck, and she’d shaved the left side of her head and dyed the other side of shoulder-length hair a vivid green. Walker thought she didn’t look the part of the archaeology grad student, but then he admonished himself for it. This job wasn’t about how you looked.
Polly barely glanced up from the seriousness of her efforts, but she did offer a slight salute of greeting.
Professor Marshall cocked an eyebrow. “I’d shake, but…”
She held up both dusty, gloved hands and gave a small shrug.
“Understood. And I’m sorry to interrupt your work.”
“Not at all. I’m glad you’re taking an interest. It’s not every day you see something impossible.”
Walker nodded. “Agreed. Though why do I have the feeling you’re not just talking about the elevation?”
Professor Marshall opened her arms to take in their surroundings. “This thing is at least five thousand years old, by my best guess. That’s about the same time the Egyptians figured out how to lash planks together to build a hull, though this might be even older. But this ship—”
“The ark.”
“If you like. The ark is far larger and more elaborate than anything else built in that era. The Khufu ship was entombed at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza about five hundred years later, and that had similar length, but that was nothing more than a barge.”
Walker studied her. “You’re saying it shouldn’t exist at all.”
“Don’t mistake me. I’m thrilled it’s here. It’s like a dream—the kind of thing I never imagined I would ever get to be a part of—but when I say it’s like a dream, that’s in more ways than one. It feels so surreal. If you want your mind boggled even more by just how impossible this seems, talk to Professor Olivieri.”
He didn’t ask who that might be, assuming he’d meet Professor Olivieri soon enough. The ark wasn’t that big.
“So,” Walker said, “you think the Bible story is true? God sent the flood to—”
Professor Marshall shot him a sharp look. “Don’t bring God into it, Dr. Walker. We’re here to examine and report, not to explain. We’ll leave that part to others.”
As she returned to her work, Walker stared at the wall just beyond where her team was working. He’d spotted long furrows clawed into the timbers around what appeared to be a door.
“Are those…”
She glanced up. “Sorry?”
Walker pointed at the scratches on the door—a door that had been tilted toward the mountain, pressed there, trapping people inside. “Is that what it appears to be?”