Half an hour later Rob saw it, suddenly, the strange tower, looming. It was a broken pillar of a building constructed from burnt mud bricks seven storeys high, but shattered at the top. It was enormous.
‘What is it?’
Christine swerved off the main road, towards the tower. ‘It belongs to the oldest Islamic university in the world. Haran. A thousand years old at least. It’s derelict now.’
‘It looks like the tower on the Tarot cards. The tower hit by lightning?’
Christine nodded distantly, staring out of the window as she parked; she was staring at a row of little homes with mud domes for roofs. Three kids were kicking a football made of rags, in the yard that abutted the tiny houses. Goats bleated in the heat. ‘See those?’
‘The mud houses? Uh-huh?’
‘They’ve been here since the third millennium BC maybe. Haran is vastly old. According to legend, Adam and Eve are meant to have come here, after being thrown out of Paradise.’
Rob thought of the name: Haran. It was triggering some deep memory of his father, reading out the Bible. ‘And it’s mentioned in Genesis.’
‘What?’
‘The Book of Genesis,’ Rob repeated. ‘Chapter 11 verse 31. Abraham lived here. In Haran.’
Christine smiled. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘I’m not. Wish I didn’t remember any of that crap. Anyway,’ he added. ‘How can they be sure?’
‘What?’
‘How can they be sure it’s the town where Adam and Eve lived after the Fall? Why not London? Or Hong Kong?’
‘I don’t know…’ She smiled at his sarcasm. ‘But it’s pretty clear, as you say, that the early Abrahamic traditions date back to this area. Abraham is strongly linked with Sanliurfa. And, yes, Haran is where Abraham got the call from God.’
Rob yawned, and got out of the car, and gazed across the dust. Christine joined him. Together they watched a mangy black goat scratch itself against a rusty old bus; the bus, inexplicably, had blood down one side. Rob wondered if the local farmers used the bus as a makeshift abattoir. This was a strange place.
‘So,’ he said, ‘we’ve established this is where Abraham came from. And he was the founder of…the three monotheistic religions, right?’
‘Yes. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He started them all. And when he left Haran he went down into the land of Canaan, spreading the new word of God, the single God of the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran.’
Rob listened to this with a vague but insistent sense of unease. He leaned against the car and pondered; he was getting more flashbacks to his childhood. His father reading from the Book of Mormon. His uncles quoting Ecclesiastes. Glory O young man in thy youth. That was the only line from the Bible Rob had ever really liked. He said the line aloud, then he added: ‘What about the sacrifice? The slaying of the son?’ He searched Christine’s intelligent face for confirmation. ’I remember some story about Abraham and his son, right?’
Christine nodded. ‘The slaying of Isaac. The Prophet Abraham was going to butcher his own son, as a sacrifice, a sacrifice ordered by Jehovah. But God stayed the knife.’
‘There you go. Pretty decent of the old man.’
Christine laughed. ‘Do you want to stay here, or shall I take you somewhere even weirder?’
‘Hey, we’re on a roll!’
They jumped back in the car. Christine shifted a gear and they sped away. Rob sat back, watching the landscape blur into dust. Every so often the mouldering hills were punctuated by the odd ruined building, or a crumbling Ottoman castle. Or a dust devil, whirring its solitary way across the wastes. And then, unbelievably, the desolation intensified. The road got rockier. Even the blue of the desert sky seemed to darken, to turn a brooding purple. The heat was almost insupportable. The car rattled around bleached yellow promontories, and along hot rutted tracks. Barely a tree disturbed the endless sterility.
‘Sogmatar,’ said Christine, at last.
They were approaching a tiny village, just a few concrete shacks, lost in a silent bare valley in the middle of the baked and mighty nothingness.
A big jeep was parked incongruously outside one shack and there were a few other cars; but the roads and yards were devoid of people; it reminded Rob instantly and queerly of Los Angeles. Big cars and endless sunshine-and no people.
Like a city hit by plague.
‘A few rich Urfans have second homes here,’ said Christine. ‘Along with the Kurds.’
‘Why the fuck would anyone live out here?’
‘It’s got a lot of atmosphere. You’ll see.’
They stepped out of the car, into the kiln of dusty heat. Christine led the way, scrambling over decaying old walls, past scattered and carved blocks of marble. The latter looked like Roman capitals. ‘Yes,’ Christine said, sensing Rob’s next question. ’The Romans were here, and the Assyrians. Everyone came here.’
They approached a big dark hole in an odd and very squat building: it was a building carved literally out of the rock face. They stepped inside the low-slung structure. It took a few seconds for Rob’s eyes to adjust.
Inside, the smell of goat shit was oppressive. Pungent and dank, and oppressive.
‘This is a pagan temple. To the moon gods,’ said Christine. She pointed at some crudely carved figures cut into the walls of the shadowy interior. ’The moon god is here, you can see his horns-see-the curve of the new moon.’
The badly eroded effigy had a sort of helmet: two horns like a crescent moon balanced on his head. Rob ran a hand over the stone face. It was warm, and strangely clammy. He drew his hand back. The decaying effigies of the dead gods stared at him with their eroded eyes. It was so quiet in here: Rob could hear his own heartbeat. The noise of the outside world was barely perceptible: just the tinkling bells of goats, and the churning desert wind. Hot sunlight blazed at the door, making the dark room seem even darker.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine. I’m fine…’
She walked towards the opposite wall. ‘The temple dates from the second century AD. Christianity was sweeping the region, but here they still worshipped the old gods. With the horns. I love it here.’
Rob gazed about him. ‘Very nice. You should buy a condo.’
‘Are you always sarcastic when you are uncomfortable?’
‘Can we get latte?’
Christine chuckled. ‘I’ve one more place to show you.’ She led him out of the temple and Rob felt a serious relief as they exited the clammy, fetid darkness. They headed up a slope of scree and hot dust. Turning for a moment to take a breath, Rob saw a child staring at them from one of the humble houses. A small dark face in a broken window.
Christine scrambled up and over a final rise. ’The Temple of Venus.’
Rob climbed the last metres of scree to stand beside her. The wind was brisk up here, yet still burning hot. He could see for miles. It was an extraordinary landscape. Miles and miles of endless, rolling, blanched-out desolation. Dying hills of dead rocks. The mountains were marked with the black empty sockets of caves. These were, Rob presumed, more temples and pagan shrines, each more derelict than the last. He stared at the floor on which they stood, the floor of a temple, open to the sky. ‘And all this was built when?’
‘Possibly by the Assyrians, or the Canaanites. No one knows for certain. It’s very old. The Greeks took it over, then the Romans. It was certainly a place of human sacrifice.’ She pointed out some grooves in the carved rock beneath them, ‘See. That was to let the blood flow out.’
‘OK…’
‘All these early Levantine religions were very keen on sacrifice.’
Rob looked out across the desert hills and down at the little village. The child with the face was gone; the broken window was empty. One of the cars was on the move: taking the valley road out of Sogmatar. The road ran alongside a dried up old river bed. The course of a dead river.
Rob imagined being sacrificed up here. Your legs tied with rough twine, your hands bound behind your back, the foul breath of the priest in your face; and then the thud of pain as the knife plunged into your ribcage…