And the Frenchwoman certainly seemed confident: she was calmly but firmly telling the men where to dig, ordering them this way and that, up and down the valley. For an hour or two the dust rose and settled; the spades rang and shovelled. The hot, joyless wind whirred over the Valley of Killings.
And then one man dropped his shovel. It was Radevan’s second cousin, Mumtaz.
‘Miss Meyer!’ he cried. ‘Miss Meyer!’
She ran over; Rob followed.
A portion of white bone was lying in the dusty earth. It was the curve of a skulclass="underline" small but human. Even Rob could tell that. Christine seemed intrigued, but not triumphant. She nodded.
‘OK, good. Now dig laterally.’
The Kurds did not understand. Christine told Radevan, again, in Kurdish: dig straight across. Don’t bother digging any deeper. It was a matter of covering the ground now: they had less than two days left.
The men worked to order, apparently charmed by Christine’s wilfulness. Rob joined the shovelling once more. Every few minutes they uncovered a new skull. Rob helped them scrape the earth away with feverish energy. Another skull; another skeleton. Whenever they found the ruins of another body, they didn’t bother uncovering the whole thing-as soon as they got the sense of one skeleton, Christine told them to move on.
Another skull; another skeleton. These, Rob noted, were quite small people. Typical huntergatherers, as Christine explained, five foot tall at most. Sturdy men of the caves and the deserts, with healthy physiques: but no more than averagely tall for the time.
They dug, quicker and quicker. It was messy and slipshod. The sun was past its zenith and Rob also sensed the great wall of water was getting nearer. The incoming flood was just a few days away.
Still they dug.
And then Rob heard another shout, this time from Radevan.
‘Mr Rob,’ Radevan said. ‘Look at this! A very big man. Like American.’ He was scraping earth from a femur bone. ‘Like American who eat many McNuggets.’ The femur was almost twice as large as any of the others.
Christine jumped down into the trench; Rob joined her. They helped to unearth the rest of the skeleton. It took time because the skeleton was huge: seven foot six at least. They all scraped earth from the pelvis. From the ribs. From the spine, unearthing large white bones in the grimy yellow dust. And then they came to the skull. Radevan pulled it out in one go, and held it up.
Rob gawped. It was enormous.
Christine took the great skull from Radevan’s hands and examined it. It was not an obvious human skulclass="underline" it was much larger, with slanting, birdlike eyes, stark cheekbones, a smaller jaw and a very large braincase.
Rob looked closer at the grinning jaw, with its teeth still intact. ‘This is…’ He wiped the sweat, salt and dust from his face. ‘This is a hominid, right?’
‘Yes,’ said Christine. ‘But…’ She turned it in the shadeless sun.
The skull was filled with dark yellow earth, giving the large slanted eye sockets a blank and hostile stare. Rob could hear a bird somewhere, calling-a lonely bird circling languidly in the sky. Probably a buzzard, attracted by the bones.
Christine brushed some adhering yellow dust from the skull. ‘Clearly hominid. Clearly non-Homo sapiens. Like nothing we have ever found. Very large braincase, presumably highly intelligent.’
‘It looks kind of…Asiatic. No?’
Christine nodded. ‘Mongoloid in certain aspects, yes. But…but look at the eyes, and the cranium. Amazing. Yet it fits. Because I think…’ She looked at Rob. ‘I think we have the answer here, to the hybridization. This is the other species of hominid. The one that interbred with the smaller people here, to produce the skull from the Black Book.’
The Kurds were still digging. Skeleton after skeleton. The number of bones they had uncovered was almost sickening. The sun was nearing the horizon: the day’s fast would soon be over and the men were keen to get home for the feast, the end of the day’s Ramadan famine.
When he was too exhausted to continue, too nauseated by the white of the bones, and the grins of the enormous skulls, Rob lay back on the dusty slope and just watched. Then he took out his notebook and began to scribble. To piece the story together. This was the only way he knew to unlock a puzzle: to write it down; set it out. And thereby piece together a narrative. He sensed the light fading as he wrote.
After he’d finished his notes he looked up: Christine was measuring bones, and taking photos of the skeletons. But the day was over. The desert breeze was mild, and freshening. The inundating water was now so near that Rob could smell it in the air. Probably no more than two or three miles away. He gazed down the trenches with his tired eyes. They had uncovered an enormous and mournful graveyard: a charnel house of protohumans, lying next to near-human giants. But the real puzzle remained hidden; Rob hadn’t worked it out; his notes didn’t make sense. They hadn’t yet managed to solve the secret. And the darkness of the desert meant they had just one day left.
Rob’s heart cried out for his daughter.
48
On the drive back to Sanliurfa they talked about the document, the reference to the Book of Enoch. Rob shifted gears, vigorously, as Christine shouted her theories across the rattling car.
‘The Book of Enoch is a piece of…pseudoscripture.’
‘Which means?’
‘That means it’s not part of the official Bible but it is regarded by some ancient branches of Christianity, like the Ethiopic Church, as being truly sacred.’
‘OK…’
‘The Book of Enoch is about 2200 years old and was probably written by Israelis, though we are not entirely sure.’ She stared ahead at the unrolling desert. ‘It was found amongst those documents preserved in what we know as “The Dead Sea Scrolls”.
‘The Book of Enoch describes a time when five fallen angels-the Five Satans, or the Watchers-and their minions came amongst early men. These angels were supposedly close to God but they could not resist the beauty of women. The daughters of Eve. So the bad angels took these women, and in return promised the human males the secrets of writing and building, of artistry and carving. These…demons also taught the women to “kiss the phallus”.’
Rob gazed across the car and managed a smile. Christine smiled back. ‘That’s the exact phrase the Book of Enoch uses,’ Christine said, drinking some water from a bottle. ‘Yuk. This water’s warm.’
‘Go on,’ said Rob. ‘The Book of Enoch.’
‘OK. Well…this intermarrying between demons and men created a race of evil raging giants, the Nephilim, again according to the Book of Enoch.’
Rob stared at the twilit road ahead. He wanted to comprehend what she was saying. He really wanted to. He tried hard. He got her to repeat it…but then he gave up. He couldn’t stop thinking about Lizzie. He wondered if they should call Cloncurry. But he knew that was stupid; they had to surprise him. They had to announce suddenly that that they had unearthed the secret-if they ever unearthed it: that was the way their plan worked.
But he was tired, sunburnt and frightened, and still feeling that spookiness of the desert. He could sense the nearness of the stones of Gobekli. Still out there in the wilderness. He remembered that carving of the woman, staked and pinioned, ready to be raped by the wild boars with the penises. He thought about the babies, screaming in their ancient jars.
And then he thought of Lizzie again, and Cloncurry-and tried to shunt the thought from his mind.
The conclusion of the drive was silent. And anxious. The Kurds said a muttered goodbye and went off to eat and drink; Rob and Christine parked the cars, wearily, and sloped quietly into the Hotel Haran. Rob carried the Black Book close to his chest, the exhaustion rippling through his arms.