The Lost Ark (8 page)

As the sky began to darken, the wind brought with it the sweet smell of rain, and later, when the ledge merged into a steep grassy slope, the rains finally came. Attached to our windbreakers were hoods, which we immediately utilized. Still, the drops were like ice on my face and neck, until my skin grew completely numb and lost all feeling.

I led the way across the field, trampling through the tall grass. The patter of rain was somehow comforting against the nylon hood. Next, a low fog moved in. There’s something to be said about a swirling mist clinging to the side of a mountain, as if we had stepped into a fantasy land created by Tolkien. My tongue felt fat and sticky—the brutal reality of this world. I stopped in the middle of the grassy field and removed my backpack. Faye did the same and we both drank eagerly.

As we did so, a distant figure emerged from the fog. Seconds later, the figure proved to be a man. He stumbled once, but held himself up with a long wooden staff. He was dressed in a tattered robe. I could see blood on the cleaner parts of his robe.

Faye pressed against me; the feeling of closeness was not unpleasant, and her need for comfort was surprisingly appealing to me. “He’s a shepherd,” I said. “And, like us, he’s trespassing.”

The shepherd paused, swayed on his feet, and then fell forward.

* * *

He lay face-down, torn robe spread around him like broken angel wings. I carefully rolled him over. Faye gasped. His nose was broken and swollen and split from side to side. Blood poured from his nostrils and into his gray beard. His equally gray hair was caked with blood. He could have been seventy years old, and in those seventy years he surely had seen better days.

“What happened?” Faye asked, dropping to her knees.

I shook my head. “Could have taken a fall, or been caught in a rock slide. A few years back, an American astronaut was struck by such a falling rock. When they found him, he looked similar to this.”

Faye reached under his head and lifted it and poured water over his puffed and cracked lips, washing away some of the blood and exposing more deep wounds around his mouth. The old man opened his brown eyes for the first time and tried to sit up but Faye held him down.

He drank more water, then spoke for the first time, a rambling stream of nomadic Kurdish. When finished, I responded in the same language.

“What did he say?” said Faye eagerly. “What did
you
say?”

“His name is Makmur, and he knows of me.
The great white guide
, as I’m known to his people. I said I knew of him as well, a dedicated shepherd and respected patriarch.”

“Is that true?”

“The great white guide business?” I shrugged modestly.

“No, Sam Ward. Have you heard of him?”

“Of course not. I was being courteous. It was expected of me.”

Makmur’s eyes flicked to Faye, and the old man spoke again: “He says you must be an angel, because surely he has died and gone to Heaven.”

Faye Roberts blushed. I didn’t know she had it in her. “Spunky little devil,” she said. “Tell him that’s the oldest line in the book.”

I did. “He also says you would make a fine shepherd’s wife, and he has a grandson available.”

“Remind him that he’s too injured to play matchmaker.”

Sheet lightning flashed, illuminating the dark underbelly of the storm clouds. The old man spoke in a long rambling stream and I translated between his many pauses: “He says he has a right to live and work and eat off the mountain just as his father did before him, and his father’s father before him, etc., etc. He was beaten as a warning for others to stay away.”

“Who beat him?”

“Soldiers.”

We were silent. Makmur’s breathing became increasingly labored. Blood bubbled from his lips, mixed with saliva. The rain came down steadily. The rain somehow made the setting even more forlorn.

Faye asked, “Has he seen my father?”

I repeated her question and the old man responded: “There were two men, foreigners, above the Gorge. That was a month or two ago. But he does not know who they were or why they were here.”

Faye closed her eyes and seemed to pray a silent prayer. Meanwhile, I opened Makmur’s robe. There was a pool of blood spreading like a disease under the paper-thin skin of his abdomen. Internal bleeding. His ribs were broken, and maybe also a punctured lung, judging by his ragged breathing. Faye held his head in her lap as the wind and rain swept over us. We bundled the old man back up and sat with him until he died. His last breath was extraordinarily long, and his chest seemed to shrink down into the rocky soil. I shut his eyes.

Five minutes later, Faye was still holding his head. I reached over and touched her shoulder. She looked at me, eyes troubled and wet. “Why did they kill him, Sam?”

Thunder rumbled overhead. Water dripped steadily from the end of my nose. I looked at the beaten body. “My guess is that Emir Omar Ali has something to hide. Perhaps something very important.”

We stared down at the sodden, broken body. The rain washed the blood away from his face. Faye finally said, “Won’t the wild animals get him?”

“Probably.”

“Well, I won’t have that.”

Faye shucked her backpack, scavenged the area for the dark volcanic rocks and began placing them around the body. I slipped out of my own pack and helped, taking us the better part of an hour to completely cover Makmur’s small body. Finally, I broke his gnarled staff a third of the way down and secured it with twine from my backpack and shoved the makeshift cross between the stones over his head.

Chapter Sixteen

The rain turned into a freezing drizzle. We had been hiking for the better part of six hours. During that time I thought of Makmur. He was murdered, that much was true. A powerful man like Omar Ali, acting within Turkish authority, could do just about anything. And trespassers were fair game. A simple beating of an old shepherd would go unnoticed, even if it resulted in death.

The temperature continued to drop; our breaths fogged before us. Later, the drizzle stopped and there was a break in the clouds and the sun shone brightly down as if making up for lost time. A pair of white snowfinches streaked overhead, followed by an alpine chough that turned its head and watched us, then disappeared up through the clouds.

The grassy slope was mostly barren, with the occasional outcropping of igneous rock. Later, we stopped beside a crystal clear stream, which wound down from above, bubbling over smooth stones. I handed out dried fruit and almonds. Almost too exciting for words. After eating, we sat back in the lush grass. Faye laced her fingers behind her head and stared up at the overcast sky. “Let’s be reasonable, Sam. There is no ark.”

“Not according to Mrs. Dartmouth,” I said.

“Who’s Mrs. Dartmouth?” she asked.

“My Sunday school teacher.”

“Of course.”

The water made relaxing bubbling noises, the sort that’s recorded and sold in alternate health stores everywhere. I pulled out a shoot of grass and stuck it between my teeth. It tasted just like grass.

I said, “I’ve heard all the arguments before. The arguments bore me. It’s a moot point. A classic example of science versus faith. I don’t know much science, and I don’t have much faith.”

“That’s taking the easy way out, Sam,” Faye said. “Other than some unusual animal deposits that may be the results of a massive
local
floods, there’s just no evidence of a world-wide flood.”

“They say God works in mysterious ways.”

“But where did the water come from, Sam? And I don’t buy into the Canopy Theory. There’s little if any evidence supporting that Earth was covered in a layer of water vapor which contributed to the flood. Even so, where did all the water go? How did all the animals fit into one ark? How did the animals come to be on the ark?”

“Refer to my prior comment.”

I closed my eyes. My stomach made some digesting noises. Something rustled in the grass maybe twenty feet away. Probably a field mouse.

“To be fair,” she added, “there’s substantial evidence of a massive flood occurring in the Black Sea basin about seventy-five hundred years ago. Two colleagues of mine, both noted oceanographers, have proven this event to be the largest in recent history, geologically speaking. Many lives were lost, including whole communities. The evidence even suggests that this disaster helped spread farming into central Europe, and could be the basis of the Noah’s ark story, along with the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.”

“Should I make copious notes for the quiz later?”

“Are you ever serious, Sam?”

“Look,” I said. “You scientists have all the proof you need to denounce it, the believers have all the faith they need to believe, so who the hell cares what I think?”

“But you make a living endorsing that myth.”

“Correction, I make a living safely guiding people onto a very dangerous mountain. What they do on the mountain is their business.”

“Have you ever seen any evidence of the ark?”

“No.”

She sat back, satisfied. “As I said, it’s a myth. Bedtime stories. A classic hero tale, one man conquering nature and all that.”

“Now that you’ve got it all figured out,” I said. “Perhaps we should get going.”

And that’s when Faye screamed, and not because of a field mouse.

* * *

The creature was long and beautiful and as deadly as they come. Relative to the North American cottonmouth, the puff adder, with its patch-work pattern, was perfectly camouflaged for its surroundings. It moved languidly through the dry grass a foot away from Faye’s out-stretched leg.

“Sam!”

Puff adders were deaf; or, more accurately,
lacked
hearing. Good thing.

“Christ, Sam, do something!”

“Just be still.”

Its forked tongue, covered in sense organs, flicked in and out, testing its surroundings. The adder was long, perhaps the longest I’ve seen on the mountain. And it was shedding. Seen in a different light, the snake could look ghastly, which was probably the light in which Faye was seeing it.

“I’m going to faint, Sam.”

“Not a good idea,” I said.

“I-I can’t breathe.”

I moved forward, crouched low to the ground. The adder paid little attention to me, or even to Faye, for that matter. It seemed intent on the bubbling stream, and suddenly made a turn for the worse…slithering over Faye’s ankle.

“Sam!”

“Sit still.”

“I can’t breathe.”

The snake’s tongue flicked out rapidly, wiggling like a worm on a hook. Faye’s eyes suddenly rolled up into her head and her elbows slipped from under her. She fell silently back into the soft grass. It was just as well, and a whole lot quieter.

I grabbed the snake’s tail and pulled it away from Faye. True to its name, the creature puffed out extraordinarily and swung its jaws, bubbling with venom, at me, but they fell just short. Thirty feet away, I set the creature free in the wet grass.

Chapter Seventeen

We followed a series of sheep trails along a rocky slope as the wind hit us first from one direction, then another. Sparring like a boxer. The effect was complete instability.

I checked on Faye. She appeared to be doing fine. Her face was set in grim determination. Grim determination was an asset on this mountain. We stopped under a rock overhang and drank from our water bottles. I watched a dust devil move up the slope, then lose its steam and dissipate into nothing. Faye said, “I’ve never fainted before.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

“But nothing to be proud of either.”

“Then I promise not to tell,” I said, “no matter how much the tabloids offer.”

The wind tousled her hair. Her hair looked good tousled. She removed her sunglasses and looked at me. “You can be very sweet behind the jokes and tough-guy attitude.”

“Sweet, tough and funny,” I said. “A hell of a combination.”

“Notice I didn’t say modest?”

“I noticed.”

Her eyes followed the slope all the way to the snow-capped peak thousands of feet above. “Do you think we’re wasting our time?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe Emir Omar Ali has some answers to your father’s disappearance.”

“Why do you say that?”

I said, “The shepherd established that your father and his student were above the Ahora Gorge, which may be near Omar’s camp. If your father did come across Omar, he would have stumbled upon a whole hornet’s nest of trouble—just look at what happened to the shepherd.”

“Do you think Omar killed them?”

I shrugged.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“Maybe we should have a look at Omar’s camp,” I said.

Faye chewed her lower lip, alternately moistening it with the tip of her pink tongue. I didn’t chew my lip; instead, I watched her. Same effect, less chewing. “But how do we get in?” she asked finally.

“We’ll cross that ice bridge when we get there,” I said.

“I suppose we can’t just say we were in the neighborhood,” Faye said.

“No,” I said.

“And selling Girl Scout cookies is out of the question.”

“That was funny.”