by Alex Archer
Up they climbed by stages, roping themselves in and waiting while Josh and Larry took turns scouting the safest routes. The sun came up without incident in the form of either wind or threatening storm clouds.
On their third such stop, Levi looked down at Annja, hanging over the abyss beneath his boot soles, smiled shyly and said, "I meant it, you know."
Annja had been trying to meditate, keep a lid on her misgivings about what the future held. Not to mention a natural apprehension about hanging like a fly on a wall—or in a spider's web—with nothing beneath her for thousands of feet except the odd ledge just wide enough to give her a good bone-breaking bounce, as a sort of preview of what awaited at the bottom. Now she was confused.
"Meant what, Levi?"
"About the dueling gods. I really feel it could be true." He smiled self-deprecatingly. "Almost, anyway."
"But you're a rabbi!" Uncomfortably she realized she'd just echoed Leif Baron, of all people.
"Yes, but I'm a Qabbalist rabbi. Not the Madonna sort, of course. The more traditional Jewish thing. It's a natural vice for a nerd."
"I've encountered those before," Annja said.
"So I don't necessarily believe the cranky mountain-thunder spirit a lot of the Biblical stories are about was the one true god. He's a true god. I believe he exists. So do all others. And they have their little spats."
Annja looked up and then, unhappily, down, to make sure none of the Young Wolves was listening in. Levi was keeping his voice down, thank goodness. Only Wilfork seemed to be close enough to overhear them easily. He seemed to be off in a world of his own. Annja was unconvinced that meant he wasn't eavesdropping. But he seemed unlikely to have the sort of ideological hot buttons most other members of the expedition did.
"The being I and those who are like me worship is the Creator who is the Universe," Levi went on, "and above such petty concerns. But He likes a good show. Some say that's why He made the universe. Or She, or It, or They—the important thing about the Creator is that no one can understand the Creator without being the Creator. Coming to fully grasp that is the first step of the dedicated Qabbalist."
"What's the second?" Annja asked.
"Trying our best to divine the Creator's true nature through study of what you call the Old Testament."
"But I thought you said you took for granted you couldn't understand God?" Annja said, trying to understand.
"We're funny that way," he said with a little shrug. It made him twist alarmingly in his ropes. She reached a hand up and grabbed his right boot to stabilize him. Whether the experience unnerved him or not he didn't continue the conversation. That suited Annja fine.
In the early afternoon the storm clouds returned with a suddenness that halfway tempted Annja to believe in Levi's dueling mountain-deities. They slammed together overhead like leaden gates with such abrupt authority she was surprised they didn't produce a tooth-rattling boom like thunder.
And almost the same moment a soft cry was repeated from above by Bostitch and Baron, and Annja looked up to see Larry's head silhouetted against the ominous boiling clouds. Although it was shadowed she could tell he was grinning fit to split his head.
Less than five minutes later Levi and Larry were helping her scramble onto the top of a gently sloping plain of ice, pierced by snow-mounded black juts of rock. A mile and a half ahead of her rose the snow-covered head of Ararat, rising another 1,300 feet above them.
And there, a quarter mile away to the south and west of them, the long, dark mound of the Ararat Anomaly seemed to hang over the edge of the abyss.
Chapter 21
"It's fantastic," Charlie Bostitch said. He dropped to his knees and began to pray. Too loudly for Annja's taste, although the upward slope inboard of them was gentle enough she doubted there was a great danger of avalanche here. Still, anytime you had big snow and slopes…
"Yes," Robyn Wilfork said, staring with his goggles pushed up on his forehead. "But what is it?"
"Noah's Ark, you Godless heathen," Baron growled. And somewhat to Annja's surprise he fell to his knees beside Bostitch and joined him, if more quietly, in prayer. She had known all along that he was a religious fanatic; but to see him demonstrate it in so conventional—and un-martial—a way was still something of a shock.
"It looks like a big rock," Trish Baxter said, coming up beside Annja. Tommy walked a pace behind her, shooting the snow-clad object itself framed by the members of the team and their response. The sound technician seemed unconcerned whether the more pious members of the expedition heard her or not. Annja wondered whether the editors would edit that particular sound bite out of the audio back in New York before airing whatever finally came out of this journey.
Finishing his prayer before his employer did—probably feeling the weight of his sins less keenly, whatever they were—Leif Baron rose up and began in a crisp but not loud voice to direct his crew. That entailed rousing them from their knees as well. He was determined to pitch camp before investigating the Ark, or whatever it was, itself. Snow had begun to fall, ever more heavily.
Levi had pulled his goggles, which he wore over his glasses, up over his forehead. He stood blinking at the Anomaly with snow sticking to the lenses and his long lashes behind them. "It really looks as if it could be something," he said.
"Why don't we go see?" Annja said.
She looked to Bostitch. He was the expedition head and her employer, after all. And he wasn't the first expedition leader she'd known who'd ever engaged in over-the-top displays of emotion on finding the object of an arduous search, either.
"Yes," he said, his eyes shining moistly. "Let's go look."
Even Tommy and Trish seemed perked up by the excitement of the occasion. The whole group seemed to glow with anticipation of discovery. Of what remained the question, but it was one Annja was content not to ask aloud. She knew there was no point in aggravating the majority of the party when answers might just be close at hand.
"I have to caution against expecting immediate results, immediate answers," she said, trying to pitch her voice to carry without making it too loud. The clouds had closed in again overhead, causing a sort of slightly echoing cathedral effect. It certainly seemed appropriate enough.
"It can take months for test results to come back, that sort of thing," she said.
"I have faith," Bostitch said. "I think the Lord will make all clear to us very soon."
"Let's hope you're right," Annja replied.
They approached the shape, swinging inland up the gradually sloping glacier so as to come at it from that way. The footing was nowhere near as sketchy as Annja would have thought; the glacier was a pretty stable structure, after all. And while it was going somewhere, it did so very slowly. It wasn't as if it had a deadline.
Still, somewhat to Annja's surprise, she could hear it. The glacier moaned and rumbled and grumbled constantly. Its voice was a profound basso that straddled the lower ranges of human hearing and reverberated in the marrow of her bones.
The Anomaly itself really was imposing. Several hundred feet long, it rose what Annja guessed was about a hundred feet, although it was sufficiently piled with snow and ice to make it difficult to tell. It was a matte black in the gray light.
"The color isn't inconsistent with basalt extrusion," she said aloud, largely for the benefit of Tommy and Trish, who were focused on her for the moment. The stocky cameraman was walking backward in front of Annja, filming her with the big camera propped on his shoulder. The young blond woman kept the foam-covered end of a microphone aimed at Annja. "Then again, it could be a lot of things. Including an ancient ship."
She thought that only seemed fair, or anyway sporting, to include. Despite its pushing the lower limits of Annja's conception of what it could be. Still, something about it stirred atavistic feelings inside her. It was a sensation as primal as the awe of gazing at the Milky Way through clear night air.
Could it really be the Ark? She couldn't help but wonder.
They had
to mount a steep, somewhat slippery bank to reach the object's base. Seen up close it had a texturing Annja had to admit was at least vaguely suggestive of the grain in wood. She took off her glove and touched the black substance.
"So what's the verdict?" Robyn Wilfork asked. "Wood or stone?"
Annja shrugged. "Feels like basalt," she said, "but again, that's not conclusive. It wouldn't be very likely, though, for wood to survive this long."
"Couldn't it be petrified wood?" Larry Taitt asked.
"It'd seem to be pretty fast for that process to take place," Trish said.
"But wood does fossilize," Baron said.
Annja nodded. "That's certainly true. That's why I'm keeping an open mind. Still, under these conditions it usually would not fossilize."
"I see you're not knocking any sample chips off with your ice ax," Wilfork said. "Afraid of defiling a holy relic in spite of your skepticism?"
She pointed up toward the crest. Its white stood out against lead-sullen, lowering clouds. A thin pennon of blown snow trailed away from it.
"More afraid of dropping several thousand tons of ice and snow on our heads. We need to be careful. Especially at this altitude when, frankly, our judgment is subject to clouding up without our noticing," Annja said.
"I still can't see," Tommy said, one-eyed behind his camera, "how the world could flood so deeply it'd maroon a ship up here, three miles in the air."
"Maybe the mountain rose since then," Baron said. "Maybe they brought the Ark higher."
"Mr. Baron," Annja said, "Ararat is a volcano. The way it rose was the same way most volcanoes do—through depositing material during eruption. If the Ark grounded there at some lower level, wouldn't lava have long since buried it thousands of feet under, if the mountain actually were building itself higher?"
She also knew now from her research that the mountain was estimated to have last erupted about ten thousand years before. But the Biblical literalists dismissed geological dating—especially since that would have put the mountain's last eruption before the Creation.
She couldn't see Baron's eyes behind his tinted goggles. But she could see the slight hunch of his brawny shoulders, the deepening lines around his near-lipless mouth. He was not happy with her. How will he respond if I totally rain on his parade and say it's just a giant rock? she thought.
"Hey," a voice called from higher up and to the right, around the northerly end of the great dark snow-cloaked shape. Everybody looked up to see one of the twins waving a mittened hand down at them. "We found an opening!"
Everybody looked at each other. Perhaps it was only Baron grabbing Bostitch by the arm and towing him up to where Zeb was practically hopping up and down with excitement that kept a mad rush up the slick slope from taking place.
Wilfork, nearer to the two expedition leaders, followed them closely. Annja, hauling Levi along the way Baron tugged his boss, got right on their tails. The Young Wolves crowded forward, practically baying with eagerness, and leaving Trish and Tommy to shoot the scene from behind. Annja felt a brief poignant stab of sorrow all over again at Jason's death. He'd have contrived to be right up there shooting over Bostitch's and Baron's shoulder as they saw whatever it was awaiting them within.
It turned out to be a dark passage with Jeb just inside, cheeks round as a chipmunk's with his grin. He turned and led them forward by the thin-milk light streaming in through the entryway, which was two black slabs of stone tipped against each other.
The passage seemed to be rock and ice. Annja felt a twinge of uncertainty verging on fear. What would it take to bring this all down to bury us? she wondered. But her own eagerness overcame her doubts.
We paid lives for this sight, she thought. We might as well at least see it.
Just as the last faint gleam of light from behind played out, attenuated by the twist of the short passageway and the bodies occluding it, Baron and Bostitch vanished from sight. Annja stifled a gasp of alarm. Then she realized they'd stepped to the side. At the same time she sensed a larger space opening before them.
Greenish light exploded outward to illuminate great dark ribs arching overhead. Baron had cracked a chemical light stick and held it high as if it were a torch.
"It's like a bloody cathedral," Wilfork whispered.
The journalist's comparison was certainly apt. Heavy dark expressions from the wall arced up over their heads like curved beams. Around their feet lay a tremendous jumble of rocks. Some of which, though, looked suggestively as if they might have been posts or beams.
Or is my imagination running away with me? Annja wondered.
In awestruck silence they made their way forward. As Baron swung his light stick left and right Annja saw a fugitive pale gleam from ahead. "What's that light?" she asked.
Baron swung back. Although the glow of the stick was anything but bright it briefly dazzled his eyes enough that he missed it initially. Then he said, "It's coming from the other side of that doorway."
With Levi crowding like an eager puppy right behind Annja followed Baron and Bostitch through the opening toward the faint light. They stepped into an open space vastly larger than the first. The vaulted walls curved over their heads to meet a flat wall tilted about thirty degrees toward them from the vertical. Sunlight—cloud-filtered to gray but almost blinding to eyes accustomed to the dark—slanted down from openings above.
"Oh," Trish said in a tiny voice, stepping through the entry behind the acolytes, who had spread out to either side of the opening, stepping carefully to avoid irregular shapes, probably stone, mostly hidden beneath mounded snow and ice from overhead.
The others came in to stand looking up and turning slowly around, awestruck.
"Dude," Tommy said, sweeping the great chamber with his camera eye. "It sure looks like a great big boat tipped on its side."
"So what is your scientific opinion, Ms. Creed?" Bostitch asked, not trying to hide the triumphant note in his voice. "Have we found the Ark, or not?"
"It's still too early to make any kind of definitive assessment, Mr. Bostitch," she said. "But there appears to be a definite possibility this is a man-made structure, as opposed to a natural one."
But a voice in her head was saying, "Definite possibility"? All right, Ms. Smarty, how many natural processes can you name that could account for these formations? Location and circumstance precluded this being any kind of natural cavern. Nor had she ever seen accretion formations—stalactites and stalagmites—that looked anything like what confronted them here.
What natural process or succession of accidents could possibly create what we're seeing, which looks like the beams and compartments—some busted up, most out of place—of an ancient shipwreck?
To her shame she couldn't bring herself to speak the thoughts out loud. It felt too much like…capitulation to superstition and bigotry of which she, at core, was no more tolerant than the New Yorkers were. It felt like betraying science. It felt like betraying skepticism.
From the corner of her eye she saw Levi assiduously digging at the juncture between two apparent beams with a pocketknife. He had shucked off his gloves. A shaft of sunlight fell on his back.
"Whoa! Rabbi, I wish you wouldn't do that. It's not, uh, not really considered best archaeological practice any more," Annja said with alarm.
"Sorry, Annja. So sorry," he said. He looked anything but sorry. His thin cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright behind his glasses. "But look at this! Look at what I've found!"
He'd pulled his gloves off. They lay discarded by his boots. In his palm he held out crumbs of some black material.
"Pitch," he said.
The others had begun to cluster around. "What?" Annja said.
"Pitch," Levi said, voice rising in excitement. "It's pitch. You know—made from coal tar, distilled out of bituminous coal. The ancients used it to seal and waterproof joins."
He waved a hand around at the canted cathedral setting. Motes of snow now drifted through the brightening sunlight slanting from above
, as if a single rent in the clouds allowed the light to stream down unimpeded by the gathering storm.
"This could be wood impregnated by pitch! The curving walls, the beams. That might account for how wood could survive so long on a glacier."
Annja felt acutely aware of the pressure of eyes on her. She saw the red light of Tommy's camera peeping over Larry Taitt's shoulder.
She shook her head. Not in denial of what he said, but in confession of her own inability to judge so soon. "It may be plausible," she said. "I have to admit I'm no expert on the taphonomy of wood."
"Taphonomy?" Charlie asked.
"The study of how things fossilize," Robyn Wilfork said. "Goodness me. I think I need a drink!"
"We need to remain scientific and systematic," Annja said, raising her voice to try to burst the bubble of excited comments flooding the cavernous space. "We can't jump to conclusions—"