The Genesis Inquiry

by Olly Jarvis

  Matthew tried to get up but his body wouldn’t respond.

  The intruder’s mouth was at his ear. ‘You’re dying, don’t waste that knowledge – tell me.’

  Matthew turned his head away.

  ‘Let me be the one to finish it,’ Kline whispered.

  ‘No,’ Matthew hissed back. ‘You’ll never see its true value.’

  Kline sneered. He stood up and swept a hand over the books and manuscripts on the table. He picked up the protractor, examining it in the half-light. And then he saw the piece of paper. He grinned. ‘You wrote it down for me?’ He picked it up, holding it in the light. ‘Of course! Göbekli Tepe.’ He pointed through the window and waved the scrap of paper in front of Matthew’s face. ‘I had a hunch it wasn’t in Cizre.’ He folded up the paper and put it in his pocket. ‘Oh well, I don’t need you anymore,’ he said in a mock apology. ‘Looks like destiny is mine.’

  The man bent down towards Matthew, took a pillow off the bed and placed it gently over Matthew’s head. He pressed down harder, smothering his face.

  Already close to death, Matthew’s lungs made one last stand, allowing his mind a final dance.

  And then, as he felt his life slipping away, he prayed for a messiah.

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  The Škoda limped into a petrol station with a dimly lit, dusty forecourt with one lone pump. Badil went straight to the back of the vehicle and inspected the damage.

  Ella and Broady got out and stretched their legs. Lizzie and Jay followed, taking it in turns to swig from a bottle of water.

  Two men were sitting at a table with rusty metal legs outside a small kiosk. The attendant in a dirty boiler suit got up and sauntered over, engaging Badil in conversation.

  The other, a studious-looking young man with a leather briefcase on the ground beside him, was just visible under a naked light bulb with flies orbiting around it.

  Broady pointed up at the sky. ‘Can you see the comet?’

  Ella looked up at the stars. It was beautiful, a crystal clear night, the comet above the horizon to the north, its tail in a wonderful cascade.

  ‘It looks like a broom,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘They used to call them broom stars,’ said Broady.

  ‘A new broom sweeps clean,’ said a voice from the direction of the table.

  Ella wandered over, noticing a row of pens in his shirt pocket. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ah,’ he replied. ‘English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Cambridge,’ Ella answered.

  The man seemed totally out of place in the dilapidated surroundings. ‘Cambridge?’ he repeated, eyes widening at the name.

  ‘Yes, we’re historians, just on our way home,’ Ella lied, unsure why.

  He gazed at the rest of the odd-looking party. ‘Historians?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ella replied.

  The young man was clearly impressed. ‘I’m a student archaeologist from Istanbul, working at Göbekli Tepe. Just waiting for my lift.’ He pointed across the road into the darkness. ‘I say I like to work before the sun gets too hot, but the truth is I just can’t stay away.’ He gave her a coy smile. ‘Please,’ he said, waving at the three-legged chair on which the attendant had been sitting. ‘What is your specialism, may I ask?’

  ‘Ancient history, Stonehenge,’ Ella replied.

  ‘Ah!’ the man exclaimed. ‘Well, I’m afraid Göbekli Tepe is much older,’ he said, puffing out his chest.

  Lizzie and Jay shared a glance and came over, followed by Broady.

  Ella noted their expressions which she took as a warning to be careful with strangers. ‘Really?’ she said to the student. ‘How much older?’

  ‘Seven thousand years,’ he announced with pride and acknowledging the growing audience. ‘This site has been dated to 9500 BC.’

  Ella was thrown. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Carbon dating,’ he replied in a tone that verged on condescension.

  Ella frowned. ‘How come I’ve never heard of it?’

  The man laughed. ‘Maybe the world is not yet ready for a rewriting of history.’

  ‘Yes, but…’ Ella was tongue-tied by the revelation.

  ‘What she means,’ said Lizzie, ‘is why isn’t the world talking about this place?’

  ‘It’s not easy to change the way we’ve always thought about our history,’ the man replied with a smile.

  Ella understood. ‘It changes everything.’

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  From the outside it looked just like any old lorry, with photos of foodstuffs and some Turkish livery on the side. Twelve men and women of all ethnicities were sitting cross-legged against the sides of the enclosed section at the back on a steel floor. All were in traditional Islamic dress and headscarves like a group of ancient Mujahideen fighters. Some had machine guns in their laps and one was holding a digital camera.

  Sarah Hart lay curled up in the corner with hands and legs tied together and a gag in her mouth. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  Once the vehicle stopped, David Kline stood up and lifted his scarf away from his bearded face. He bestowed an intimate smile on each of his disciples, one by one, in the way only a leader can. ‘You, the chosen ones,’ he began, ‘have shown great loyalty to me and to the cause. You had the courage to see things as they really are, the death of our planet. For decades world leaders had the chance to save us, but they stood by, watching while the Amazon burns, our oceans drown in plastic and our air chokes on carbon dioxide. Tonight, we will finish this destructive cycle in the very place it all began. And we will begin anew.’ He walked amongst them touching their covered heads. ‘I promised you enlightenment. I promised you we would show our power – and now you shall see it with your own eyes.’

  The fighters twitched with excitement, hanging on Kline’s every word.

  ‘As Plato tells us, the world was destroyed by a great event eleven thousand five hundred years ago. Atlantis was lost as the sea levels rose. A man called Noah knew the comet was coming and so he built an ark. He filled it with every animal he could find.’ Kline screwed his hand into a fist. ‘He wanted to preserve life, just as we do.’ Kline scanned the expectant faces. ‘The ark landed in the mountains of Ararat at a place called Göbekli Tepe. Using all his knowledge from the old world Noah built a temple to give thanks. Then, just as the Bible tells us: Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.’ Kline crouched down on one knee. ‘But it was more than just a temple, it was an observatory, a warning through time, telling us when the cycle would end.’

  ‘Have you found it, David?’ asked a disciple unable to contain his excitement.

  Kline smiled. ‘They built more and more great stone circles to commemorate comets as they passed and then a thousand years after Noah had landed, they carefully buried the whole site under a million stones, perfectly preserving it for us tonight.’ He banged his fist on the side of the lorry at the driver’s end. ‘Come, it is time.’

  The driver, similarly dressed, got down from the cab, walked around the vehicle and unlocked the rear doors.

  ‘Bring her,’ said Kline stepping down into a small deserted mountain-top car park with an empty attendant’s hut in the corner. The starry sky covered them like a great dome. The distant lights of Sanliurfa could be seen far below them. The disciples followed Kline towards the path to the summit, some holding torches. A large man carried Sarah in his arms. All seemed oblivious to her distress and muffled protests.

  ‘Already it’s about money,’ said Kline waving an arm at a brand-new visitor’s centre, illuminated by a few uplights in a flower bed. ‘Thirty years they’ve been excavating this site.’ He turned to his followers and walked backwards a few paces. ‘They’ve even carbon-dated the first stone circle to eleven thousand five hundred years ago and still they don’t know what they’ve got.’ He laughed. ‘Staring them in the face.’

  They
climbed over a row of turnstiles and carried on up a newly laid brick path to the top, passing a half-constructed roof over some excavations to their left until they reached the main site. A curved roof on stilts covered an open air, circular walkway at the top of a wooden, slatted stairway. The walkway surrounded a large, deep pit. ‘Look,’ said Kline leaning over the balustrade. His followers shone their torches into the pit lighting up a number of stone circles, each slab metres high but much thinner than the boulders at Stonehenge, and these slabs standing before them had beautiful, ornate carvings in relief of different animals. Each pillar had a wider cross-section on top giving them a T-shape. ‘A lion,’ shouted one of the disciples, pointing like an excited child at the three-dimensional figure protruding from the side of a monolith.

  Kline led them around the walkway to the other end of the circle. ‘The earliest and greatest enclosure of them all,’ he announced pointing at the two huge flat pillars within a stone circle and in pride of place, an altar.

  Two women flung a rope ladder over the rail, secured it and waited for the guru to be the first to climb down.

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  The young archaeologist gave Ella a knowing smile. ‘We always thought that in 9500 BC we were hunter gatherers. Before farming, before the wheel.’ He lifted his hands off his lap. ‘But then, here we have people who must have come together in vast numbers to build this place. Such organisation. And use tools in the most intricate way.’ He seemed to be studying Ella. He hesitated, then said, ‘Would you like to see some pictures?’ He was already opening his case.

  ‘Yes please,’ said Ella as they all crowded around the table.

  He took out an A4-size album, gave the table a cursory wipe with his hand and opened it up. ‘This is the main excavation site,’ he said pointing to a photo of a circular pit containing several stone circles with a series of T-shaped stone pillars. The monoliths had the most extraordinary, three-dimensional stone carvings protruding from the side.

  Ella stared in awe at the intricacy.

  ‘That looks like a dodo,’ said Jay pointing to the carving on one of the upstanding stones. ‘But they’ve never existed outside Mauritius.’

  The young Turk revelled in the wonder of his guests. ‘There are many unanswered questions about Göbekli Tepe.’

  Ella felt her heart beating faster. ‘Everything is in perfect condition. I don’t understand it.’

  He gave her a knowing smile. ‘The site was used for a thousand years then deliberately buried under a huge pile of stones. Protected all these years.’

  ‘Like a marker in time,’ said Broady. ‘A time-capsule.’

  The man nodded then turned the pages until he found a large photograph. ‘The greatest mysteries are in the oldest enclosure, D. They even used plaster in 9500 BC. What we don’t understand is why the older circles are more impressive than the newer ones. If you look at other circles, Stonehenge for example, the earliest evidence is of wooden post holes, and then they move on to more permanent structures, here it’s the other way around.’

  ‘They were forgetting the old cycle, their building skills,’ said Ella, glancing excitedly at Broady.

  ‘Old cycle?’ the young man asked, regarding Ella with some confusion.

  They could see that of all the rings, Enclosure D was the most impressive. Huge slabs in a perfect circle with two massive stones in the centre facing each other, each several metres high. Even the ground around the stones had a smooth floor like modern concrete.

  ‘Foxes,’ said Broady, pointing to the depictions on the central columns. ‘Their tails have signified comets throughout history.’

  ‘And check that out,’ said Jay pointing to a monolith on the outer ring covered in more carvings than any other.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the young archaeologist ‘Pillar 43. The most intriguing of all the stones. People call it the Vulture Stone.’

  The side of the T-shaped pillar was covered in ornate relief carvings, with various animals depicted in the central area. A scorpion was clearly visible on the lower section and a bird-like creature in the centre was indeed a vulture. Above its wing was what appeared to be a perfect circle.

  ‘What does that represent?’ said Lizzie pointing to the disc.

  ‘We think it’s a severed head,’ he replied.

  Broady looked mesmerised.

  ‘There’s something about their positions on the pillar,’ said Ella. ‘It’s so deliberate, the way they relate to each other.’

  ‘Totally,’ said Jay. ‘It’s telling us something.’

  ‘It’s a date,’ said Broady slowly tilting his head. ‘The first dot.’

  The young man looked puzzled.

  ‘That’s not a severed head,’ suggested Broady. ‘It’s the sun’s position in the sky in relation to the other carvings – the constellations.’

  They all looked at the pillar anew.

  ‘The scorpion is Scorpio.’

  Lizzie stared at the scorpion. ‘I didn’t think people identified the constellations until about 3000 BC?’

  ‘Nor did I,’ said Broady.

  ‘Maybe you are right,’ gushed the young man. He pointed to another pillar with a small, round hole in its centre. ‘That site hole would have pointed to Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus eleven thousand five hundred years ago, if one takes into account precession.’

  ‘Precession?’ said Jay.

  ‘The position of the stars gradually moves over time,’ said Broady, moving around the table for a better view of the photograph. ‘Deneb is the head of the Northern Cross but some people call it the Swan because it looks like wings. Maybe they saw it as a vulture.

  Ella had never seen Broady so enthused.

  ‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed pointing to one of the two larger central columns. Along the longer sides of the pillar were three-dimensional arms clasping the rock, with the hands meeting on the thinner side. On the wedge end was what appeared to be a belt carved in relief with a fox-pelt hanging off it.

  Ella peered closer at the detail on the belt. She could make out a cup shape with three prongs inside the semi-circle. ‘It’s a three-tailed comet, just like the ones in the Book of Silk.’

  Everyone stared at the pattern.

  ‘Look at the cup,’ said Broady. ‘That’s the bowshock that you get at the front of a comet. They were worshipping comets.’

  The young man stared at the historians, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘Göbekli Tepe,’ said Ella. ‘It’s a monument to the comet strike. Rebirth and the beginning of the Holocene.’

  ‘And the animals,’ asked Jay. ‘From the ark?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ella, turning the page to find another photo of Enclosure D, taken from a different angle. To their astonishment, something else came into view.

  Between two of the outer stones was a smooth, flat, stone altar.

  Ella felt a shiver down her spine. ‘This is the place.’

  Broady nodded. ‘We need to go.’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid it doesn’t open until eight,’ the man said, fingering the pens in his shirt pocket.

  ‘No,’ stuttered Ella, ‘I meant the airport.’

  ‘I see,’ the man replied.

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Ella before striding off towards the Škoda where Badil was putting the finishing touches to a tape job over the bullet holes whilst the attendant filled the tank.

  She handed the petrol guy some lira and watched him wipe his free hand on his overalls before taking the notes.

  They all piled back into the car and waited for Badil. Before he had even put the key in the ignition, Ella asked to use his phone again. He handed it over. As they pulled out, she said, ‘You need to go back the other way.’

  Badil gave her a look. ‘Not Abraham Cave?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, typing the words into a text to Harris. ‘Göbekli Tepe.’

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  The last man came down into the pit with Sarah draped over one shoulder. H
e dumped her on the stone floor of Enclosure D whilst the others set up some free-standing torches. The pristine condition of the place belied its antiquity.

  Kline ran his hand over the carving of the comet belt on the thinner edge of one of the two central T-shaped monoliths inside the stone circle. ‘This is the spot,’ he said in a kind of manic enthusiasm. ‘The birth of religion, modern civilisation.’ He swaggered over to the altar and sat on it. ‘They all harnessed the power,’ he said, facing his believers. ‘Alexander, Atilla, Khan, William, Napoleon. Now it is my turn.’ He got up again and walked across to the outer stone with a site hole. The view of the constellations was blocked by the rubble surrounding the pit. ‘Deneb is in alignment with our comet.’ He patted the defunct stone. ‘It’s time.’

  Kline produced a flick knife from his pocket and opened the blade, then sauntered over to where Sarah was curled up on the floor. He bent down and took the gag out of her mouth. He moved his head to the side in a gesture of sympathy for his captive. ‘This is a great thing you are doing – a tool for change.’ He used the knife to cut through her bindings. ‘Please, David, I don’t understand,’ she pleaded, the American accent incongruous with the surroundings. ‘Please let me go.’

  He gave an almost apologetic smile. He handed the knife to the nearest man. ‘Strip her and place her on the altar.’

  ‘No, please,’ she whimpered.

  After a brief hesitation, the disciple bent down and began to cut through her t-shirt.

  Kline covered his face with his scarf and the others followed his lead. Then they busied themselves arranging placards in an Arabic script around the altar.

  A woman fixed the camera to a tripod.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Badil drove them back up the highway towards the sign then turned off up the road. In the distance Ella could just make out the looming shadows of hills and mountains. There were no lights anywhere.