by Richard Farr
For half an hour we climb fast and sure, in almost total silence.
We’re good at this. Very good. Rosko’s been climbing since he was six, with parents who consider the Bavarian Alps their personal jungle gym. Mom trained me on some of the nastiest rock in Scotland. Then Norway. Then most of the major peaks in the Wrangell–Saint Elias ranges, followed by a winter ascent of Denali. As for her—you don’t summit Everest twice, then Kanchenjunga, and then do record-breaking solo ascents of both Nanga Parbat and Cho Oyu, without knowing which way is up. But still, the Torre Sur in winter is a huge challenge, especially when the wind starts to pick up.
It rises steadily at first, then comes at us in more irregular gusts. I’m focused on that, on staying calm and close to the wall, when Rosko shouts.
Mom is leading the pitch, maybe ten feet above Rosko. For no reason that I can make out, she stops for a few seconds, motionless as a statue with her neck craned back, then seems to shade her eyes, point, shade her eyes again. Then she shouts something down to Rosko, who shrugs as if to say, Don’t understand. She shouts again, and this time there’s urgency in it. There’s a sort of flickering, then, as if the light is going out—or a shadow is passing over us.
At first I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.
“What?”
Rosko looks down to me and shakes his head, puzzled. Maybe I imagined the shadow after all, or it’s just the result of staring at too much sunlit ice.
I’m peering up past him, trying to figure out what she’s saying.
That’s when it happens.
Climbers rest. For instance, they get a good hold with one hand, adjust their bodies into a more relaxed stance, and hang one arm down. Lower the head too, a body-and-mind mini-chill before attempting the next move. Mom does something a bit like that, but it’s not quite right. She’s still holding on with both hands, but her whole body seems to go limp for a second, as if she’s fainted. The thought flashes across my mind: She’s about to fall. Then the opposite happens. She reaches up, almost lunges up, and starts climbing like a spider monkey. Brilliantly, deftly, inhumanly fast even for her—without stopping to place any protection on the rope.
On a wall like this, the lead climber is supposed to do only a meter or two before using a little device, usually a hex nut or a cam, to secure the rope to a crack in the rock face. That way, a couple of meters is as far as you can fall. Attach some protection, clip in the rope, only then look up and find a new hold. But Mom is ten feet up, then fifteen, twenty, far too fast for safety in any case, with free rope spooling out behind her as if she has forgotten rope exists.
It’s as if she’s desperately trying to get to something she’s seen above her. Rosko and I both shout. She doesn’t even slow down.
When she runs out of rope, forty feet above Rosko with nothing to arrest a fall, a projection in the rock face means that I can only just see her, but in the wind’s intermittent lulls I can still hear that she is shouting, or calling out to someone, or something.
Then the shadow comes again, as if the air itself has darkened, and I see, for a second or two, something wholly impossible.
Above her, as if congealing out of smoke, there is a shape, which becomes a recognizably human figure. It’s not on the rock, but floating above her. The image is so strange that my brain wants to dismiss it as an apparition, a hallucination, a trick of the brain or a trick of the light. But it’s stubbornly there. Reaching down to her now. Coming almost into focus, as if it’s about to be someone or something I can identify. And then as it touches her there’s a noise like colliding freight trains.
Rockfalls happen all the time when you’re climbing. You learn to read the surface for the marks they leave, and use other signs and bits of knowledge to pick a route where the danger from above is less. But you can’t avoid it; that’s why we wear helmets. In Alaska once, a piece came at me out of nowhere, made a noise like a gunshot as it was deflected by a small overhang, and just missed me. But this? This is like nothing within my experience.
For perhaps one full second the surface under my fingers twitches and bucks, like a machine being turned on, or an animal dreaming. Earthquake is the first word in my head. Cascades of ice start to come down. The figure in the smoke has gone, but the sense of a shadow persists on my retina, and my eyes hurt. Then, just as the movement stops, the top of the tower shrugs its shoulders.
It’s not a rock that moves, not a boulder, even. Shaped like a wedge, it’s a piece of the mountain. I’m still having trouble seeing clearly, but it’s as if a giant with a sharp knife has cut a neat slice, just a couple of yards thick by a hundred long, from a block of cheese. The thin sheathing of white comes away and disintegrates like old tissue paper. Underneath, a thousand-ton blade of rock is in motion—enough to bisect an office building.
Does that much mass accelerate in slow motion? Or do your perceptions work in slow motion when you’re confused and terrified? Not sure. But it takes forever to pick up speed. It rotates lazily. As it does so, a projecting part on the extreme edge, a knuckle the size of a couch, extends out toward us. It seems to catch her in the shoulder. Flicks her sideways off the rock with tremendous force, the way a boy might flick a plastic soldier.
I know she’s dead before she begins to fall.
CHAPTER 3
BABILANI
At that moment, Dad and Morag are six and a half thousand miles due north of us. Just off a plane from London, they’re hurrying through the big glass doors at a Boston TV station, where they’re about to engage in half an hour of televised banter about God’s anger management issues.
After years of getting nowhere with the Phaistos Disks, Dad’s thrilled to be part of a real find again—even when the find’s not his. Also, he’s totally unable to resist a bit of publicity, and it’s almost charmingly typical of him to show up for a TV interview with a teenage girl in tow, and simply bully them into including her on the program. Still knows how to hustle people. Still knows how to pull rank. Loves to pieces the idea that he’s the guardian of fascinating secrets.
To understand what Dad and Morag are doing, being interviewed in Boston, you have to fly to Fallujah in Iraq, float down the Euphrates¸ and set your watch back thirty, thirty-five centuries.
A sophisticated irrigation system is already in place. Farms line the river. Boats loaded with dates, grains, and cattle go with you downstream. Seventy miles later, trailing your hand in the water, you look up and see the heart of ancient Babylon. Rising from the center of the largest city in the world, a huge stepped pyramid, or ziggurat—a stack of seven boxes in descending order of size. But the top smokes and glows and flashes with reflected sunlight: it looks like a volcano with a lit fuse.
A mile away, you hear drums. Then you catch the first whiff of roasting goat carcass from ritual fires that are kept burning day and night at the four corners. Now the angle shifts, and the light from the summit no longer blinds you. Grand diagonal stairways become visible, connecting each level with the next. At last, perhaps half a mile away, you pick out figures climbing one of these diagonals. That’s when you get your first shocking sense of the scale.
The ziggurat is exactly ninety meters on a side, and ninety meters tall. Not big by our standards, but unequaled in its time: a man-made mountain. A structure you could model out of three or four hundred Lego blocks, if each block was a midsized suburban house.
Now the crowds at the base come into focus, people swarming like insects. At the same time you make sense of that earlier smoke and light. On the summit, there’s a golden structure, a temple maybe, reflecting the sun’s rays. And on the temple roof, in a deep stone bowl the size of a truck, a great smoky fire is burning.
What’s going on?
There are three different stories about this place. Three approved versions of the truth. A modern, dull, scientific, sensible one, and two others that are old, exciting, religious, and crazy. But as Dad-the-scientist likes to say, Weird stories don’t come from nowhere.
The earliest story belongs to the people who built this place. Babilani, they call it—“the gateway of the gods.” The priests, with their shaved heads and hidden bronze daggers and robes the color of oxblood, will explain that in terms any sci-fi nerd can understand. It’s the place for the local god Marduk to occupy, when visiting his puny creations; it’s the portal—the transporter room, if you like—through which he steps out from heaven, and through which in turn the favored few, those who are acceptable to him, ascend into the heavenly, immaterial dimension, escaping forever the world of meat and mud.
A thousand years later, Jewish writers in exile here will come up with an even grander theory, the book of Genesis. According to them, the original structure on the site, already destroyed in their time, was literally where civilization began. We were seminomadic herders, careless wanderers in the East, when God (they believed in only one) dropped by and favored us with the gift of Divine Language. At last we could communicate with all people, and with Him. But we were not satisfied with divine face time. We settled down permanently, built our first ever city, and instead of worshipping or thanking God, we decided to rival Him, by building a tower that would reach right up to heaven. God became angry: he destroyed the tower, scattered us over the face of the earth, and confused our tongues so that we could never do it again. Then the ziggurat was rebuilt—not to challenge the heavens, or transport worthy souls cloudside, but to beg for God’s forgiveness.
The Genesis version explains a lot, or it’s intended to: everything from the existence of nations, religions, and racial hatred to the lists of French irregular verbs lurking in my homework. Six thousand languages: no wonder we don’t make sense to each other. And hey, here’s a joke to lighten up the slaughter: those Jewish writers noticed that the placename Babilani is close to the Hebrew verb bal-al, which means “to confuse.” So over time it became Babel, “the place of confusion.” Funny funny funny—except that it turns out the joke is on us.
OK, but I digress: here’s the modern, sensible story. According to the scientific historians, the linguists and archaeologists—Dad, Jimmy, and Lorna, for starters—both the heavenly gateway and the outraged God are, to use a technical term, a crock of shit. Myths. Bedtime stories for the ignorant. Of course there was no such thing as ascent into heaven from some theological launchpad. Of course there was no Divine Language, and of course the staggering diversity of human languages isn’t to be explained by a heavenly act of tongue-shredding. Get a grip, people! The great ziggurat was, like the dozens of other ziggurats in the region, simply a place of worship. A church, if you like. It was made from mud bricks, so eventually it collapsed. It was repaired, and collapsed again. It was even destroyed by invaders more than once, rebuilt from scratch more than once. In the end, a ruin; in the end, not rebuilt.
Whichever story you favor, there’s not much left. Mud. Weeds. Brick dust. With not a shred of evidence for what truly happened. Or so several generations of archaeologists believed.
Jimmy and Lorna do love their gadgets!
We visited the Chens last year, when they decided to take a fresh look at Babylon. I remember my ruddy-faced, sandy-haired Scots auntie explaining it all. They had found nothing, at that point. It was just an idea, just a technique they were testing on some known features:
D’ye see, no? The substructures are less dense than the mud, by just a wee hair mind, because of the air pockets, and they draw down the surface moisture at a different rate. Right about dawn, even here in the desert, there’s dew. A smidgin o’ dampness. So I sets a camera to maximum contrast, couple it to the side-impact radar and the GPS. Jimmy attaches the whole gubbins to a tethered balloon, and a thousand feet up we go clickety-click-click! There’s not much for the eyes, mind. But ye run the data through this software, which by the way some of Iona’s boys in Seattle put together for us, and bingo! See that square? It’s a storeroom. Ten meters down, completely invisible, but on this enhanced image it sticks out like pee in the snow.
Ten days before we’re due to leave for Patagonia, Dad gets the big message from Jimmy. “Listen to this,” Dad says. “ ‘We’ve found the library, and it’s incredible. Buried much deeper than we expected, and most of the tablets aren’t in Babylonian even, but older languages like Akkadian. Superbly preserved too—like Nineveh, only better. We need you out here ASAP, Bill. It’s a bloody goldmine.’ ”
That night I make my special pasta carbonara. You fry fresh rosemary in olive oil, with a pinch of salt and insane amounts of finely chopped garlic. Add a little chopped pancetta, then make the sauce by adding a pint of whole milk and curdling it with a tablespoon of vinegar. Boil it down for ten minutes, and mix in a couple of beaten eggs right at the end. Sprinkle on some finely shaved fresh parmesan—never the pre-grated stuff—and coarsely ground black pepper. Good stuff. When I ask Dad the significance of Nineveh, he’s so excited that he can’t stop talking even with long thin worms of sauce-flecked spaghettini burrowing greedily into his mouth.
“Ashurbanipal. Assyrian king, bit of a scholar. Had a big library in his palace at Nineveh, in what’s now northern Iraq. The whole city was sacked and burned in 612 BCE, might as well have disappeared forever. Fast-forward a couple of dozen centuries. In the 1840s, a Brit called Austen Henry Layard dug it up. What you’d expect is rubble, right? Dust? But the library preserved itself by burning. Luckily for us, the Mesopotamians never invented paper—they wrote only on clay tablets. Even clay would have crumbled over centuries, but the heat acted like a kiln, baked the stuff rock hard. It’s an effect I’ve seen in several places. Anyway, Layard was able to send shiploads of them back to the British Museum in London.”
“Where they sat gathering cobwebs until you found them?”
“No no. Layard knew this brilliant young language specialist, George Smith—”
Mom’s turn to tease. “Surely not as brilliant as you, darling?”
Dad doesn’t break stride. “Obviously not as brilliant as me, no. But close. Smith started translating this stuff, and one afternoon he found himself reading the story of Noah and the Flood. Only it wasn’t Noah. In the Nineveh tablets, the dude with the epic storm forecast and the floating zoo was named Utnapishtim. And the Flood was being threatened not by just one angry god in a genocidal rage, but a whole committee of them.”
By this point in the conversation, I’m waving my hands back and forth like an air traffic controller. “Wait. Slow down. You’re saying this story was sort of an early draft of Noah and the Flood?”
“Centuries early. But even that wasn’t the first draft. Turned out there were half a dozen even older sources, each one with its own watery apocalypse and its own reluctant ferry captain. The version Smith discovered was part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It totally appalled the Victorians. Forced them to consider the idea that the book of Genesis, the supposed Word of God and all that, was just, you know, a yarn. Cobbled together from a whole tradition of much earlier yarns.”
Dad and the Chens are all familiar with this stuff. Mom is the odd one out, and she likes to tease them by talking as if ancient history is just a cute hobby—the sort of thing smart people do to entertain themselves if they don’t have real work, such as running a global corporation. “So,” she says, smiling indulgently, “you think the Chens have just found you a new Epic of Gilgamesh, lying there in the desert? And since your work on Crete is still going nowhere, this will be your next big thing. Naturally you have to drop everything, in the service of knowledge, ignore your family, and go to Iraq.”
He takes a swig from his glass, lobs a fragment of my special crusty Italian loaf into his mouth. He knows she’s only teasing, but still he spends a few half sentences stumbling around trying to defend himself. “If the tablets are as well preserved, and even older than Nineveh—I mean, if this is the library of Babel—I mean, there’s no telling what we might find.”
He chews, swallows, falls silent. Then he gestures through the doorway at the obstacle course of tents, crates, boot
s, and climbing gear in the living room. Tries, and completely fails, to disguise a smirk. “Sorry I won’t be able to come with you. No Patagonia for the wicked.”
Truth is, I’m jealous about him going to Iraq. Not that I’d miss Patagonia for anything. And not that I’m under any illusions about archaeological digs in Iraq, either. A hundred and twenty in the shade, dust like glass powder everywhere, camel spiders the size of rats. But I want to share in Jimmy and Lorna’s glory, see history being uncovered, see Morag again.
“My love, your disappointment is heartrending,” Mom says drily over the top of her wineglass. “Let’s face it: you don’t climb, you hate the cold, and you’d sooner have a root canal than sit in a tent making polite conversation with the Eislers about the current state of the medical-database industry. Go to Iraq. Give Lorna and Jimmy big hugs from me. And dig up your Akkadian tablets. I hope they don’t all turn out to be tax records or Little League scores.”
He’s on the next plane.
As we pack up and leave for Chile, I get a clear picture of life at the Chens’ desert camp by way of cheerful daily texts from Morag, who has so much more in common with Dad than I do:
Bill’s taken over the largest tent. Sleeps all morning, when it’s cool and he should be working. Then works all afternoon, when everyone else is trying to nap.
Already brought several hundred tablets to the surface. Yesterday he was grumbling about the way we cataloged them. The way I cataloged them, actually. So I took him for a walk in the moonlight and spent an hour explaining to him why my cataloging system is just fine.
The tablets are in every language ever committed to writing in Mesopotamia—plus a few scripts even Bill can’t identify, which means no one on the planet has ever seen them before.
We’ve established a rule: we talk to each other in a different language every day. Spanish yesterday, German today, Russian tomorrow.