"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—"
She became aware of Baron's vindicated smirk. Charlie Bostitch had tears
running down his big saggy cheeks.
"We need to set up camp outside," Bostitch said. "I know, I
know—we're all excited about this. About finally confronting irrefutable proof
of the literal truth of God's Word."
"But—" Annja began. No one paid attention.
"But Ms. Creed's right. We need to go about this in a systematic way. We
don't want skeptics picking our story apart, now, do we?"