Part 3 (1/2)

The Land Rover jolted as if to make her point. 'There's a wild and terrible beauty here. It's the beauty of symmetry, of form determined by function.

The land is the people, do you seep 'No.' I bit my lip. The images of poverty and starvation, illness and death were just too close to home.

Candy laughed. 'Dear boy, you have the soul of an electrician.'

I thought of a dirty flophouse on Deneb Seven and the squat shape of a Denebian and what I had done for him and how much I had charged and how badly he had beaten me afterwards - and I said nothing.

My thoughts were interrupted by distant gunfire. The gunfire muttered for some while and then abruptly stopped. There was a long moment of quiet.

Then a dull thump which might have been an explosion. Then the guns started up again.

I found myself thinking questions I didn't want to think. I could see Candy did too. We drove on in silence. I gripped the steel rollbar and tried to get my feelings back under control.

It wasn't easy.

Twenty minutes pa.s.sed with nothing more dramatic happening to break the tedium than a flock of sheep which had wandered on to the road.

Then, out of an otherwise clear sky, the drone of an engine became suddenly louder. A plane flew overhead, banked and swept back for a second pa.s.s over the Land Rovers.

The plane, probably a military spotter, flew low overhead as if its pilot was checking everyone out by sight. I bit my lip. Allied pilots did this in the Gulf War just before strafing their own tanks.

I waved nervously to the pilot, whom I caught a brief glimpse of peering out of the canopy through a pair of binoculars. The pilot did not wave back. The plane flew overhead, seemed to hesitate for a second, then, with a thunder of engines, roared off in a straight line over the nearest hills. The sound of the engine echoed briefly for a moment, then grumbled away to silence.

Candy glanced at me. 'I do believe you scared them off.'

I let my hand fall back into my lap, then changed my mind and gripped the rollbar again as the Land Rover swerved to avoid an apparently suicidal sheep, then lunged around a ma.s.s of rock projecting from the mountainside.

And there it was. G.o.d's mountain. Ararat.

We stared at the mountain and Candy continued to drive. She was ecstatic.

'Boy oh boy. It's a whopper, isn't it?' She almost jumped up and down with excitement. Her foot jerked repeatedly on and off the accelerator and the Land Rover jerked savagely with her.

I stared through the windscreen at the jagged slope of the mountain ahead.

Rising from a sheath of morning mist, Ararat was a double peak sweeping towards a thundery sky. Its grey and brown peaks glimmered with a coating of snow.

'It's seventeen thousand feet high. Mean, moody, and suitably Biblical, wouldn't you say?' Candy pulled off a spectacular handbrake stop.

I jammed my eyes shut for a moment, offering a silent prayer of thanks that we were the last vehicle in the convoy. 'G.o.d must really want us to find this d.a.m.n boat.'

The Land Rover skidded in a cloud of dust. Candy was reaching for her watercolours even before it had ground to a halt beside the road.

'Seventeen thousand ... how does Jim know where to look for the Ark?'

Candy grinned. 'Why, the answer to that should be as obvious as the nose on your face. Only the top was good enough for G.o.d's faithful to land on.'

Jason groaned. 'You mean the top? The very top? Seventeen thousand -'

'Yep.' Candy bounced from the Land Rover, dropped the tailgate and unpacked an easel. 'Anyway, Jim's always got those farmers and their letter to guide him.'

'The soldiers' letter? You don't believe that, do you?' Candy laughed. 'Good old Jim. He practically turned cartwheels when he found out about that letter. Personally I feel it's stretching. the limit of credibility to a.s.sume that a Turkish soldier would have marched across the border into what was then Russian, territory, not once but twice, in order to reach his home village.'

Candy grabbed a box of brushes. 'Still, if it makes him happy, who am I to argue? The fact that he ”discovered” the letter when those two con merchants tried to sell it to him for the price of an entire farm full of sheep was, apparently, not that important.' She laughed. 'Actually, that seems a little heartless. Let me put it this way: it's a great trip and somebody else is paying for me to be here and I get to paint all this beautiful scenery. If I get to paint an old boat as well that's just icing on the cake.'

I eased myself from the pa.s.senger seat into a slowly settling cloud of dust.

'You sound like you're on the wrong expedition.' I moved carefully. No telling what damage those last deep potholes had done to the old back.

'Expeditions are all in the mind, dear boy. Life is an expedition - to the most wonderful places you can imagine.' Well. Sometimes.

I joined Candy at the back of the Land Rover. I picked up the easel and carried it to a small hillock which was, amazingly enough, almost completely devoid of sheeps.h.i.+t. I set up the easel, peered over it towards the rapidly vanis.h.i.+ng cloud of dust which marked the movement of the rest of the Land Rovers along the road.

'We can't just stop, surely? What about the others? What about the major?

Won't he ... you know, worry or something?'

'Oh they're all used to me doing this sort of thing. We'll catch them up in a bit. I am the archivist, you know. It is my job.' She adjusted the easel, clamped a board to it and began happily squeezing paint from tubes on to a palette.

'What about the soldiers? They'll miss us. It could get complicated.'

'Oh don't be so pessimistic.' Brushes flew, paint slapped the board.

'Anyone would think I'd need an escort to go to the bathroom. I am sixty-three you know. I have sons older than the major. Did I tell you about them?'

I sighed. 'Frequently.'

'Well. Never mind. Hold the easel steady for me will you, dear boy? The wind does tend to fling it about so.'

I held the easel steady against a gusty breeze for half an hour, by which time my fingers were numb and my back was aching and I was beginning to think about Bernice. About the way she had looked when she came out of the shower this morning, the little lines round the comers of her eyes, the way her hair seemed to have lost its bounce. The tired brittleness creeping into her sense of humour. How old was she anyway? I thought about other girls I had seen and the way they almost always looked both younger and more interesting than my wife. Well, not more interesting - n.o.body could be more interesting - but ... still there was something. Wasn't there?

Something about them that was more attractive than Bernice? Sam Denton had it too, whatever it was.

And Bernice didn't.

Candy peered around the board at me and grinned. 'There. All done. That wasn't so painful, was it? You can pack the tripod now, if you wouldn't mind.'

I sighed. 'Can I see the picture first?'

'You can do better than that. You can hold it for me until the paint dries.'

'Can't we just wait until -'

'Heaven forbid! You know what worriers these military types are. We'd better push on before they miss us and start to panic.'

'But just now you said -'

'Yes, well, never mind about what I said just now. The quicker you pack the easel, the quicker we can be on our way.'

I nodded dubiously, braved a cloud of diesel fumes as Candy started the engine, shoved the easel into the back, locked the tailgate and climbed reluctantly into the pa.s.senger seat.