Part 5 (1/2)

'So tell me: it's a big mountain. How do you know we're going the right way?'

Raelsen reached into his pocket and pulled out a waterproof envelope. He showed me a number of aerial photographs of the local area.

I noticed the NASA logo printed in one comer. 'Satellite pictures?'

'Shuttle pictures, actually. They show the Ark, known locally as the Tendurek Formation. They give an exact grid reference.'

I sighed. 'It's no fun when the machines do it for you, is it?'

He smiled. I could see he understood. He tucked the photographs away as we led the mules around a big, water-filled depression in the rocks. I chewed absently on my amomum stem. 'Do you suppose Utnapishtim had any thoughts on the significance of frogs with relevance to the Ark?'

He laughed again. 'Got me on that one.' He seemed about to add something when we rounded a bulbous granite outcropping. Instead of speaking he stopped. Actually we all stopped. Conversation ceased.

We were here. It was here. We'd found the Ark.

It didn't look like the Ark. It didn't look much like a boat at all. It was a shallow depression in the ground bordered by low walls which rose from the ground to a height of a few yards. The walls formed a lens or eye-shape some four hundred feet long and about a hundred and twenty feet wide at the point I was surprised to find myself already thinking of as 'amids.h.i.+ps'. Inside the perimeter the ground was uneven, distorted by the ma.s.s of stone we had walked around, which projected into the formation for nearly a third of its width.

The whole formation sloped uphill so that the farther end was some hundred feet above the nearer, roughly on a level with the top of the stone outcropping.

Of course n.o.body was taking observations at this exact moment - they were all too busy partying.

Well, all except Dot Baumgardner. While everyone else had more or less abandoned sensible thinking and were leaping around and hugging one another, she was doing her level best to be Mister Spock. She tethered the mules. She watered them. She broke out the cooking gear and started a fire and put on the kettle and made two gallons of tea and while it was brewing broke out her field a.n.a.lysis kit and started a compositional a.n.a.lysis of part of the main structure.

The only other person actually doing any work was E.J. 'Reefer'

McCormack. The ponytailed student was waving his camcorder round like a b.u.t.terfly net and trying to persuade people to say something significant about the moment while puffing wildly on a joint, which he took great delight in referring to as theCamberwell Carrot'.

In this respect he didn't appear to be doing anything vastly different from the rest of them. Raelsen, Ed Levinson and Ellie n.o.ble the radar operators and Terry Sehna the archaeologist were engaged in a sort of four-point square dance with no rules. As for Dilaver, he seemed both fascinated and amused by the sight of these foreign adults behaving like village kids. He lost no time in joining in the revelry, hopping madly around the scientists, muttering 'Pretty view', and 'Beg pardon?' with a regularity they all seemed to find hilarious.

So I sat down beside the fire and made myself a brew and sipped it gratefully while watching the madness.

After a few moments the two soldiers who had accompanied us on the expedition came over, billycans drawn and ready for use. I plied them with tea and smiles. With depressing predictability they responded best to the tea.

And so the party went on.

After an hour I broke out my sleeping bag and tent. It was obvious we were going to get no work done this evening. I set up the tent, had a short but deeply significant conversation with the mules and then went for a walk.

I found a halfway comfortable rock and sat on it, watching the sunset. I tried not to think of Jason and failed miserably. b.l.o.o.d.y husbands. Why do they make themselves so important and then go and mess you up? They're so d.a.m.n good at it. You'd think it was an evolutionary imperative.

The sun went away and the sky darkened. The mutter of distant guns was swamped by the chatter of frogs. I groped in my pocket for another sherbet flying saucer and held it up against the purple glow of sunset, wis.h.i.+ng for just a moment that it was real and that it had come to take me away from all this.

I indulged myself for a moment, then surrendered to the inevitable and ate the flying saucer. As I munched my gaze was caught by something else moving in the sky in its place.

A plane.

It was low and slow. Not like a spotter plane. This puppy was big, like a troop carrier. I resisted the impulse to wave at it.

There were no lights on this plane. That in itself wasn't unusual. It was very quiet though. It pa.s.sed overhead, vanished behind the peak of Mahser Dagi. I lost sight of it then in the gathering darkness.

The engine noise seemed to take a long time to fade.

I waited a long time for the stars to come out but clouds covered the sky without a break, scudding along before an indifferent breeze.

Feeling cold and suddenly alone, I got up, stretched and trudged back to camp. I didn't know it then but we were no longer alone on the mountainside.

I crawled into my sleeping bag and slept like a baby.

Next morning we breakfasted early and, over coffee, decided to split the expedition. Dot had spent the previous evening and a good few hours this morning working on the Ark structure and now wanted Dilaver to show her something she referred to as the drogue stones.

Most of what I knew about drogue stones had been learnt several thousand years ago in Egypt. A trip down the Nile on a trading boat had shown me how clever the Egyptians were at negotiating the dangerous tidal flux at bends in the river. The high-sided boats they built were exceptionally susceptible to the tidal flow at river bends because they were built without keels. (Don't ask me why - these were the people that built the Pyramids for heaven's sake!) I once saw a boat carrying seventeen tons of trade goods come broadside on to the current while navigating a bend, and capsize. Half the crew were drowned or crushed. This sort of tragedy was eliminated by the use of drogue stones and a keel-raft. The stones - sometimes with a combined weight of as much as ten tons - were tied to the boat at the stern and amids.h.i.+ps. They dragged along the river bed and stabilized the boat. The raft was tethered by long lines to the bow. It's keel was broad and flat, built at right angles to the direction of travel so it would catch the tide. It was like a huge sail and it whipped the boat around the river bend fast enough for it to avoid capsizing.

Thinking about Egypt made me yearn for warmth and sunlight, not this dreary, cold mountainside. I decided that I would go with Dot. I might learn something - if not I could always daydream. I took my field notebook and a pocket camera, a paintbrush, my trowel, a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee. Dot took a dictaphone and her a.n.a.lysis kit and a portable spectroscope. Dilaver took himself.

At the last moment as we left the camp, Reefer ran to join us holding his camcorder as if it were a babe in arms. 'Yo, crew. Wait up.' He caught up with us, ejected a tape and inserted a new one with the casual ease of a soldier slapping a fresh magazine into his a.s.sault rifle. He aimed the camcorder, at us and made director-type movements with his free hand.

Dilaver capered. Dot frowned. I had to laugh. 'Lens cap. White balance.

Check the mike lead. Aim at the whites of their eyes and shoot to kill.'

Reefer fiddled with the camera. 'Yo, man, I'm on it.'

I stared at his joint, first of the day, a restrained half the size of the previous evening's Camberwell Carrot. 'I believe you are.'

Reefer frowned. 'Now don't you be getting on my case, Benny-mine. I like yo' white a.s.s but I am dangerous when -'

'- wet?' I finished fast, then laughed. Reefer had been brought up on a diet of Spike Lee and Tarantino and wanted everyone to know it. The fact that he was of mixed French Scottish descent and was as white as Wensleydale cheese did not seem to make the tiniest of dents in his lifestyle homage to his celluloid heroes. Which mostly seemed to consist of wearing hopelessly inappropriate clothes and spitting awful macho one-liners out through clouds of dope smoke.

'Roused. Was gonna say roused. Dangerous when roused.'

'Yeah. And I was gonna say that you know what the authorities'll do if they catch you smoking that stuff here?' I waited as Reefer attempted to adjust the white-balance control. 'Don't you?' I prodded verbally when Reefer looked like he'd forgotten what I'd said just thirty seconds before.

Reefer did his best Keanu Reaves. The hands, the frown, the works. 'Yeah, man but they ain't gonna. I as slick as the wind. I know when them boys after me. I got the sense.' Only his French accent spoilt the delivery.

'Yeah. Right. Like you know when the lens cap's still on.'

'What? s.h.i.+t.' Reefer fiddled with the camcorder for a moment, then shot some establis.h.i.+ng footage. He was halfway through a somewhat melodramatic voiceover when Dot finally gave up and walked off with Dilaver.

Reefer switched off the camcorder, sucked disappointedly on his joint.

I grinned. 'Never mind, Quentin, your day will come.' We followed the others south-west into the foothills.

An hour later we were still walking. The sun was up by now, burning off the ground mist. Footing was lousy. Despite this I was finding the old joy of being somewhere I didn't know awakening in me for the first time in ages.

For the first time since the wedding in fact. I took off my jacket and tied 'the sleeves round my waist, schoolgirl fas.h.i.+on. I felt like a schoolgirl, too, one who had bunked off cla.s.s to search for fossils at the local stone quarry. It was a sensation I hadn't realized I'd miss so much.

Reefer aimed the camcorder at Dilaver. 'Hey man, we still heading right?'

Dilaver nodded enthusiastically into the lens. 'Stones. Soon. Much stones.'

Reefer panned around at the boulder-strewn landscape, seemed about to say something, then decided to let the visual joke speak for itself.