Land of Marvels Page 20

  It was the major who, whether advertently or not, brought an increased vivacity into the conversation. “I don’t really see where all this research business comes in,” he said, addressing the Swedish couple, who had asked if the seating plan could be changed so as to allow them to sit side by side—something, they explained, they always liked to do no matter what the company. “I mean, either you are a believer or not. It’s a question of faith, not proof.” He had spoken in his characteristically clipped manner, though rather more irascibly than usual; he was feeling the strain of keeping up a constant watch for false moves on Elliott’s part, and he had, in any case, a rooted aversion to missionaries of any persuasion, regarding them basically as troublemakers who unsettled the subject peoples and made the colonies more difficult to govern. “Look at India,” he was fond of saying. “Look at the Siege of Lucknow and the Black Hole of Calcutta. That’s what comes of busybodies meddling with people’s beliefs.”

  “Excuse me, if I may ask, since you have raised the subject, are you yourself a believer?” This came from the husband, whose name was Johansson.

  “Certainly I am,” Manning said. “God and the King.”

  It was a remark of such baseness, made worse by the fact that for some reason the major had glanced toward Alex as he spoke, that Edith could not forbear a look of contempt in his direction, though she did not think he noticed this and after the first moment hoped he hadn’t; she had been sworn to secrecy, which meant of course behaving normally toward this wretched man.

  “Well, I am glad,” Johansson said. “But it is our view, as members of the society, that faith in the message of salvation contained in the Scriptures is strengthened by showing beyond question that the facts are as related there.”

  “Not the truth, that is absolute,” Mrs. Johansson said, “but our belief, our readiness to accept that truth.”

  “Exactly, my dear,” Johansson said. “You do well to make the distinction.” The two exchanged a loving smile. They were dissimilar in appearance, though clearly identical in their views and in the excellent quality of their English. Johansson had a slow and weighty manner and a heavy, crumpled-looking face, rather appealing, with some fugitive likeness to a teddy bear in it, one that had been knocked about a bit but not in any spirit of malice. His wife was sharper of face and quicker of movement. Her hair was very fair and rather neglected-looking; strands from it escaped the containing band and fell forward over her brows; from time to time she made a sudden birdlike, preening movement, raising both hands as if to clear her vision.

  “We too are archaeologists,” Johansson said, smiling at Somerville. “We are biblical archaeologists. Let me give you an example. On the eastern side of the island of Malta, on the Munxar Reef, members of our society have found the anchor stocks of the grain ship from Alexandria in which St. Paul and the Apostle Luke were voyaging when they were shipwrecked off this island, thus demonstrating the truth of the account as related in Acts Twenty-seven.”

  Mrs. Johansson raised her head and parted her hair on her brow and spoke toward the ceiling: “ ‘Then fearing lest we should have fallen upon rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern . . .” Her expression, solemnly exalted while she uttered the words, grew severe as she came to the end of them. “There are those,” she said, “and unfortunately there are members of the society among them, who try to belittle the importance of this discovery by insisting that the shipwreck took place off the coast of Dalmatia. They have no case, they have found no anchor stocks.”

  “Then take Sodom and Gomorrah and the Cities of the Plain,” Johansson said. “Members of our society have located these cities, all five of them. They have found balls of brimstone embedded in a wide area of ash near the Dead Sea. Now, if you consult a dictionary, you will find that ‘brimstone’ is another word for sulfur. Golf-sized sulfur balls with burn marks all around them! You could not have a clearer truth of the words in Genesis Nineteen. No doubt you are familiar with them? ‘Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah . . .’ Chemical analysis of these balls has revealed that the brimstone is composed of ninety-six to ninety-eight percent sulfur, with traces of magnesium, a substance that creates an extremely high temperature burn. This is the only place on the earth where you can find this percentage of pure sulfur in a round ball.” He looked around the table, and his likeness to a battered teddy bear deepened as he broke into an upward-curving smile. “Quod erat demonstrandum,” he said.

  “The sulfur was probably ordered up from hell,” Patricia said in low tones to Palmer, who was sitting opposite her. As often happens, this remark, which was not really intended to be heard by the Johanssons, released feelings of irritation in Patricia that had been building up all through this talk of the firebombed cities. “Do you really mean to say,” she said loudly and furiously, “that you think God put the magnesium in the mixture to make it burn hotter? I can’t believe that people spend time and money and go to all that trouble in a futile attempt to prove the truth of a myth, and a pretty nasty little myth at that.”

  Johansson’s smile was now full of tolerance and understanding. “We can only guess at God’s purposes, we cannot know them. When we speak of myth, we are acknowledging that fact. It is a confession of our ignorance.”

  “It was a warning,” his wife said, directing a look of kindly reproof toward Patricia. “A warning that this rain of fire will one day be visited again on the wicked.”

  “As long as it is clear who the wicked are,” Palmer said. “I mean, a lot of people who weren’t particularly wicked must have gone up in smoke too.” He had spoken mildly, with some vague idea of reducing the emotional level—Patricia was looking distinctly cross at having been called ignorant.

  “It is not clear to us, but it is clear to God,” Johansson said.

  “That must be terrible for him,” Somerville said. “All the darkness of all the hearts in the world.” He was conscious as he spoke of the darkness he had harbored in his own heart since Jehar’s proposal. Neither Johansson nor his wife seemed in any way put out by the obduracy they were encountering. Of course, he thought, they are the ones that have the proof.

  “Just one black heart would be enough to go on with,” Edith said, taking care not to look at the major again.

  “God bears this burden of the soul’s darkness through our Lord Jesus.” Johansson’s face had returned to gravity. “ ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.’ ”

  “ ‘And with his stripes we are healed,’ ” Mrs. Johansson said.

  “Statistically though,” Palmer said, “it is unlikely that every single inhabitant of these cities deserved to have fireballs rained on him. Unless of course by wicked we mean simply those who are in line for firebombing, come what may.”

  The Swiss, whose name was Spahl, spoke now for practically the first time. “It is interesting, what you say. But Malta, the Dead Sea, these are places far away. May I ask why you are here, what in this place you are doing?”

  The Johanssons looked at each other and smiled, a smile of affectionate complicity. “There is no harm to speak of it now,” Mrs. Johansson said. “Now that we have the lease.”

  “For fifteen years now my wife and I are engaged in one single quest,” Johansson said. “And that is to discover the exact site of the Garden of Eden. We have devoted all our time and efforts to it. I tell you now, with a full heart, that our efforts have at last been crowned with success.”

  “Over the years we became convinced that it lay in Mesopotamia,” his wife said. “On grounds of climatic conditions first of all. The description of the plants in the Garden is very suggestive of a tract of land lacking in rainfall, to which irrigation has been brought. ‘And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.’ He did not send rain to make the trees grow.”

  “Also there is the fact,” Johansson said, “that Adam and Eve, when detected in their sin, had nowhere to hide but among the trees God had made to gr
ow. Outside the Garden the land was bare, there was no other vegetation. We lost much time searching at Kurna, where Arab tradition places the Tree, but this was a great mistake. Kurna is in the south, where the floods are heavy, much of the time it is swampland. Would the Lord God have set our first parents down in a swamp?”

  The Johanssons paused on this question to exchange a smile in which all such mistakes and disappointments were dissolved in joy. No one else at the table said anything.

  “We believed for a while that it might have been at Aman on the Euphrates,” Johansson said, “but in the end it was the evidence of the four rivers that convinced us. ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.’ Four is a symbolic number, it stands for the four quarters of the world. Once we had understood this, we realized that the earthly paradise must have been set dead in the center of the known world. After that it was only necessary to identify the four rivers. They are the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Persian Gulf. We had some uncertainty about this last, but it is a narrow inlet, it can be regarded as a river. Now, if you join the mouths of these rivers with ruled lines, with the Nile and the Gulf at the base, you will get a perfect equilateral triangle. And if, within this triangle, you bisect the Belikh and Khabur rivers at exactly the same latitude, you will form a perfect diamond shape. At the very center of this diamond, the one unique and indisputable place, that is where the Garden was.”

  The Johanssons sat back in one identical movement and smiled one identical smile of triumph around the table. For an appreciable while nobody spoke. Then Palmer, with a certain sensation of coming up for air, said, “And you have identified the spot, you say? The actual bit of ground, I mean.”

  “We inspect it tomorrow,” Johansson said.

  “It is not far distant then?”

  “It is less than a mile from this very place where we are seated. It is between this house and the little hill where you are digging. That is close to where the railway will pass, but it will not touch the sacred place where the Garden was.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” Somerville said, not knowing, in his own quandary, whether to envy or pity such blithe confidence.

  “Because, my dear sir, my wife and I, on behalf of the Society for Biblical Research, have obtained a lease of the site to the extent of four acres of ground. Let me tell you now of our further design. We intend, naturally with the blessing and financial backing of the society, to build a beautiful hotel surrounded by gardens on this site, and we will call this hotel the Garden of Eden.”

  “Or the Paradise Hotel,” his wife said, with sudden sharpness; it was clear that there had been some disagreement between them on this matter.

  “It will be a great success. People will come here from all the four quarters of the world; the railway will bring them. It will be a sort of pilgrimage, you see, being built in such a sacred place. And it will be unique in all the world. A luxury hotel that will also have a spiritual atmosphere. We are proposing to incorporate a mission house and a chapel with a minister of the church in permanent attendance. How happy it makes us that we can speak of this now, now we have the lease.”

  Once again, as in his earlier question, the Swiss showed himself interested in immediate, practical matters. “And this lease that you have,” he said, in his soft, slightly purring voice, “this lease, from whom you have obtained it?”

  “Why, from the Ottoman government, of course. It bears the stamp of a high official at the Ministry of the Interior. They have granted us a lease of ninety-nine years.”

  Elliott quitted the table shortly after this. He was grinning to himself as he made his way to his room. The Johanssons had provided some light relief, much needed. They looked so happy, which made it funnier. Someone at the Ministry of the Interior had made a tidy little sum. All the same, it wasn’t such a bad idea; there would be plenty of people ready to shell out for luxury with a spiritual atmosphere. The waters of Jordan coming from the shower—nicely warmed up. Especially honeymooners, he thought. Quite a kick in it, having your nuptial couch directly over the spot where Adam and Eve had theirs. Of course, they didn’t have long to enjoy it before being kicked out . . . The lease wasn’t worth much. The Ottoman government might have legal title, but they had no firm hold on the region and if war broke out those who came off best would have the say-so and it was pretty unlikely to be the Turks. But of course it was not just the Johanssons; the agreement was with these biblical research people, an international organization with members in every country of Europe and the United States. It would survive the war. It was like oil: Common interest, common profit, these would survive any upheaval. A multinational, multilingual luxury hotel with a spiritual atmosphere and spacious honeymoon suites—and a lake of oil not far away.

  He had decided against locking his door when he was inside the room and awake. It gave the wrong message; he wanted to appear confident that Manning would keep his word and allow him the time they had agreed on. However, he kept his revolver always within reach, in the drawer of his table or under his pillow. And while he slept he kept the door locked.

  He had cause for self-congratulation this evening, in spite of his troubles. He had completed his investigations, more or less; he had sufficient evidence. It was only necessary now for him to get out of here and back home with a whole skin.

  He had been since early in the morning on the site of what he was now convinced was a gravity-induced, piercement salt dome, a vast pillar of Cenozoic and Mesozoic salt something like three hundred million years old, which had traveled through several miles of sedimentary rock to reach the surface. Everything had confirmed it. The caprock was composed of limestone, anhydrite, and traces of calcite over a large part of its surface, the result of groundwater interacting with the salt and causing mineral changes. A good deal of the calcite had dissolved through this exposure to water, forming cavernous expanses; he had discovered the existence of a system of linked caves not far below the surface, and he was now sure that these were filled with oil.

  This promised extremely well in regard to the amount of oil trapped in the flanks of the dome; he had reason now to think it was there in vast quantities. But when a zone like this one was penetrated by the drill, the oil would come out fast and furious; there was danger of a gusher that could be sudden and violent in the initial stage, before it could be brought under control. This would make the operation more difficult and dangerous—and more expensive. The risk was increased by the difference in pressure between the strata that had been broken and pushed upward in the slow rise of the salt and the shallower strata these had penetrated. This meant there would be overpressured layers—floaters, as they were called—near the surface, and these posed a threat of violent outflow when attempts were made to drill through them.

  All this would go down in his report, the one that neither the British nor the Germans would see. He would describe the site and give the exact location; he would specify the risks and give his estimate of the quantities; he would include sketches and diagrams and notes of depth and densities. And this report he would carry with him at all times. It would be with him on the morning, coming soon, when he rode out with his helpers as if for another day combing the ground, carrying with him the few possessions he would need. And it would be there, still with him, when he dismissed these men and paid them and made his way on horseback, accompanied only by Alawi, to Lataku, where the boats left for Cyprus and Smyrna. Here he would say good-bye to Alawi and give over the horses to him. Only in the evening would his presence be missed, and he would be well on his way by then . . .

  He was disturbed in these reflections by a light tapping at his door. His first thought was that Manning had taken it into his head to come and inquire into the progress he was making with his report. No attempt was made to turn the handle, so it could not be Edith. “Who is it?” he called through the door.

  “It is I, Spahl.”

  Elliott opened
the door to find the Swiss smiling on the threshold, a smile that looked as if it had been there already, prepared in advance.

  “I hope you will forgive this lateness of hour,” Spahl said. “I wanted to lose no time.”

  Elliott smiled and held the door open. He said, “I will have to come clean with you right from the start. I never give interviews after ten o’clock in the evening.”

  “Ha-ha, no,” Spahl said as he entered the room. “It is not for that I am coming.” He was a big man, heavily built, but he moved very lightly, Elliott noticed now, and with short steps. He looked very carefully about him as he advanced into the room. “No, it is for business,” he said.

  “Have a seat.” Elliott pointed to one of the two upright chairs at the table, the one on the opposite side to the drawer where his revolver lay. “Would you care for a drink? I’ve still got some of the Scotch that I brought from London with me.”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “Water with it?”

  “No, I like it straight, as you Americans say. Why make crooked what is made to be straight? That is a joke I am making.”

  “Well, I agree with you. Your very good health, sir.”