Ararat

FOUR

Adam rushed up from sleep, fleeing a dozen ugly dreams. He felt the grip on his shoulder and had his right hand clamped on a human throat before he’d even opened his eyes. Shaking off the caul of slumber, he focused on the face above him and discovered that he was choking Feyiz.

“Shit,” he hissed, releasing the guide. “Sorry, man. Really sorry. You caught me in the middle of a nightmare.”

They’d made good time to Camp One, but without any sleep at all, they had all agreed that they needed at least a few hours of shut-eye before they continued their climb. Now Adam’s head felt full of cotton and his eyes ached from tiredness. Sometimes a little sleep was worse than none at all.

Feyiz wheezed and massaged his throat. “Damn it, Adam…”

“Really. I’m sorry. It’s like I was still dreaming for a second there.”

For a moment it looked like Feyiz might be pissed, start a fuss about Adam’s violent awakening, but a change came over his face. Whatever reason he had for coming into the tent and waking Adam took precedence.

“Olivieri’s team is passing us by,” Feyiz said. He cleared his throat. “Meryam sent me to wake you.”

Shaking off the last mists of a nightmare—in which long, withered arms had reached out from behind the pendulum of a grandfather clock—Adam slid from his sleeping bag and dragged on his boots. The cold mountain air whipped through the open tent flap and he shuddered as he grabbed his jacket. Scraping at his bristly beard, he thought of his first trip to Alaska. It was cold here, but compared to that journey, the predawn morning on Ararat felt nearly tropical.

“Bad dreams,” Adam said with a shrug.

Feyiz nodded. “We all have them.”

True enough, but the unease left behind by his nightmare lingered. Adam pushed through the flaps and exited the tent. An inch of snow had fallen on the grassy pasture that made up Camp One and a few stray flakes eddied in the air overhead. The rock formations that jutted from the pasture made this a perfect spot for the camp, allowing tents to be erected behind natural windbreaks. For most of the year, it would be quite comfortable up here, but now winter had begun to knock on the door and the weather would be unpredictable on the best days.

Meryam and Hakan stood about twenty feet away, sipping coffee from thermoses. They had set up a camp stove and used water from the small stream that ran beside the camp—higher up they’d have to melt snow for water. Right now, the camp stove seemed an indulgence they could not afford, not when another group of climbers was passing right by the camp instead of stopping to rest. He counted a dozen heads, half of the group on horseback and the others leading mules laden with equipment. The third rider was a burly man with a prematurely gray beard and goggles on his forehead that Adam knew had the same prescription as his eyeglasses. Armando Olivieri was the kind of man who came prepared, and once Adam had learned about those goggles they served as a constant reminder of the professor’s determination.

Olivieri spotted him by the tent and waved as the parade went by. Worried and irritated, Adam strode toward Meryam and Hakan. The two of them had ignored each other on the hike up to Camp One the night before and they didn’t seem exactly chummy now, but for the moment it was clear they were on the same side.

“What the hell does Olivieri think he’s doing?” Adam asked.

Meryam glanced at him. “Moving on to Camp Two, I assume.”

Adam laughed softly. After the trudge to Camp One, it would have been smart for the professor’s team to stop and rest, but he could see skipping that step, considering they were in competition. The next step would be to ascend to four thousand meters or higher—about the same elevation as Camp Two—and then come back down to allow for acclimatization, avoiding the risk of altitude sickness. A night’s sleep would follow before the typical climber would rise in the small hours of the morning and make the much steeper trek to Camp Two, stopping there for another night before the last part of the ascent. If they’d been climbing to the peak, that would be another six hours up and then a much more rapid descent, but of course they weren’t heading for the peak.

“You really think they’re going to try straight for Camp Two and stay there?” Adam asked. “No acclimatization?”

Hakan grunted. “What choice do they have?”

Meryam turned toward them. “If Olivieri wants a crack at the cave, he has to beat us there.”

“Shit,” Adam rasped. He turned to shout for Feyiz but saw that the man had already moved the gear out of the tents and started breaking them down. At least he seemed to understand the need for speed.

“We’ll overtake him,” Meryam said. “Fifteen minutes and we go. Pack up, have a wee, and get your camera ready. Another day, another adventure.”

“You can’t pretend you expected them to catch up this quickly. We only slept four hours and here they are—”

“With no sleep,” Meryam added. “And without Feyiz and Hakan for guides. Twelve people, most of them not used to climbing. Odds are some of them will get mountain sickness if they attempt it. Neither of us has ever been prone to it. If we need to skip acclimatization, I think we’ll be okay, but Olivieri’s got two tweedy Arkologists and a sixty-year-old rabbinical scholar on his team. They’re going to need to acclimatize. They just are.”

Adam nodded, telling himself it all made sense, but something niggled at the back of his mind. “What about those guides? Who the hell are they?”

He turned toward Hakan, who took a long drink of his steaming coffee, then poured the rest out on the fire and began kicking dirt and freshly fallen snow over it.

For the first time, Meryam seemed unsure of herself. Adam loved her for her confidence, but she didn’t always think things through. He turned to see Feyiz zipping up a backpack.

“I thought your family had cornered the market up here.”

Feyiz frowned and studied his uncle. “Uncle Hakan and his cousin Baris are not in agreement on who ought to be giving the orders. The family is split on this subject. A final decision has not yet been made.”

Meryam swore, spinning on Hakan. “You let us think no worthy guide was going to help the Arkologists up the mountain, that you had them all under control!”

Hakan went and nudged Feyiz aside, knelt, and began to unzip and repack the backpack, a silent assertion of control. He knew better, he was telling them all. Feyiz might be a passable guide, but he was in charge.

“The silent treatment again,” Adam said. “Perfect.” The mountain wind whipped around him and he shivered, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. “So Baris is helping Olivieri. And if they reach the cave first—”

“It is not only your professor friend who will find victory there,” Hakan said. “The family will think my cousin more capable and he will become the chief guide. The argument will be settled by achievement. Baris will not worry about altitude sickness. If several become ill, he will have one of his men descend with them.”

Meryam handed Adam her coffee thermos. “This is the only thing that’s hot. There’s some bread and honey. Eat fast.”

Adam didn’t want to bother eating anything, but he knew he would need some food in his belly. He turned toward Feyiz, who had begun to break down the second tent.

“Wait,” Hakan said, digging a plastic bottle out of the inside pocket of his coat. He twisted off the cap and began to tap pills out into the palm of his glove. “Take these first. Two different pills, take one each.”

Meryam didn’t hesitate, plucking the medications from Hakan’s hand.

Adam examined the pills, brows knitted. “I assume one of these is Diamox. What’s the other?”

“Procardia,” Hakan said. “For blood pressure. It should prevent…” He turned to Feyiz and said something in the language they shared.

“Edema,” Feyiz translated.

“These medicines are no guarantee,” Hakan continued, “but take them and drink a lot of water, and with luck we will not have to carry you off the mountain.”

Adam selected pills for himself, studying Hakan’s face. “This cousin you didn’t tell us about? He’ll have given his group the same medicines, I assume?”

Hakan closed the pill bottle, slid it back into his jacket, and stomped on the last embers of the fire. Meryam approached Adam and cupped his scruffy, bearded cheek in her hand. When he turned to her, she dry-swallowed the pills and grinned.

“Let’s go, my love,” she said. “We’re in a bit of a hurry now.”

“Olivieri’s got horses and mules,” Adam replied quietly, clutching his own pills.

“And you’ve got me. Get ready and then start filming.”

“You have a plan?”

Meryam laughed. “The only possible plan. They’ll want to use their animals as long as possible. They’re going to Camp Two and then straight across to the southeast face, above the cave, just as we’d planned to do.”

Adam thought about the broken rock and earth that the avalanche would have spread down the mountainside beneath the entrance to the cave. He thought of the inch or more of snow that had fallen on top of it during the night.

“So we stay just west of the rockfall. Straight up, but not in the avalanche zone,” he said. “Not completely suicidal, but still dangerous as hell.”

As the burning rim of the sun crested the eastern horizon, her eyes sparkled. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

The next time Meryam saw Olivieri more than nine hours had passed. She had her pick buried in the icy rock in front of her and the claws of her crampons digging for toeholds. Her stomach twisted and bile burned up the back of her throat but she forced herself not to vomit with the pain inside her skull. Acute altitude sickness could be fought. She’d already taken more medication and she had both prayed to and cursed her own god and everyone else’s. She told herself that she would be all right, and maybe that was true. As long as her lungs didn’t fill with fluid and her brain didn’t swell—the results of pulmonary or cerebral edema—the other symptoms would subside eventually.

If she did develop edema and didn’t descend immediately, it would be quite a different ending to her story. She would die.

Breathing deeply in the thin air, Meryam dug the toe of her boot into the ice and hauled herself upward, ripped her pick out and smashed it back into the mountain overhead. Skipping acclimatization had been a stupid, stupid plan. Setting off on their own, even with guides who knew the secrets of the mountain better than the curves of their wives’ flesh, had been idiotic.

The horizon had turned a deep indigo on one end of the sky, the sun gliding into hiding on the other. A hand touched her back and she glanced to her right, surprised to see that Adam had overtaken her. The wind whipped at his face, making him squint.

“Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

“The wind,” Meryam said, resting against the mountain. “What’s the problem?”

“Feyiz is right. We should have stopped at that shelf we passed half an hour ago. I think we should go back to it.”

Grip tightening on the handle of her pick, she stared at him. Queasy, head pounding, she had to play the words over in her head to make sure she’d heard them correctly.

“Hakan said we could make it! He said we were almost there!”

Adam’s expression hardened with frustration. “That was an hour ago and where are we now? Do you see the damn cave? Even if we get there, you know as well as I do that there’s no ark inside. It makes for great footage, but it’s impossible for a flood to have reached this height—”

“Who’s this talking now?” Meryam said. “Not my Adam. I’m the atheist in this relationship, remember? What’s impossible when God’s in the mix?”

Her parents and brother refused to speak to her or even acknowledge that she still shared the same planet with them. The alienation had both broken her heart and emboldened her to fulfill her dreams, but still it was so lonely. The last time she had been with them, on a hot July day in London six years before, she had seen sadness and longing in her mother’s eyes but only hatred and disgust from her father and her brother. If her mother had the courage to flout her husband’s wishes, Meryam thought they might speak again one day. But she doubted that time would ever come. Declaring herself an atheist had been as bad as spitting in her father’s face and she had known that before she had ever spoken the words. She had done it anyway, determined not to hide her true self. Not ever.

Now here she was, desperate to claim whatever lay in that cave. Part of her wanted to find it empty, to throw that emptiness in the faces of the self-righteous bastards in every faith she had ever encountered. But another part of her wanted very badly to find something… anything to believe in. Anything that might ignite a spark of faith in her and lead her, if not home, then at least to a place where she and her family could speak again.

“Can we have this conversation later?” Adam said. “We need to do something. We can’t make it to the cave before sunset and it’s too dangerous to—”

She set her knees against the thin layer of snow and let go of the pick, just the crampons on her boots holding her in place. “Come on! It’s not like it’s a vertical face. I’ll get banged to hell if I fall, but I’m not going to plummet to my doom.”

He fixed her with a cold glare. “Stop it.”

Meryam sighed and grabbed hold of the pick. Yes, they ought to have brought pitons and rope, and if they’d brought them they would have been using them here. And, yes, if she did fall at the wrong point and couldn’t slow her tumbling descent, there was always the chance that she’d smash into a rock or fall into a crevasse, but the terrain to the east was so much steeper. A sheer, jagged face, even under the snow. As long as they kept climbing straight up—

“No,” Adam said, reading her face. “We’re already close to the rockfall. You don’t know how close. Not even Hakan knows. We’re going back down to that shelf and camping there for the night.”

Meryam grabbed hold of the pick again, feeling herself deflate. “If we stop, I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I can carry on.”

Adam rested against the mountain beside her. “You should’ve spoken up.”

Hakan shouted at them from below. Meryam felt her hackles rise, ready to snap at him for his impatience. Then she caught the tone in his words, and put the syllables together to form a name. Olivieri.

She glanced below her and saw Hakan pointing up and to the west, then she lifted her gaze and squinted into the burning golden light of the setting sun. Higher on the mountain, still at least eight hundred meters below the peak, a line of black silhouettes made their way across a snow-clad ridge.

“Shit.”

“Meryam—” Adam began.

She whipped her head around to stare at him, heat rushing to her face, unable to explain her urgency, the necessity, her obsession with making this discovery herself. Rough and handsome in his scruffy way, it was the warmth and intelligence in his eyes that always got to her—that had supported her through so many journeys—but there were things she could not say to him. Not now.

At the moment she had only one word for this man she loved.

“Climb!”

“What—”

“Adam, just climb!” she snapped. Hauling back her pick, she planted it in the rock and ice above her head and hauled herself up. She kicked her left boot at the mountain, caught the teeth of her crampon into a toehold, and scrambled upward.

As she moved out of his sightline, she heard Adam swear, as he finally registered what she and Hakan had reacted to. Meryam glanced over again and saw the line of half a dozen silhouettes moving along the ridge to the west, nothing but dark cutouts against the golden gleam of the dying sun, shapes moving through the hour of long shadows.

There were no more words. Adam climbed, his grunts of exertion after nine long hours a perfect, synchronous match for her own. They had stopped to rest multiple times and debated stopping for the night, but the combination of Meryam’s fierce desire and Hakan’s determination to beat his cousin had made them press on. More than once she had thought they were being ridiculous, that Olivieri’s team would have camped and rested or fallen ill. There were only six or seven out of the original twelve members of that group remaining, which meant that some of them had stopped or gotten sick and had to descend, but between Olivieri and Feyiz’s uncle Baris, they’d forced the rest to keep going.

Left hand digging into snow for a solid hold, she kept climbing. Pick, boot, hand, boot, using her knees to brace herself. The sun had been warm, but as it slid over the distant, jagged edge of the world the temperature dropped precipitously and the wind buffeted them, screaming as it whipped across the face of the mountain. Meryam scrabbled upward, an awkward, clawed spider. Feyiz and Hakan began snapping at each other, but she couldn’t focus on climbing and translating at the same time, so she ignored them.

“Meryam,” Adam said, “talk to me. You all right?”

She ignored him. Loved him, but could not draw the breath it would take to reply. The cold radiating up from the mountain had gotten inside her, aching in her bones. Her face and nose stung now that the wind had cranked up. Pick, boot, hand, boot. Heart slamming inside her chest, lips so dry she felt them crack, Meryam lifted the pick again but wavered. A sharp pain spiked through her head and she blinked, vision blurring at the corners of her eyes. For half a heartbeat she lost herself, forgot where she was, and then the sick twist of nausea clutched at her again and she felt hot bile rushing up the back of her throat.

No.

Refusing, spittle on her lips, she choked it back down and forced her guts to be still. Her head pounded as if huge fists smashed against her skull. She breathed deeply and steadily, waiting for the pain to abate. Dread prickled at the back of her neck, a feeling of vulnerability, as if all the cruel malice in the world had abruptly been directed toward her. That dread turned to a thousand tiny, icy points and spilled down her back, sliding over and through her before it was gone.

“What the hell was that?” she whispered to herself, barely aware she’d spoken. Frigid, salty little tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked them away.

Sound rushed in before she had a chance to even recognize that the world had gone silent. For a moment she had just blanked out, the same way the electricity in their flat went dark for just a blink during a bad storm. The lights flickered and the clocks all reset, flashing twelve. Heart thrumming, blood rushing to her face, Meryam sucked in a ragged breath and began to sag backward.

Adam called her name. He planted a hand on her back and in doing so, lost his own footing. Kicking out, jamming the toes of his boots into the rock and snow, he started to slide and the mountain slid with him. Loose rock tumbled and Meryam screamed his name, started to reach for him before another hand grabbed her from the left—Feyiz, keeping her from doing something stupid.

“Don’t move!” he snapped.

A curtain of snow began to slide off to their right, stone and earth and white shifting and tumbling down. Hakan called out a prayer but none of them moved, just listened to the whispered rumble of the mountain’s displeasure. Adam had gone silent but kept moving, grasping, stabbing his pick into the shifting rock. They’d come right up beside the location of the avalanche but the snow had hidden the rockfall, and Adam had climbed right onto it.

He’s dead, Meryam thought, and the sickness in her gut turned to a hollow, icy pit. Pure emptiness. Her heart went numb. She held her breath.

With a sound like a chorus of voices shushing her, the cascade slowed and then stopped altogether. Adam perched at the edge of it, pick embedded in a tumble of loose rock, rigid as he waited to see if it would start again.

Meryam took a few short breaths, her heart thumping. She felt her pulse throbbing at her temples but the pain in her skull had calmed to a dull ache. She wetted her lips.

“Move!” she called to him, then flinched at the loudness of her voice, afraid even the sound might cause the slide to begin again. “Carefully, but move now!”

Hakan began to descend, the mountain still solid beneath him. They had been climbing right alongside the rockfall until Adam had moved over beside her, but Meryam knew there would be all kinds of fissures in the rock and earth so close to the avalanche zone. They had to be wary.

Adam shifted his left hand. Rocks skittered downward but he moved his left foot. A fifteen-foot segment of the rockfall shifted again, just slightly. Meryam let the mountain take her weight, cradle her as she breathed and prayed to any god that might listen. It wouldn’t be fair. Just not fair.

Feyiz spoke softly to her, small encouragements and reassurances that all amounted to “He’ll be all right.” But neither of them knew that.

Ropes, she thought. Pitons. A larger team, proper safety precautions.

Oh, my God, I’ve killed him.

Adam tugged his pick out of the rocks and it all started to give way beneath him. He didn’t swear or cry out to God. Instead he shouted for Meryam, in that instant more anguished at being parted from her than at what might happen to him next.

“Roll!” Hakan roared at him.

The mountain flowed downward but Adam heard, and instead of fighting for a hold he rolled left. Even as he rode the shifting stone and snow, he made himself tumble to the side. All it took was half a dozen feet and he sprawled onto solid, unmoving mountain face. Hakan scrambled down to meet him as he managed to get a new hold, dig in his pick and the crampon claws at the toes of his boots.

“Adam,” she whispered to herself, a different sort of prayer.

Forty feet below the place where she and Feyiz perched, Hakan reached Adam and talked to him quietly, checking his body for broken bones and his pupils for dilation, in case he’d suffered a head injury. To the west, the sun had started to slide out of sight, the upper corona turning vivid colors that spread along the horizon line. They had only minutes before even this golden light vanished and then all that would be left was the glow of the stars and the crescent moon. The incline was not difficult for climbing—the rockslide might have killed Adam, but otherwise this part of the face required only stamina, caution, and a modicum of skill. They had been climbing easily enough… but sleeping out here would be impossible.

In the dying light she could see the blood on Adam’s face, a cut or scrape on his forehead that trickled dark red streaks across his cheek and into his beard. He’d been knocked around, but when he glanced up and met her eyes, she knew he was all right. Still with her. Still on this journey.

“We’ve got to climb,” she said, turning to Feyiz.

From the moment when her body had seemed to give up on her, when that terrible feeling of malice had pressed down on her, until right now, she had taken strength from the guide’s presence, but only as she saw the concern in his eyes did she realize that Feyiz was more than just a guide or an ally. He was a friend. She had a history of not recognizing friendships when they really took form, when they became true and solid like Pinocchio becoming a real boy. That flaw had cost her in the past, but she felt it now.

“Come on, Feyiz,” she said. “We’ve got to—”

Hakan shouted for them to look up. Meryam cringed, put her shoulder against the mountain and ducked her head, afraid something had been dislodged above them. When nothing fell she blinked and craned her neck to gaze up toward the peak, but a jagged ridge blocked her view. A wave of relief swept over her—a shelf, perhaps seventy meters up. It would take time, but…

She blinked.

Feyiz had begun a prayer of thanks. In her peripheral vision, in that last golden gleam of daylight, she saw his smile. Only then did she understand, and broke out into a smile of her own.

The cave.

Meryam plucked her pick from the mountain’s face and lunged upward, digging in. Pick, boot, hand, boot. Quicker than she’d been at the start, all pain in her head forgotten. She glanced over at the silhouettes of Olivieri’s team, just inky black marks against the darkening mountain, and knew she was going to beat him.

Feyiz followed her. Forty feet below, injured or not, Adam had begun to climb again, with Hakan looking after him.

Remnants of queasiness lingered in her gut, but Meryam kept moving and breathing deeply. There would be more meds when they reached the shelf. But only a tiny part of her brain remained aware of her discomfort. The rest of her thoughts were dedicated to climbing toward the mystery that had brought them here. She tried not to fantasize, dared not to hope, but even if they found nothing but a gaping wound in the side of the mountain, at least she had reached it first.

Her back muscles burned. Her arms felt weak, as if she had been deceiving her body for the past few hours by continuing to climb, somehow persuading flesh and bone that she had not asked them to endure far more than she had any right to expect they could. Now she needed just a little more. Weariness set in, carved its blades deep. Knowing they were so close to finding rest made every handhold harder to find, made her body heavier with every inch she dragged herself up the mountain.

Below, Hakan and Adam spoke to each other. The words floated up to her but she did not bother listening to discover if their conversation was speculation or an evaluation of Adam’s injuries.

“Meryam,” Feyiz said, moving up beside her when she began to slow. “Do you need me to—”

She shot him a withering look. “Do not help me.”

The hard edge in her voice went too far. She knew it, but she saw the shifting shadows across Feyiz’s face and the moonlit gleam of his eyes, and she knew he understood. She hadn’t come this far to accept help from anyone. This had been her quest from the start—not even hers and Adam’s, but hers—and she wouldn’t accept a hand up from anyone unless she started falling. Maybe not even then.

Moonlight, she thought. For the first time she noticed that while they’d been climbing, in just the past few minutes, the sun had gone down. The glow of it still haunted the western horizon but it had vanished off the edge of the world.

In the darkness, she reached up her empty hand and caught nothing but air. A glance upward, and she saw the edge of the shelf. The lowest corner of the new cavern that had appeared in Ararat’s face.

She grinned, warmth flooding her chest, buried the point of the pick into the flat edge of the stone shelf, and dragged herself up and into the cave.

Lying on her back, watching the stars come out, Meryam began to laugh.

Then she turned onto her hands and knees and threw up.

Adam wanted to drop his pack onto the floor of the cave and collapse. The muscles in his calves and shoulders burned and his knees were stiff in what he imagined was a prelude of what it would feel like when his youthful tendency to overdo things brought his joints to arthritic ruin. He wanted water and a bite to eat and to take a moment to revel in the knowledge that they had beaten Olivieri’s team to this cave, even if they found nothing at all.

Then Meryam started to retch.

“Meer?” he said, rushing to her side even as Feyiz and Hakan clicked on flashlights and began to scan the cave’s deep shadows.

In the crescent of moonlight that touched the first dozen feet of the cave’s interior, Meryam lifted a hand to wave him away. “I’m all right.”

“Bullshit.” He took her hand, felt her pulse, asked her if she could breathe all right.

“Not while I’m—”

Another thin stream of vomit interrupted her. Meryam stayed on her hands and knees, trying to catch her breath. Adam put a hand on her back and tried to soothe her.

“You’re okay,” he said with more certainty than he felt. “You’ll be all right. If we need to get you down—”

“No.”

“—we’ve already secured the entrance. We’re here. Olivieri’s team may show up on our doorstep at sunrise, but they can’t claim the dig for themselves—not with the deal you made with the government. If there is a dig, I mean.”

“I’m not… not going down.”

“You can acclimate,” Adam went on. “Take Feyiz with you. Rest here a few hours and then—”

Meryam whispered something he didn’t catch. Adam leaned in, asked her to repeat herself, and she twisted round to stare at him. Her eyes caught the moonlight but instead of silver they glinted a coppery red for just a moment. A trick of the light, and the night.

Taking a deep breath, she reached a hand to him. “Help me up.”

Adam went cold, felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. “You know what can happen with altitude sickness. Come on, don’t mess around with this.”

“I’m…” she began, before her body seized up as if she might be sick again. Breathing through her nose, teeth bared, she managed to fight it off.

Adam knelt beside her. He reached for her wrist again, worried about her rapid heartbeat.

“It’s not altitude sickness,” she said, jerking her hand back. “Stop.”

“What is it, then?” He’d been feeling unwell himself—a clammy, almost feverish film on his skin and a thumping in his head. “No matter how many pills Hakan dishes out, you can’t climb as long and as high as we did today and not have it wreak havoc on your body. I’m all twisted up inside myself.”

“It’s not altitude sickness,” she said again. Firmly, hanging her head and taking even breaths.

“Then what?”

Meryam glanced up at him, her gaze pale and sad. “Fine, all right? Maybe it is. But I’m not climbing down. I didn’t come this far to go back without at least—”

Feyiz called to them. Adam studied Meryam’s face, searching for the thing he felt certain she must be hiding. It might have been that she felt worse than she wanted to let on, or it might have been connected to the wall she had been building up between them. Adam had been hiding from that bit of truth for a while, but now he felt it more keenly than ever.

“Meryam…” he began.

Feyiz shouted, and this time they both heard the urgency in his voice.

“Coming!” Adam called back. He unzipped Meryam’s pack and dug out her light, handing it over before retrieving his own.

She took his arm and rose, unsteady as she clicked on her light. The floor canted slightly, slanting downward. Only when they turned together and stepped deeper into the cave—out of that corona of moonlight—did they hear the soft, muttered prayers that came from off to the left. Adam waved his flashlight beam in that direction and saw Hakan. Meryam’s torch beam moved slowly across the floor of the cave and then froze as it illuminated a pattern that might once have been an animal. Shapes like bones lay under a layer of powder that seemed partly snow and partly a chalky dust. A ribbon of thin, leathery skin or fabric flapped in the breeze.

Meryam reached out and took Adam’s hand.

Feyiz continued to call for them, but now neither of them seemed able to reply. Adam noticed Hakan moving toward the back of the cave off to their left but the man’s presence hardly mattered. The only things that did were the next breath, the next step, and the way Meryam’s torch beam and his own continued to sweep across the nearest parts of the cave. The mouth of it—this vast wound in the side of the mountain—must have been at least a hundred feet wide, and the flashlight beams were not powerful enough to disperse all of that darkness. But as Adam and Meryam moved deeper, hand in hand, their torchlight kept revealing more of what waited for them in the darkness.

A dusty array of buckled timber beams jutted slightly from the floor of the cave. No, they were the floor of the cave.

Adam felt as if he were far beneath the ocean, weighted down and wading in slow motion through the deepest, darkest waters. The beam of his torch picked out the half-collapsed remains of a creaking apparatus that might once have been stairs. Dust motes swam in the shafts of light that he and Meryam played across the beams, like plankton floating past undersea. Then the wind howled at the mouth of the cave and the timbers creaked again and the illusion of the ocean bottom vanished. His mouth and skin felt dry and his head throbbed and he stared.

Meryam released his hand and took a step forward, and the tilted cave floor groaned underfoot. Flinching, she looked down and Adam followed her gaze to see that her boot had pressed down upon another timber.

“Holy crap,” Adam whispered, frozen.

He swept his torchlight to the right, revealing thick, rough-hewn wooden columns, partly blackened by thick smears of pitch. Short walls that might have been the walls of animal pens blocked parts of his view, but there were other withered, desiccated piles of bones, large and small. Most of the mummified remains belonged to animals, but his torchlight danced across two shapes that might once have been human. He shone his light upward and saw the lattice of beams that still held a second floor, perhaps a third.

Not floors, he thought. Decks. God help me, they’re decks. The animal bones alone told the story but none of them thus far had been willing to say it aloud. Tremors of giddy joy shook his body.

Meryam took several more shuffling steps, dry timber sighing at the shifting of her weight. “It’s real.”

“Or it’s the greatest hoax ever,” Adam said. But no, it felt too real. Too quiet and ancient and looming, as if the ark itself had some impossible presence and awareness, like it knew they had come. Like it had been waiting. It even smelled real, though he couldn’t have described what that meant to him.

“This way!” Hakan called, reminding Adam that Feyiz had been beckoning to them and they’d ignored him.

Adam peered into the darkness of the deeper cave and saw the flicker of Feyiz’s flashlight beam. They’d have to learn what he wanted, but with Hakan so much closer—sixty feet away, investigating the western wall of the cave—Adam started in his direction first. Meryam blew air out between her lips, one hand on her belly.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Not important.”

With torch beams lighting their tilted path, they walked carefully over to Hakan. Adam felt the soft, dry, ancient wood beneath his feet and slid back into the strange, waking dream that had enveloped him the moment he had seen the collapsed timbers and the animal bones. Now the combined light from their three torches seemed to generate enough illumination that a patch of darkness shimmered into haunting golden life. Meryam came to a halt twenty feet from Hakan, but Adam managed several steps farther before he understood what had brought her up short.

So close to the cave wall, Hakan’s flashlight beam exposed a broad circle to detailed examination. The timbers were like long bones, almost as if they had climbed into the belly of an enormous whale, nothing but its skeleton remaining. Jonah, four thousand years on. The seams had all been treated with bitumen pitch to seal water out.

“I’m not an archaeologist—” Hakan began.

“Neither are we,” Adam interrupted. “Probably a mistake not getting that degree, right?”

Hakan turned, forgetting himself for a moment as he included Meryam in his gaze. “This is not a cave at all. The whole cave is the ark. Buried all this time.”

Adam could find no words.

“Smashing,” Meryam said, a grin spreading across her features. Then she punched Adam in the shoulder. “What are you doing, love? Get the bloody camera rolling!”

Adam swore. Exhausted and in awe, he’d completely forgotten. Laughing in amazement at the days and weeks—hell, the months—ahead of them, he dug out the camera and started filming, beginning on those beams sunken into the wall.

“It’s extraordinary,” he said.

Something shifted in the darkness to their right, farther into the cave. Adam whipped the camera around, its light revealing an unsmiling Feyiz. He had gone pale and looked like he might be ill.

“You think that’s something?” Feyiz began, shielding his eyes from the glare of the light, staring into the camera. “Come and have a look at this.”

Meryam started to ask if he was all right, but Feyiz turned his back on them. The beam of his torch led the way along a long passage, past a row of large stalls. Adam caught it all on film as he followed Meryam and Feyiz, with Hakan taking up the rear. The wind that howled outside did not seem to reach this far inside the cave—inside the ark, he reminded himself. Outside the temperature had fallen dramatically, but here in the recesses of the ark the air began to feel close and stagnant and strangely warm. Adam’s stomach gave a queasy rumble but he kept the camera steady as they followed the slanting passage all the way to what appeared to be the rearmost section of the ark, what had once been its outer wall.

“Here,” Meryam said, pointing to a mummified corpse propped against an upright beam. Its teeth were bared in something never intended to be a grin, mouth lipless, eyes nothing but powdery holes in a face more like papyrus than flesh.

“Naamah,” Adam said quietly. The wife of Noah. The name had popped into his memory and then to his lips. Odds were whoever built this ship had not been called Noah, nor his wife Naamah, but the names didn’t really matter.

“This is impossible,” Meryam muttered, glancing around as if entranced. “No flood could rise this high. And even if… if somehow this is real… it couldn’t be this well preserved.”

“You’re standing in it,” Adam reminded her.

He couldn’t argue her points—they were simple truth. And yet here they were. This ship was not evidence the biblical story had been a precise record, but it did prove the flood had taken place and that there had been a Noah—whatever his name might have been. No, the names didn’t matter. Noah would be fine enough, and so they might as well call this one Naamah.

“What’s this?” Meryam said.

Adam panned the camera away from the corpse, found Meryam, and let the lens follow her focus to a place on the floor where her flashlight had picked out a scattering of gleaming black stones.

“Volcanic?” he asked.

Hakan moved into the video frame, frowning as he knelt to pick up one of the stones. “Ararat is a volcano, yes… but no eruptions for almost two hundred years.”

Meryam kept searching with her torch. “This thing has been here a lot longer than two hundred years.”

“It’s not volcanic rock,” Feyiz said from the shadows ahead.

Meryam lifted her torch and shone it in his direction. Adam followed with the camera, spotted Feyiz’s flashlight on the floor, shining its light into a pile of dust and black stone. He had set the torch down, but now the camera’s own light joined with Meryam’s and Hakan’s to zero in on Feyiz. The bright lights and strange shadows made the bearded young guide appear almost two-dimensional, as if he’d been transformed from a man into a portrait painted on the air in front of them.

“It’s hardened pitch,” Feyiz went on.

On the floor in front of him lay an enormous object that Adam at first took to be some kind of obelisk made of that same gleaming black pitch, perhaps some sort of altar. But then Feyiz broke off a piece of the pitch and Adam took a step nearer, zooming the camera in for a close-up.

“What is it?” Hakan said. “A crate?”

Adam slipped over behind Feyiz. Now that it had been illuminated, he could see that the entire black casing on the far side of the obelisk had been broken away, revealing a different texture beneath. A large, rectangular wooden box, timber heavy and blackened. Its lid had been sealed with that same bitumen, but Feyiz had begun to run his fingers over the seam and Adam zoomed in to see that the seal had been shattered, broken bits of pitch all over the floor.

Zoomed in, the camera picked up strange markings carved in the black surface, both on the outside of the box and on the shattered seal.

“It’s some kind of sarcophagus,” Meryam said.

“It’s Egyptian?” Adam asked.

She gave him a sharp look. “How should I know?”

“Sarcophagi are Egyptian.”

“We’ve established there are no archaeologists among us,” Meryam said. “I’m only saying I think it’s some sort of coffin.”

“A tomb,” Hakan said quietly.

“So, not Egyptian, then?” Adam teased, the joy of discovery buzzing inside him. He could feel that everything had changed for them. The future would begin with this moment.

But Meryam had stopped smiling. Her features paled and fresh beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. Her pallor went an ugly yellow.

Still crouched by the tomb, Feyiz muttered something in his own language and then slumped onto his side in a sprawl, unmoving. Hakan shouted his nephew’s name and shoved past Meryam. Adam reached for her too late. Meryam twisted to one side, dropped to her knees, and retched again. A moment later she clasped her hands to both sides of her head and began to scream in pain, crying out that her skull had split open.

The camera saw it all.

Outside the ark, the cold wind went on howling. A cloud passed across the moon and, atop Mount Ararat, all lay in darkness.