Land of Marvels (27 page)

13.
 

S
omerville could never afterward recollect the exact words with which he had rejected this outrageous proposal; he knew only that they had been angry and emphatic. The proposal itself, on the other hand, remained in his mind with total clarity: all the circumstances of it; Jehar’s words and the eagerness with which he had uttered them; the look of joy his face had worn. All this remained vividly present to him in the time that followed, as he supervised the work of clearing the steps that were now seen to give access to a vaulted chamber.

It was during this period too that further visitors arrived, unexpected and unannounced, all on the same day, first a Swedish couple, man and wife, who smilingly introduced themselves as seekers after truth and were members of the Society for Biblical Research, which had links all over the world, they said. They were always grateful, as they also said, for the generous hospitality they had invariably found on their travels. They had come from Abu Kemal on the Euphrates, where there was a Swedish mission house. Then, some hours later, a Swiss journalist arrived. He had been commissioned to write an article about Mesopotamian archaeology and in particular about the men and women engaged in it, the successors to the great figures of the mid-nineteenth century, Botta, Layard, Rassam. He was hoping, he said, to interview Somerville and anyone else who cared to talk to him at Tell Erdek. He had a camera, and he was proposing to include photographs in his article—photographs of the people and the places.

It was thus a strange and ill-assorted company that sat down to dinner that evening, the newcomers in their different ways adding to the incongruities already existing, the Swedish couple effusive in manner and frequently exchanging smiles, the softly spoken, gentle-mannered Swiss waiting patiently for the time when Somerville, who grew more and more secretive as his discoveries promised to be important, would grant him an interview. A certain atmosphere of constraint hung over the table, with the major seeming more stiff and bristling even than usual, Elliott silent and preoccupied, Somerville prey to a temptation still unadmitted, Edith absorbed in thoughts of how appearances could deceive: Who could have ever suspected that Major Manning, such a perfect type of British army officer, as she had thought, could be in the pay of a foreign power and working against the interests of his own country, was little better than a spy, in fact. And the Russians, of all people, so backward and savage.

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 grow. 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.”