Tomy and the Planet of Lies (11 page)

“What a surprise,” she smiled innocently. “I see you got out of Iran in one piece.” Completely carefree, as if nothing had happened and we were old friends, she greeted us all effusively and then grabbed a stool and slid it between Marc and Tomy. Her escort, presumably her chauffeur, disappeared into the interior of the building. I wanted to know where she was headed and she told us she was on the way to Ankara. “And how come you're not flying?” I asked. She claimed she had far too many things in her luggage that couldn't be taken by plane, whatever that meant.

Somehow, I didn't trust this woman. She told us she had some time on her hands, grasping Marc's arm affectionately, and seeing as she could speak a little Turkish, she thought she might be able to help us out a little. I found the offer embarrassing. And what's more, we were planning on making side trips to two archeological sites along the way. Just in passing, and more to distract her than anything else, I asked Chantal what she thought of Mount Ararat and the Flood story. “Must have been pretty much as it was described in the Bible,” she answered, “or in the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. There you find the same story told in the first person by survivors of the flood.”

She was well read, I had to give her that much. But that just made me sit up and take notice even more. I asked her straight out what you should never ask a lady, namely how old she was. After the usual coy guessing games, she finally pulled out a French diplomatic passport from her bag: Chantal Babey, I read, née le 28 juin 1957. So, she was thirty years old. I would have guessed that she was a few years younger than that. Why the diplomatic passport? As a connecting element between France and Iran, she required diplomatic protection, she explained pointedly.

She mocked Tomy gently, asking him if he couldn't simply jump over Ararat and look for the Ark.

“I don't know anyone up there,” he answered evasively. She didn't let up, though, wanting to know if he thought the story of the Flood and the Ark were at all plausible. “It's not impossible,” he mumbled. “The continental crust is only 35 kilometers thick: there are stresses and fissures in it that make massive floods of that nature almost inevitable.”

“And what does that have to do with the Flood?” inquired Marc. I noted that Tomy reacted far more positively to Marc's questioning. When Chantal asked something he was polite, but cool.

“The surface of your planet is 510 million square kilometers, of which around 361 million square kilometers is covered in water. Press a football into that soup and it has to overflow somewhere.”

Chantal broke in, shaking her head: “You keep talking about ‘your' planet and not ‘ours.' Aren't you a human being like us?”

“That's it in a nutshell,” Tomy replied subtly. “I tried to explain this to you already, but you thought you knew better.”

Chantal looked contemplative, then slid her chair a little way away from Tomy as if he had suddenly transformed into a poisonous jellyfish. Clearly, she had started digesting the incomprehensible truth about him. After a short moment of silence she asked:

“OK. So what's the name of this planet where you come from?”

“You call its sun Vega. It is the fourth planet.” He wasn't prepared to say any more.

We decided to set off; Chantal and her chauffeur close behind us. Beforehand I had arranged with her that it wasn't a problem if we lost sight of each other because we could meet up in the Sheraton Hotel when we got to Ankara. But we didn't lose sight of each other: they stuck to our tail like glue.

The newly paved road took us via Agri to Erzurum, where we took rooms in a lousy hotel because there was nothing else available. That evening I managed to contact an old friend of mine, Ercan Güsteri. He was living in Istanbul and gushed about how incredibly delighted he was that we were there, and of course, he would be our guide and interpreter. He would take the early plane to Erzurum and meet us the next day.

I hadn't seen Ercan for nearly two years. He was a typical playboy, the kind you see in glossy magazines: a natty dresser, raven-black hair, a face that was more than a little reminiscent of Roger Moore, always tanned, slim, six feet tall, Porsche sunglasses, and an Omega Speedmaster a permanent fixture on his wrist. I knew him as a travel guide and hobby archeologist and recalled from earlier encounters that he had pretty nationalistic leanings. A Turkish patriot. I couldn't fail to notice his ingratiating smile as he greeted Chantal with a slight bow and an excessively long kiss of the hand. Chantal reacted like a spoilt poodle, wagging its tail enthusiastically around the legs of its master.

Ercan had always been an enthusiastic supporter of my ideas. He had visited me twice in Switzerland and had presented me with large-format pictures of recent excavations in Turkey. Something else: his father had been the representative of some conservative party or other in the

Turkish parliament. Whether he still was or not, I didn't know.

All afternoon we chatted about the archeological highlights of the route we were currently on. Ercan talked incessantly. He wanted us to go to Hattuşa, the ancient capital of the Hittite people. “And then we really
must
go to Mount Nemrut!” he enthused, gesticulating in its general direction. “It is a holy mountain in Southeast Anatolia, Erich!” he insisted. “You can't leave out Nemrut. We have to go up to the peak for daybreak. Then you will see the red dawn from a terrace filled with mighty stone seats and sculpted heads. You've never seen anything like it!”

It was hard to interrupt this cascade of words. Especially seeing as he was enthusiastically backed up by Chantal. I wanted to know if this mountain, too, had its secrets, whether it might have something to do ancient astronomy.

“And how!” answered Ercan and started digging postcards out of his leather briefcase. “There's a pyramid up at the top that no one, to this day, has been able to dig into because the stones just slip back into place. You will be able to take photos of a huge lion head covered in astronomical symbols that no one has been able to decipher. There are engraved images of the moon surrounded by several planets on its breast. But it's the play of colors as the sun comes up which transforms the pyramid and all the seated gods; it's an unforgettable experience. You have to go up there, Erich!”

* * *

The next morning, after only a few hours of sleep, we set off at six a.m. Ercan had rented a Russian Jeep copy, a Lada, and led the way. We would have all had room enough in my Rover, but Ercan clearly wanted to be alone with Chantal. The route took us past a Qur'an school from the 13th century and the archeological museum being built next to it. Then we were out of the provincial capital, driving through the Anatolian highlands and down into the Amik Plain to Malatya. As the day progressed, more and more trucks were taking to the road, and every overtaking maneuver was like dicing with death. Some waved us by, some blocked both lanes, and the crazy ones swerved out while we were overtaking.

And so it carried on along the E99 until we reached Golbasi. Here, Ercan took a sharp right turn onto a bumpy, unpaved natural road in the direction of Adiyaman. His destination was the village of Eski Kahta, the starting point for the ascent of Mount Nemrut, known as Nemrut Dağ to the locals. The village was right at the foot of the mountain and had nothing to offer apart from a chalet-like hotel, where we immediately booked rooms.

There were no single rooms, only wooden bunks for the military and rucksack tourists. We were grateful to get a room together—Tomy, Marc, and me. Ercan and Chantal managed to get an eight-man room just for themselves. It was obviously off-season and the military seemed to have withdrawn. Later, during a somewhat modest dinner, two mustachioed officers appeared, greeting Ercan like a long-lost brother with kisses and bear hugs. They greet us too in a friendly manner and joined us—at Ercan's insistence—at our table. Their furtive questioning, particularly that of the younger officer, should have made me sit up and take notice, but the heavy, rather sweet red wine had dulled my faculties somewhat. The fact that the officer asked me about my books—which also enjoyed a great deal of success in Turkey—was nothing out of the ordinary. But the probing questions regarding Marc and Tomy; about their relationship to me and what they were doing for me; how long we knew each other; and why they were with me on this trip seemed a little excessive.

Ercan somehow persuaded me that it would be a good idea to take the two with us to the mountaintop. Because of Kurdish attacks, the region was crawling with military and we would probably have our papers checked repeatedly by patrols or we could even be stopped and not be able to continue at all. It would be cleverer to have the officers on board. His argument seemed plausible.

Back in our room the shower refused to provide our not particularly fresh bodies with anything resembling water and the faucet on the hand basin provided a single water droplet every 15 seconds. We ended up cleaning our teeth using mineral water. By ten o'clock, we were lying on our narrow bunks. A short while later the Ramadan celebrations began. I have never found out why it didn't already start at seven in this community.

As predicted, we were stopped three times the next morning by military patrols, which let us through after exchanging a few words with the officers accompanying us. Ercan, Chantal, and the officers were riding in the Lada; I was clattering along some way behind, drowning in the dust thrown up by their car, which blocked our vision and clogged our lungs. The ‘road' got ever steeper and more dangerous. On the right the rocky side of the mountain, on the left breathtakingly deep ravines. There was no room for maneuver. At around 5 a.m. we reached the end of the drivable stretch of the track—it couldn't really be described as a road any more, by any stretch of the imagination. Here, in the cliffs, a small passing point had been blown out of the rock. Ercan turned his Lada so that front was facing outwards, towards the valley, and I did the same with our car. Four hundred meters above was the pyramid-like mountaintop. We were shivering from the cold as we unloaded our camera cases and the metal detector from the car. Then, with our equipment on our backs or hanging round our necks, we set off, still coughing from the dust, in single file on the path up to the summit. The track took us in an ever-climbing spiral. Its slippery gravel, which reminded us of the rusty chunks of rock found between railroad sleepers, made us long for the reassuring solidity of rock under our feet. With plumes of condensation coming out of mouths with every breath, we finally reached a flat stone area that looked as if it had been specially prepared for helicopter landings. We deposited our equipment on the ground. I guessed that this ‘helipad' was around 30 x 30 meters. In front of the cone-like pyramid of the summit, we could see the dark figures of five gods sat enthroned on mighty stone seats. They reminded me of the Colossi of Memnon in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. On the ground in front of them stood two huge eagle heads; a couple of meters to the right were four human heads, all wearing the pointed Hittite helmets of the supposed weather god.

As the first rays of the sun poked their way through the cool morning grayness and began to illuminate this fantastic scenery, we were gripped by an indescribable feeling of reverence. For several minutes, we just stood there marveling at the spectacle, as if it were a kind of natural laser show. At some point, Marc reminded me about the cameras and we quickly began setting up the equipment and shooting as many pictures as we could. The sun poured its ruby light over the terrace and the pyramids in a breathtaking pyrotechnic of color. Two hundred meters higher there was a second terrace with five more deities on ten-meter-high plinths, their gazes directed sternly towards the valley. As the sun illuminated the throned gods on one side of the pyramid with its liquid gold, the other side was thrown into deep shadows. We rushed from one terrace to the next so as not to miss a single moment of this natural wonder. Every few seconds, someone would cry out: “Over here, quickly! Amazing!” Marc, Tomy and I, each one of us armed with a different camera, would run over to whoever had cried out.

Hesitantly, the sun bestowed its warmth on the new day; the dark valleys and peaks around us took on a gently blue hue, occasionally cascading into violet or red. Then the peaks began to shine with white light, which slowly transformed into gold. In the ravines the colors ran into each other and mixed together as if the great master Michelangelo himself were stirring them together for a grandiose composition.

Ercan hadn't been exaggerating. It was a unique experience that everyone should have at least once in their life. In a gallery, arranged from left to right, a stone lion, a monolithic eagle, and then the enthroned figures of Apollo, Fortuna, Zeus, Antiochus and Heracles were lit fantastically. Under our feet, there was a gigantic slab with an engraving of a lion at its center. I could count 19 stars on its breast, along with a rising moon and three planets. Why only three? A short while after the sun had crested the horizon we were finally able to photograph the inscriptions on the rear side of the gods' thrones. The engraving was in pristine Latin letters: Antiochus—who had ruled from 69–36 BC—had had this tomb built for himself and the gods “to leave an unshakeable law of the age by entrusting an immortal message to this untouchable monument.” But what was the message he had left on the Nemrut Dağ, 2150 meters above sea level?

After two hours of unceasing photograph taking we had finally ran out of film and were sitting on a mighty stone step catching our breath. Chantal's face looked a little cheesy, as if she were afraid of something. Ercan, on the other hand, appreciatively lit up a small cigarillo and blew out clouds of caustic smoke in the direction of the gods, as if it was some sort of burnt offering. The two officers had wandered off somewhere—at least, I couldn't see them anywhere. The indefatigable Marc was busy unscrewing the lenses from the cameras and carefully packing them away in an orderly fashion in their cases. Tomy was staring dreamily down into the valley, so I went over and sat down next to him.