The Genesis Secret

47

Christine and Rob flew to Turkey straight from London the same evening, after telling blatant lies to Forrester and Boijer.

They decided to take the Black Book with them: Christine was obliged to show her archaeological credentials at Heathrow and flash her most charming smile to get a strange and arguably human skull past London customs. In Turkey they had to be even more careful. They flew to Dyarbakir, via Istanbul, then made a long, dusty, six-hour cab-ride to Sanliurfa, through the night and the dawn. They didn’t want to announce their arrival to Kiribali by turning up at Sanliurfa Airport, conspicuous, Western and unwanted; indeed they didn’t want Kiribali to know they were anywhere near Turkey.

Just being here, in Kurdistan, was risky enough.

In the thrumming heart of broiling Urfa they headed for the Hotel Haran. Right outside the lobby Rob found his man-Radevan-sheltering from the hot morning sun, arguing noisily about football with the other cab drivers, and acting a little grouchy. But the grumpiness was due to Ramadan: everyone was grouchy, hungry and thirsty through the hours of daylight.

Rob went straight for it and asked Radevan if he could find some friends to help them dig the Valley of the Slaughter. He also quietly asked him to procure some guns, as well. Rob wanted to be ready for anything.

Initially, Radevan was moody and unsure: he went off to ‘consult’ with his numberless cousins. But an hour later he returned with seven friends and relatives, all smiling Kurdish lads. In the meantime Rob had bought some second-hand shovels and hired a couple of very old Land Rovers.

This was probably going to be the most makeshift archaeological dig of the last two hundred years, but they had no choice. They had only two days to unearth the final answer to all their questions, two days to unearth the Valley of the Slaughter, and lure Cloncurry into a position in which he would have to give up Lizzie. And Radevan had done his job with the guns: they were concealed in a shabby old sack: two shotguns and a German pistol. Radevan winked at Rob as they made the transaction. ‘You see I help you, Mr Robbie. I like Englishman, they help the Kurds.’ He grinned, luxuriously, as Rob handed over the wad of dollars.

As soon as everything was stowed in the cars, Rob jumped in the driver’s seat and keyed the engine. His impatience was almost unbearable. Just being in the same city as Lizzie, yet not knowing where she was or how she was suffering made him feel as if he was having a serious heart attack. He had pains shooting up his arm; palpitations of anguish. His jaw hurt. He thought of Lizzie, tied to a chair, as the last of Urfa’s suburbs became a haze of dust and greyness in the rearview mirror.

Christine was in the seat beside him. Three Kurdish men were in the back. Radevan was driving the second Land Rover, right behind. The guns were hidden in their sack, under Rob’s seat. The Black Box, in its worn leather box, was firmly wedged in the boot.

As they rattled along, the familiar talkativeness of the Kurds lapsed into whispers, and then into silence. Their silence was matched by the deadness of the landscape as they headed out into the vastness of the desert. The yellow and desolate wastes.

The heat was quite incredible: high summer on the edge of the Syriac wilderness. Rob sensed the nearness of Gobekli as they motored south. But this time they drove straight past the Gobekli turn off, and were waved through several army checkpoints further down the hot Damascus road. Christine had bought a detailed map: she reckoned she knew precisely where to find the valley.

‘Here’, she said, at one turning, very authoritatively. They took a right and barrelled for half an hour along unmetalled dirt tracks. And then at last they crested a rise. The two cars halted, and everyone climbed out: the Kurds looking dirty, sweaty and mildly mutinous. The shovels were unloaded, the trowels, ropes and backpacks were dumped on the sandy hilltop.

To their left was a bare and narrow valley.

‘That’s it,’ said Christine. ‘The Valley of the Slaughter. They still call it the Valley of Killing. It’s actually marked on the map.’

Rob gazed and listened. He could hear-nothing. Nothing but the mournful desert wind. The site-the entire region-was strangely hushed, even for the deserts near Gobekli.

‘Where is everyone?’ he said.

‘Gone. Evacuated. Moved by the government,’ replied Christine.

‘Huh?’

‘That’s why.’ She was pointing left where an expanse of silver flatness glistened in the distance. ’That’s the water from the Great Anatolian Project. The Euphrates. They are flooding the whole region, for irrigation. Several major archaeological sites have already flooded-it’s very controversial.’

‘Christ-it’s only a few klicks away!’

‘And it’s coming in our direction. But that levee will stop it. The earthbank over there.’ Christine pointed, and frowned. Her white shirt was freckled with yellow dust. ‘But we need to be careful: these inundations can be very quick. And unpredictable.’

‘We need to be quick anyway,‘ said Rob.

They turned and descended the hill into the valley. Within a few minutes Christine had got the Kurds digging. As they worked, the size of the task assailed Rob. The valley was a mile long, at least. In two days, their team would only be able to turn over a fraction of it. Maybe twenty per cent. Maybe thirty. And they wouldn’t be able to dig very deep.

So they were going to have to be lucky to find anything. The sombreness and fear that Rob had been feeling since they had returned to the Kurdish desert was joined by a rising surge of ennui. A great tide of pointlessness. Lizzie was going to die. She was going to die. And Rob felt useless: he felt he would drown in the futility of it all, be entombed like the thirsty lands around him, awaiting that vast silver coffinlid of water. The Great Anatolian Project.

But he knew he had to stay strong, to see this through and so he tried to improve his mood. He reminded himself what Breitner had said of Christine: that she was ‘one of the best archaeologists of her generation’. He reminded himself that the great Isobel Previn had taught Christine at Cambridge.

And the Frenchwoman certainly seemed confident: she was calmly but firmly telling the men where to dig, ordering them this way and that, up and down the valley. For an hour or two the dust rose and settled; the spades rang and shovelled. The hot, joyless wind whirred over the Valley of Killings.

And then one man dropped his shovel. It was Radevan’s second cousin, Mumtaz.

‘Miss Meyer!’ he cried. ‘Miss Meyer!’

She ran over; Rob followed.

A portion of white bone was lying in the dusty earth. It was the curve of a skull: small but human. Even Rob could tell that. Christine seemed intrigued, but not triumphant. She nodded.

‘OK, good. Now dig laterally.’

The Kurds did not understand. Christine told Radevan, again, in Kurdish: dig straight across. Don’t bother digging any deeper. It was a matter of covering the ground now: they had less than two days left.

The men worked to order, apparently charmed by Christine’s wilfulness. Rob joined the shovelling once more. Every few minutes they uncovered a new skull. Rob helped them scrape the earth away with feverish energy. Another skull; another skeleton. Whenever they found the ruins of another body, they didn’t bother uncovering the whole thing-as soon as they got the sense of one skeleton, Christine told them to move on.

Another skull; another skeleton. These, Rob noted, were quite small people. Typical huntergatherers, as Christine explained, five foot tall at most. Sturdy men of the caves and the deserts, with healthy physiques: but no more than averagely tall for the time.

They dug, quicker and quicker. It was messy and slipshod. The sun was past its zenith and Rob also sensed the great wall of water was getting nearer. The incoming flood was just a few days away.

Still they dug.

And then Rob heard another shout, this time from Radevan.

‘Mr Rob,’ Radevan said. ‘Look at this! A very big man. Like American.’ He was scraping earth from a femur bone. ‘Like American who eat many McNuggets.’ The femur was almost twice as large as any of the others.

Christine jumped down into the trench; Rob joined her. They helped to unearth the rest of the skeleton. It took time because the skeleton was huge: seven foot six at least. They all scraped earth from the pelvis. From the ribs. From the spine, unearthing large white bones in the grimy yellow dust. And then they came to the skull. Radevan pulled it out in one go, and held it up.

Rob gawped. It was enormous.

Christine took the great skull from Radevan’s hands and examined it. It was not an obvious human skull: it was much larger, with slanting, birdlike eyes, stark cheekbones, a smaller jaw and a very large braincase.

Rob looked closer at the grinning jaw, with its teeth still intact. ‘This is…’ He wiped the sweat, salt and dust from his face. ‘This is a hominid, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Christine. ‘But…’ She turned it in the shadeless sun.

The skull was filled with dark yellow earth, giving the large slanted eye sockets a blank and hostile stare. Rob could hear a bird somewhere, calling-a lonely bird circling languidly in the sky. Probably a buzzard, attracted by the bones.

Christine brushed some adhering yellow dust from the skull. ‘Clearly hominid. Clearly non-Homo sapiens. Like nothing we have ever found. Very large braincase, presumably highly intelligent.’

‘It looks kind of…Asiatic. No?’

Christine nodded. ‘Mongoloid in certain aspects, yes. But…but look at the eyes, and the cranium. Amazing. Yet it fits. Because I think…’ She looked at Rob. ‘I think we have the answer here, to the hybridization. This is the other species of hominid. The one that interbred with the smaller people here, to produce the skull from the Black Book.’

The Kurds were still digging. Skeleton after skeleton. The number of bones they had uncovered was almost sickening. The sun was nearing the horizon: the day’s fast would soon be over and the men were keen to get home for the feast, the end of the day’s Ramadan famine.

When he was too exhausted to continue, too nauseated by the white of the bones, and the grins of the enormous skulls, Rob lay back on the dusty slope and just watched. Then he took out his notebook and began to scribble. To piece the story together. This was the only way he knew to unlock a puzzle: to write it down; set it out. And thereby piece together a narrative. He sensed the light fading as he wrote.

After he’d finished his notes he looked up: Christine was measuring bones, and taking photos of the skeletons. But the day was over. The desert breeze was mild, and freshening. The inundating water was now so near that Rob could smell it in the air. Probably no more than two or three miles away. He gazed down the trenches with his tired eyes. They had uncovered an enormous and mournful graveyard: a charnel house of protohumans, lying next to near-human giants. But the real puzzle remained hidden; Rob hadn’t worked it out; his notes didn’t make sense. They hadn’t yet managed to solve the secret. And the darkness of the desert meant they had just one day left.

Rob’s heart cried out for his daughter.