Stone ruins covering one section appeared to be mostly crude structures. On the far edge lay a much larger structure, one that seemed to protrude into the ground.
The ATV slipped a bit. Realizing he was still hanging over the edge, Hawker pushed off the handlebars, straightening up. With his hand on the clutch he walked the ATV back a few steps, flipping up the night-vision goggles as he went.
“A little warning next time,” he suggested.
“Like you gave me in Paris?”
There was not much he could say to that.
Danielle smiled. “Would you like a drink?” she said. “You must be thirsty after eating so much dust.” She was obviously enjoying the moment.
“Didn’t know you were such a comedian.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
That much was true. Maybe someday.
Behind him, Sonia stepped off the ATV.
“Is this it?” she asked.
Danielle nodded. She pointed to the walls of the pit, the moat that surrounded the structure in the middle like a castle.
“If this whole theory is right, we’re looking at the land of Havilah, ‘the table or stretch of sand,’ closely related to the name used in the Bible and ‘completely surrounded’ by the river Pishon.”
Sonia pulled off her helmet and shook out her hair.
“And in the middle?” Hawker asked.
“The first and the last of the Miraculous Gardens of Life,” Danielle said. “The Garden of — or in — Eden.”
It seemed both correct and wrong. The place was barren, quiet, and deserted. It seemed the opposite of life in its current state and yet the stars above were so brilliant in their intensity, it almost felt as if God were watching.
“How is it no one ever found this place?” Hawker asked. “Especially if this Bashir guy has been looking for it all his life?”
“Because,” Danielle said, “until a few years ago, when Saddam drained the swamps, this whole area was underwater. Since then it’s been kind of a war zone.”
That made sense. Too bad for Bashir, maybe for the rest of the world, too.
Sonia reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. Scratched into the paper was a drawing of a large, lush area surrounded by water and walls.
“This was drawn up from a Sumerian description of the place where life flowed.”
She held it out at an angle. It didn’t really match, but with imagination Hawker could kind of see the resemblance.
“So now what?”
“Down inside,” Sonia said. “If they still exist, what we’re looking for will be in the main building.”
They tied a rope to one of the ATVs, climbed down into the moat, and crossed the open area. Making their way up to the platform was far more difficult but eventually they reached the first tier.
Strange rows of rocks stood piled and aligned in places, but most of it was a jumble. Since the water had drained away, the area had become bone dry. The only erosion had come from the wind. Like the sites at Ur or the pyramids of Giza, what hadn’t been disturbed by man lay pretty much as it once had.
They crossed the lower, outer platform and scaled a crumbling ten-foot wall onto the main level of the platform.
Sonia moved toward the main building, appearing for all the world like she knew what she was looking for.
“The people who lived here predated the Sumerians,” she said. “Some scholars call them the Elamites.”
“Elamites — Edenites,” Hawker said. “Got to be the same.”
“We call them the Elamites,” she said. “We have no idea what they called themselves.”
Danielle laughed and leaned in to Hawker. “She’s too smart for you. She should date McCarter instead.”
Hawker had to laugh. He was enjoying the moment. No one was shooting at them or trying to blow them up, Sonia seemed to be glowing as she neared the end of her quest, and every jealous bone in Danielle’s body had begun to act up.
“Never thought you’d be the jealous type,” he replied.
“Just trying to save you some heartache.”
They followed Sonia through the broken remnants of the large structure. Here and there she looked at parts of the ruins, eventually coming to an opening that led underground.
“Can I use the light?” she asked.
So far they’d been maneuvering by moonlight, but to go where she was going required artificial illumination.
Hawker nodded. “Just keep it covered until you’re inside.”
Sonia pulled her flashlight out and stepped to the edge. She made it down a foot or so and then turned on the beam, covering it with her hand.
Danielle and Hawker moved up to the edge.
Hawker followed Sonia’s light and Danielle came in behind him. They moved into an empty room that looked like it might have been hollowed out of the rock itself to make a storehouse. Most of it was filled with sand, but like the moat outside, some sections seemed to have been sheltered. Or cleared.
Hawker bent close to Sonia as she ran her hand across one of the stones.
“What are you looking for?”
“Growing stones,” she said.
“What’s a growing stone?”
She explained. “According to the Sumerian part of the legend, the life-giving tree bore two kinds of fruit: the seedless kind that was consumed, and on rare occasion a seeded bud. They were so valuable and few, that upon their reaching fullness, they were plucked, surrounded in wax, sealed into a ball of gold, and then placed inside bricks of mud and clay. The clay was then baked at a very low temperature until it hardened into tablets. Tablets upon which the story of their existence was carved.”
“So the seeds aren’t in the mud,” Hawker noted.
“They are,” she said. “It’s just the mud is now a brick.”
“Look at this,” Danielle said.
They turned her way. With the edge of her knife she was scraping off soot and creosote from the stone walls. Shining the flashlights around what was left of the structure showed the same soot everywhere, baked into the stone.
“There was a fire here,” Danielle said. “Big enough, hot enough to heat these rocks and scar them.”
She scraped off a bunch more of the soot, filling a small plastic bag.
“What, are you with CSI now?”
“McCarter wanted samples so he could try to carbon-date the place.”
“What does he think about all this?”
“He read the scroll,” she said. “It says two people were kept here to tend the Garden. They were given everything by the king but were never allowed to leave. They partook of the seedless fruit from the Tree of Life and thus lived for ages.”
“Sounds familiar,” he said.
“It parallels very nicely,” she said. “Apparently the keepers of the Garden weren’t permitted to know of the outside world. They were born here, told that this was the entire world, and made to live all their lives here. They were given food and wine and other treasures. Everything a person could want, but they were never allowed to leave.”
“Because if they left, they could tell someone where the Garden was,” Hawker guessed, assuming that was one thing the king couldn’t have.
“Exactly.”
“Bashir told my father the scroll was found in the grave of the first one,” Sonia said. “Adam.”
She looked around. “A long way from here, though.”
“The scroll says they were tricked into leaving by one of the king’s guards,” Danielle explained. “According to McCarter, it doesn’t mention anything about knowledge of good and evil but it does mention knowledge of a wider world.”
“And once they left and gained this knowledge?” Hawker asked.
“Can’t go home again,” Danielle said. “Once they’d left, the king needed to find and kill them, lest they tell anyone about his garden.”