“ ‘So now you will suffer death,’ ” he said, quoting Genesis.
She nodded. “They had eternal life and everything a person could want and now the king, the one who had provided them with everything, sent orders that they be killed. Life in the Garden, death outside.”
“So the king becomes God in the text,” Hawker said.
“A different kind of God,” Sonia said.
“Different than the Abrahamic God?” Danielle asked.
“Not by name,” she said. “But by actions. If you read Genesis carefully, you’ll see a different character from the all-knowing, all-powerful God we meet in the rest of the Bible. He often seems surprised by things, like the serpent tricking Adam and Eve. Sometimes he seems confused or even afraid. When he comes to see Adam and Eve after they’ve eaten the apple, they hide and he doesn’t know where they are. He demands that they show themselves. He doesn’t know who told them they were naked. He asks them if they’ve eaten from the tree he told them not to. And when they say yes, he asks them why, what made them do that?”
“Religious people will tell you that’s not what He meant,” she added. “Usually right after they tell you to read the Bible literally, but that’s what it says.”
It felt odd to Hawker. Even though he considered the Garden of Eden a metaphor, there was some natural resistance to anyone offering a different view of the Bible. He felt it himself this moment, even though he had his own different views.
“Is this why Savi was upset when I called it a metaphor?” he asked.
“She was hoping you would see it our way,” Sonia said.
In hindsight he could see it that way. He didn’t necessarily agree with it, but his mind was open. In fact one thing he’d always wondered jumped out at him — if Adam and Eve were the people from whom all others came, how come they ran into other humans shortly after they left the Garden? If anything, that seemed to suggest a more earthly and different reality, more like what was being told in the copper scroll. People who had no knowledge of the outside world might think they — and the king who came around — were the only ones who existed. At least, that is, until they stepped into that outside world and ran into more people.
“Ever wonder what would have happened if Adam had refused to eat the fruit after Eve had taken a bite?” Hawker asked, thinking it sounded like Eve might have left, snuck off this castle/island, and then returned to tell Adam of the outside world. And then perhaps Adam went, too.
“Or if Eve had killed herself like Judas, before luring Adam in,” Sonia said.
There was an odd tone in Sonia’s voice, made odder by the way it echoed around beneath the stone outcropping.
“Either way, Adam would have been awfully lonely at night,” Danielle said.
Hawker had to agree. “Better to die with love than live without it.”
“The thing is,” Danielle said, “according to the scroll, the keepers of the Garden, this first one and his wife — whether it was Adam and Eve or not — they did try to come back here, only to find the Garden in flames. War had broken out between the king and the traitor who tricked the keepers of the Garden and as their swords clashed, the last of the miraculous gardens burned.”
As Danielle scraped another smudge of black carbon off the stone walls, Hawker wondered if the image of this garden in flames while men fought over it was the source of the Bible verse that told of God preventing humans from returning to Eden by stationing mighty angels with flaming swords at its entrance.
Fire, swords, no return; maybe, or maybe he was just trying to fit those puzzle pieces together again. To see a picture where there wasn’t one.
Danielle tucked her sample away and scanned around the ruins. “McCarter asked for samples of wooden beams and things like that, but I don’t see any.”
Hawker followed her gaze. The whole structure was stone, cut and laid precisely. He remembered McCarter telling them about stone blocks and how, without mortar, they’d hold themselves in place far longer than cemented structures.
The weight of the stones did the work. And with no mortar or cement to dissolve, the structure would last as long as the stone itself. That’s why the great pyramids around the world still looked relatively close to their original shape.
He’d said if humans disappeared from the earth today, a visitor five thousand years later might find no sign of the modern world, and yet the pyramids of Giza would still stand.
Hawker glanced at Sonia. She was studying the layer of soot as Danielle had, but she’d moved from the walls to what looked like a threshing stone on the floor. She examined it for a moment and then moved on.
One by one she studied each and every block and mud brick as if she was looking for clues. Finally, after pulling one heavy stone out of the ground, she stopped. Her eyes fixated on something underneath it.
Hawker looked. It appeared to be another rectangular brick about the size and shape of a cereal box. In the glare of Sonia’s light, he saw markings.
Sonia began to scrape away the dirt and then stopped, looking disappointed.
“This isn’t what we’re looking for,” she said.
“How do you know?” Hawker asked. “Can you read it?”
“No, but I’m looking for the sign.”
“What sign?”
Danielle answered from another section of the ruin.
“This one.”
Hawker and Sonia turned. Danielle was pointing to another of the flat, rectangular bricks. Like the one Sonia had looked at, it lay one level down, beneath another stone.
A carving appeared in its center. The mark looked like a rectangle, surrounded by a larger square, surrounded by a circle with hash marks pointing out in four directions, like a compass rose.
Sonia moved toward her. “That’s the one.”
“You guys want to let me in on your little secret?” Hawker asked.
They exchanged glances and smiled. Suddenly it was a girls’ club, like best of friends, with him on the outside.
Sonia dropped to the ground and began digging around the edges of the tablet. Danielle turned to Hawker.
“When McCarter translated the writing on the copper scroll, he found a symbol at the bottom of each column. It was the only symbol written the same in all three languages,” she said.
“That symbol,” Hawker guessed.
“Exactly,” she said. “It is a combination of the Sumerian symbol of life and”—she looked around—“a representation of this place.”
Hawker thought about that. The platform in the middle, the larger, sunken platform surrounding it, the curving sides of the pit surrounding the square shape of the platform: It certainly made sense.
“What are the lines branching out from the circle?”
“The four rivers of Eden,” Danielle said. “Or in reality, the four canals. They controlled the water to the pit, keeping it level, keeping it a certain depth and temperature. Because if McCarter and Gilgamesh are right, the Tree of Life didn’t grow on the land, it grew in the water, on the lower terrace.”
“It’s as if the story took on different forms,” Danielle continued. “The Garden of Hesperides to the Macedonian Greeks. The plant under the water in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis.”
“And what’s this place?” Hawker asked. “This building. I don’t recall Adam and Eve doing any construction work.”
“Like anything, we’re talking about a legend that traveled the known world seven thousand years ago. It might have been written down in a few places like these tablets or the copper scroll, but those types of things were far too valuable to move around.”