Doctor Who_ Eternity Weeps Part 3

The Land Rover jolted as if to make her point. 'There's a wild and terrible beauty here. It's the beauty of symmetry, of form determined by function.

The land is the people, do you seep 'No.' I bit my lip. The images of poverty and starvation, illness and death were just too close to home.

Candy laughed. 'Dear boy, you have the soul of an electrician.'

I thought of a dirty flophouse on Deneb Seven and the squat shape of a Denebian and what I had done for him and how much I had charged and how badly he had beaten me afterwards - and I said nothing.

My thoughts were interrupted by distant gunfire. The gunfire muttered for some while and then abruptly stopped. There was a long moment of quiet.

Then a dull thump which might have been an explosion. Then the guns started up again.

I found myself thinking questions I didn't want to think. I could see Candy did too. We drove on in silence. I gripped the steel rollbar and tried to get my feelings back under control.

It wasn't easy.

Twenty minutes pa.s.sed with nothing more dramatic happening to break the tedium than a flock of sheep which had wandered on to the road.

Then, out of an otherwise clear sky, the drone of an engine became suddenly louder. A plane flew overhead, banked and swept back for a second pa.s.s over the Land Rovers.

The plane, probably a military spotter, flew low overhead as if its pilot was checking everyone out by sight. I bit my lip. Allied pilots did this in the Gulf War just before strafing their own tanks.

I waved nervously to the pilot, whom I caught a brief glimpse of peering out of the canopy through a pair of binoculars. The pilot did not wave back. The plane flew overhead, seemed to hesitate for a second, then, with a thunder of engines, roared off in a straight line over the nearest hills. The sound of the engine echoed briefly for a moment, then grumbled away to silence.

Candy glanced at me. 'I do believe you scared them off.'

I let my hand fall back into my lap, then changed my mind and gripped the rollbar again as the Land Rover swerved to avoid an apparently suicidal sheep, then lunged around a ma.s.s of rock projecting from the mountainside.

And there it was. G.o.d's mountain. Ararat.

We stared at the mountain and Candy continued to drive. She was ecstatic.

'Boy oh boy. It's a whopper, isn't it?' She almost jumped up and down with excitement. Her foot jerked repeatedly on and off the accelerator and the Land Rover jerked savagely with her.

I stared through the windscreen at the jagged slope of the mountain ahead.

Rising from a sheath of morning mist, Ararat was a double peak sweeping towards a thundery sky. Its grey and brown peaks glimmered with a coating of snow.

'It's seventeen thousand feet high. Mean, moody, and suitably Biblical, wouldn't you say?' Candy pulled off a spectacular handbrake stop.

I jammed my eyes shut for a moment, offering a silent prayer of thanks that we were the last vehicle in the convoy. 'G.o.d must really want us to find this d.a.m.n boat.'

The Land Rover skidded in a cloud of dust. Candy was reaching for her watercolours even before it had ground to a halt beside the road.

'Seventeen thousand ... how does Jim know where to look for the Ark?'

Candy grinned. 'Why, the answer to that should be as obvious as the nose on your face. Only the top was good enough for G.o.d's faithful to land on.'

Jason groaned. 'You mean the top? The very top? Seventeen thousand -'

'Yep.' Candy bounced from the Land Rover, dropped the tailgate and unpacked an easel. 'Anyway, Jim's always got those farmers and their letter to guide him.'

'The soldiers' letter? You don't believe that, do you?' Candy laughed. 'Good old Jim. He practically turned cartwheels when he found out about that letter. Personally I feel it's stretching. the limit of credibility to a.s.sume that a Turkish soldier would have marched across the border into what was then Russian, territory, not once but twice, in order to reach his home village.'

Candy grabbed a box of brushes. 'Still, if it makes him happy, who am I to argue? The fact that he "discovered" the letter when those two con merchants tried to sell it to him for the price of an entire farm full of sheep was, apparently, not that important.' She laughed. 'Actually, that seems a little heartless. Let me put it this way: it's a great trip and somebody else is paying for me to be here and I get to paint all this beautiful scenery. If I get to paint an old boat as well that's just icing on the cake.'

I eased myself from the pa.s.senger seat into a slowly settling cloud of dust.

'You sound like you're on the wrong expedition.' I moved carefully. No telling what damage those last deep potholes had done to the old back.

'Expeditions are all in the mind, dear boy. Life is an expedition - to the most wonderful places you can imagine.' Well. Sometimes.

I joined Candy at the back of the Land Rover. I picked up the easel and carried it to a small hillock which was, amazingly enough, almost completely devoid of sheeps.h.i.+t. I set up the easel, peered over it towards the rapidly vanis.h.i.+ng cloud of dust which marked the movement of the rest of the Land Rovers along the road.

'We can't just stop, surely? What about the others? What about the major?

Won't he ... you know, worry or something?'

'Oh they're all used to me doing this sort of thing. We'll catch them up in a bit. I am the archivist, you know. It is my job.' She adjusted the easel, clamped a board to it and began happily squeezing paint from tubes on to a palette.

'What about the soldiers? They'll miss us. It could get complicated.'

'Oh don't be so pessimistic.' Brushes flew, paint slapped the board.

'Anyone would think I'd need an escort to go to the bathroom. I am sixty-three you know. I have sons older than the major. Did I tell you about them?'

I sighed. 'Frequently.'

'Well. Never mind. Hold the easel steady for me will you, dear boy? The wind does tend to fling it about so.'

I held the easel steady against a gusty breeze for half an hour, by which time my fingers were numb and my back was aching and I was beginning to think about Bernice. About the way she had looked when she came out of the shower this morning, the little lines round the comers of her eyes, the way her hair seemed to have lost its bounce. The tired brittleness creeping into her sense of humour. How old was she anyway? I thought about other girls I had seen and the way they almost always looked both younger and more interesting than my wife. Well, not more interesting - n.o.body could be more interesting - but ... still there was something. Wasn't there?

Something about them that was more attractive than Bernice? Sam Denton had it too, whatever it was.

And Bernice didn't.

Candy peered around the board at me and grinned. 'There. All done. That wasn't so painful, was it? You can pack the tripod now, if you wouldn't mind.'

I sighed. 'Can I see the picture first?'

'You can do better than that. You can hold it for me until the paint dries.'

'Can't we just wait until -'

'Heaven forbid! You know what worriers these military types are. We'd better push on before they miss us and start to panic.'

'But just now you said -'

'Yes, well, never mind about what I said just now. The quicker you pack the easel, the quicker we can be on our way.'

I nodded dubiously, braved a cloud of diesel fumes as Candy started the engine, shoved the easel into the back, locked the tailgate and climbed reluctantly into the pa.s.senger seat.

'Are you sure you wouldn't like' me to drive?' I asked as Candy thrust her painting at me. 'I mean, all that painting, that concentrating, it's hard work, right?'

'Nonsense, dear boy, wouldn't hear of it. You're young. Enjoy the view. I've seen it all before anyway.' She rammed the Land Rover into first and gunned the engine as if taking delight in the fact that I no longer had my hands free to prevent myself from being hurled painfully from side to side, battered by both the seat and the painting as Candy drove.

The mist burnt off as the sun rose. Ararat loomed before us, its twin peaks jutting into the sky above the shuddering windscreen.

When we reached a fork in the road Candy swung the Land Rover off to the north-east.

'How do you know they came this way?'

'The sheeps.h.i.+t on this road has fresh tyre marks in it.' I admitted to being impressed.

'Dear boy, when you've hunted elephants through the Mountains of the Moon, following half a dozen Land Rovers towards the biggest landmark in Turkey is a bit like taking bubblegum from a baby.'

Yeah, right.

We caught up with the rest of the expedition about five kilometres north-east, at a place where the road panned out into a rocky field and then just seemed to disappear amongst a scattering of goats.

The other vehicles were parked in a semicircle, with the major's jeep off to one side. The two soldiers with him were sitting on the ground beside the jeep sipping hot coffee from cracked china mugs.

Everyone else was huddled around a fire and waiting for us. At first I was pleased. It felt nice to be wanted. Then I realized the truth. It was lunchtime by now; the food was in our Land Rover.

After lunch Allen sat everyone down in the shade of a rocky outcropping and made tentative plans to scale the mountain.

'Drive into foothills. Two hours. Buy mules at Nehira village. Distribute equipment. Proceed on foot to summit.' Denton looked at the crate containing the heavy geological radar and frowned. 'How far will we have to climb?'

'Five thousand feet. Six. Not far.' 'Can we ride the mules?'

Allen shook his head. 'No money. We walk. Good. Make fit.' For some reason he looked at me as he said this. I compared the amount of equipment stowed in the Land Rovers with the number of people who would have to carry it. Great. See where marriage to Bernice Surnmerfield will get you?

Allen went on, 'Make camp at nightfall. Deploy frequency generator. First light. Look for iron. Artificial configuration. Confirm with geological radar.

Find boat. Become rich. Become famous.'

Candy laughed. 'Dear boy, you're such an optimist.'

Jim smiled quirkily. 'Am scientist. Have walked on Moon. Finding big boat on mountain not difficult.'

It was at this moment that I first realized there was not much to choose between the methodology of the two expeditions. All right, Allen and Raelsen were searching on different mountains, and they were driven by very different philosophies. But essentially they were using the same methods to find the same thing: the remains of a boat aged some five thousand years, built of wood, which utilized iron in its construction, in the form of nails and pegs. These nails would have survived even being buried under rock and would still, hopefully, retain something close to the configuration they had been in when part of a functioning sea vessel.

I was not the only one to appreciate the irony of Jim's plan: the frequency generator, first developed late in the previous century to search for metallic remains of wrecked s.h.i.+ps, would now serve to locate a boat which was five thousand years and two hundred and fifty kilometres away from the nearest sea.

The remains of the' meal were buried, the utensils cleaned and packed.

The expedition moved on through a grey wilderness of landscape, which became almost surreal in its monotony, coming, after several more hours'

travel, through a small mountain pa.s.s to the village of Nehira.

Nehira was a splotch of colour dumped in the middle of endless grey-brown land. Candy muttered obsessively about its being a jewel at Ararat's scarred, rocky. throat', while feverishly applying paint to canvas. There were two streets with a small number of dwellings, a few farms, a smaller number of children and - if anything - a larger proportion of people trying to sell home-made carpets. I suppose they have to do something with all that wool.

Candy bought a carpet.

Everyone else bought mules.

Actually we rented them for an extortionate amount of money. But since the village economy would probably have failed without them, Jim had to agree to (a) return them alive and uninjured on pain of something horrible of a religious nature happening to his children, and (b) leave three of the Land Rovers as security. This in addition to the cost of the animals, naturally.

When the expedition set out once again from the village it was in high spirits.

All except for me, that is. I stared up at the cloud-wreathed ma.s.s of stone looming over us and I scowled.

Five thousand feet. Five thousand sodding feet.

b.u.g.g.e.r the boat. I wanted a rest. I wanted a drink. I wanted eggs Benedict with Worcester sauce and a gallon of fresh orange juice and a stack of waffles on a china plate. I wanted clean clothes. I wanted a bath. I wanted a nice bed. Preferably with someone nice in it.

b.u.g.g.e.r you, Bernice. It's all your sodding fault.

I started to walk.

Despite growing blisters we made good time. We climbed for several hours before the alt.i.tude and the steadily increasing slope defeated us.: Then we set up camp, started a fire and boiled up some coffee. Everyone seemed tired but excited. They all wanted to talk. They all did talk. They kept me awake half the night wagging their chins about what they might find.

Trouble started at first light when one of the two farmers, Kuresh, got into an argument, with one of the Turkish soldiers, a thin, sour-faced man named Mehmet Ozer. The argument started over breakfast and ended with Kuresh staring down the barrel of a rifle, while the rapier-thin point of his s.h.i.+n sofu dagger rested on Ozer's s.h.i.+rt, little more than a good deep breath from the soldier's heart.

Major Raykal broke the shocked silence. He spoke softly in Arabic. He spoke only to Ozer but it was obvious his words affected Kuresh too. As soon as he spoke, Ozer lowered his rifle and took a step backward from Kuresh. He spoke in a clear voice.

Apparently satisfied, Kuresh sheathed the knife.

I smelt burning, realized I was still holding a frying pan in which half a dozen eggs were now as dead as the saint for whom they were named.

The whole thing had happened so fast. From whispered beginnings among the soldiers to near-double homicide had been less than two minutes. I glanced at Candy.

'The farmers here don't like the military.' Candy took the pan from me and tipped the scorched eggs away. 'They're famous for their underhand methods.'

'Of what?'

'Everything.'

'I see.'

'No you don't. Everyone knows about the letter that Kuresh and Ahadi tried to sell to Jim. The one that contains an account of seeing the Ark. Ozer and the other soldiers think it's a fake. They know the routes a soldier would have taken as well as anyone - and they don't include two long marches over what was then the Russian border on to Ararat.'

'So Kuresh was defending his family honour?'

'Dear boy, don't be obtuse. Kuresh was defending his right to sell a bit of hok.u.m to Jim for loads of money.'

'Does Jim know this?'

'Can Jim speak Arabic?'