'So tell me: it's a big mountain. How do you know we're going the right way?'

Raelsen reached into his pocket and pulled out a waterproof envelope. He showed me a number of aerial photographs of the local area.

I noticed the NASA logo printed in one comer. 'Satellite pictures?'

'Shuttle pictures, actually. They show the Ark, known locally as the Tendurek Formation. They give an exact grid reference.'

I sighed. 'It's no fun when the machines do it for you, is it?'

He smiled. I could see he understood. He tucked the photographs away as we led the mules around a big, water-filled depression in the rocks. I chewed absently on my amomum stem. 'Do you suppose Utnapishtim had any thoughts on the significance of frogs with relevance to the Ark?'

He laughed again. 'Got me on that one.' He seemed about to add something when we rounded a bulbous granite outcropping. Instead of speaking he stopped. Actually we all stopped. Conversation ceased.

We were here. It was here. We'd found the Ark.

It didn't look like the Ark. It didn't look much like a boat at all. It was a shallow depression in the ground bordered by low walls which rose from the ground to a height of a few yards. The walls formed a lens or eye-shape some four hundred feet long and about a hundred and twenty feet wide at the point I was surprised to find myself already thinking of as 'amidships'. Inside the perimeter the ground was uneven, distorted by the ma.s.s of stone we had walked around, which projected into the formation for nearly a third of its width.

The whole formation sloped uphill so that the farther end was some hundred feet above the nearer, roughly on a level with the top of the stone outcropping.

Of course n.o.body was taking observations at this exact moment - they were all too busy partying.

Well, all except Dot Baumgardner. While everyone else had more or less abandoned sensible thinking and were leaping around and hugging one another, she was doing her level best to be Mister Spock. She tethered the mules. She watered them. She broke out the cooking gear and started a fire and put on the kettle and made two gallons of tea and while it was brewing broke out her field a.n.a.lysis kit and started a compositional a.n.a.lysis of part of the main structure.

The only other person actually doing any work was E.J. 'Reefer'

McCormack. The ponytailed student was waving his camcorder round like a b.u.t.terfly net and trying to persuade people to say something significant about the moment while puffing wildly on a joint, which he took great delight in referring to as theCamberwell Carrot'.

In this respect he didn't appear to be doing anything vastly different from the rest of them. Raelsen, Ed Levinson and Ellie n.o.ble the radar operators and Terry Sehna the archaeologist were engaged in a sort of four-point square dance with no rules. As for Dilaver, he seemed both fascinated and amused by the sight of these foreign adults behaving like village kids. He lost no time in joining in the revelry, hopping madly around the scientists, muttering 'Pretty view', and 'Beg pardon?' with a regularity they all seemed to find hilarious.

So I sat down beside the fire and made myself a brew and sipped it gratefully while watching the madness.

After a few moments the two soldiers who had accompanied us on the expedition came over, billycans drawn and ready for use. I plied them with tea and smiles. With depressing predictability they responded best to the tea.

And so the party went on.

After an hour I broke out my sleeping bag and tent. It was obvious we were going to get no work done this evening. I set up the tent, had a short but deeply significant conversation with the mules and then went for a walk.

I found a halfway comfortable rock and sat on it, watching the sunset. I tried not to think of Jason and failed miserably. b.l.o.o.d.y husbands. Why do they make themselves so important and then go and mess you up? They're so d.a.m.n good at it. You'd think it was an evolutionary imperative.

The sun went away and the sky darkened. The mutter of distant guns was swamped by the chatter of frogs. I groped in my pocket for another sherbet flying saucer and held it up against the purple glow of sunset, wishing for just a moment that it was real and that it had come to take me away from all this.

I indulged myself for a moment, then surrendered to the inevitable and ate the flying saucer. As I munched my gaze was caught by something else moving in the sky in its place.

A plane.

It was low and slow. Not like a spotter plane. This puppy was big, like a troop carrier. I resisted the impulse to wave at it.

There were no lights on this plane. That in itself wasn't unusual. It was very quiet though. It pa.s.sed overhead, vanished behind the peak of Mahser Dagi. I lost sight of it then in the gathering darkness.

The engine noise seemed to take a long time to fade.

I waited a long time for the stars to come out but clouds covered the sky without a break, scudding along before an indifferent breeze.

Feeling cold and suddenly alone, I got up, stretched and trudged back to camp. I didn't know it then but we were no longer alone on the mountainside.

I crawled into my sleeping bag and slept like a baby.

Next morning we breakfasted early and, over coffee, decided to split the expedition. Dot had spent the previous evening and a good few hours this morning working on the Ark structure and now wanted Dilaver to show her something she referred to as the drogue stones.

Most of what I knew about drogue stones had been learnt several thousand years ago in Egypt. A trip down the Nile on a trading boat had shown me how clever the Egyptians were at negotiating the dangerous tidal flux at bends in the river. The high-sided boats they built were exceptionally susceptible to the tidal flow at river bends because they were built without keels. (Don't ask me why - these were the people that built the Pyramids for heaven's sake!) I once saw a boat carrying seventeen tons of trade goods come broadside on to the current while navigating a bend, and capsize. Half the crew were drowned or crushed. This sort of tragedy was eliminated by the use of drogue stones and a keel-raft. The stones - sometimes with a combined weight of as much as ten tons - were tied to the boat at the stern and amidships. They dragged along the river bed and stabilized the boat. The raft was tethered by long lines to the bow. It's keel was broad and flat, built at right angles to the direction of travel so it would catch the tide. It was like a huge sail and it whipped the boat around the river bend fast enough for it to avoid capsizing.

Thinking about Egypt made me yearn for warmth and sunlight, not this dreary, cold mountainside. I decided that I would go with Dot. I might learn something - if not I could always daydream. I took my field notebook and a pocket camera, a paintbrush, my trowel, a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee. Dot took a dictaphone and her a.n.a.lysis kit and a portable spectroscope. Dilaver took himself.

At the last moment as we left the camp, Reefer ran to join us holding his camcorder as if it were a babe in arms. 'Yo, crew. Wait up.' He caught up with us, ejected a tape and inserted a new one with the casual ease of a soldier slapping a fresh magazine into his a.s.sault rifle. He aimed the camcorder, at us and made director-type movements with his free hand.

Dilaver capered. Dot frowned. I had to laugh. 'Lens cap. White balance.

Check the mike lead. Aim at the whites of their eyes and shoot to kill.'

Reefer fiddled with the camera. 'Yo, man, I'm on it.'

I stared at his joint, first of the day, a restrained half the size of the previous evening's Camberwell Carrot. 'I believe you are.'

Reefer frowned. 'Now don't you be getting on my case, Benny-mine. I like yo' white a.s.s but I am dangerous when -'

'- wet?' I finished fast, then laughed. Reefer had been brought up on a diet of Spike Lee and Tarantino and wanted everyone to know it. The fact that he was of mixed French Scottish descent and was as white as Wensleydale cheese did not seem to make the tiniest of dents in his lifestyle homage to his celluloid heroes. Which mostly seemed to consist of wearing hopelessly inappropriate clothes and spitting awful macho one-liners out through clouds of dope smoke.

'Roused. Was gonna say roused. Dangerous when roused.'

'Yeah. And I was gonna say that you know what the authorities'll do if they catch you smoking that stuff here?' I waited as Reefer attempted to adjust the white-balance control. 'Don't you?' I prodded verbally when Reefer looked like he'd forgotten what I'd said just thirty seconds before.

Reefer did his best Keanu Reaves. The hands, the frown, the works. 'Yeah, man but they ain't gonna. I as slick as the wind. I know when them boys after me. I got the sense.' Only his French accent spoilt the delivery.

'Yeah. Right. Like you know when the lens cap's still on.'

'What? s.h.i.t.' Reefer fiddled with the camcorder for a moment, then shot some establishing footage. He was halfway through a somewhat melodramatic voiceover when Dot finally gave up and walked off with Dilaver.

Reefer switched off the camcorder, sucked disappointedly on his joint.

I grinned. 'Never mind, Quentin, your day will come.' We followed the others south-west into the foothills.

An hour later we were still walking. The sun was up by now, burning off the ground mist. Footing was lousy. Despite this I was finding the old joy of being somewhere I didn't know awakening in me for the first time in ages.

For the first time since the wedding in fact. I took off my jacket and tied 'the sleeves round my waist, schoolgirl fashion. I felt like a schoolgirl, too, one who had bunked off cla.s.s to search for fossils at the local stone quarry. It was a sensation I hadn't realized I'd miss so much.

Reefer aimed the camcorder at Dilaver. 'Hey man, we still heading right?'

Dilaver nodded enthusiastically into the lens. 'Stones. Soon. Much stones.'

Reefer panned around at the boulder-strewn landscape, seemed about to say something, then decided to let the visual joke speak for itself.

We found our first objective within the next ten minutes. It was a chunk of rock ten feet high, five broad and about thirteen inches thick. Its flattest surface was covered with ancient inscriptions. Although well weathered, the stone showed marked signs of having been shaped by human hand. The weathering indicated that the shaping had been done a long time ago. The rock was about eighteen inches thick at the top - and there was a six-inch-wide hole drilled right through it. The hole was obviously as old as the stone.

Dilaver ran around to the far side of the stone, jumped up on to a nearby rock and peered back through the hole. 'Pretty view!' He waved madly.

'Pretty view, Benny!'

I scowled at him, remembering my shoes and shirt, and that seemingly endless walk to Dogubayazit. 'You'll be lucky.'

Dot noticed my tone of voice and looked curiously at me. 'It's a long story.

Tell me about the stone.'

Dot began to set up her a.n.a.lysis kit as she spoke. 'A number of them have been found here on the western slopes of Mahser Dagi. They range in size from three to ten feet high. They all have various Biblical inscriptions on them. Crosses, Arabic letters et cetera.'

I shrugged, ran my paintbrush over the stone to clear some dust from the inscription.

Dot said, 'For a long time it was thought they were gravestones. Soviet Armenia is full of iconographic stones like this.' She pointed to the hole through which Dilaver was still waving at us. 'But then, gravestones don't have holes.'

Reefer said, 'I bet that baby weighs more'n a Cadillac. The holes could be used for moving the stones.'

I let Dot tell Reefer why he was wrong. 'Put a rope through where that hole is situated and the rock couldn't even support its own weight.' She shook her head.

I joined in. 'I've seen Egyptians use -' I coughed. 'Egyptians used stones like these.' I took a slug of coffee to cover my slip. 'It's a drogue stone. A drag or anchor for an unpowered vessel designed to run with the tides. It's shaped the way it is to create drag in water and prevent the vessel from being cast sideways in a following sea. Stones like this could be attached to the hull with ropes because the water would support a large portion of their weight. A boat like Noah's probably had about fifteen tons of these stones attached to it.'

Reefer tried not to look impressed. 'Must've been one mother of a boat.'

Dot stared at the drogue stone. Her expression was a familiar one: that of someone looking inward, back across time to the thing which had provided their life's motivation. 'That it was.' She chipped off a tiny piece of stone and began her a.n.a.lysis of the structure.

I walked up to the stone, climbed a loose mound of dirt and peered through the hole at Dilaver. I made a face and he ran away laughing. Instead of his face I saw the double peak of Ararat gleaming in the distance. 'Hey, Dilaver. Are there any more of these stones nearby?'

'Oh yes. Much stones. Pretty view.'

'Goody.' I took out my notebook and began to sketch the markings on the stone. They consisted of a large cross surrounded by seven smaller crosses. Four of the smaller crosses were of the Maltese type; another had wedge-shaped arms, and two more were of Teutonic designs. There were also three bullet holes, which worried me even as I placed them on the sketch. 'Are the inscriptions the same on all the stones?' I asked.

Dilaver shook his head. 'Beg pardon?'

I sighed, pointed at the crosses. 'Are all the stones marked like this?'

He nodded, then frowned, shook his head again. 'All different. All crosses.

But different.'

Dot added, 'I would imagine they've been carved in the stone in recent years by locals.'

I nodded.

Dot entered the sample data she had taken from the chipping into her laptop and ran the a.n.a.lysis program. 'There may be more stones but these may be buried, or have broken. The Turkish Ministry of Culture hasn't been too forthcoming with permission to excavate for them. The area has become something of a graveyard over the years --and it's easy to see that excavations could be misconstrued as grave-robbing.' I thought of the punishment for that and winced. 'Ouch.'

'Precisely.'

I finished my sketch, looked up to find myself face to face with Reefer and his ever-present camcorder. I waggled my fingers at the spliff poking out from behind the lens. 'Yo, Reefer, you seeing little flying elephants yet?'

Reefer lowered the camcorder and wobbled away to get a long shot, puffing smoke you could probably smell as far away as Iraq.

I munched on a sandwich and said, 'Well, I'm going to sketch some more of these drogue stones. Anyone for a short walk?'

Dot didn't move. 'Dot?'

She looked up then and her face was a picture. Shock. Amazement.

'What's up?'

She waved a hand' at the laptop. 'I ran the program three times to check.

There's no error.' She got up and moved to the drogue stone, laid her hand against the flat side. 'Reefer, get your camera over here now. This stone is more than six billion years old.'

Reefer shrugged, allowed Dot to direct the camcorder's movements.

Reefer zoomed in for a close-up of the stone, panning the lens across the hole and the inscription. 'What about all this s.h.i.t, man? This all from Mars too?'

Dot laughed. 'Just because the stone is older than life on Earth doesn't mean to say the hole is. It'll take a lot more work to find out when the stone was worked, but I bet it was sometime within the last few centuries.'

I realized Reefer had panned the camera to take in my expression and I waved him away distractedly. 'We have to check.'

'I've run the program three times.' Dot hefted a handful of little stones.

'These stones are a couple of thousand years old.' She pointed at the drogue stone. 'This one is six billion years old.' Again she held out the handful of stones. 'Metamorphic rock. Schist. Clay. Quartzite. This one here is marble. a.n.a.lysis confirms the presence of manganese, chromium, all the elements you'd expect.' Again she pointed at the drogue stone. 'This one has a spectrographic signature unknown on Earth outside a laboratory.'

Dilaver wandered up at this point and asked in broken English if we wanted to see the other drogue stones.

Reefer nodded. 'Yeah, man. Just 'cause one of 'em's from Mars don't mean they all are.'

I stood up. 'Ladies and gentlemen, let's march.'

By lunchtime we had seen a total of eight drogue stones. They were all, in Reefer's words, 'from Mars'.

Dot sat down on a rock and poured a cup of coffee. While she did that, I wandered over to the nearest stone - a block some six feet high and three broad, again covered with cruciform inscriptions. I tapped the crosses one by one. 'Noah. Ham. Sheph. j.a.peth. Noah's wife. His sons' wives -' - and a partridge in a pear tree.

I took my spectroscopic a.n.a.lyser from my bag, placed it against the rock, triggered the sensor. Two minutes later I checked the readout.

I shook my head. 'Dot?'

'Yes?'

'This rock.'

'Yes?'