The Anomaly(15)

Of course, that kind of food always tastes better in the outdoors and when you’re on something of an adventure, but it turned out Dylan had spent a year as a personal chef somewhere in the Mediterranean and genuinely knew what he was doing. Even Feather, who was—naturally—vegan, seemed satisfied, as there were containers of non-amateur salads available, too. She was still chowing down on kale and quinoa, her nose and forehead glowing red from the day’s sun, long after the rest of us had staggered away from the table.

It further transpired that Ken had firmly stipulated that this not be a dry expedition, and so a number of bottles of vodka had found their way into a dedicated cooler. He and I were, therefore, slowly getting blasted.

“It’s not crap,” I agreed.

“What’s the deal with the colors?”

The view was changing minute by minute, the last rays of sun highlighting striations of red, orange, and brown in the walls and the boulders, large and small, strewn over the slope on either side of the beach. “Mineral deposits.”

“I know that, you tosser. I meant, isn’t there something we’re supposed to be looking for tomorrow?”

“A lot of the wall up and down this stretch of Marble Canyon is made up of an aggregate called Vishnu Schist, two billion years old and originally ten miles underground. So in the process it got heavily compressed and is therefore relatively dense, and a darkish brown color. That’s not what we want to be seeing. Kincaid mentioned sedimentary layers near the site of the cavern, and specifically refers to ‘stains’ about halfway up the wall. Along here, that basically limits us to a five-mile section.”

“Five miles is a lot of rock to stare at.”

“I narrowed it down to about a quarter of a mile, and that’s the location Molly passed to Dylan. He reckons we’ll get there late morning.”

He winked. “Big day tomorrow, then. Should be exploring the cavern by lunchtime.”

“Ha, ha.”



Later, having successfully said things while Pierre pointed a camera at me, I was sitting by myself on a rock, drinking coffee and smoking a contemplative cigarette, when I heard someone approaching.

“Don’t worry,” Gemma said. “I’m not wearing my investigative journalist hat. Just looks like you’ve found a good spot to sit.”

I moved up so she could perch a couple of feet away, and for a while we looked along the dark canyon together, listening to the sound of cold water.

“I did want to ask something, though,” she said.

“How confrontational is it, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Only about a two. Mysteries. What’s the appeal? To you, I mean. And don’t feed me that ‘it matters only that we seek’ crapola. Most of the stuff you cover—let’s face it, there’s never going to be an answer. Isn’t that kind of frustrating?”

“No,” I said. “Once you’re in possession of a fact, you’re done. Case closed. Mind closed, too. Unresolvable mysteries expand the mind.”

“I don’t see how. Truth is what shows us new things.”

“But there’s never just one truth. You threw Noah’s Ark at me earlier—so take flood myths as an example. They appear all over the world with remarkable consistency. You can’t just ignore that. You need to try to find an explanation.”

“So try one on me.”

“I’ll give you three. First, you could claim it’s evidence of historicity, a real flood in ancient times—a catastrophe on a scale so massive it was recorded in oral histories all over the world, histories that gradually morphed into myth.”

“But for which people have found zero evidence, right?”

“Actually they have, but only ones outside the mainstream—because it makes you sound like you’re trying to prove the Bible, which consigns you straight to nut-job status. But sure, ignore their decades of research, though at least acknowledge that the end of the last ice age affected sea levels worldwide, wiping out coastal villages and covering previously inhabited regions like Doggerland in the North Sea. So instead you cite these localized rises in water level—for which there is demonstrable, science-friendly evidence in places like Iraq and the Persian Gulf, the heart of civilization ten thousand years ago. On the back of which you speculate that the universality of a flood myth suggests ancient migrations caused the movement of legends around the world. You don’t get the global superflood, but you do get the idea that the peoples of prehistory were far more mobile than conventional archeology is prepared to admit.”

She appeared to consider this idea seriously.

“Worst case,” I went on, “you go Jungian and speculate that the idea of a flood (always framed as a result of mankind’s behavior provoking divine retribution—as in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Koran, and the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis) represents an archetypal fear universally resident in the human psyche. That it’s a metaphor for the cyclical collapse of societal forms, followed by a period of chaos, and the gradual establishment of a new paradigm in the aftermath. And why are you grinning like that?”

“When you’re on a roll, you’re not too dumb-sounding. It’s disconcerting.”

“My point is any or all of these explanations might be true—and reveal something eye-opening about humankind. Yet ‘science’ downgrades Noah’s Ark and all other myths to the level of ‘made-up shit from before we had computers.’ That’s what pisses me off. Science is supposed to be the revealer and leveler—but it’s become a religion. ‘Shut up and believe our “truth”—even if it flies in the face of long-established traditions, and half of it is funded by vested interests or dictated by fashion. Oh, and we reserve the right to change our mind next year. And then again the year after that.’ Because…science.”