It was a soft, warm evening in Sanliurfa. In the lobby of his hotel Rob found Christine perched on a leather seat trying not to inhale the smoke from three cigar-puffing Turkish businessmen sitting nearby. She looked chic as ever-elegant jeans, sandals, a white sleeveless top under an aquamarine cardigan. When she saw Rob she smiled, but he could see stress in the corners of her eyes.
They were going to Franz Breitner’s for a few drinks: a supper party to celebrate the great success of the latest digging season: the dating of Gobekli Tepe.
‘Is it far?’
‘Twenty minutes’ walk.’ Christine replied. ‘And about thirty minutes’ drive. It’s right past the market.’
The restaurants and cafés were stirring after the torpor of the afternoon. The scent of roast lamb from turning spits wafted across the dust-whirled streets. Taxi drivers hooted; a crippled man in a
wheelchair hawked yesterday’s Ankara newspapers; the pistachio sellers were wheeling their glass-fronted barrows into position. Rob greedily inhaled the exoticism of the scene.
‘Shall we buy some wine? To take to Franz’s place?’
Christine laughed. ‘In Sanliurfa?’
They walked past a clock-tower into the old town. Rob scanned the ancient colonnades, the kiosks selling garish plastic toys, the endless mobile phone outlets. Various open air cafés were full of heavy-set Kurdish men smoking hookahs, eating from plates of white Turkish delight, and staring hard at Christine. No one was drinking alcohol.
‘They don’t sell booze? Anywhere?’ Rob felt his mood plummet. He hadn’t had a beer or a glass of wine in three days. He drank too much, he knew that, but that was how he coped with the stress of his job. Especially after Baghdad. And three days without alcohol was quite long enough to reconfirm a fact he already knew: he wasn’t suited to sobriety.
‘Actually, I think there are a couple of liquor shops on the outskirts of town. But it’s like scoring dope in England. All very furtive.’
‘Jesus.’
‘What do you expect? This is a Muslim city.’
‘I’ve been to a few Muslim cities, Christine. But I thought Turkey was secular.’
‘People think the Kurds are somehow westernized.’ She smiled. ‘They’re not. Especially the ones
around here. Some of them are exceptionally conservative.’
‘Guess I’m used to Palestine and Lebanon. Even in Egypt you can get a fucking beer.’
Christine placed a comforting arm around his shoulder and hugged him. Her smile was sarcastic-but friendly. ‘Good news is Franz has plenty of hooch. He brings it from Istanbul.’
‘Thank God for that!’
‘
Bien sur.
I know what journalists are like. Especially British journalists.’
‘American, Christine.’
‘Here-look-the fish pools!’
They’d reached the sweet green oasis at the heart of the town. The little tea houses twinkled in the twilight sun; Turkish bachelors were walking hand-in-hand along the tree-lined pathways. Across the waters of the pools, the beautiful stone arcades of a mosque were shining like ancient gold.
Christine and Rob watched a large family group: the men in baggy trousers and the women in full black veils. Rob considered how the women must have been sweltering through the day, and he felt an automatic resentment on their behalf. Christine, however, seemed unfazed. ‘The Bible says Job was born here, as well as Abraham’.
‘Sorry?’
‘Urfa.’ Christine pointed to the steep hill, beyond the fishponds and gardens, on top of which stood a crumbling castle-where a huge Turkish flag
hung flaccid in the windless warmth, between two Corinthian columns. ‘Some scholars think this is Ur, the original city in the Book of Genesis. The Akkadians, the Sumerians, the Hittites, they all lived here. The oldest city in the world.’
‘I thought that was Jericho?’
‘Pah!’ Christine chortled. ‘Jericho! A mere stripling. This place is much older. In the old town behind the bazaar there are people who still live in caves cut into the rock.’ Christine glanced back at the fishponds. The shrouded women were feeding bread to the shoals of excited carp. ‘The carp are black because they are meant to be ashes of Abraham. They say if you see a white fish in the pond you will go to heaven!’
‘That’s fantastic! Can we go and eat now?’
Christine laughed, again. Rob liked her good-natured laugh. In fact, he liked Christine a lot: her academic enthusiasm, her cleverness, her good humour. He felt an unexpected urge to share his inmost thoughts with her; show her a picture of little Lizzie. He suppressed the inclination.
The Frenchwoman was gesturing, enthusiastically.
‘Breitner’s house is just past the bazaar up this hill. We can take a look at the bazaar if you like: it’s got an authentic caravanserai, sixteenth century, built by the Abbasids with some older elements and…’ She glanced at him, then chuckled. ‘Or we could go straight there and get a beer?’
The walk was short but steep, behind the back of the souk. Men ferrying silver trays of tea and olives came the other way, and all of them stared at Christine. An orange-coloured sofa sat inexplicably across the opposite pavement. The smell of hot unleavened bread filled the narrow alleys. In the middle of it all was a very old, very beautiful house, with balconies and Mediterranean shutters.
‘Breitner’s place. You’ll like his wife.’
Christine was right. Rob did like Franz’s wife, Derya: she was a vivacious, secular, smart, thirty-something woman from Istanbul, with no headscarf or veil, and excellent English. When she wasn’t teasing Franz about his bald head or his obsession with ‘menhirs’ she served Rob and Christine, and the other archaeologists who had all gathered for the supper party. And the food was good: a splendid buffet of cold lamb sausages, rice in vine leaves, exquisite walnut pastries, thick gooey chunks of baklava and greeny-pink arcs of the freshest water melon. Even better, just as Christine has promised, there was plenty of icy cold Turkish beer-and some decent red wine from Cappadocia. Within a couple of hours Rob was feeling very relaxed, convivial and happy, content to listen to the archaeologists argue about Gobekli.
For his benefit, Rob guessed, they conducted the argument mainly in English, though three of the four men were German, and the other was Russian. And Christine kind-of French.
As he nibbled his third slice of baklava, chasing it with his Efes beer, Rob tried to follow the debate. One of the archaeologists, Hans, was questioning Franz about the lack of skeletal remains. ‘If it’s a funerary complex then where are the bones?’
Franz smiled. ‘We will find them! I told you.’
‘But you said that last season.’
‘And the season before,’ said a second man, standing nearby with a plate of green olives and white sheep’s cheese.
‘I know.’ Franz shrugged, happily. ‘I know!’
The director of the dig was sitting on the biggest leather chair in his sitting room. Behind him, the antique windows were open to the Sanliurfa streets. Rob could hear the evening town life beyond. A man was shouting at his kids in the house across the way. A television blared in the café down the road: probably showing Turkish football, judging by the cheers and jeers of the customers. Maybe Galatasaray versus the local team, Dyarbakir. Turks versus Kurds. Like the rivalry of Real Madrid and Barcelona, but way more venomous.
Derya provided them with more baklava straight from the patisserie’s silver cardboard box. Rob wondered if he might expire through over-eating. Franz was gesticulating at his juniors. ‘But if it isn’t a funerary shrine or complex then. what is it?
Ja?
There is no settlement, no signs of domestication, nothing. It has to be a temple, we all agree on that. But a temple
to what, if not ancestors? Surely it honours the dead huntsmen? No?’
The other two experts shrugged.
Franz added, ‘And what are the niches, if not for bones?’
‘I agree with Franz,’ said Christine, coming over. ’I think the corpses of the hunters were brought there and excarnated…’
Rob burped very politely. ‘Sorry. Excarnated?’
Franz explained, ‘It means picked clean. The Zoroastrians still do it. And some think Zoroastrianism came from here.’
‘Practically
all
religions came from around here,’ said Christine. ‘Excarnation is a funeral process whereby you take the body to a special place then leave it to be eaten by wild animals, or vultures and raptors. As Franz says, you can still see this in Zoroastrian faiths, in India. They call them sky burials-the corpses are left to the sky gods. In fact, a lot of the early Mesopotamian religions worshipped gods, shaped like these buzzards and eagles. Like the Assyrian demon we saw in the museum.’
‘It’s very hygienic. As a form of burial. Excarnation.’ The interruption came from Ivan, the youngest expert, the paleobotanist.
Franz nodded, briskly, and said: ‘Anyway-who knows-maybe the bones were moved, afterwards. Or maybe they got shifted when Gobekli was buried itself. That could explain the lack of skeletons on site.’
Rob was confused. ‘What do you mean? “Gobekli was buried itself”?’
Franz put his empty plate down on the polished parquet floor. When he looked up he wore the satisfied smile of someone about to reveal a delicious piece of gossip. ‘This, my friend, is the biggest mystery of all! And they did not mention it in the article you read!’
Christine laughed. ‘You got your exclusive, Rob!’
‘In or around 8000
BC
…’ Franz paused for effect, ‘the whole of Gobekli Tepe was buried. Entombed.
Completely covered in earth.
’
‘But…how do you know?’
‘The hillocks are artificial. The soil is not a random accretion. The whole temple complex was deliberately concealed with tons of earth and mud in around 8000
BC
. It was hidden.’
‘Wow. That’s wild.’
‘What makes it even more amazing is how much labour this must have taken. And therefore how pointless it was.’
‘Because…?’
‘Think of the effort to put it all up in the first place! Erecting the stone circles of Gobekli, and covering them with carvings, friezes and sculptures, must have been a process that took decades, maybe even centuries. And this at a time when life expectancy was twenty years.’ Franz wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘We imagine the hunter-gatherers must have lived in the area in tents,
leather tents, as they constructed the site. Living off the local game for sustenance. Generation after generation. And all of it without pottery or agriculture, or any tools but flints…’
Christine stepped a little nearer. ‘I think maybe I’ve already bored Rob with this?’
Rob raised a hand. ‘No, really, it’s not boring. Really!’ He meant it: his article was expanding by the day. ‘Go on Franz, please?’
‘
Jawohl.
Well then you see we have the mystery, the deep deep mystery. If it took these barely human people hundreds of years to construct a temple, a shrine to the dead, a funerary complex, why the hell did they then go and hide it under tons of earth two thousand years later? Moving all that soil must have been almost as daunting as building Gobekli in the first place. Is it not so?’
‘Yes. So why
did
they do it?’
Franz slapped both his hands on the tops of his thighs. ‘That is it! We do not know! Nobody knows. We only confirmed it this month, so we haven’t had a chance to think.’ He grinned. ‘Fantastic,
ja?
’
Derya offered Rob another a bottle of Efes beer. He took it and thanked her. He was having fun. He’d never expected archaeology to be fun, he hadn’t expected it to be puzzling either. He thought about the mystery of the buried temple. Then he watched Christine as she talked with her colleagues across the living room and felt a tiny and ludicrous pang of jealousy, which he immediately quashed.
He was here to write a story-not fall pathetically and fruitlessly in love. And the story was proving much more exciting than he’d hoped. The oldest temple in the world. Discovered next to the oldest city in the world. Built by men before the wheel: built by Stone Age cavemen with the curious gift of great artistry…
And then the great Neolithic cathedral, this Kurdish Carnac, this Turkish Stonehenge-Rob was imagining his piece now, writing the paragraphs in his head-then the whole damn temple was deliberately interred beneath tons of ancient dust, concealed for all time, like the most terrible secret.
And no one knows why.
He looked up. He’d been in a journalistic reverie for maybe ten minutes. Carried away with his job. He liked his job. He
was
a lucky man.
The little supper party was coming to a head. Someone got out an old guitar and everyone sang a few songs. Then the raki flowed for a final round of nightcaps, and then it flowed again, and Rob knew he was getting too drunk. Before he disgraced himself and fell asleep on the wooden floor he decided he should head home-so he went to the window to inhale some fresh air and prepare himself to make his excuses.
Out there, the streets were much less noisy. Sanliurfa was a city that stayed up late, because it slept all the hot afternoon-but it was nearly 2 a.m. Even Sanliurfa was asleep. The only real sound came from directly below. Three men were
standing in the street, just under Franz Breitner’s elegant windows. They were singing a strange lowpitched song, almost like a chant. Quite peculiarly, they had a little trestle table erected in front of them: a table arrayed with three guttering candles.
For maybe half a minute Rob watched the men and the candle flames. Then he turned and saw Christine standing in the far corner of Franz’s living room, talking to Derya. Rob beckoned her over.
Christine leaned out of the window, looked at the chanting men and said nothing.
‘It’s sweet isn’t it?’ Rob said quietly. ‘Some kind of hymn or a religious thing?’
But when he turned to look at her he could see that her face was pale, and very tense.
She looked horrified.
Rob made his farewells and Christine accompanied him.
Outside, the three chanting men had blown out the candles, packed up the trestle table, and were now starting to walk down the street. One of them looked back at Christine. His expression was inscrutable.
Or maybe, Rob thought, it was just the lack of streetlight making it hard to see what the man was thinking. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked in its own lonely ritual. The moon was high above the nearest minaret. Rob could smell raw sewage.
Threading her arm through his, Christine guided them down the dark little road and out onto a broader, slightly better-lit street. Rob was waiting for her to explain but they continued in silence. Beyond the furthest apartment blocks Rob could just glimpse the desert. Dark and endless, and ancient and dead.
He thought of the pillars of Gobekli, standing naked in the moonlight, somewhere out there: exposed for the first time in ten thousand years; he felt cold for the first time since arriving in Sanliurfa.
The silence had gone on too long. ‘OK,’ he said, unthreading Christine’s arm from his own. ‘What was all that about? The chanting?’ Rob knew he was being fierce, but he was feeling tired, irritable and a touch hungover. ‘Christine. Tell me. You looked like…like you’d seen the Assyrian wind demon.’
It was meant as a joke, to lighten the mood. It didn’t work. Christine frowned. ‘Pulsa Dinura’.
‘What?’
‘That’s what the men were chanting. A prayer.’
‘Pulsa…di…’
‘Nura. Lashes of fire. Aramaic.’
Rob was impressed, again. ‘How do you know?’
‘I speak a little Aramaic.’
They were down on the level of the fishponds. The old mosque was shadowy and unlit. No couples walked the paths. Rob and Christine turned left, heading for his hotel, and her flat just beyond.
‘So they were singing an Aramaic hymn, that’s nice. Busking!’
‘It’s not a hymn. And they weren’t fucking busking.’
Her sudden vehemence surprised him.
‘Sorry Christine…’
‘Pulsa Dinura is an ancient curse. A hex of the desert. Of the Mesopotamian wastes. It’s in some versions of the Talmud, the Jewish holy book, written at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. When the Jews were imprisoned in Iraq. Rob, it’s very evil and it’s very
old.
’
‘OK…’ He didn’t know how to react. They were nearing his hotel. ‘And what does it do? Pulsa di Nura.’
‘It’s meant to summon the angel of destruction. The whips of flame. They must have been aiming it at Franz. Otherwise why do it under his windows?’
Rob felt the irritation again. ‘So they’re hexing him. So what? Fair enough. Probably he’s not paying them enough shekels. Who cares-it’s just bloody mumbo jumbo! Right?’ Then he remembered the cross around Christine’s neck. Was he somehow insulting her? How religious was she? How superstitious? Rob was firmly atheist. He found religious belief and superstitious irrationality hard to accept and sometimes deeply annoying; yet he loved the Middle East, birthplace of all those irrational faiths and desert creeds. And he rather liked the passions and debates stirred by these faiths. A strange paradox.
Christine was silent. Rob tried again: ‘What does it matter?’
She turned to face him. ‘It matters a lot to some people. In Israel for instance.’
‘Go on.’
‘Pulsa Dinura has been used a few times in recent years, by Jews.’
‘Right…’
‘Some ultra orthodox rabbis, for instance. They summoned the angel of death against Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader, in October 1995.’ She paused. Rob was working out the significance of the date. Christine got there before him: ‘And Rabin was assassinated within the month.’
‘K. An interesting coincidence.’
‘Some more rabbis used Pulsa Dinura against Ariel Sharon, the next prime minister, in 2005. A few months later he fell into a coma, after a brain haemorrhage.’
‘Sharon was 77. And he was fat.’
She looked directly into Rob’s eyes. ‘Sure. It’s just…coincidence.’
‘Yep. It is.’
They were at the lobby of his hotel. They were nearly arguing. Rob regretted this. He liked Christine. A lot. He didn’t want to offend her. He offered-keenly-to walk the further half a kilometre with her to her apartment block, but she-gently-declined. They looked at each other. Then they hugged briefly. Before she left she said, ‘As you say Robert, it’s just coincidence. But the Kurds believe it works. Lots of people in the Middle East think Pulsa Dinura works. It is infamous. Check it on Google. So if they are using it…what that means is that some people really want Franz Breitner
dead.
’
With that she turned and walked away.
Rob watched her for a few minutes. Her disappearing figure. Then he shivered again. The night was getting colder as the wind blew in off the desert.