“Because,” he paused, looking up at me. Again those eyes burned feverishly. “Because it holds a vast and unique significance for His people.” He stared off into the dead, gigantic, twisted vines. He seemed to be poised, listening. I heard it too, a deep and persistent resonance, not of insects nor the hot wind but of the throbbing, unbounded energy of the cosmos.

“Of course,” he said dismissively, “what we have here could be just another yield of the earth’s inexhaustible riches. Or,” his voice rang with the steely timbre of total assurance, “it could be something special, the most overwhelmingly extraordinary find in history.” He held up a nugget, turning it slowly between thumb and forefinger.

“Gold has been found before,” I told him. “So has onyx and bdellium.”

“But only once in the same place. So you must realize the significance.”

“I can’t say that I do. I see nothing unique or extraordinary about it.”

His eyes went back to the dust of the wadi. “‘And a river,’” he said, “‘went out of Eden to water the garden…’ Genesis Two: Eight. Remember? Then, in verse thirteen: ‘The gold of that land is good,’” he quoted, “‘and there is bdellium and the onyx stone.’”

He smiled at me, the smile of a man of many wiles—action and scholarship, soldiering and exploration—beamed on his son, who lacked all of them.

“You’re saying that this is… was the Garden of Eden?” I glanced around at the decomposing cluster of vines. “And your source is the Bible?”

“An excellent source.”

“But not exactly a scientific text, if you’re going to examine the origins of the earth and of man. The Garden of Eden was a Hebraic trope, symbolic, not to be taken literally.”

He exchanged the nugget in his hand for the lump of bdellium. “Would you…” he sniffed it pleasurably, “go so far as to say that my find warrants investigation?”

“I suppose so,” I said, allowing myself to be drawn in to his delirium, the better to restrain it. Again I glanced around at the purple vines, dense, murky, unfruitful. “But wouldn’t you agree,” I said guardedly, “that the chances of this place ever having been any kind of garden, much less Paradise, are pretty slim?”

“What about outer space?”

“What about it?”

“The odds against intelligent life existing in outer space are well over five hundred million to one; still we reach out, probing the heavens in the hope of coming up with an answer. Are the odds against finding Eden any greater? Whatever the odds, the search cannot be dismissed as nonsense.

“There are those who call Genesis a cosmogony of folklore. Eden was not a geographical fact but a dawn myth. Just about all the world’s peoples have something like it.