Ishmael

we’ve got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because this is the right way to live.’ For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, ‘This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.’ They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don’t even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam—those who vanished.

“But it’s not going to be this easy for the Takers. It’s going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they’re doing is right, and they have to go on doing it even if it means destroying the world and mankind with it.”

“Yes, that’s the way it seems.”

“Giving it up would mean… what?”

“Giving it up would mean… It would mean that all along they’d been wrong. It would mean that they’d never known how to rule the world. It would mean… relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.”

“It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.”

“Yes.”

9

Ishmael nodded to the stack of bibles at my feet. “According to the authors of that story, the people living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had eaten at the gods’ own tree of knowledge. Where do you suppose they got that idea?”

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever gave the authors of this story the idea that the people living in the Fertile Crescent had eaten at the gods’ tree of knowledge? Do you suppose they saw it with their own eyes? Do you suppose they were there when your agricultural revolution began?”

“I suppose that’s a possibility.”

“Think. If they’d been there to see it with their own eyes, who would they have been?”

“Oh… right. They would have been the people of the Fall. They would have been the Takers.”

“And if they’d been Takers, they would have told the story a different way.”

“Yes.”

“So the authors of this story were not there to see it with their own eyes. How then did they know it had happened? How did they know that the Takers had usurped the role of the gods in the world?”

“Lord,” I said.

“Who were the authors of this story?”

“Well… the Hebrews?”

Ishmael shook his head. “Among the people known as the Hebrews, this was already an ancient story—and a mysterious story. The Hebrews stepped into history as Takers—and wanted nothing more than to be like their Taker neighbors. Indeed, that’s why their prophets were always bawling them out.”

“True.”

“So, though they preserved the story, they no longer fully understood it. To find the people who understood it, we have to find its authors. And who were they?”

“Well… they were the ancestors of the Hebrews.”

“But who were they?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea.”

Ishmael grunted. “Look, I can’t forbid you to say, ‘I have no idea,’ but I do insist that you spend a few seconds thinking before you say it.”

I spent a few seconds at it, just to be polite, then I said, “I’m sorry. My grasp of ancient history is frankly negligible.”

“The ancient ancestors of the Hebrews were the Semites.”

“Oh.”

“You knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I guess so. I just…”

“You just weren’t thinking.”

“Right.”

Ishmael bestirred himself, and to be perfectly honest, my stomach clenched as the half ton of him brushed past my chair. If you don’t know how gorillas make their way from place to place on the ground, you can visit the zoo or rent a National Geographic videotape; no words of mine will make you see it.

Ishmael lumbered or shambled or shuffled over to the bookcase and returned with an historical atlas, which he handed to me open to a map of Europe and the Near East in 8500 B.C. A blade like a hand sickle very nearly cut the Arabian peninsula away from the rest. The words Incipient Agriculture made it clear that the sickle blade enclosed the Fertile Crescent. A handful of dots indicated sites where early farming implements had been found.

“This map, I feel, gives a false impression,” Ishmael said, “though it was not an intended impression. It gives the impression that the agricultural revolution took place in an empty world. This is why I prefer my own map.” He opened his pad and showed it to me.

“As you see, this shows the situation five hundred years later. The agricultural revolution is well under way. The area in which farming is taking place is indicated by these hen–scratches.” Using a pencil as a pointer, he indicated the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates. “This, of course, is the land between the rivers, the birthplace of the Takers. And what do you suppose all these dots represent?”

“Leaver peoples?”

“Exactly. They’re not designed as a statement about population density. Nor are they intended to indicate that every available stretch of land was inhabited by some Leaver people. What they indicate is that this was far from being an empty world. Do you see what I’m showing you?”

“Well, I think so. The land of the Fall lay within the Fertile Crescent and was surrounded by nonagriculturalists.”

“Yes, but I’m also pointing out that at this time, at the beginning of your agricultural revolution, these early Takers, the founders of your culture, were unknown, isolated, unimportant. The next map in that historical atlas is four thousand years later. What would you expect to see on it?”

“I’d expect to see that the Takers have expanded.” He nodded, indicating that I should turn the page. Here a printed oval, labeled Chalcolithic Cultures, with Mesopotamia at its center, enclosed the whole of Asia Minor and all the land to the north and east as far as the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The oval extended southward as far as the entrance to the Arabian peninsula, which was a cross–hatched area labeled Semites.

“Now,” Ishmael said, “we have some witnesses.”

“How so?”

“The Semites were not eyewitnesses to the events described in chapter three of Genesis.” He drew a small oval in the center of the Fertile Crescent. “Those events, cumulatively known as the Fall, took place here, hundreds of miles north of the Semites, among an entirely different people. Do you see who they were?”

“According to the map, they were the Caucasians.”

“But now, in 4500 B.C., the Semites are eyewitnesses to an event in their own front yard: the expansion of the Takers.”

“Yes, I see.”

“In four thousand years the agricultural revolution that began in the land between the rivers had spread across Asia Minor to the west and to the mountains in the north and east. And to the south it seems to have been