“OK, I’m sorry I asked.” Cassie rubbed her head distractedly. “Too much information. I already had a headache before you guys got here, and I think my brain just reached its capacity for processing new data.”
“When did you eat last?” Griffin asked solicitously.
“Not since I left Chicago,” she replied glumly. “I have a thing about airline food.”
“Maybe a meal would help,” the scrivener suggested. “I confess I’m a bit peckish myself.”
“We might as well order room service and eat out here,” Erik said. He walked back into the room and returned with a menu. “At least if we charge it to Cassie’s room I won’t get an earful from Maddie about my expense account.”
“Surely, she’s allowed you a per diem for meals?” Griffin asked.
Erik gave a short bark of a laugh. “Like you said, man, elephants.”
Chapter 10 – Flooded with Information
Half an hour later their room service order arrived, and the Arkana team hungrily dove in. Cassie’s headache evaporated once she started eating.
Griffin looked at Erik’s plate disparagingly. “Thousands of miles from home and all you can think to order is something as prosaic as a hamburger?”
“It’s a cheeseburger,” the security coordinator replied defensively taking a large bite. “I like cheeseburgers.”
Cassie and Griffin had opted to try a sample of Turkish dishes called meze.
“What’s that you’re eating?” Cassie scrutinized an interesting item on Griffin’s fork.
“Its name is patlican salatasi in Turkish. I believe it’s cold aubergine salad.”
“What’s that in English?”
“Oh, sorry. You Yanks would call it eggplant.”
Cassie smiled. “I can’t pronounce any of the names, but these dishes sure are good.”
“Just don’t drink the tap water,” Erik cautioned.
“He’s right about that,” Griffin concurred. “Bottled water only.”
Cassie sat back in her chair taking a break between courses. She watched the aquatic taxis and commercial ships making their way up the thin blue ribbon of water separating two continents. “It’s hard to believe a place as pretty as this has seen so much death.”
Erik looked up briefly from his burger. “You mean all the battles? That’s nothing.”
She fixed him with a stare. “What do you mean?”
“Some places just seem to attract disaster. And this one had a dark history long before the first Greek decided to settle here.”
Cassie turned her attention to Griffin. “What’s he talking about?”
Griffin hurriedly swallowed a mouthful of food. “He’s referring to the flood.”
“The flood,” the pythia repeated skeptically.
“Yup, the flood,” Erik echoed, shifting his focus to his french fries.
Cassie gave a huge sigh. “OK, I’ve eaten. My head’s clearing up. Tell me the rest.”
“In the beginning…” Erik intoned pompously.
“You’ve no doubt heard of the flood in the Bible?” Griffin dabbed his mouth with a napkin.
“You mean Noah and two by two and the ark?”
“The very same.”
“Of course, I have. So what?”
“There’s a very good possibility that a flood of epic proportions really happened and that it happened not very far from where we’re sitting.”
“Get out!” Cassie blurted, intrigued.
“Other cultures have recorded the story of a similar catastrophe. The most well-known is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. But there is also a Sumerian deluge myth and the Akkadian epic of Atrahasis. Of course, by the time these stories were written down, the event itself was several thousand years old.”
“Then what did happen here?” Cassie sat forward, looking at Erik inquisitively.
“Let him tell it, I’m still eating,” the security coordinator growled.
“Very well.” Griffin cleared his throat. “You may think of global warming as a modern occurrence, but it’s quite old. The catastrophe of the Black Sea flood was the result of global warming on a scale that is nearly incomprehensible. You see until quite recently a large part of the northern hemisphere was covered in ice.”
“You mean as in glaciers?” Cassie offered helpfully.
“Precisely. Around 10000 BCE, the last ice age was coming to an end, and those glaciers began to melt. The process took thousands of years. During that period, the Black Sea was a body of fresh water called the New Euxine Lake.”
Cassie looked out at the Bosporus in surprise. “But how’s that possible? Doesn’t this channel connect the Black Sea with the ocean somehow?”
Griffin smiled knowingly. “That’s quite correct, but at the time of which I’m speaking, there was no strait here. Just a rocky shelf separating the Sea of Marmara to the south of us from the Euxine Lake to our north. There was a tiny rivulet called the Bosporus that let fresh water out into the sea.” He paused, looking out at a boatload of sightseers bobbing on the strait.
“Sumeria is often credited with being the cradle of civilization, but it’s far more likely that the signal honor belongs to the coastline of the Euxine. Humans had left their gatherer-hunter ways behind and become settled agriculturists all along its shores. They set up villages that traded with one another for hundreds of miles around. We assume they were peaceful matristic communities though we can’t be sure. The Arkana is in the process of collecting evidence to that effect. The pleasant life along the Euxine may, in fact, be a memory fragment that eventually found its way into the Bible as the Garden of Eden—a land which was supposedly fed by four rivers. It can’t be proven, of course, that the writers of Genesis were referring to the Black Sea basin, but it is fed by four major rivers: the Dnieper, Dniester, Danube, and Don. An interesting coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Get to the good part,” Cassie urged. “How did the lake become a sea?”
Erik leaned back in his chair, propped his feet on the balcony railing and closed his eyes.
Griffin forged ahead. “As I mentioned, the glaciers had gradually been receding and dumping an enormous quantity of melted ice into the world’s oceans. It was only a matter of time before the sea level rose higher than the fragile little outcropping of rock which separated the Sea of Marmara from the Euxine
