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ground and that afternoon issued a telegram:“We have found the Flood!” The news electrified the press and intrigued scientists. “We all agree that your theory is mad,” one colleague said. “The problem which divides us is this: Is it sufficiently crazy to be right?” Within days even Woolley had to concede that it wasn’t, as excavations proved that it was a localized flood. “It was not a universal deluge,” he wrote.
    But the bait had been laid, and generations of scholars have been unable to resist lowering themselves in after it. One question:Where did all the water come from? Some have said underwater volcanoes, others melting glaciers. Because the text says the forty days of water came from above and below, a few hydrologists have suggested a vapor canopy may have enveloped the earth. (One side benefit of the vapor: It would have blocked ultraviolet rays, thereby helping Noah live six hundred years.) Many have tried to date the Flood. Two oceanographers recently suggested the Mediterranean may have flooded around 5600 B.C.E. Woolley himself placed the event around 2800 B.C.E. But Gene Faulstich, founder of something called the Chronology Research Institute inIowa, puts them to shame. Using astronomical dating, he says the Flood occurred on May 14, 2345 B.C.E. It was, he says, a Sunday.
    If the Flood has been grounds for speculation, the ark has been ripe for obsession. The Bible says the ark should be three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, and thirty high. A cubit is the length of a forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Using eighteen inches as a standard, the ark would have been roughly the size of a soccer field, four stories high. That would make the ark, built without metal, five times longer than the Mayflower and, notably, half as long as the Titanic . Though most scholars, including Avner, consider the numbers in the Bible to be idealized, such thinking has not deterred enthusiasts. One problem has been that since the world has over one million species of animals today, how could they fit onto one boat? In The Genesis Flood, John Witcomb, a theologian, suggests that with common ancestry Noah would have needed no more than 3,700 mammals, 8,600 birds, and 6,300 reptiles, which would have been fine considering volumetric analysis shows the ark could have held up to 100,000 sheep.
    But could one family of eight possibly have tended all these animals? That, too, is no problem, says Ken Cumming, a biologist: Many of the animals would have responded to the lack of light by going into hibernation. Even if the animals could have fit and been cared for, could they have been housed in a food-chain-proof way? Easily, says Eddie Atkinson, a reverend and amateur ark-builder: Birds and rodents would have been on the top deck; lions and tigers on one end of the second deck, hippos and rhinos on the other, elephants and giraffes in between. The bottom deck, analysts assert, must have been empty, because according to zoologists at the San Diego Zoo, during their year aboard the ark the animals would have generated eight hundred tons of manure.
    By our second day the drive had become downright eerie. All through Turkey the scenery had been pastoral, but hardly otherworldly. Now, six thousand feet above sea level, with an almost complete absence of agriculture, we were entering a palette ripe for mythology—and conflict. Tanks were parked every mile along the highway, with soldiers sitting infront on white plastic lawn chairs. A giant billboard said, in Turkish and English, HOMELAND ABOVE ALL , and in the road signs that show people crossing the road, the people were dressed in traditional costumes.
    Most unnerving was the topography itself. The hillside plateaus were covered for miles in basalt coated in pale green fungus that looked like mold growing on charcoal. The basalt, while cooling from a volcanic eruption, had splintered into hundreds of fists, which in turn had splintered into jagged fingers