time as they were mining for copper,” Ethan noted.
“Exactly,” Rachel nodded. “Everything happened for them at once, and that’s what doesn’t fit with the rest of ancient history. At the same time, people here in the Levant were also beginning agriculture, forming a script, mining copper, and attempting to smelt bronze.”
“Are there any other legends that match Sumer’s?” Ethan asked.
“Plenty. In the Indian Ramayana, the Pushpaka Vimana of the god Ravana is described as a chariot that resembles the sun, that traveled everywhere at will like a bright cloud in the sky.”
“You think that they saw a flying vehicle?” Ethan asked in amazement.
“History is full of such records,” Rachel explained. “On Kimberly Mountain in western Australia, there are cave walls bearing paintings of several beings with round heads and huge black eyes. Calling the figures Wondjina, the Aborigines consider the beings extremely sacred. The Wondjina were drawn at least ten thousand years ago and bear little resemblance to any known Earth creature.”
“Could be just the natives strung out on naturally occurring narcotics,” Ethan dismissed her.
“In the Tassili Mountains in the Sahara Desert there are images of towering figures,” Rachel continued, “drawn at twice the height of humans and animals drawn alongside them. They also wear strange headpieces and there are flying discs hovering above them. Hopi Indian petroglyphs tell of ‘Star-Blowers’ who traveled the universe and visited Earth in the distant past. There is an ancient Peruvian legend about the goddess Orejona landing in a great ship from the skies near the site of the famous Nazca Lines, not to mention Native American ‘Thunderbirds,’ Arab djinni, and one of the first written accounts of a fleet of flying saucers from an Egyptian papyrus of Thutmose III, who reigned around four thousand years ago.”
“I had no idea,” Ethan admitted.
“Most people don’t,” Rachel said, “but ancient history is littered with such records, right down to images of flying discs with windows that were painted on rocks thousands of years ago. The extraterrestrial appearance is considered too radical by science, and so other explanations are created despite the obvious implications.”
“You can hardly blame them,” Ethan said. “The idea that E.T. popped down to teach mankind to brew alcohol and then cleared off doesn’t sound like serious archaeology.”
“No, but that’s the whole point,” Rachel said. “I wouldn’t have believed it either, but when you look at some of the artifacts, it’s virtually staring us in the face. Sumerian and Egyptian gods portrayed as humanoid with animal heads and wings are a good example. In Val Camonica in Italy there’s a cave painting of two men in suits holding strange objects that’s at least ten thousand years old. In Sego, Utah, there are seven-thousand-year-old petroglyphs of unmistakably alien humanoids drawn alongside ordinary-looking humans.”
“Cave paintings are hardly solid evidence,” Ethan pointed out.
Rachel shrugged and watched as Luckov made a carefully judged descending turn around the epic heights of Masada as he lined the aircraft up with Bar Yehuda airfield. Set on an isolated cliff in the Judean Desert, Masada’s precipices soared more than four hundred meters above the Dead Sea. Ethan could see the immense and seemingly impregnable fortress on its summit, built by King Herod and the site of the last stand of the Zealots against Imperial Rome.
The de Havilland’s flaps whined down, the aircraft bobbing and plunging on thermals spiraling up from the hot desert below. Ethan watched with interest as Aaron and Safiya worked together, the scant runway of Bar Yehuda looming up before them as the scrubland whipped past below. Aaron flared the aircraft gently and set it down on the narrow strip as Safiya pulled the throttles back. The engine changed note to a rattling patter as they taxied off the runway alongside a scattering of dilapidated buildings erected from old corrugated iron and sandstone blocks sweltering in the heat.
“This is it,” Aaron said, cutting the engine’s fuel switch.
The engine shuddered to a stop, and the sudden silence that enveloped them was as deep as the timeless history of the land itself. An elderly man walked toward them from out of the desert as they disembarked, materializing ghostlike through rippling rivers of haze that obscured the horizon. He was dressed in traditional Bedouin garments to protect him from the heat and the winds that moaned across the empty wastes. Behind him walked several young men swathed in similar traditional clothes.
“Shalom aleichem, Ayeem,” Aaron greeted the elderly man, and they embraced briefly.
“Aleichem shalom,” the Bedouin replied, before looking at Ethan and Rachel.
Ayeem’s