Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,53

animals he herded. He had seen one world pass away and another begin. He had been chosen by God to live while the rest of the world perished. It only makes sense that he would write about what he had experienced.” She opened the notebook she’d pulled from the cabinet. “My work before I began this project was in ancient languages, and so it has fallen to me to assist Azov in his attempt to understand the contents of Noah’s tablets. This page,” she said, indicating a script that Vera found inexplicably familiar, “is a copy of the words found on that tablet there.” She pointed to a fragment of wood lying in the case. “It is a record of the seeds Noah carried onto the ark.”

“These are Noah’s memoirs?” Vera asked.

Azov slipped on a pair of plastic gloves before reaching into the case and removing the tablet. “This piece of wood,” he said, “is one of over five hundred tablets we recovered from a village submerged 350 meters below the surface of the Black Sea. They were bundled together and stored in a casket. Carbon dating shows that it is nearly five thousand years old.”

“I’m sorry, but it is really difficult to believe,” Vera said, slipping on the pair of gloves Sveti offered before taking the wood from Azov. “Any organic material would disintegrate rapidly under water.”

“On the contrary,” Azov said. “The composition of the Black Sea created ideal conditions for preservation. It is essentially a dead sea. Although it was once a freshwater lake, saltwater from the Mediterranean spilled into it, creating an anoxic climate. The organisms that might eat wood or other degradable materials are absent. Artifacts that would have disappeared within a millennium are still intact, as if frozen in time. It is an archaeologist’s dream.”

Vera ran her gloved fingertips over the crevices. The tablet was light, made of a hard durable wood, with strange symbols stamped into it. Glancing at Sveti’s notebook, she realized that the symbols had an uncanny resemblance to the scribbling in Rasputin’s album. It took all of her restraint to refrain from confirming the match immediately. “So you are saying that you believe these tablets are not simply from that period of Noah’s life, but that they were written by Noah himself?” Vera asked.

Azov said, “These tablets were discovered among the items in the settlement, and we’re certain that the settlement was Noah’s home after the Flood.”

“What is your proof?” Vera asked.

“Carbon dating, the location of the settlement, identifiable personal belongings. And, most important, the tablets themselves.”

Vera turned the slab of wood over. It looked like something out of an Egyptian tomb. “If this is as old as you claim, it is simply incredible that it exists at all,” she said. Carved into the grain were more symbols, many of them partially washed away. “What is this alphabet?” she asked, trying to mask the growing excitement in her voice.

“It is a language called Enochian,” Sveti said. “It was given to Enoch by God, and Enoch used it to write the original story of the Watchers and the Nephilim. It is a common belief that a pre-Deluge lexicon—a universal language that contained the original power of Creation—existed. Some believe it was the language God used to create the universe, and that it was the language used by angels and Adam and Eve. If Noah was the last human being to carry antediluvian traditions to the new world, it makes perfect sense that he would have been versed in the language of Enoch.”

“Noah was a direct descendant of Enoch,” Azov added. “Which could explain how it was transmitted.”

Sveti continued. “Enochian script was revealed to an angelologist named John Dee in 1582, and was called Sigillum Dei Aemeth. His assistant, Edward Kelly, transcribed the script at the instruction of an angel, and went on to fill many volumes with it. It was considered by most angelologists to be a revealed language—authentic, but impossible to trace historically. Enochian script seemed, in the sixteenth century, to literally come out of nowhere. Of course, there are those who believe John Dee simply made it all up. Linguists have analyzed the language and concluded that there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. But if these tablets are authentic, they would not only verify Dee’s script as the language used by Enoch’s descendants, they would also support Dee’s claim that the language was not composed but revealed by God. The magnitude of such a discovery would be enormous.”

Sveti paused,