The bones, Roy thought. The bones never lie. Provided you can
find them. He was silent for a minute. Oddly, so was Winfield. He
seemed to be chewing on the marrow.
“Look,” Roy said, “I know you might think this sounds a little
cuckoo…” but then he realized that would be like the pot calling the
kettle African-American. “The thing is,” he continued, “I really am
trying to locate the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. I think it’s a
coffee tree. And I think it’s around here. But I don’t know where to
look.”
“Ha!” Winfield bellowed.
Of all the nerve! “You’re laughing at my ideas?” Roy cried.
But Winfield was already rummaging around in his overly-
complicated backpack. There were so many zippers and
compartments that it took him a full minute to find what he was
looking for. Finally, he pulled out several photographs. They were
aerial pictures of different islands in the middle of Lake Tana. They
were lush and green and lovely.
“So?” Roy said.
“Have you read Genesis?” Winfield asked. Roy nodded. “Well,
does it say anywhere that God built a wall around the Garden of
Eden? It didn’t. Yet somehow they couldn’t get back in. Assuming
Adam and Eve couldn’t swim, what does that suggest to you?”
Roy smiled. “An island? Very interesting,” he said, “You’re
insane, but perhaps that’s a good thing.” He was getting that warm
righteous feeling again. “How much is it to get a boat?” he said.
Winfield grinned, looking out over the lake. “It’s unbelievably
expensive. If we rent one, that is. If we steal one, substantially
cheaper.”
2. Q.E.D.
The following morning Crash and Roy took a bus down to a point on
the mainland they believed nearest to Deq, commandeered a papyrus
boat from an unsuspecting local and paddled out onto the Blue Nile.
It only took an hour of easy paddling to reach Deq. There had been
some confusion as to whether the dots on the map represented actual
islands or were just a kind of geographic pointillism: Here there be
islands. But they managed to locate it with ease. It was exactly as one
might imagine a primordial paradise: a green island on a blue lake
ABYSSINIA
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