Declare

made when he had walked away from the tents; and the sky was too overcast for him to throw much of a shadow. Perhaps he was not really walking back to the tent at all.
    Oddly, and he smiled wryly at it, he was feeling an extra bit of guilt here—Hale and I didn’t finish that poker game in 1948, he thought, but I took the whole pot anyway: I had Señorita Ceniza-Bendiga the next day in Dogubayezit, and I kept Maly’s amomon instructions too.
    Andrew Hale looked up from his cup of tepid tea when Philby came stamping back into the tent.
    Hakob Mammalian was right behind him, followed by the surlier of the two Turks, Fuad.
    “Sit,” said Mammalian as he ponderously lowered himself into a cross-legged position on the rubberized canvas floor, scattering floury snow from his boots. Philby and Fuad sat down, and the Turk by the little paraffin stove began handing disks of flat bread to Hale, who passed them to Mammalian. Hale was just wearing his tan wool liner gloves, and he could feel that the bread was hot.
    “When we were here in ’48,” Mammalian said, his breath steaming in the razory cold air, “we did not come this high. We did not presume to knock at their door , but called them down to the gorge. We were cautious because of some old stories—St. Hippolytus wrote in the third century that climbers who tried to ascend Ararat were thrown down to the valley floor by demons; and in the fourth century, Faustus of Byzantium recorded the story of an Armenian bishop, Jacob—”
    Fuad snorted around a mouthful of the bread. “An Armenian named Jacob!” he said in English. “Was he a saint?”
    “He was,” said Mammalian imperturbably. “And he climbed part-way up the mountain, hoping to see the Ark. Where he slept, a spring burst out of the rocks; we passed that spring in the gorge yesterday, by the cairn of rocks that marks his grave, though the shrine that used to stand there was destroyed in the 1840 earthquake. He too found himself abruptly at the foot of the mountain—but he had been carried there by an angel, who gave him a piece of wood from the Ark and told him that it was God’s will that he not attempt to climb the mountain. That piece of wood is today in the Armenian Ortho-dox monastery in Echmiadzen, in Soviet Armenia. The angel was a Christian one, and knew that Jacob might be killed if he climbed higher. With my own eyes as a boy I saw a demon face staring angrily from the Ark. Perhaps we Armenians are in a privileged position; my father and I were not molested.”
    “The mountain does not belong to Armenia,” said Fuad. “It is in Turkey. Why do you Armenians have it on your coat-of-arms?”
    “Does the moon belong to Turkey?” asked Mammalian. “It is on your flag.” He gave Fuad a dismissive wave. “But”—he shrugged— “in fact men of many nationalities have ascended to the Ark and survived; and in this century the djinn have been more quiescent, possibly because one of their number is abroad now, in Russia. In 1948 our group on the north side of the gorge was not attacked, but our covering party below the southern cliffs, as well as a British and a French group that tried to sabotage our operation from that side, were nearly all killed—many men were lifted away into the sky, doubtless to be thrown down onto the plain, as Hippolytus described.”
    Hale passed the last piece of bread, not taking any for himself— the thought of eating nauseated him, and he almost gagged at the thought that the bread smelled like khaki—and he touched the lump in his pocket that was the special derringer he had bought a week ago in Allenby Street in Beirut. He made himself stare back at Mammalian with no expression.
    “But,” Mammalian went on, steepling his fingers in front of his beard and glancing from Hale to Philby and back, “the djinn did speak, that night. They said, in Arabic, ‘Answer whom? The brothers are divided.’ ”
    A moaning gust of wind from the peak bellied the tent wall behind Mammalian and snapped the outer flap like a flag; Hale’s nostrils constricted at a cold whiff of metallic oil over the bread-and-rubber smell of the tent.
    Mammalian shucked the leather mitten off of his right hand and began unsnapping his parka. “Wear your drogues outside your clothing!” he barked.
    Hale hooked a finger into the leather thong at his neck and drew out the flat rectangular stone Mammalian had given him yesterday, at the camp by the trucks on the plain. The stone was the