The Novel--The Hunt for the Tree of Life--Chap. 1

Chapter 1

The puzzling poem perplexed the professor. Six weeks went. Yet, he was unable to unravel it.

It was 8 A.M. and he had already taken half a dozen energy drinks. He was now on the seventh. He adjusted himself in his seat and read the first line for the umpteenth time:

The Flood came and swept the tree of life away, even Eden+o

Well, that was pretty straightforward. The Hebrews were gifted poets and sometimes their poems could be frank to a fault.

However, it was not all that simple when he read the second and the last line of the poem:

Yet, the tree and the garden remain, as God decreed at the beginnin’+o

There was no honest answer. But that was the message he must urgently pass on to Mr. Mark Catcher, the director of the FBI, when he comes at midday.

Was the tree of life still in Eden?

The professor put the two lines together trying again to understand the contradictory lines:

The Flood came and swept the tree of life away, even Eden+o

Yet, the tree and the garden remain, as God decreed at the beginnin’+o

Intriguing, he thought, rising and looking out of the window into the misty Washington morning.

The White House had given him this lavishly furnished office with living rooms, a catering staff, a library of poetry books, and a handsome life salary for the sole purpose of cracking the poem.

Who else could have been entrusted with such a noble responsibility? After ten years at the University of California in Los Angeles, fifteen years at Emory and Harvard Universities, and a Nobel Prize in literature, Professor Muse Letterman was most suitable to explain the ancient poem and say the location of Eden and the tree of life.

Only a few remember that his first name was Jones. He earned the moniker, Muse, after interpreting a sonnet that had baffled his colleagues at Harvard by just reading the first and the last fourteenth lines.

But now, the Muse seemed to be failing him.
Where-was-the-tree-of-life?

The answer depended in knowing where Eden was. He looked at the Hebrew version of the poem to determine if some letters that could provide a clue to the meaning were missing:

השיטפון בא, וטיאטא את העץ של חיים הלאה, אפילו עדן+o
עדיין, הגן והעץ נשארים, כ/כפי שאלוהים פסק בהתחלה+o

He was not an authority in the language, but he found no missing lines. They were just two Hebrew lines ending with symbols. A team of professors at Stanford University had done the Hebrew-to-English translation. So there could be no fault in the English rendering. Hebrew must be the language of equivocators, he thought.

He now decided to reread the cryptological interpretation accompanying the poem by the cryptologists. He did not know how many times he had read it. He sat and read it again:

An Interpretation of the Symbol of the Methuselah Poem by Cryptologists, Dr. Lipson Divine and Mr. Sayer Oracle

The +o symbol following the Methuselah poem is a pointer to the location of the Garden of Eden and the tree of life. The + sign stands for the pagan cross, originating from Tammuz, the deified Nimrod. Worshipers of the Babylonian gods used the symbol, which later came to be used in modern religious worship.

The o sign represents the sun which rises from the East, and could be a reference to ancient worshipers of the sun god, Mithras. However, the circular symbol can be found on church windows of today.

When we looked at the composite sign +o, we think it might mean a sex symbol used in worship at the temple of Ishtar, goddess of love and war. Also, the complete symbol could represent the cross and circular signs on church windows.

We looked at it again in conclusion and think that the whole sign suggests a reference to a pagan temple or a church.

The above is the interpretation of the symbol +o with reference to the poem.

Signed by: Dr. Lipson Divine and Mr. Sayer Oracle

The professor laughed for the first time after rereading this, and stood up again. That was the vaguest report that he had ever read! Why? An interpretation of the symbol should assist him in explaining this baffling poem. But it seemed that even the renowned cryptologists were more confused.

They were doing permutation—simple guesswork. Either North or South. Heaven or earth. Land or sea. Black or white. They were not sure of anything. Just shuffling cards.

They should have been conjurers!

Were they insinuating that Adam and Eve, who were both husband and wife, committed a sexual sin in Eden? If so, how would they have begotten children?

Now which pagan god or goddess was housing Eden and the tree of life? Ridiculous!

Also, which church were they talking about? Is it the old Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Lutheran Church, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, or the Egyptian Coptic Church? Is it the Anglican Church, the Church of God, the New Jerusalem Church, the Mormon Church, or the Church of Christ Scientists?

He wanted to search on-line for names of churches, but he gave it up. That would only compound the problem. He would get one million results!

How could Eden and the tree of life be in one of those places? Who could undertake the task of finding it? They were talking from two sides of the mouth!

It reminded him of Croesus, the stupendously wealthy king of Lydia. The king had gone to the oracle at Delphi to inquire if he would win a war against King Cyrus the Great of Persia. “If Croesus crosses the Halys, he would destroy a mighty empire,” the oracle had told him.

The all-believing King Croesus went to war against King Cyrus but he was randomly routed by the Persians and chained as a prisoner. The punch line was that the oracle later told him that it was his fault because when he heard the prophecy, he didn’t ask whose kingdom would fall.

King Croesus was done in by double talk. Not for a professor like Muse.

It was not the cryptologists but the Nobel laureate who had the answer.

Now, where was the original garden of bliss?
As the professor stood contemplating, the FBI director drove in. He quickly sat, waiting . . .

Knowing the meaning of the poem was crucial. It would open the way to the location of the lost tree of life in Eden. America and China needed it to make an elixir of life in a new world superpower game.

In the Bible book of Genesis chapter 2, it said that God made Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, and put them in Eden. This was a garden of eternal bliss, with a river of four tributaries and abundant fruit trees.

God had commanded the pair to eat of every fruit of all the trees of the garden except one. In chapter 2 verse 17, it clearly says:

“But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it for in the day you eat from it you will positively die.”

Well, Adam and Eve, deceived by the Devil, ate the forbidden fruit, fell under the sentence of death, and died. But they would have lived on if they had gotten hold of the fruit of another tree in the same garden: the tree of life.

To prevent them from reaching this tree, God did something according to Genesis chapter 3 verse 24:

“And so he drove man out and posted at the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubs and flaming blades of a sword that was turning itself continually to guard the way to the tree of life.”

It is that way to the fruit tree that gives eternal life that America and China were searching for. The first country to reach it would remain the undisputed world superpower throughout eternity.

The fruit of the tree would be used to develop a drug that would cure sickness, aging, and death. Adam and Eve would have reversed death if they had braved the cherubs and the flaming swords and eaten of the fruit.

Next to the long life that the citizens of the discoverer would enjoy is the economic power. The elixir would generate massive income from patients around the world, and the country has the right to save or allow the rest of the world to perish.

There were indications that the two contending nations—America and China—would discover Eden and the tree of life. After all, stories abounded in many lands of a lost paradise:

Of the Persians telling of the perfect world of the fair Yima created by the god, Ahura Mazda . . .
Of the Greeks narrating their happy beginning before beautiful Pandora was giving in marriage to Epimetheus by the Olympian god, Zeus . . .

Of the Chinese remembering the lost golden ages of the ancient Chinese emperors . . .

Of the Japanese Shinto god, Izanagi, giving birth to the sun goddess, Amaterasu, and the darkness drama that followed . . .

Of the Kikuyus of Kenya and their creation story of Gikuyu by the god, Ngai, who put him and his wife in the beautiful land of Mukurwe wa Gathanga by Mt. Kirinyaga . . .

Of South African Zulus and their Unkulunkulu- chameleon-lizard story . . .

And of many other stories . . .

The Garden of Eden itself had a physical location. This could be figured out from the four tributaries of the river in Eden: Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates.

A more convincing fact was that if archaeologists had discovered Biblical artifacts and cities, why shouldn’t America and China find Eden and the tree of life?

The first country to nurse the ambition was China. The early Chinese had sought after an elixir of life. The modern Chinese wanted to continue from where their ancestors stopped and take it to the next level.

However, the Chinese quest was leaked through an intelligence report to President Bill Godsend of the United States of America who swore to beat China to it. And it was proving true. Although China was the first country to send an exploratory mission to Turkey, the supposed location of Eden, it was America, which came later, that was making progress.

The Americans saw no Eden, but chanced on a report concerning an ancient tribe that worshiped a stone by the Aegean Sea. The legend had it that there were two large slabs on which were inscribed a mystic two-line poem about Eden.

One of the slabs, according to the myth, was placed in the original Garden of Eden, where the four rivers flowed, while the second was in the land where Methuselah lived.

Tradition had it that Noah’s Flood buried Eden and the slab in the garden, but that the other stone was washed into the neighboring Aegean Sea.
No one knew who wrote the words on the slab and why they did, but since the second stone was in Methuselah’s land, it came to be called the Methuselah poem.

America invested personnel and resources to find this slab in the Aegean Sea and were making progress.

When the Chinese found that the Americans had taken the lead in the golden quest, they changed their game plan. They deployed a spy satellite to watch the Americans.

They were no longer actively searching, but spying.

The Chinese destroyed the slab when the Americans found it in the sea, only to later discover that America already had the photo of the poem.
Yet, there was no winner or loser because the Americans who had the poem did not yet know the meaning of the contradictory lines.

Time flies. It had taken a year for the Americans to track the slab and find the poem. Only the nine sisters could tell how long it would take Professor Muse: UCLA, Emory, Harvard, and Nobel laureate to interpret it and say where Eden was. His last meeting with the FBI director didn’t produce results. The professor was lecturing the director on Hebrew semantics. But he hadn’t come to listen to lectures.

However, the director knew that the professor wouldn’t disappoint. Professors of the top world universities do not fail. Nobel laureates are Nobel laureates.

The professor was still pouring over poetry books and comparing notes.

On the face of it, it was a simple poem that he was given to interpret. Why? Simple things could sometimes be difficult.

Suddenly, he got a hunch. Yes, a bright idea. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He wondered. What a shame! Sometimes the human brain plays games. He would compose an ode to the brain after this, and call it Cerebral Song. Each stanza of the poem would be devoted to eulogizing each part of the brain. How many parts were there in the human brain? He wouldn’t remember that now.

The professor suddenly realized that solutions to knotty questions were not always in far away Timbuktu. Or in down under Australia. It could be close home—at one’s finger tips.

He smiled, dialed a telephone number, and listened to the phone ringing at the other side.

He was getting close to the answer . . .

END OF CHAPTER ONE

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