LIKE MANY HOLY PLACES, MOUNT Ararat, where Noah's Ark came to rest after the Flood, occupies contested ground. Located on the fault line between the plates of the Arabian and Eurasian landmasses, in a rough triangle where Iran, Turkey and Armenia mee
t, it represents an historic border between Christianity and Islam. Yet Noah's story is common to both religions, while the Bible's Flood is echoed in earlier mythologies, not least the local Epic of Gilgamesh.
Ararat's symbolic meaning is matched, confused and exacerbated by geography, religion and culture. Covering an area of over 500sq km, ice-capped and ash-covered, it dominates the landscape, rising to over 5,000 metres. A national and religious symbol of the greatest significance for Armenians, it was part of Russia in the 1800s, but remained contested by the Czar, the Sultan and the Shah. Ceded to Turkey in the 20th century, after genocide expelled Armenians from the area, it became a key strategic point in the Cold War, its slopes littered with radar and listening devices. Consulting a detailed map of the area, Westerman wryly notes that while he may be looking at the landscape of the Old Testament, he's also aware of a large legend which states: AIRCRAFT MAY BE FIRED UPON WITHOUT WARNING.
Given Noah's story, it's unsurprising that there are those – Westerman dubs them Arkeologists – who are obsessed with searching for the remains of the boat, though he's surprised to find it a modern phenomenon, initiated in 1916 by the claim of a Cossack regiment to have stumbled across the Ark's remains on Ararat's northern flank. The Czar promptly sent 150 royal engineers to take a closer look, before being engulfed by revolution. Thereafter, the search was resumed only after the Second World War, increasingly by westerners.
One such is Steve Irwin, an American astronaut – who walked on the moon in 1971 – now turned born-again Christian. In 1986, after leading an evangelical Dutch camera crew up the mountain, he was detained by the Turkish authorities for spying. But born agains are not so easily deterred, and still flock to the mountain in pilgrimage. Yet nothing of substance has ever been found, though there are many claims, usually based on boat-like shapes identified from satellite photographs. And the picture is further confused by the rival claim of nearby Cudi, where the shape of an outcrop seems to suggest the petrified remains of a boat.
Yet Ararat retains its ability to fascinate and to symbolise. In 2007, Greenpeace built a mini Ark on its slopes to draw attention to global warming and the need for world peace. Westerman's attitude to those drawn in by Ararat's apparent significance is one of fascination and irritation. Comically, he asks what kind of meaning we might draw from the fact that the scene of God's Covenant with Man is also an active, two-headed volcano very like Mount St Helens, which exploded in 1980 with the force of 27 atom bombs.
Appropriately enough, Westerman's own pilgrimage to Ararat begins with a flood, a sudden inundation which nearly drowns him while playing aged 11 in the River Ill. In this beguiling, digressive mix of travelogue, memoir, history and gentle philosophising, he probes at the roots of his own sceptical fascination with the mountain, ascribing it in part to the early religious faith fuelled by his survival on the river, but long since lost to the rationalism fostered by his education. Nevertheless, like the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, he has "developed a sixth sense, an Ararat sense: the feeling of being drawn in by a mountain", his search driven by the need to understand the relations between belief and knowledge, religion and science.
On the way, he enlists the help of a cast of colourful characters, from his old geology and mathematics professors – rational to a fault – to those encountered on his climb, among them a Russian monk and his minder who, despite being indigent, nevertheless turn up for dinner sporting a bottle of cognac called Noah's Ark. Given his intellectual debt to rationalism, Westerman is frequently bemused by the uncritical faith displayed by his fellow obsessives, as he is disarmingly bemused by himself.
Meanwhile, Westerman's wife is worried he'll suddenly get religion, while his editor courageously tells him that, should that happen, he won't publish the book. But finally Westerman remains an agnostic. In this consistently fascinating and elegantly written exploration, he acknowledges that mystery and myth are central to human kind; it's just that we shouldn't push that particular boat out too far.
• Frank Westerman is at the Edinburgh book festival at noon today.
The full article contains 793 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
