The call to prayer sounded just after 3 p.m. It came from a minaret, echoed off the storefronts, and stopped me, briefly, in the middle of the street. All around, people halted their hurrying and turned their attention, momentarily, to God. A few old men pulled cloaks around their shoulders and slipped into the back of a shop. Two boys hurried across the road and disappeared behind a stone wall. A woman picked up her basket of radishes and tiptoed out of sight. Part of me felt odd to be starting a journey into the roots of the Bible in a place so spiritually removed from my own. But continuing toward the center of town, I realized my unease might be a reminder of a truth tucked away in the early verses of Genesis: Abraham was not originally the man he became. He was not an Israelite, he was not a Jew. He was not even a believer in God - at least initially. He was a traveler, called by some voice not entirely clear that said: Go, head to this land, walk along this route, and trust what you will find.

Within minutes, the afternoon prayers were complete and people returned to the streets. Dogubayazit, in extreme eastern Turkey, was thuddingly bleak, with two asphalt roads intersecting in a neglected town of 30,000. Just outside of town, hundreds of empty oil tankers were parked in a double-file line waiting to cross the border into Iran. The trucks, the town, as well as most of the surrounding countryside were completely overshadowed by a looming triangular peak with a pristine cap of snow.

Mt. Ararat is a perfect volcanic pyramid 16,984 feet high, with a junior volcano, Little Ararat, attached to its hip. The highest peak in the Middle East or Europe, Big Ararat is holy to everyone around it. The Turks call it Agri Dag, the Mountain of Pain. The Kurds call it the Mountain of Fire. Armenians also worship the mountain, which was in their homeland until a brutal war in 1915. I later met an Armenian in Jerusalem who took me into his home where he had at least 150 representations of the mountain, including rugs, cups, coats of arms, bottles of cognac, and stained glass windows. Mt. Ararat is the first thing he thinks of every morning, he said, and the first thing his children drew when they were young.

I had come for a different reason. Genesis, chapter 8, says that Noah's ark, after seven months on the flood waters, came to rest on "the mountains of Ararat." Mt. Ararat is the first place mentioned in the Bible that can be located with any degree of certainty, and it seemed like a fitting place to begin my effort to reacquaint myself with the biblical stories by retracing the first five books through the desert. The topography of this part of Turkey, which includes the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, permeates the early chapters of Genesis. Chaos, Creation, Eden, Eve are all drawn from the fertile union of Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers" and the birthplace of the Bible.

In recent years, however, this region has been one of the most volatile - and bloody - in the Middle East. Over 40,000 people have died in a largely overlooked war in which indigenous Kurds have tried to gain autonomy from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. In every travel book I read about the region the author was at least briefly detained. The Rough Guide I brought actually superimposed a blank area over the region, saying it was too unsafe for its correspondent. "In our opinion, travel is emphatically not recommended." In some cases, it said, security forces respond to the rebellion by "placing local towns under formal curfew or even shooting up the main streets at random."

Though Dogubayazit was calm today, the underlying tension was still apparent. Approaching the center of town, I had barely made it past a string of cheap jewelry stores when a man approached me, eagerly.

"Hello," he said, in English. We shook hands. "You just drove into town in that brown car, didn't you? You're staying in the hotel, in Room 104."

The secret police were working overtime, I thought.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Um, I'm here to find out about Noah's ark," I said.

"Noah's ark!" he repeated. "Well, if you want to learn about the ark you have to go to the green building at the end of this street. Go inside and up the stairs until you get to a dark room. Inside there's another set of stairs. Go up those and you'll find another dark room. In there you'll find the man who knows everything about Noah's ark."

At first I thought this a joke, or a trap. I thanked him and continued strolling. I had heard enough horror stories, and seen enough tanks on the road into town, not to follow directions like these. I walked around for a few minutes, bought some plums in the market, and was heading back to the hotel when I caught myself: why exactly had I come here anyway?

Inside the green building I found the sagging staircase and proceeded to the second floor. The room was dark, and smelled of discarded cigarettes. I hesitated for a minute, took a step forward, then reconsidered. I was just turning back when I heard a noise from above, then steps. Seconds later a figure appeared. It was a man in his early 40's, lean, with black hair, and an enormous bushy moustache that cascaded over his lips. His eyes were concealed. He appraised me for a second, before saying, in perfect Oxonian English, "May I help you?"

"I was told you know about Noah's ark," I said.

He considered my answer. "But you were supposed to go up the second set of stairs," he said.

I agreed.

"Maybe you don't really want to know."

He retreated as quietly as he had appeared and left me standing in the dark. This time I didn't hesitate.

Upstairs, the man was just settling onto a low chair covered with carpets. He gestured for me to sit next to him. Between us was a table covered with books and a handful of photographs. He poured me a glass of tea and we exchanged niceties. He was a native of Dogubayazit, a Kurd. Ten years ago he had served time in prison for his role as an insurgent. He refused to talk about the war and when I asked his name, he gestured toward his moustache, "Everyone calls me Parachute." He was wearing a blue and white horizontal striped T-shirt that, along with his dark hair, made him look like a Venetian gondolier. After a while I asked if it was possible to climb the mountain.

"It is forbidden," he said. "Since 1991, nobody has been to the top."

"Is there anything to see?"

"If you believe something, you can see. If you don't believe, you cannot see."

"What do you believe?"

"We believe. When we are children, we hear things. They tell us that this is Noah's countryside. Even today, when something happens, the people say that it's the luck of Noah."

"Do you have the luck of Noah?" I asked.

"We know that something is there. We find something there."

"I'm confused. You're saying that you know something that everybody else does not know?"

"Yes." His eyes were big, with deep bags under them. He didn't move at all when he spoke. "I know it's there. I find something there."

"What is it that you found?"

"Ah."

"You won't tell me."

"Hmm."

"When will we hear?"

"One day you'll hear."

"And you'll be famous around the world?"

He crossed his arms in front of his chest in a sly, self-satisfied way.

As Parachute well knew, almost since the Bible first appeared, stories of sightings of Noah's ark have been a staple of Near Eastern lore, making it, in effect, the world's first UFO. Josephus, the first-century historian, wrote of legends that the ark landed "on a mountain in Armenia." In 678 C.E., Saint Jacob, after asking God to show him the ark, fell asleep on the mountain and awoke to find a piece of wood in his arms. By the 19th century the sightings grew more elaborate. In 1887, two Persian princes wrote that they saw the ark while on top of the mountain, which is covered in snow year-round. "The bow and stern were clearly in view, but the center was buried in snow. The wood was peculiar, dark reddish in color, almost iron-colored in fact, and seemed very thick. I am very positive that we saw the real ark, though it is over 4,000 years old."

In 1916, two Russian pilots claimed they saw the ark from the air, and the following year Czar Nicholas II sent two expeditions with over 150 personnel to photograph it. Because of the Bolshevik revolution, the photographs never reached him, though his daughter, Anastasia, is said to have worn a cross made of ark wood. Most photographs of the ark have similarly disappeared, including dozens allegedly taken by pilots during World War II and more taken by the CIA using U-2 spy planes in the 1950's. Even Air Force One is said to have spied the ark. During a flight to Teheran on December 31, 1977, while Jimmy Carter was traveling to a New Year's party given by the shah, passengers on board claimed they saw "a large dark boat." Said UPI photographer Ronald Bennett, who was on the plane: "It's my opinion that the president probably had Air Force One routed over Mt. Ararat and most likely saw the ark too."

Since that time, technology has only heightened interest. Dozens of books have explored the subject, and more than 50 web sites track the ongoing chase. In 1988, a stockbroker from San Diego flew a helicopter along the east slope taking photographs. The following year a pilot from Chicago aired footage of an "ark-like object" on CNN. Charles Willis, who was once Charles Manson's psychiatrist, ran four expeditions, and astronaut James Irwin, who once took a Turkish flag to the moon in an attempt to butter up the Ankara government, made five. None has found the prize. As my companion and guide, the Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren, had warned, "Archaeologists won't even take into consideration that there are any remains. This story, like Creation, is crystallized from many traditions." But that won't stop the pursuit, for as Avner said when I asked him if any of the recent expeditions interested him, "As a scientist, no. But as an adventurer, yes."

Which is exactly what Parachute was banking on. With prodding he explained that during a trip up the north side of the mountain in 1990, with a colleague from England, he found a piece of black wood 100 feet long. It was located at 12,000 feet.

"But it could be 100 years old," I said.

"We tested it."

"And how old is it?"

"When we find out everything, you'll know."

"But why wait? How much money would it take for you to bring me to it?"

He thought for a moment. "It's not the money. It belongs to us. We found the ark. If you give me a million dollars I won't bring you to it. If you wanted the pictures I wouldn't give them to you."

"You have pictures?"

"Yes."

At this point I decided to go back to the hotel and get Avner, who had been napping. Avner had been up the mountain in 1982 on a climbing expedition (no ark sightings, but lots of pure, clean snow). For the rest of the afternoon the three of us sat in Parachute's den. I asked Parachute what explained the ark's appeal.

"The ark is not so interesting to people," he said, "but Noah has meaning, like Mohammed or Jesus."

"You're suggesting that Noah is as important as Jesus."

"If we can prove that any of these stories happened, then people will believe in God."

"What about you?" I asked. "What did you think when you found it?"

"I was happy. I was walking along - it was a particularly warm year - when suddenly I fell into this cavern, covered by snow and ice. And there it was."

"I would like to believe your story," I said. "But I find it impossible to believe that in 4,000 years you're the first person to go into this hole."

"Around here there are only five guides licensed to go up the mountain," Parachute said. "Two are in jail, one is ill, one won't go. That leaves me."

"Will you show me the pictures?"

He refused.

"What if I tell you that you're being selfish, that there are several billion people in the world who would like to know if Noah's ark exists?"

He didn't react.

"What if I tell you that you could be the savior of the Kurdish people, by bringing millions of tourists to this area?"

He didn't move.

"What if I tell you that my mother is dying" - a lie - "and that she could die in peace if she knew that Noah was real?"

Nothing.

I was stunned. "Not even for my mother!?" I said. "Do you understand what you have here? More people believe in this book, more people have died because of this book, more people are influenced by this book.... You could change the world!"

Parachute was silent for a moment and unfolded his arms for the first time in hours. "You can tell your mother that she can be happy, that in the world there is one person who has seen Noah's ark. The Bible is true."

"So if she sees your ark, will she believe in God?"

"She'll have to," he said. "And you will, too. God is real. I have seen the proof."

Outside, darkness had fallen, and I was bit unnerved by our conversation. I suggested we take a Turkish bath to decompress. As we walked, I asked Avner what he thought about Parachute's claim. "I suspect he uncovered something," Avner said, "though I don't believe it was the ark." If nothing else, he noted, the chances of finding remains from a 5,000-year-old wooden boat seemed remote. And yet, now that we were here, the truth seemed far less important. What was important, I realized, was the ongoing hunt, the often eccentric never-ending quest to verify the biblical story, which itself masked one of the oldest human desires: the need to make contact with God.

Back at the hotel, we picked up some supplies and wandered a few blocks to a run-down, concrete building. Inside we paid a small fee and were ushered into dressing rooms. I stripped off my clothes and wrapped a faded brown dish towel around my waist. The attendant pointed the way through several doors, where the musty atmosphere gave way to an empty gray marble sanctuary, filled with perfume and steam. The attendant took a bucket of hot water and splashed it over an octagonal platform. I lay down and closed my eyes.

The idea of writing about the Bible had sneaked up on me. Like many of my contemporaries, after leaving home at the end of high school, I lost touch with the religious community I had known as a child. I slowly disengaged from the sticky attachment that comes from a regular cycle of readings, prayers, and services. I separated myself from the texts as well. And ultimately I woke up one morning and realized I had no connection to the Bible. It was a book to me now, one that sat on the shelf above my TV, gathering dust on its gilded pages. The Bible was part of the past - an old way of learning, a crutch. I wanted to be part of the future. Over more than a decade of living and working abroad I found that ideas, and places, became more real to me when I experienced them firsthand. It was the opportunity - and curse - of being alive in the age of discount airfare.

But even as I traveled, I found that certain feelings from my past kept resurfacing. I sensed there was a conversation going on in the world around me that I wasn't participating in. References would pop up in books or movies that I vaguely understood yet couldn't fully comprehend. I would read entire newspaper articles about wars I couldn't explain. At weddings and funerals the words I heard and recited were just that - words. They had no meaning to me. No context. They were not part of me in any way. And yet I wanted them to be. Suddenly, almost overnight as I recall, I wanted these words to have meaning again. I wanted to understand them.

No sooner had I made this realization than I discovered how daunting it seemed. For starters, the idea of reading the Bible from cover to cover seemed undoable. The text was too long; its structure too convoluted; its language too remote. I went to the bookstore seeking help, but found 50 different translations, with assorted concordances, interpretations, and daily inspirationals. Other options seemed equally unappealing. Though there are shelves of books on every aspect of the Bible - from spelling to sex - none seemed to offer what I craved. Were these stories real, or made up? When did they take place, and where? Looking further didn't help either. None of the classes I considered tackled these questions. I was left with the book, which sat by my bed for months on end, suffering from renewed neglect. After several years I was no closer to reconnecting to the Bible than I had been at the start.

Then I went to Jerusalem. I had just completed a long project and decided to reward myself with a trip to the Middle East. On my first day in the country I joined an old friend, Fred, who was giving a tour to some high school students. We stopped for lunch on a promenade overlooking the city. "Over there," said Fred, "is Har Homa," a controversial new settlement. "And over there," he said, pointing to the Dome of the Rock, "is the cliff where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac." Real or not, that piece of information hit me like a bolt of Cecil B. DeMille lightning. It had never occurred to me that that story -- so timeless, so abstract -- might have happened in a place that was identifiable, no less one I could visit. It had never occurred to me that the story was so concrete, so connected to the ground. To here. To now.

In subsequent weeks I had the same experience in a variety of places - the Dead Sea, Petra, the Pyramids. In the Middle East, I realized, the Bible is not some abstraction, nor some book gathering dust. It's a living, breathing entity unencumbered by the sterilization of time. If anything, it's an ongoing narrative: stories that begin in the sand, get entrenched in stone, pass down through families, and play themselves out in the lives of residents and visitors who traverse its lines nearly 5,000 years after they were first etched into memory. That was the Bible I wanted to know, and almost immediately I realized that the only way to find it was to walk along those lines myself. I would take this ancient book, the embodiment of old-fashioned knowledge, and approach it with contemporary methods of learning -- traveling, talking, experiencing. In other words, I would enter the Bible as if it were any other world and seek to become a part of it. Once inside, I would walk in its footsteps, live in its canyons, meet its characters, and ask its questions in an effort to understand why its stories had become so timeless and, despite years of neglect, once again so vitally important to me.

At first, few people thought this was a good idea. I returned home and tried to put it out of my mind, but couldn't. A few months later I traveled back to Jerusalem, and on my first went to visit Avraham Biran, the dean of biblical archaeologists and the colleague of a friend. Professor Biran listened attentively to my ramblings. He squinted at me from behind clouds of cigarette smoke. And when I finished, he leaned across his desk and told me politely that I was out of my mind. There were few confirmed sites. Most sites that did exist were in war zones. And most were supervised by archaeologists who were far too busy to explain them to me. "It really would be an imposition," he said. I sat back, deflated.

But even as he discouraged me, Professor Biran could not resist reaching out his hand. Over the next two hours, he plucked photographs from his desk, pulled books off his shelf, and eventually took me to the maws of his laboratory to show me some shards of pottery. That night he called me at home. "What you need is someone to go with you," he said, "someone who has a sense of poetry. Somebody like Avner Goren." Several days later, in the Negev, I ran into two young Israeli guides and discussed my plan with them. "What you need is someone like Avner Goren," they said.

Two days later I telephoned Avner at his home in Jerusalem. He agreed to pick me up the following morning and arrived at dawn in a rickety blue Subaru. In his 50's, with a body that reminded me of Winnie the Pooh's, he had squinty blue eyes, bulbous cheeks, a boyish grin, and curly hair. Though he was dressed in standard Israeli fare -- blue jeans, T-shirt, and sandals - that morning his most dashing feature was a long white scarf, Lawrence on his way to Arabia but still clinging to Oxford. After greeting me warmly, he drove around the corner to a coffee shop in the fashionable German Colony where we chatted over herbal tea and croissants -- instant neighbors in the global bistro.

A charming, charismatic figure, Avner was a romantic, a child of the desert. For the fifteen years that Israel controlled the Sinai - 1967 to 1982 -- he was the region's chief archaeologist and preserver of antiquities. But soon after, he abandoned the academy to become a popularizer of biblical history, one of Israel's most eloquent spokesmen on life in the ancient world. He tutored prospective Israeli and Palestinian guides, gave lectures on ancient history around the world (for the State of Israel, the UN, and others), and was a charter member of a pioneering group of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian educators who were using archaeology to open the fabled Nabatean Spice Trail to cross-border traffic. Indiana Jones, meet Dag Hammarskjold.

As we talked, a sort of implicit teacher-pupil relationship developed. "I was thinking about which route in the Sinai to take," I said. Avner didn't flinch. "I prefer the southern route," he said. "It offers the best experience." "I'm concerned that I won't be able to get to certain sites in Egypt," I said. "Fear not," Avner said, rubbing his fingers together in the international expression for an exchange of money. Finally, after tiptoeing through this logistical minefield, I told him about my conversation with Professor Biran. "Half the people I meet tell me I'm out of my mind," I said. "They tell me it can't be done." As I finished a smile slowly crept across his face. "I don't think you're crazy at all," he said. "I think it sounds exciting."

I sat back, relieved, and exhilarated. "Somehow I knew you would," I said. "By the way, would you come along?"

A year passed between that meeting in Jerusalem and our first foray into the field, in Turkey. During that time I returned to the United States and set about preparing myself for the trip. First I read the Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse. It took me almost a month, and I was amazed by how little I remembered. Abraham went to Egypt? Moses committed murder? What were all those rebellions in the desert? I began making a chart linking places in the text to places on the ground. Was Abraham born in Iraq or Turkey? Where was Mt. Sinai? Was there really a place called Sodom? This process led me to read about what those places would have been like at the time the stories were written. I started with books on history, archaeology, geography. These were rational subjects, consistent with my past as an undergraduate history major, as a master's student in international relations. Keep it real, keep it concrete, keep it safely removed from spirituality. "This is a literary quest," I kept telling myself. "This is about me and the Bible. This is not about me and God."

As I bounced from topic to topic I realized how little I knew about the ancient world. Books about history led to ones about religion; religion books led to language books; language to culture. In time, the topics became more obscure. I found myself scouring used bookstores for volumes on desert botany, pyramid construction, Babylonian creation stories. I even bought a book called The Bible and Flying Saucers: The Miraculous Truth, which included the cover line, "The messengers are here!"

The homework itself became part of the adventure. My chart became more and more complex. One bookshelf filled up, and I bought another. My friends wondered about this new obsession. Why was I sprinkling conversations with references to African quail migration or the biological roots of manna? Why did I want a six-volume, 7,035 page reference book for my birthday? "Not to worry," I assured them. "I'm not becoming a nut." And I believed it, too. This was about history, I assured myself, this was about grounding the text in reality. "I'm giving myself a master's degree in the history of the Bible," I said. What could be more fun, or more rational?

For all of my reading, however, the moment I met Avner at the Tel Aviv airport for our trip to Turkey, I realized that my education hadn't even begun. I was dressed in a neatly pressed shirt from Banana Republic with a bag full of books and a new pair of hiking boots. Avner, meanwhile, was nearly spilling out of his T-shirt, beltless baggy trousers made by some bedouin in Sinai, and fifteen-year-old scruffy sandals. The message was clear: my learning was all in my head; Avner's was all in his feet. I had never met a man who knew so much who carried his knowledge so lightly. He knew all the languages of the biblical route - Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish - as well as a few others - English, Greek, and hieroglyphics. He had not only several bookcases full of Bible books, but several rooms. Yet he was unassuming to the point of being bashful. At times this frustrated me - why didn't he speak up when we ran into a pontificator? But eventually I realized that Avner, in his way, was like the place he idolized. From afar the desert might seem distant and reserved; draw closer and it has a great story to tell.

Avner was like the desert in another way: he seemed completely removed from the modern world. For all his clarity of mind, he was conspicuously disorganized, with more twisted pieces of paper, bent paperclips, and stale pieces of chocolate spilling from his pockets than anyone I ever met. His car was like an archaeological site, with layer upon layer of his life piled up in the back seat. He rarely returned messages. He often forgot where he was going. And he never met me for a trip having not stayed up overnight to pack. Even then, we usually had to go back for his passport. His appearance, which rarely varied from that morning at the airport, reflects this personality. He owns only one tie, which he keeps knotted under his bed. He once addressed a UNESCO conference in Paris wearing hiking boots. And when, late in our journey, his daughter, Smadar, got married, Avner had to buy his first pair of dress shoes.

There was another way in which Avner was a paradox. For all his learning, for all his stature and international acclaim, he had never bothered to finish graduate school. He was too drawn by the opportunity to give a speech, to join a crusade - to go on a trip with someone like me. Remarkably, this blemish did little to stunt his success. If anything it was a testament to his talent that he continued to rise in intellectual circles despite not having the one credential that would seem to be necessary. He was a fellow at the prestigious Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Israel. He was recruited for prominent digs. He counseled prime ministers. And he knew everyone within a thousand-mile radius of Jerusalem. I never produced a name of someone I wanted to meet - an artist, a scientist, a bedouin, a scholar - whom Avner couldn't deliver within 24 hours. And I never attended a meeting with one of those individuals in which the other person, regardless of stature, didn't defer to Avner. As a friend of his told me, "Avner Goren is like Moses. He's a prophet. He has no boundaries, no borders, he's actually part of the land. And the best thing is, he doesn't even realize it."

This set up the unusual equation at the heart of our experience. I wasn't looking for a father anymore than Avner was looking for a son (he has one). I wasn't looking for a prophet anymore than he was looking for a disciple. And yet, we both were looking for the Bible, which, at the moment, had brought us together at the start of a journey that was still hardly defined.