A Mystery On The Mountain Of Pain

His relationship with the town was complex, however. While he was shown the hospitality customary of the region, his strident proselytising was also a source of tension. “He was coming and talking really bad about Islam and about Mohammed,” Selahattin says. “Many times I said, ‘Be careful, that’s not good. Some day, someone might kill you because Mohammed is a very important person for all Muslims.’ But he just said, ‘No, Jesus will protect me.’”

Ararat’s southwest face looms over the town of Dogubeyazit as a stout and singular sentry. When the British explorer James Bryce saw the mountain for the first time in the 19th century, he wrote that “no one who had ever seen it rising in solitary majesty far above all its attendant peaks could doubt that its summit must have first pierced the receding waves.” And this vision, of the flood and Noah’s Ark, still brings people to the town. There are up to 100 dedicated Ark-seekers who come in and out of Dogubeyazit, according to Halic. On top of that there are approximately 2,000 people a year who climb the mountain with an official permit, and just as many who climb it illegally.

4,000 visitors at most really drive the economy for 100,000 people

For Dogubeyazit residents, the mountain exerts a more practical pull. Amy Beam told me, “If there are no climbers, the horsemen have no work. If there are no tourists, the restaurants have no work, the hotels have no work, and the taxi drivers have no work. It’s an astonishing fact that 4,000 visitors at most really drive the economy for 100,000 people.”

While a fragile peace process is under way, there is hope that tourism can really take off. South of here, the Sirnak Culture, Tourism, and Development Foundation has announced plans to bring the replica ark used in the 2014 Darren Aronofsky film Noah to the region. Ararat is also seen as a big draw, an attraction that has the potential to transform a district where the average annual income is just $3,000. If peace really takes hold, “There will be thousands of people. Ararat can be really famous like Kilimanjaro when everything is safe,” says Halic, referring to the mountain in Tanzania that attracts 25,000 people each year.

I wake at Camp 1 to the milky pre-dawn sky. We are on a plateau not more than two football fields long and deep with a panoramic view over the plain below, Dogubeyazit to the southwest, and the craggy hills of Iran to the southeast. The red, yellow, and green star of Kurdistan and the acronym of the Kurdish rebels—PKK— are painted on a large boulder above the camp. Two sheep dogs with thick matted hair prowl with their heads bowed low to the ground like stooped old ladies.

Wolves eat humans up there quite regularly

“Did you hear the gunshots last night?” Selahattin asks me as he watches over a boiling samovar.

Yesterday, a German climber and a local nomad with a rifle stumbled across a mess of blood, organs, and bones as they were descending the mountain, according to Selahattin. Soon after, they saw the culprit in the distance. The nomad fired three shots, but the wolf escaped.

“They eat humans up there quite regularly,” Mackenzie had said of the wolves of Ararat in a tale captured on YouTube. He may have been exaggerating to impress his friends, but it is true that wolves have been known to kill both shepherds and sheep on the mountain. Some people have suggested that a wolf might have killed Mackenzie, but when I ask Selahattin about the possibility, he says, “If it was a wolf, there would be bones.”

And that’s one of the main problems: There are no bones. In the years since 2010, there have been a number of searches for Mackenzie, but his body has yet to be found. For Mackenzie’s family, there’s a sense that more could have been done at an official level. Others say it’s simply too dangerous to search for him. “I said to my business partner at that time that I wanted to go to Lake Kup and find out about Donald Mackenzie and what had happened,” says Amy Beam. “He said, ‘Leave that story alone, because it’s not clear if he died or if he was killed. And if you get close to the truth, you are going to be in danger.’”

Group ascent. Photo: Patrick Wrigley

From a distance, Mount Ararat looks like the famous Japanese oil painting of Japan’s Mount Fuji, a portent of both exaltation and oblivion. It is an arresting view. But once you are on the mountain, things change. Above Camp 1, at 10,500 thousand feet, you move into geological time. The pasture gives way to volcanic rock and the mountain is just plain ugly.

Numbed by the sun, putting one dusty foot in front of the other, we make slow silent progress. Then Selahattin points across a ravine to the west. “I found Donald’s tent over there at about 3,800 metres,” he says. “I knew it was his tent because I always hiked with him.” Selahattin’s brother, who had taken a shortcut off the main trekking route, was the first to see the tent. “It was damaged by the sun and he found some spoons, beans, and conserves in it. Nothing else. I don’t know, maybe someone discovered it before him. Maybe other people took his passport before my brother got there.”

If this really is the location of Mackenzie’s campsite, it is here, just below the snowline and the dizzying upper slopes of the volcanic cone, where he made his last call to his family. But if true, that also means Mackenzie was camping close to the site where NAMI claimed to have found Noah’s Ark. It was in this landscape, in the Red Canyon, where a NAMI video shows men in white hazmat suits and masks, as though on the set of a Hollywood crime drama, sliding into ice caves and touching large planks of wood.

Not long after Mackenzie went missing, local guides began suggesting that the discovery was a hoax orchestrated by one of their colleagues, Ahmet Ertugrul, known as Parasut (pronounced “Parachute,” for his droopy moustache that looks like the canopy of parachute), who had been hired by NAMI. Abdullah Kaya, a mountain guide who claims to have worked with Parasut and the NAMI mission, told me about the fraud he helped commit. In October 2009, he says, “We brought the wood of an old boat here from Erzurum (a neighboring state)… We took it up Ararat and put it inside an ice cave.” Abdullah left the scheme before the full deceit took hold, but he says the six-person team that perpetrated the fraud received “big money” from NAMI. (Repeated phone calls to NAMI’s Hong Kong offices went unanswered.)

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