For a complete change of pace, you can’t do better than Rift in Time. Archaeologist and adventurer Adam Livingstone is on the threshold of the historical discovery of all time—Noah’s ark, buried deep in a glacier on top of Turkey’s Mount Ararat.

As famous as that makes him, his discovery of the original site of the Garden of Eden may be even more spectacular. But such discoveries, confirming as they do, the truth of the book of Genesis, awaken the sleeping giants of secularism and long-dormant forces of evil that must discredit his discoveries…and silence Adam Livingstone for good. Hang on to your hat, you’re in for an exciting ride!

From the opening of Rift in Time:

Two legs dangled precariously over a jagged precipice of ice. A yanking of thin lines stretching above followed in final test of readiness. The ropes appeared too thin for the task. In truth they were strong enough to hold a mammoth. Then came the command: “Lower away!”

Slowly the figure in the orange jumpsuit descended from the icy ledge into the no-man’s-land of space. Far below the daring mountaineer a black mouth in the glacier overlooking Ahora Gorge on the north slope of the mountain—appearing tiny, but wide enough to receive him—possessed a secret about to be exposed to a waiting world. The target hole, toward which he was being lowered through space, stretched across a mere six feet in diameter. It had been melted through the ice with state-of-the-art torches lowered by the same crane on the ends of two large cables. A third simultaneously sent oxygen into the recess to keep the flame alive, even as the melted water thus produced was suctioned out with a gigantic dentistry tube attached to a fourth.

One of the lines also held a remote television camera to guide the efforts of the team perched safely in the encampment above. Coordinated by a sophisticated computer program designed specifically to Livingstone’s specifications, the operation combined large-scale NASA engineering with intricate medical ingenuity to perform a space-age archaeological arthroscopy on one of the most remote glacial packs on the globe. The only potential glitch that neither men nor computers could control was the winds. Always unpredictable at 16,000 feet, they were especially treacherous here in the eastern Turkish highlands. If they whipped up, neither astronaut nor heart surgeon, with any number of computers at their command, would be able to prevent the cables from flailing about wildly.

The winds, however, had behaved according to the optimistic forecasts of the team’s resident meteorologist. The burning was carried out in the early morning hours on two successive days of calm. They would make it possible for a man to be lowered in place of torches. He would witness the discovery up close with his own eyes and feel with his own fingers what everyone on the mountain hoped the spectrographic images from the previous spring had indeed discovered, and the subsurface interface radar from two weeks ago confirmed and pinpointed more precisely. And now, at a little after seven o’clock on the morning of the third bright day in a row, the much anticipated moment had at last arrived.

From the cliff’s edge precisely above the target hole, the orange figure slowly descended. No less than fifty video and television cameras recorded the moment from various vantage points of safety about the mountain above.

Archaeologists, historians, and preachers had dreamed of this moment for centuries. Now the potential discovery offered an exquisitely fitting climax to a millennium of technological advance, briefly diverting man’s focus from what he might become to where he had come from. For if the predictions were indeed correct, the seed of all humankind on the globe may have originated right here.

Whether anyone would be the first in the modern era to actually set foot in that ancient place—a site of legend and myth to some, of fact and divine intercedence in man’s affairs according to others—probably few of those dreamers in their heart of hearts realistically imagined possible.

Adam Livingstone’s thoughts, however, were preoccupied with the task at hand. Closer and closer, he now approached what signified a major fulfillment of the objective he had set for himself ten years earlier. That was to see, to discover, to set foot inside places unknown to any mortal before him. His dream was to represent to the field of archaeology what Alexander did to conquest, what Columbus did to sailing, what Edison did to technology, what Einstein did to nuclear physics. Livingstone glanced below him.

The essence of his chosen field of endeavor was digging holes into the past, yet now he was about to enter the most remarkable such tell imaginable. It was one he hoped would take him back to the earliest of all beginning points known to man . . . to the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis itself!

“Easy now . . . I’m nearly there,” he said, speaking into the tiny microphone embedded in his suit. Immediately a slight tug came upon his shoulders signaling a slowing of descent. Then a stop. “Are you over it?” came a voice through a miniature speaker attached to the headgear near his right ear. “Slightly off . . . only two or three feet.” Livingstone felt himself swing slightly from the pull at the top of his tether. “Good, that’s it,” he said. “I’m over it—wait a minute till I’m steady again. . . .”

A brief silence. “. . . start easing me down gradually. All right . . . about twenty-five feet . . . twenty . . . now fifteen . . .” Again he slowed. “Ten feet . . . eight . . . six . . . four, three, two, one—stop. I’m exactly at the top of the shaft. My boots can touch the ice around the edge.” “See anything inside?” “Just blackness. Wait a minute—I’m going to turn on my spotlight.” Livingstone reached for the halogen lantern strapped to his side, flipped it on, and sent the high-powered beam straight down below him. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s deep,” he added with a laugh.

And later in the story…

On the continent of Europe, other eyes also watched. They were the eyes of the two foremost members of the highly secretive Council of Twelve, to whom had been entrusted the indoctrination of mankind in preparation for a new-world order.

They had been watching for years . . . their predecessors for centuries. Those of their Order were not anxious over momentary rises and falls in their Master’s vast scheme. Unlike their ambitious colleague, they were not concerned on this day over the attention the incident drew from the world. The masses were fickle and small-minded, easily manipulated in any direction that became necessary. The enemy might appear in a thousand simultaneous visions around the world, and it would not increase belief in him nor endanger their cause. There were deeper matters involved, of more far-reaching import.

They were part of a timeless design. The passage of years mattered little to the ultimate success of The Plan. Yet a climax approached for which long preparations had been made. “I have felt strange rumblings in the Dimension,” said a tall, stately woman whose eyes were alight with vision beyond the ordinary. To have called her attractive would not have been untrue, though her countenance and demeanor exuded quiet potency and unassailability far more than beauty.

She was one capable of transfixing the mind, not the eye. “I was awakened in the darkness,” rejoined her counterpart, a greying man of dignified bearing. He was sixty-two and well fit, and his face bore a like expression of command. “My Wise One was calling me,” he added. “My Spirit Guide likewise spoke in the early hours” said the woman. “The message was a single word—beware . . . beware!”

“My Wise One cautioned—the door must not be opened! His face wore a grave expression. A vision came to me the likes of which I had not before seen.” The woman nodded. Her Guide had come to her with similar countenance. As of one mind, the two turned toward one another where they sat, extended their hands until their fingers barely touched, then closed their eyes. They must seek further illumination from those who had gone before and who now apprehended deeper levels of the Dimension than could their earthbound eyes.

The woman began to softly hum a strange otherworldly melody. The man’s lips moved in silent repetitive cadence to open the channel to his Wise One. The next sounds several minutes later came from voices eerily unlike the two out of whose mouths they came. “A door tightly shut for eons,” said a strange voice through the woman’s lips, “. . . must not allow the origin of the breach to be found . . . threatens to awaken mysteries of power kept secret since the dawn of time. Keep the door of that truth sealed. Find it . . . discover the source and destroy it.”

The idea of such a secret coming to light had indeed caused Lucifer’s legions to rise and take note. Nor were these the only two being summoned. That secret represented the true light—the light of Truth, where good and evil were born—not the darkness that such as these called “light.” Such were no mere matters of transitory whim on the part of the enemy’s people, but they touched the very foundation of their existence. The eyes of mankind must not discover the portal to that truth! Over the potential emergence of this truth the Dark Dimension was not merely uneasy—the Livingstone discovery had set the spirit realm atremble!

And further on…

On the monitors, observers now saw Adam kneel down. “The surface is a brownish gray,” he said. “I’m sure you can see too that it doesn’t appear at first glance to be any kind of granite, at least nothing I’m familiar with. It’s uneven, though not pitted like stone. There seem elongated depressions, a graininess such as you would expect from wood.

It obviously appears to be wood—solid, frozen . . . and I would have to say it does not look like a mere tree. It’s flat, as would be a cut timber of some kind.” They could see Adam scanning the interior of his tiny cave of exploration. All waited in silent expectation. They saw a hand rub back and forth across the floor as Adam appeared examining the floor very carefully.

“Scott, you’re not going to believe this!” he said. At last his voice displayed genuine excitement. “The petrification is not complete! This is wood all right—real, genuine wood. We’ll have to do more tests, but it is wood, of that there can be no doubt. I am standing on a flat, not a round, surface. It can’t be a tree. Unless I miss my guess, there are detectable markings different from the grain itself—which to me indicate that I am not the first man to touch this wood.” “What kind of markings?”

“Such as would come from a crude cutting instrument of some kind. I would stake my reputation on the conviction that these are boards hewn by man.” The cheering that went around the tent of headquarters now did not stop for three or more minutes. Immediately half those in the tent scrambled for their satellite-linked cellular phones.

In less than an hour, four-inch headlines had been set at the offices of no less than five hundred daily newspapers around the world—from Tokyo to Moscow to London to New York—proclaiming NOAH’S ARK DISCOVERED!