Book III Meira and the Gilgamesh Syndrome

By Philip Newman

In Part I of Book III, The Gilgamesh Syndrome, Meira has grown from the angry young woman in Looking for Father who became the adventuress harnessing the power of the oceans in The Seahorse, to the heiress proper - fulfilling her role and accepting the huge responsibility descending upon her.

While looking for answers in the ancient city of Aleppo is she caught up in terrorist activity but rescued by agents of her old enemy The Federation of Fossil Fuel Purveyors - FFFP. She returns to Mesopotamia, this time to Damascus, becomes entangled in the war raging there and is whisked away to southern Iran where a hidden city has been revealed by a commercial mining group. It is a staggering find of far greater value than of the city she visited in the Karakorum Mountains in Book I, and harnessing more power than the Sea Horse of Book II.

With her old friends, Ben and Peter, to help her, and her old enemy Commander Conway to protect them, she studies the architecture of the living city and the recorded texts only she can understand.

In Part II of Book III Meira is armed with knowledge of the Ancients stretching back to 100,000 BCE.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Newman
• Release date: May 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370401451

Philip Newman

Phil Newman, fourteen years a Concorde Flight Engineer, has turned his hand to romantic adventure novels to carry the green, sustainable, energy message. The Meira series of books are based on the findings of Christopher Jordan, "Secrets of the Sun Sects", and on his own, extensive, travels in the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, and the South American tropical rainforests. Philip brings adventure and excitement to the science of renewable energy and the study of the Ancients' use of the Sun. For comment please use: [e-mail]

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THE GILGAMESH SYNDROME

BY

Philip Newman

Copyright © 2016 Philip Newman

The moral right of the author has been asserted

This is a work of fiction.

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, living, or dead, contained within these pages is purely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the author; nor may it be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other that in which it is published, and without a set of similar conditions, including this condition, being imposed on subsequent purchasers.

ISBN

Published by Sothic Press

101/6 Moo. 6 Maenam

Koh Samui, Thailand 84330

E-Mail:Publisher@SothicPress. com

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Chapter One

John Conway watched a large elephant as it sauntered across the patio not twenty feet away from where he sat in low canvas chair. It was a bull, he noted - a full-grown, African monster of an animal with ears near half its height flapping irregularly to its steady gait. It didn’t look at him. Even as he sat up to stare at it’s passing, it didn’t look at him. It just continued at a steady plod to the corner of the building where it turned, and was gone.

Slumping back John pulled on a long glass, his mind wondering - an elephant of that stature would need two hundred plus kilos of vegetation every day - six tonnes a month. They could ship it in on trucks, but from where? Higher up the Indus Valley? Certainly not from over the border in Afghanistan - there was nothing there. Where then? Central Africa would be ideal but . . . Ah. Ah, he had it. They're bringing in green bamboo from Burma in that old Lockheed Hercules Freighter - using it to hide the armaments ferried in from China. Clever. Powerful elephants could do much of the heavy lifting here where earth moving equipment was scarce and what there was always in need of repair and, and they had gas. There's nothing quite like a big elephant if you needed gas - methane gas would do very nicely out here in Balochistan where just about everything combustible is in short supply.

He turned to see Bill Brown in faded denims and a Guns 'n Roses T-shirt approaching quickly. John stood, extending a hand. You keepin’ pets then boy?

We are, and shit. Tons and tons of shit. We got shit like you'd never believe.

Soft, warm, shit I bet. Not like the stuff I'm about to pull down on you.

Straight to the point then Commander. No courtesies - no sit Bill, take the weight off, have a drink . . .

Sit and drink Bill, you'll be needin’ it.

***

She could find no way to ease the pain. She could see no way to reduce the wrenching agony of the destruction of lives, of the obliterations of buildings and monuments, of the futile attempts of bands of brigands to wipe four thousand years of human development from the face of Syria. The streets of Damascus and Aleppo ran wild with fear of gunmen, tanks, strafing aircraft and the knife and sword wielding blood letterers determined on pain and murder. She shook her head, reflecting that there was in fact very little she could do for any of the pain in a world of military regimes and manic clergy, but Syria’s needs seemed so much more pressing. It was her home. It was her father's home. It was the incubator in which the seeds of much of human progress had germinated, grown, and matured into literate societies. Cuneiform, the first written language, was born here, developed here - in the markets, in the foundries, in the forums, brothels, lavatories . . . here language, and how it was to be written, was established for the very first time. Sun discs, too, for cooking, purifying, preservation, glazing . . . and for battle, were first formed here - right on the Tropic of Cancer. Later, much later, it was from here that King Gilgamesh set off in search eternal life in order to save a life. In that very first story recorded on stone tablets did humans begin to record – to catalogue history.

The destruction left tumbling in the wake of American forces rampaging across Iraq brought her to tears but to witness it happening again, in Syria, was a mind numbing experience - one that set her determined on a path to bring such madness to a halt. As heiress to the Matriarchy she was, for the most part, above local wars but the slaughter and destruction in Syria, in the very centre of human development, wrenched at her - wracked mentally and bodily. She was in such pain.

When will they stop Mother? When will they cease to hurl metal and poison at each other? How long must I wait? She knew the answers but a little screaming and crying in really bad moments helped.

There was work to do - a lot of work to do. She needed her helpers - Ben, wonderfully named Benjamin Ali Akbar Saint Thomas Houghton, immediately sprang to mind and she was going to need Peter - if wasn't buried under one of his pyramids. Ben is the son of Sir William Saint Thomas Houghton - a product of the old order of British training and education for boys. Sir William was first sent to Winchester, graduated