Roman Ice
Page 31
Barry: Still in London? You need to get here. Found something amazing.
Aside from an email congratulating him on the Iceland tube and diamond chamber discovery, Darwin had not heard from Barry. He messaged back:
Darwin: Yeah, in British Museum
His iPhone rang. “Hey, Barry,” said Darwin, collecting his notes and walking to a place he could talk.
“Darwin, how are you, lad?” Barry asked over a thrumming sound.
“Good. It’s hard to hear. Where are you?”
“About thirty meters below you.”
“You’re working on Crossrail?” asked Darwin, referring to the massive underground rail project that ran from Heathrow Airport to the eastern side of London.
“Yeah. I’m on a long-term sabbatical from Newcastle. I got tired of the administrivia and politics. This is what I love.”
Darwin laughed. “You must be part Hobbit. You sound happiest when you’re in some hole in the ground.”
“Could be. Listen, how fast can you get down here? I got something you need to see before the word gets out,” said Barry.
“I’ll come right away. What do I need?”
“Nothing. I got supplies here. I’ll meet you up top at the Liverpool Street Station in twenty minutes.”
Darwin got there in seventeen. Barry shouted to him from across a large lot. The area was jammed with pallets all covered against the London weather. Crossrail was the largest transport project in Europe and also the most extensive archeological dig in UK history. At first, the security guard protested that Darwin was not on the cleared list of archeologists, but then Barry mentioned that Darwin was the guy who had found the diamond chamber. After taking a couple selfies with the famous archeologist, the guard admitted Darwin.
They boarded a construction lift, and, during the descent, Darwin’s stomach sank. Oh god. His vision closed in and he flashed on the horrors from the lava tube. He breathed and focused on the small elevator control box as the vertical shaft rushed past.
“Darwin, are you okay?” asked Barry as the elevator slowed. Bright white lights illuminated what looked like a city intersection.
“Ah, yeah,” said Darwin.
“You want to go back up?” shouted Barry over the noise.
“No. I’m fine now. Let’s talk about what you found. It’ll help me get over the feeling.”
“Sure,” said Barry handing him a pair of safety headphones that dulled the sharp noises. “The section we’re in here will be a major station. The pallets you saw being lowered in here are full of concrete sections used to support the walls. Somebody’s getting rich making thousands of these things.”
They walked near the wall away from the main construction of the future platform and into the right side train tunnel. After about a hundred meters, they reached the back end of a tunnel-boring machine. A dozen workers were chatting with one another, and one of them glowered as they passed.
Barry stepped onto the back of the TBM and led Darwin to a section of the machine where curved concrete segments were fitted into the sides of the tunnel. Barry pointed to a hole in the dirt ceiling where the TBM paused from placing a concrete segment. The opening was about the size of a street sewer cover and its edges were solid rock.
“As best we can figure, the TBM cut through the bottom of the rock. The pilot reported shuddering for about a minute, then returned to normal. Typical for when it hit rocks in the soil. The supervisor stopped the boring when they cleared this spot and some rubble piled out,” said Barry.
“Lava!” exclaimed Darwin as he rolled some crushed rock in his palm.
“Precisely,” said Barry.
“What’s in there?” asked Darwin.
“The reason I called you,” said Barry, turning and placing his large hands on Darwin’s shoulders. “It’s a lava tube, but we’ve got to get moving, as the site manager tells me the TBM costs about one hundred thousand pounds an hour to sit still.” They suited up in coveralls and mounted video cameras on their helmets. Barry carried a DSLR camera with flash gear.
They climbed into the tube using a ladder. Darwin oriented himself to the tube. Its sides were ridged and a small shelf stuck out, evidence of multiple lava flows. Nothing unusual. He knelt down and brought an object up to his face.
“Is it…?”
“Roman!” said Darwin. “Bits of a clay oil lamp.” He laid the clay piece back down in its original position and then stepped back to survey the scene. Barry photographed everything in situ as Darwin used his helmet-cam to record the layout. They would come back later with a more formal operation.
While Barry continued photographing, Darwin moved farther down the tube. He had a sensation that there was more. Another tube opened on his right. Smaller, but still human height. He turned, letting his hand drag on the wall as he rounded the corner. He stopped and scoured the walls at eye level.
An Aquila symbol! Clear as the day they made it. He snapped a picture. He scanned the floor and found it clean. Ahead, the tube curved to the right and upwards.
“Darwin?” yelled Barry.
“In here,” he yelled back and kept going. The tube opened into a wider space covered in rubble on its far wall. I’m close. A box shape stuck out of the dirt. Just then he felt a rumble. Earthquake? No, this is London. The only thing that rumbled here was the Underground. A train had passed by. He was sure. This is the other side of the opening where James found Agrippa’s scroll!
His heart danced with excitement as he moved to the box sticking out of the pile. It looked like some kind of table. The unburied end rested atop a wooden block. It was dark grey, covered in dust. Skeletons were scattered about the floor. Strange. Darwin stepped around them and wiped a small corner near the bottom of the box and saw it was marble. What?!
He heaved dirt onto the floor and the box grew into a rectangular shape about a meter high. There was too much dirt to see its full length, so he stopped digging. The sides were smooth. It’s a sarcophagus!
He stood and videoed the top of the marble. There were letters carved in the lid. He removed a brush from his backpack and swept away the dirt from the inscription.
AGRIPPA CICERO
HEROEM IMPERI
Tears blurred his vision, and he swallowed hard.
“Darwin? What is it?” asked Barry.
“This tube goes all the way to Rome.”
Author’s Note
The idea for Roman Ice sprang from a BBC online article I read on 26 June 2012: “Roman and Celtic coin hoard worth up to £10m found in Jersey” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-jersey-18579868
How could a large cache of Roman coins could end up in New Jersey USA? A quick read told me this was Jersey England, but my brain began to imagine the possibilities of Romans reaching the New World 2,000 years ago. My brain churned through possible ways Roman explorers could reach the future America and bring a treasury weighing “three quarters of a tonne”.
Sailing? Maybe, but the Romans were not long distance sailors in the size craft needed for that weight. Tunnel? That’s it. They tunneled from the Britannia to North America. Wait. What? The logical part of my brain played out the dig and imagined wagons full of dirt being hauled a thousand miles back to Britannia to be dumped. No. There had to be some other way.
Lava tubes. I forgot my “aha” moment exactly, but Google and Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_tube showed that lava tubes are found all over Earth. Geologists theorize that lava tubes also exist on the moon and Mars. Who knew.
About the Author
Dave Bartell lives in Silicon Valley, California and has made up stuff his entire life. His drive to understand how things work led him to study biochemistry, but his dislike of rules caused him to buck the system, like the time he turned in a one-paragraph paper. It came back with “write more.” He handed it back with “that’s all I have to say.”
A few years ago, with no time on his hands, he signed up for an online writing class. The what-if mindset of high t
ech flowed straight into his fiction. He hopes you enjoy his stories and invites you to share your thoughts at davebartell@gmail.com.
BTW, he got an "A" on that one-paragraph paper.