by Paul Twivy
‘Li?’ came a shout from above.
‘He’s all-right. He’s found his father’s body.’
On the surface, Ilana and Selima cried twice, once with relief and once with sadness for Darius’s wretched discovery.
It took an hour for four of them to set up a winch system on the surface, secured by several taut guy ropes. This meant the others could effectively abseil down the sides of the shaft whilst being lowered by the winch. It felt, and was, much safer.
Ace agreed to stay on the surface, watch for animals and winch people and equipment up and down as needed.
‘Underground isn’t for me,’ he said. ‘This is my domain,’ he added signalling across the open land.
Ben and Basarwa were the last to descend. Before they did, Ben set up an emergency transmitter to signal their position back to his department at the University. He had briefed his Deputy on the risky and peculiar nature of their mission. It felt like an umbilical cord to safety. Ace and Basarwa were just as in awe of the thoroughness and sophistication of Ben’s procedures and equipment as he was of their tracking skills.
The bottom of the shaft opened out on to a giant catacomb. Once they were all down, they banged pegs into the rock and hung lanterns on the walls to light their path as they moved forward.
‘Thank God, it isn’t raining,’ Darius said. ‘This place would flood in a few hours.’
‘The covering over the entrance would slow it considerably of course, were it still in place,’ Li observed.
‘Probably why it was put there,’ Darius suggested.
‘You think so?’ quizzed Ben. ‘I doubt that. It would have taken several men and some basic engineering knowledge to construct. It was only put there for one reason, in my view: to stop this being discovered.’
‘Captain Alexander?’ Joe asked.
‘Seems very likely,’ Ben replied, ‘given everything we know from his maps and journals.’
‘Why would he want to hide it?’ Hannah asked.
‘I suspect we’ll soon find out,’ Ben replied.
‘If we find anything at all,’ Freddie said.’ ‘This place could have been ransacked.’
‘I don’t think so. I think there’s only been one visitor in almost two hundred years,’ Darius said wistfully, ‘and that was my father.’
‘Alexander may have intended to come back,’ Selima said. ‘Doesn’t one of the journals imply that?’
‘It does,’ verified Ben. ‘He may well have returned to take out whatever he discovered and then to cover the entrance. He would have had help…probably his regiment.’
‘Can we go ahead?’ Joe asked, impatient to explore deeper.
‘Just be careful. Stay where we can see you please,’ pleaded Barbara. Sarah and Anne echoed her pleas.
Joe and Selima took the lead. Hannah and Freddie walked just behind, with Clara sandwiched between them holding Freddie’s hand.
They’d soon forgotten the instruction to stay in sight.
‘What if there are more skeletons?’ Clara asked.
‘Skeletons won’t harm you, Clara,’ Selima said and then screamed as something cold touched her head.
Clara screamed in sympathy and the piercing sound echoed around the caves until it sounded like the wailing chorus from a Greek tragedy.
‘It’s just a stalactite, Selima,’ Joe said, casting his head-torch upwards.
There was a sound of footsteps running closer.
Li and Darius appeared.
‘What frightened you, Selima?’ Darius asked.
‘Her imagination!’ Freddie replied.
‘It was just a stalactite, Dad,’ she reassured, ‘but it felt like the touch of a dead man’s hand.’
‘I think we need to stay together! You’ve had a terrible shock seeing your grandfather’s body. Perhaps you should go back up to the surface.’
‘No way,’ Selima protested.
They proceeded further, lighting and hanging lanterns at systematic intervals.
Basarwa, who had deliberately stayed back, walked towards them from the shaft entrance and shivered. In their white radiation suits they looked like ghosts patrolling the underworld.
There were a few small side caves, like the chapels for private prayer in a cathedral, each of which they explored, eager to find something. Each cave disappointed, its bare rock, almost mockingly, reflecting back the child-like probing of their multiple torches.
‘Where’s the buried treasure?’ Clara asked in frustration.
‘Who says there’s treasure, pumpkin?’ Freddie replied.
‘There’s always treasure in caves,’ Clara replied indignantly.
Then, the claustrophobic rock corridor that had run the whole length from the entrance, opened out into a magnificent space. A meteor shower of stalactites descended from the high ceiling. Stalagmites rose from the floor at one end like a vast church organ designed by Gaudi. The floor undulated like a tongue.
‘It’s like a cathedral waiting for its worshippers,’ Ralph said.
Ben placed two torches in the rocks, twenty feet apart, both shining up to the ceiling.
‘Wow,’ Clara said. ‘This is better than the meteors.’
Selima and Joe both saw something glint in the distance beyond the vast space.
‘Did you see something white over there or am I hallucinating?’ Joe asked.
‘Well, if you are, I’m sharing the same illusion,’ she responded. ‘Come on!’
They left the others, rapt in awe at the vast space, and walked rapidly ahead.
They could see something reflecting through a narrow opening. It looked like the end of a smooth, white lozenge. They squeezed through the opening by turning sideways. Their breathing slowed, their hearts, slipped out of rhythm.
As they entered the cave, their head torches illuminated it whole. There were twenty or more white caskets laid in niches carved into the cave walls. They were beautiful, flowing organic shapes but plain, unadorned and smooth. There were no handles or hinges as far as one could tell. They were all different lengths.
‘Are they coffins?’ Selima asked.
‘Perhaps. Somehow, they look more like eggs. Like something that could give birth,’ Joe said.
A minute of silently contemplating was broken by the anxious voices of Hannah and Freddie.
‘Selima?’
‘Joe? Where are you, Joe?’
‘We’re in a side cave,’ Selima called out. ‘Don’t worry we’re safe.’
‘We’ve found something,’ Joe added. ‘Something extraordinary.’
The others tried to follow the breadcrumbs of their voices, but their sound location was poor.
‘We can’t find you,’ Hannah called.
Joe had an idea.
‘We’ll switch our torches on and off. Look for the flashing lights.’
The blinking of lights soon took them in the right direction.
‘You have to squeeze in sideways,’ Selima explained.
‘Wish I’d had less breakfast now,’ Hannah exclaimed as the rock forced her belly inwards.
As they entered the cave, each one of them fell silent.
The chamber was big enough to fit all fourteen of them but Basarwa wouldn’t enter.
‘I will not disturb the ancestors,’ he declared. ‘We came with you as a favour to Ubuntu and to help. But I will not enter a tomb.’
‘You have already entered a tomb: the tomb of my father,’ Darius pointed out.
‘I realise that of course,’ Basarwa answered respectfully. ‘I am truly sorry for your loss, but he is your ancestor and not mine.’
Ilana, dug Darius in the ribs, and whispered ‘Respect his culture as he respects yours.’
‘Of course, I am sorry, Basarwa. And thank you, for guiding us here. We could never have tracked
the leopard without you. I wanted you to share in the find that’s all.’
‘That is kind, but I will stay here and light more of the main chamber,’ Basarwa responded with his usual quiet dignity.
‘I doubt very much that these are the tombs of his ancestors,’ Li said, as he laid hands upon one of the caskets, feeling its texture and exploring its contours. ‘I have never encountered a material like this. It appears to be extraordinarily advanced.’
He removed his hands from the casket and then touched it again with both index fingers, followed by his two palms which he laid on in the manner of a priest.
‘It absorbs the heat from your hand, as if it were using it as energy. Then it slowly cools.’
‘What do we suppose is inside?’ asked Ralph. ‘Ben?’
Ben was already sketching the arrangement of the tomb, and scribbling notes in a pocket- book.
‘No idea. This is like nothing I have encountered,’ Ben replied. ‘But the arrangement in niches, the symmetry, the chiselling of rock, would suggest a highly organised burial ritual. Also, the caskets are of different lengths. This suggests there may be children, not just adults buried here.’
Everyone absorbed his diagnosis, some with a shudder.
‘What is baffling is that these materials can’t be Victorian. Or even modern,’ Li said. ‘This kind of thermo-sensitivity has eluded us so far.’
‘What is also odd is the lack of any kind of painting or decoration. For a tomb that is most unusual,’ Ben observed.
‘Who said there’s no decoration?’ Clara asked.
They all stared at her blankly.
She mimicked Ubuntu at Ui Ais.
‘Where do people look when they seek inspiration?’
Almost as one, they raised their heads and eyes up and their torches with them. The floor and walls darkened, and the ceiling became a beacon.
The rock had been plastered over to form a large, smooth dome. Arranged around the dome were a series of four paintings like frescoes.
They appeared to be in a deliberate sequence. The first was a highly detailed astronomical chart. It was of a solar system. One of the orbiting planets was highlighted with rings like a halo.
Next to that, was what appeared to be an enlarged painting of the same planet. It had a greater proportion of blue than the oceans of the Earth. It lacked the reassuring contours of six continents. Instead, it looked as if the process of continental drift had been more extreme than when Pangaea, Earth’s original, single landmass, had broken apart. On this planet there appeared to be eight small continents, more dispersed than ours. They were yellow shading into reds and ochres. There was little or no green. The, ‘polar icecaps’, had thinned to virtually nothing.
‘I’ve seen computer projections of how Earth will look if global warming melts the ice-caps,’ Joe said. ‘It looks very similar.’
‘That is a dying planet,’ Li said. ‘There’s no mistaking it.’
In the next painting, there were a multitude of biomes and domes in which tiny figures – single, emaciated downstrokes of paint - appeared to live. The skies behind the biomes were blazing with light on one side of the planet, whilst on the other side, bathed in darkness, giant telescopes scanned the skies.
The last of the paintings showed a fleet of spacecraft fleeing the surface of the planet like a swarm of locusts, tiny in the vastness of space.
It didn’t need to be said but Ben said it anyway.
‘My friends, we are looking at the evacuation of a planet. One not dissimilar, it seems, to our own.’
They lowered their lights as one, as an instinctive act of respect, and stood in total silence, drinking in the truth.
Thirteen people in a cave in south-western Africa, tried to contemplate the fate of millions. The emptiness of Namibia as it spread out above them, took on another dimension.
‘A planet is fragile by its nature,’ Li said eventually. ‘We don’t think about that enough. Here we are, perched at exactly the right distance from a Sun. Move any closer and we’d burn up, and any further away we would be extinguished like a candle. We are like a molecule in the vastness of space.’
‘Stop it, Dad,’ Hannah said. ‘When I start to think like that, nothing seems worthwhile. What’s the point?’
‘The point is,’ said Ilana ‘that we have to fight the darkness. We have to make sense of being alive, of having a conscience.’
‘So, this is how a civilisation ends,’ Freddie said. ‘Twenty-one caskets and four cave paintings.’
‘All along, I had thought the answer was in patterns,’ Joe ruminated. ‘But it’s all there in paintings.’
‘Paintings are patterns,’ Clara pointed out.
‘Yes,’ Joe answered, touched, and not a little taken aback, by the simplicity of her wisdom.
‘So, Earth was their new home. But where are the others? The paintings showed millions of them,’ Freddie asked.
‘Perhaps, these are the only ones to survive.’
‘Think of what happened to millions of native South Americans when the Europeans arrived,’ Ralph pointed out. ‘They were exposed to new kinds of disease and were wiped out in their millions. The chances are that when they were exposed to Earth’s germs, they also died in their millions.’
‘There must be more caskets,’ Ben said. ‘It looks as if there are hundreds of caves in here.’
‘What happened to their spacecraft?’ Freddie asked.
‘My guess is that they are in the craters south of here. The ones that fell along the path of Alexander’s lines,’ Ben answered.
‘Why would Alexander want to hide his discovery?’ Ralph questioned. Why not tell the whole world?’
‘Think about the time he discovered this,’ Ben said. ‘1838, at the height of Victorian Christianity. Darwin wouldn’t publish “The Origin of the Species” for another twenty-four years. In Christianity, Man is the unique creation of God. Yet, this challenges all of that…’ He signalled to the caskets.
Joe had been puzzling something else.
‘They must have been mathematically advanced. Otherwise, how could they have entered the atmosphere at the right trajectory not to burn up?’
‘Remember Clara’s meteorites?’ Hannah asked, ‘the ones that survived the atmosphere, on display in Windhoek… Perhaps they studied those.’
‘Or arrived with them,’ Freddie added, conjuring images of spacecraft and meteorites riding, side by side, like burning coals, through Earth’s skin of air.
‘Or it was trial and error,’ Li suggested prosaically ‘and only a few of them survived? Perhaps, millions burned up on entry, leaving no trace.’
‘The question is what kind of creatures will we find in those caskets? Hannah asked. ‘Could they even still be alive? They might be frozen in some way.’
‘Let’s not awaken them then,’ Barbara suggested. ‘Remember Frankenstein.’
‘I hope they look like ET!’ Clara said.
It was their first and only moment of laughter for hours.
‘There’s another reason not to open them,’ Anne pointed out. ‘We don’t know what diseases it might expose us to.’
‘Won’t the radiation suits protect us?’ Freddie asked.
‘They won’t even necessarily protect us from the radiation effects,’ Li said. ‘The readings could skyrocket if we open those caskets. How do we know?’
‘I am happy to take the risk alone,’ Ben declared. ‘I don’t want the younger ones to be exposed.’
‘No, Dad!’ Joe exclaimed. ‘How can you put yourself at that kind of risk?’
‘I have two heavy duty radiation suits back at the entrance,’ Li announced. ‘Why don’t Ben and I put them on and try to open the caskets while the rest of you stay in the main cavern?’
The plan was agreed. Li and Ben emerged from the shaft opening like
astronauts. The others waited for them in the ‘cathedral cavern’ as they had nicknamed it.
‘Please be careful,’ Sara said to Li.
He signalled thumbs up and they proceeded into the burial cavern.
Li and Ben looked for springs, catches, hidden compartments, buttons or levers. There were none. The caskets appeared to be hermetically sealed with no point of access.
‘The only response has been to heat,’ Li said through the helmet. ‘I know it sounds mad, but let’s lay our hands on a small area and see what happens.’
They removed their protective gloves and laid their bare, trembling hands at one edge of the casket. They felt it warming under their touch, as if from an unseen fire within.
‘What if we get burned?’ Ben questioned.
Li signalled to him to keep his hands in place. If Li hadn’t been such a rational man, Ben would have taken his hands off. The heat grew more intense. They both started to sweat. Their hands were like coals. They stared intently at each other, each one mirroring the other’s pain but willing the other to stay put. Just as the heat became intolerable, and they felt they would melt into the caskets like wax, a few cracks appeared. The fissures spread like ice cracking across a pond. They got deeper, wider, louder, faster until the whole outer layer shattered like an eggshell under a spoon and fell in fragments on the floor.
Underneath was another casket, made of, some kind of, metal. But this casket had latches.
After one hour, which seemed as if it were five, Li and Ben re-entered the cathedral cavern, helmets removed. Their faces were pale with shock.
‘Why have you removed your helmets, Li?’
‘Out of respect,’ he replied.
‘Have you managed to…?’ Ralph asked.
They both nodded solemnly.
‘We opened one large casket and then a small one,’ Ben answered.
‘And?’ Hannah asked.
‘You better come and look,’ Li said.
‘But be prepared,’ Ben added.
‘Should the children see it… then?’ Anne asked.
Li looked at Ben who nodded.
‘Yes,’ Li said.
Clara clung to her mother as she used to when she was younger, face buried in her bosom, not wanting to look. There was silence. Then she felt Anne’s chest heave. She was sobbing, quietly at first and then uncontrollably.