Like the cape on the strange black glass god. A chill rippled over my skin. There was also a picture of a snake charmer with a flute.
On one page, the only one in color was a full-size picture of the cobra’s fangs. The Naja’s were about an inch long, curved like a tiny tusk, needle sharp, and down the center of the tooth lay a dark pillowed venom sac. “Dentibus nolite tangere,” said the Latin inscription. Do not touch the teeth! “Toxicum post mortem serpentis indefinite permanet.” I translated aloud: “The poison lasts indefi—”
There was a slight noise behind me. I jerked my head around. Standing there was Snowy Cobb, covered with mud and smiling. “Are you ready, Barney?” he asked.
Chapter Fifteen
SNOWY HAD BROUGHT DOWN half a dozen kerosene lamps. One by one he lit them for me. Each lamp showed a new turn in a street, new buildings, carefully brushed clean of their sand. Soon a whole town spread over the floor of the cave, like a Christmas village in the glimmering lights.
I knelt there, tightness in my throat, fighting tears. “All by yourself, Snowy?”
“All by myself,” Snowy answered. “For you, Barney. I thought you were a goner for a while.”
I let his words fill the cave around us. Then we dove in.
The street leading away from our first house, the potter’s shed, twisted on, lined with more impressive and complete buildings.
There was a house that appeared to be a carpenter’s shop, with metal tools, saws, hammers hanging from the walls. Tiny nails, the size of a quarter of a straight pin, lay strewn around. Beyond that was what seemed to be a fish store, for a painted sign hung above it on the outside, a perfect shape of a fish in red and blue, and inside were long wooden tables, knives, and clay bowls set into the tables.
“Plumbing,” said Snowy.
“What?”
“Look. See that clay bowl? That’s a sink. Look under. There’s a pipe leading from that to a bigger pipe under the street. I’ve dug it up a little. The whole place has thick fired clay pipes running down every street and into every house. They had running water.”
There was a miller’s shop, we guessed from a grindstone and a grayish powdery kind of flour that still remained in a wooden storage bin the size of a coffee can behind the back wall.
Most of the buildings had simple picture signs outside. We could understand a few but not all. There was a boot maker, a weapons shop with spears and arrows pictured in black and gold. Beyond the shops began the houses.
Snowy had excavated four. They were not full of furniture. They were not fancy. Only simple wooden board tables or maybe beds stood near the walls, and a few overturned half-barrellike stools for chairs. A jar or two leaned in the corners. There was straw in tiny pieces on some of them. Our kerosene lamps burned, and shadows crossed and recrossed the walls and sand that lay piled outside, where Snowy had carefully banked it so it would not fall back.
“What happened with the roots?” I asked him suddenly. “The plaster of paris you poured in? Did you take the molds to Dr. Dorothy? Mr. Finney?”
Snowy shook his head. “What could I do?” he asked. “Everybody thought you were going to die, Barney. The Finneys didn’t want to know beans about the cave. They think it’s full of African tree vipers. They told me I could never come back.”
“Where are the root molds?”
“Over there. Right near the farthest lamp. Near our stove.”
I held one of the molds up to the light. Sure enough, it looked just like a root all right. White plaster, of course, but knotted and gnarled like an old tree. It was as small as the root of a rose. “You see those little cut marks?” said Snowy, pointing.
“No.”
“I’ll show you in daylight,” he said.
“Well, what about them?” I turned the root form in my hand and squinted at it.
“You know Mr. Greeves?”
“Well, of course I know Mr. Greeves! Come on, Snowy, out with it.”
“Okay,” said Snowy, drawing up his shoulders. “I brought them in to Mr. Greeves.”
“Why Greeves?”
“Because one day I was in the art room after class, trying to replace the plaster of paris that I borrowed. He was working on his bonsai collection that he keeps on the windowsill.”
“Those little miniature trees?”
“They keep the trees small by docking the roots. That way the tree grows strong but never too big. Greeves was docking roots all over the desk. I brought these in to him. He said he only did Japanese pines. Never saw roots like this, but they were bonsai all right, or something like it. The next day he came back with a book for me. We went through it. These are bonsai’d apple, nut, and peach trees, Barney.”
I waited, kneeling in the cold sand, for him to go on. Knowing what his thoughts were.
“Barney, this is no fake. This is no model. This was real. This thing is over a hundred thousand years old. It goes back to the Ice Age. There were cobras here, Barney. Or something very much like them. And people, half a foot tall.”
“Snowy, how do you know that for absolute sure?”
“Because the bit of charcoal you sneaked to Dr. Dorothy came back from some lab in California, where she sent it. That’s how.”
“What? She didn’t tell me about it.”
“Of course not. She doesn’t want you curious about the cave. She thinks you’ll lose a leg next time. I found the letter in the desk. You sneaked the charcoal to her. You took something out of the cave and didn’t tell me you’d given it to her,” Snowy growled.
“I didn’t take anything. It fell out of my pants cuff in the car. She picked it up. Talk about sneaking, you went through their desk.”
“You’re damn right I did. I found the letter from the university and other things.”
“What other things?” I wanted to shake Snowy.
“Nothing,” he said lightly, but skewering me with a guilty look.
I knew I wouldn’t get much out of him. “What did the lab say?” I asked.
“That charcoal is a hundred thousand years old, give or take ten thousand years. The bone must be that old too, Barney.”
“The fire pit might be that old,” I argued very weakly. “It might have resulted from a natural fire. Maybe before the cave was formed. Anything. And the houses and all the stuff could still have been done by a hermit ten years ago. The bone still could have been a very old bone carved very recently. The snake fangs—they could be very ancient, but they could also be five years old.”
Snowy picked up a trowel and a paintbrush and handed me another paintbrush. “There’s a building near the last lantern there,” he said. “Bigger than the rest.”
As we scraped and flicked the sand from around three brown adobe walls, I said to Snowy, “Now we can’t talk to the Finneys about it anymore. If they find out we came back to the cave, I think they’ll have a joint heart attack.”
“It was your idea to talk to the Finneys in the first place, Barney,” said Snowy. “Did you bring your pencils and drawing paper?”
“Yes.”
“Look at that.”
We were scooping the sand out of the inside of what was the biggest house of all so far. As the sand fell away from the walls, we could see they were decorated with paintings, paintings of a dance or festival. The floor of this house was not packed dirt but tiled in a mosaic pattern, whorls, blue and white with a red one in the center. There were stone benches and in the middle of the room a marble thing that looked like a small goblet.
“Fountain,” said Snowy. “See the little hole it has in the bottom?”
We found a dozen more root holes. We decided we’d hit a garden of some kind, as the roof was open and made a courtyard. The house continued for many rooms beyond.
That night, when we reached the stable, Snowy took my blindfold off and filled a bucket of water at the tap in the old tack room.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
He showed me a new arra
ngement he had set up in a horribly dirty old bathroom at the back of the stable. He’d put a folding chair and a Coleman stove on the floor and rigged a makeshift burner over it by setting a barbecue grill on two cinder blocks. He lit the stove and put the bucket on the burner.
“Snowy, where do you get this stuff?” I asked. “Lanterns, stoves ...
“Out of a magazine,” he answered. “Some of it I keep here. Some of it other places.” When the water warmed, he gave me a cake of soap. We washed our hands carefully. He produced a bottle of Royal Navy intensive-care skin lotion, and I used that, following him. Then he washed his face, combed his hair, and brought out two complete sets of pants and shirts. We hung our muddy clothes on a rope to dry, and put on clean shoes. “They’ll never know,” he said smugly.
When I walked through the Finneys’ door that night, Dr. Dorothy greeted me with a pat on the shoulder. “You look as if you’ve been in church,” she said.
“Oh, I just spent the day in the library doing my papers,” I answered.
But she peered at me with eyes that said I’ll bet you did.
I spent the evening in the guest room upstairs, coloring in my painting of the garden courtyard we’d found that day. I tried thinking what the wall painting must have meant. It was a picture of a woman smiling, her eyes closed, in a strangely layered dress. In either hand she held a wriggling snake. Was this a religion? Was it some sort of death ceremony? The woman’s smile made me think that whatever was depicted there was a symbolic ceremony and no one was about to be bitten, although I couldn’t be sure what she was up to.
The Finneys usually went to bed by ten. I figured I was safe as I’d said I wanted to go to sleep. It was eleven before my painting was finished. At eleven ten there was a knock on the door.
“Dr. Dorothy!”
“I see you’ve got your paints out,” she said. She chuckled. “I thought maybe you’d like some chocolate with whipped cream? It’ll put more weight on you, and you’ll sleep well. I’m sure you have a lot of work ahead of you at the library.” In her hand was a Sheffield plate tray with two cups of cocoa, steaming away.
“I ... well, thank you,” I said, mumbling and shuffling backward toward my desk.
“May I come in, Barney?”
“Well, sure.”
She sat on the bed, placing the tray on a chair. I shoved most of the drawings into a binder while she was doing this and scattered papers over the rest.
“Drawing again?” she asked, chirping in her always bubbly voice.
“I was just now doing sketches of Roman architecture for Latin class. I’ve got a month’s work to make up.”
“I am sure you’ll do splendidly, Barney.” She blew slightly on the surface of her cocoa. As usual Dr. Dorothy’s hair spilled out of the bun that she piled it in with a dozen hairpins. As always her skirt and jacket were heathery tweed, the good heavy kind my dad buys when he’s in London. She had taken off her lab apron. Under it was a silk blouse and a strand of pearls. Her glasses hung on a red ribbon over her massive bosom, and she gazed at me as if she could see right through to the cells of my brain: “Drink your cocoa, Barney. I must talk to you.”
I swallowed a hot mouthful of it too fast. I felt the whipped cream stay on my upper lip. She handed me a napkin embroidered with forget-me-nots.
“Yes?” I said, my tongue still burning.
“I must ask you something without telling you much at all. I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I am not free to say anything. What I can tell you is that I know you went back to the cave. You must not do it again. You gave your word to your father, and your father placed you in our care for the rest of the school term. If Mr. Finney finds out you went back to the cave, the consequences will be very bad for you, Barney.” She paused and straightened out the ribbon that held her glasses. “When a boy gives his word, Mr. Finney takes it very seriously.”
“I ... I know,” I said, feeling myself go the color of a Delicious apple.
“You were there today, weren’t you, Barney?”
“I ... I was in the library today,” I said, my voice sliding up and then cracking a little.
“You’re too clean for the library, Barney. You have scrubbed yourself like an acolyte. That can mean only one thing.”
“Dr. Dorothy, there are no snakes in that cave. There are snake fangs but no snakes,” I blurted out.
“Snake fangs? What on earth are you talking about?”
She examined my drawings for a very long time, her cocoa cooling and forming a skin in the cup beside her.
“A cobra?” she said at last. “A cobra here in Massachusetts?”
“How can I put this?” I said. “The antivenins they used on me didn’t work. There’s a whole list of antivenins in an encyclopedia of natural history in the library. I looked it up. A cobra bite has to be treated with an antivenin they make up in India. They didn’t use that one on me because they didn’t think I could have been bitten by a cobra. Besides, the fangs in my drawings are exactly like the cobra fangs in the book. The snake’s called a Naja naja. It has one of the most deadly venoms in the world. Those little prongs, I thought they were spears, ivory spears at first. They’re cobra fangs.”
“That’s preposterous,” said Dr. Dorothy. “Cobras live only in hot climates.”
“But, Dr. Dorothy, first of all, do you know what the climate was like here in Massachusetts, say a hundred thousand years ago?”
“No, but—”
“Well, could a cobra or a snake like a cobra live in a temperate climate, something like we have now?”
“Possibly. But you’re talking about cobras in freezing caves, Barney.”
“That’s exactly it.”
“What’s exactly it?”
“I believe the snakes lived here in the wild and were brought into the cave, where they died. A hundred thousand years ago. I don’t know how long ago. But that’s what I believe.”
“By whom, may I ask? A race of people six inches tall? Cobras get to be six feet long, Barney.”
“Dr. Dorothy, we spent months in sixth grade learning how the Egyptians made pyramids as big as New York City skyscrapers almost with their bare hands. Without any steam shovels or electricity or metal or anything. Amazing things have happened. How could trees have grown inside a cave without sunlight? We don’t know, but they did. I don’t know if the snakes were drugged or trapped or if they played the flute and danced for them, but somehow this happened too, thousands and thousands of years ago.”
Dr. Dorothy sighed and glanced as if for God’s help at the ceiling light in my room.
“But the venom. It couldn’t possibly last that long.”
“Dr. Dorothy,” I said, “in the encyclopedia, even in a stupid pamphlet Mr. Silks gave me, it says venom has been tested and lasts on and on, indefinitely. Providing it’s kept at a below-freezing temperature. They haven’t tested it for long enough to know how long it does last. The cave is below freezing. The cave is the perfect temperature for storing venom, keeping it live. They store it in the medical labs at that temperature.”
Dr. Dorothy just stared. She clicked the string of pearls she was wearing between her fingers. Finally she said, “This puts me in an awful spot.”
“Why?”
“If you bring me one of the fangs you describe and I test it and the test is positive ... Her words stopped, and she stared again, at the light on my desk. “Mr. Finney will find this whole thing difficult to swallow,” she went on at last. “If you go back to the cave, he may be so angry that—”
“Dr. Dorothy,” I burst in, “I’ll take that chance. If Mr. Finney is furious, I guess I’ll have to live in the dorm again. He’ll kick me out of the house. But you can see my drawings for yourself, Dr. Dorothy. Please show them to Mr. Finney. Please convince him.” I put my head suddenly in my hands and just held it there like a heavy weight. “It’s not as if I’m doing anything bad, you know. We’ve found something wonderful down there.
”
Dr. Dorothy picked invisible lint from the front of her blouse. “I am a scientist, Barney. I understand.”
“Well, do I have your permission to keep digging, then?”
“I’d like to see one of the fangs for myself, Barney. Bring me one of the fangs. Take it out ever so carefully by digging around it with a long-handled shovel. I can test it myself in my lab by injecting a tiny bit of it into a rat. If the venom is still live, I will talk to Mr. Finney myself on your behalf.”
“But Snowy won’t let me take anything out of the cave. If I even suggested it to him, if he caught me, he’d never take me back again.”
Dr. Dorothy sat straight-spined, her eyes skimming over my drawings. She inspected the cobra god and the tracings of the gold disks, and a drawing of a broken clay pot.
She went over my painting of the fresco we’d found on the wall that afternoon and my careful floor plans of each house. “Another thing I wasn’t going to tell you, Barney.” She stopped and looked at the skin that had formed on her cocoa and decided not to try it. “But since you insist on going back.... A couple of months ago I found a piece of charcoal in your pants cuff. I sent it off to a lab in Pasadena. Embedded in this charcoal were bits of molten glass, which were tested by a process called potassium argon dating.”
“Oh? How old was it?”
“Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years.”
“Does Mr. Finney know?”
“Of course he knows. He said it could easily have come from a forest fire during one of the ice ages. Ninety thousand years ago the cave may not have even been formed. People find charcoal from trees struck by lightning aeons ago. He still says the other things you’ve found could be quite modern.”
“I wish I could bring you something,” I said.
“Do this, Barney,” she instructed, her eyes dreamy now. “We must get Mr. Finney back on our side. He may let you in the cave if he is sure there is no danger to you. Have you ever heard of a Havahart trap?”
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