"Now I've got my hands full," Indy said under his breath.
Maleiwa pointed the alicorn at him. Indy prepared to dodge the Wayua's attack, but Maleiwa was still recovering from his surprise.
"Good going, Jones," Maleiwa said, as Indy quickly reeled in his whip. "You've made it back to your world. Now you can die here." He lunged at Indy with the alicorn, but missed him by inches. Maleiwa quickly recovered, and pointed the alicorn at Indy again. "Consider yourself lucky. You get to live a few seconds longer."
"Just give up, Maleiwa," Indy said. "Give me the alicorn and go back and never return."
Maleiwa laughed. "You're a fool, Jones. There is no going back, not through this entrance. It's gone. Besides, I have business to attend to in Germany."
"Then you've got a problem, because I'm not going to let you walk away with the alicorn," Indy said. He noticed a pouch tied around Maleiwa's waist, and realized that the Wayua hadn't taken any chances. "I see you don't trust the power of the alicorn. You've brought along nalca."
"You're wrong. I know the alicorn's power, and it is protecting me. The nalca is for my ally, Herr Hitler. His scientists are going to reproduce it, so we will have a ready supply available for my army. Then the alicorn will be all Hitler's. At least for a while."
"I don't think Hitler has any scientists on his side. Like I told Salandra, he's a two-bit rabble-rouser."
"Don't count on it, Jones." Maleiwa swung the alicorn, but Indy ducked just in time. Maleiwa reversed directions, swinging the staff across his shoulder at Indy's head, but Indy blocked the blow with the coiled whip. Maleiwa pulled back on the relic, but Indy hung firmly onto it.
Anyone looking up at the Statue of Liberty at that moment would've seen two men turning in an awkward dance on the head of the majestic statue. But the ballet didn't last long. Maleiwa forced Indy toward the edge, and Indy knew his only hope was to hang onto the alicorn.
Indy's back slammed against one of the upright spikes on the crown. He groaned, but refused to let go of the staff. He jerked up his legs and shoved with all of his strength against Maleiwa's chest. He caught the Wayua off guard and pulled the alicorn away from him. Maleiwa was enraged. He rammed into Indy, and lunged for the relic.
Indy was so intent on hanging onto the staff that he forgot his precarious position. The impact knocked him from the spike. He hung for a moment, one hand on the rim of the crown. The observation deck on the lower part of the crown was right in front of him, and several people gaped at him. All he had to do was swing forward and grab one of the braces with his legs.
But he lost his grip and slid down over the statue's hairline, over the forehead, and onto the bridge of the nose. Desperately, he dug his heels into the metal and came to a stop at the end of the nose. His feet dangled in midair, but somehow he still held onto the alicorn.
Indy looked down—a mistake. He inched his way back up until his feet were pressed against the nose.
"Jones, climb up a little and throw me the whip," Maleiwa yelled, as he leaned over the side of the crown. "I'll pull you up."
"No thanks, pal."
Indy heard voices from the observation deck. "Look at him down there!"
"All part of the show," he said under his breath.
"Someone's coming after him," a voice shouted.
Indy looked up and saw Maleiwa lowering a leg over the edge of the crown. "Where does he think he's going?" Indy lifted the alicorn over his head, gripping it below the crest. "Maleiwa, you want it? Then go get it!" With that, he hurled the alicorn toward New York Harbor. It flipped end over end, and shattered against the tablet held by Liberty. The double-headed eagle crest slid over the engraved date of the Declaration of Independence, and for a moment looked as if it were going to get caught in the fingers of Liberty. Then it fell away.
"No! No!" Maleiwa shouted, still clinging to the rim of the crown. He pulled himself back up to the top, but with great effort. He was losing his strength already, Indy thought. Now he was fumbling with the nalca pouch.
Indy climbed to the bridge of the nose, then hurled the whip upward, snagging one of the braces in the lower part of the crown. Free of the alicorn, he quickly mounted the forehead and climbed over the hair of the statue. He grabbed the brace and was tempted to drop inside to the observation deck. But he wanted to make sure that Maleiwa didn't get away. He gripped the handle of the whip in his teeth, reached toward the upper edge of the crown, pulled himself up, and vaulted onto the dome again. Maleiwa was on the opposite side, leaning against a spike where he was lifting the pouch of nalca to his mouth with shaking hands.
With a smooth flip of his wrist, Indy cast his whip at Maleiwa. The end of the whip snapped against the Wayua's hand. The pouch flew from his grasp, nalca spilling out of it. Maleiwa scrambled across the dome, fell, and crawled toward the pouch. Frantically, he lunged for the nalca, but Indy kicked the pouch out of his reach. It slid between two spikes and over the back of the statue's head.
Maleiwa staggered toward the edge, groaning. Then he turned on Indy, and rushed at him with arms outspread, a lunatic in a rage. Indy wasn't expecting Maleiwa's burst of energy. He took a step backwards and slipped on a patch of spilt nalca.
Maleiwa dived at him. He flew over Indy's head and kept right on going, over the side. Indy turned and thought he saw the image of Maleiwa hovering in midair. He could see right through him. Then the Wayua disintegrated, vanished, and Indy swore he heard the sound of a bellowing beast and a horrified scream. Lacking nalca or the alicorn for protection, Maleiwa had been claimed by the maze.
Epilogue
"Marcus, we're living in a dream world if we ignore the existence of this inner earth. The world is hollow. I've been there. I know what's down there. Well, sort of. It's important for science, for our future, for our security, that we make contact with the interior world. They're ready for relations with us, at least on a limited scale."
Several days had passed since Indy had descended the Statue of Liberty, and he was meeting with Marcus Brody for the second time. Indy was anxious to spill the story to the press, to go to Washington and, if necessary, tell President Coolidge himself. Although he'd tried to deny the existence of the inner world while he was there, his confrontation with Maleiwa had been the breaking point. After he'd survived, he'd realized that Salandra had been telling him the truth. Another land, another people, existed within the earth.
He paced around Brody's office. The museum director sat back in his chair and watched him, as if he were scrutinizing a terra-cotta horse from the T'ang Dynasty to see if it was one of the many forgeries on the market.
Brody threaded and unthreaded his fingers as he listened. A slight furrow knitted his brow, but he made no attempt to interrupt.
"Of course I'm not the first person to discover the interior world. Many people from this side have been there and returned. But nobody believed them." Indy stopped in front of Brody's desk. On it was the letter he'd written Brody from Santa Marta. It was held in place by the silver double-headed eagle, all that remained of the alicorn. Indy had recovered it at the base of the statue. "You believe me, don't you, Marcus?"
"Well, it is true that many of the legends of primitive peoples speak of an underworld. Even the stories of hell might be founded in the interior world. It certainly sounds as if you experienced a sort of hell. However..." Brody leaned forward, placed his hands on the arms of his chair, and rose with an effort, as if he weighed several hundred pounds. He walked over to a map of the world on the wall.
"However, what?" Indy asked suspiciously.
"Let's look at another possibility about what happened to you, Indy."
Indy threw up his hands, exasperated. If Brody wouldn't believe him, no one would. "All right. Go ahead. Tell me I'm nuts."
"Not nuts. I just think you may have been the victim of an intricate illusion." Brody traced his finger along the western coast of South America and stopped near the bottom. "The region here on the border of Chile and Argentina is a land of l
akes and islands, just as you described after you were taken aboard the so-called ghost ship."
"Marcus," Indy interrupted. "There are lots of places in the world with lakes and islands. But I told you this wasn't like anything else. You can't imagine the things you see there."
"Indy, please, just let me go on." Brody tapped the map. "This lakes region has baffled explorers for centuries. They've gotten lost and very confused and seen things that weren't there. It's a perfect place for pirates or a strange band of believers to live."
"Believers?"
"Yes. Believers in a hollow world. I say that Salandra was born into a cult of sorts, which believes that the earth is hollow and that they were living in it. Everything in her life seems to reflect what appears to be an interior world, and you were caught up in it. There was probably some division in the cult, and that's what the controversy was about."
"Marcus, that doesn't explain half of what happened to me."
"I'm just getting started, Indy. Will you listen?"
"I think I've heard enough. I'm going to talk to a reporter at the Post. He'll listen to me."
"Indy, for your own sake, listen to what I've got to say before you go to the press with this wild story." Marcus Brody motioned emphatically with his hands as he spoke. "They'll have a field day. You'll be the laughingstock of the city. You'll be driven from your teaching job."
Indy slumped down into a chair. "Go ahead. I'm all ears."
"Thank you. As I was saying, I think you were subjected to a hollow-earth cult that exists in South America. One faction of it is fascinated with what's going on in Germany right now, and wants to lure the Nazis into their web."
"What about the rest of it—the maze, the tepuis with the cities inside, that swamp with those creatures, the castle?" Indy protested.
"Okay. You were taken to a place near San Agustin, Colombia. We know that much. This underground travel and the maze are a bit puzzling, but I'll get to that in a minute. We do know that you then traveled by train to Santa Marta and you encountered the Kogi Indians. After that you were supposedly in the interior world again. But I don't think so."
"How can you say that?" Indy snapped.
Brody held up a hand. "Please. Just listen. You were drugged, remember? I think a lot of things got jumbled. For instance, nalca happens to be the name of a prickly plant that grows in southern Chile, specifically on Chiloe. And Pincoya is not a city. It's the name of a mythical creature on Chiloe, a type of mermaid with legs and no flippers."
"But I saw the fish," Indy interrupted. "They definitely were interested in its eggs."
"I'm not saying you didn't see it. I'm just saying that many things you perceived were an illusion." Brody pointed to the map of South America again. "I think you were drugged on that mountain outside of Santa Marta, and taken to the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela. All this traveling could account for your loss of time. You were heavily drugged for long periods."
"The Gran Sabana?" The name was vaguely familiar to Indy. "Wait a minute. You mean the place Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about in The Lost World, with the dinosaurs living on the plateaus?"
Brody smiled and nodded as he opened a file folder and spread out several photographs. "Take a look." The photos showed mysterious, flat-topped mountains with sheer drops of thousands of feet, and numerous sensational waterfalls.
"It does look like the place," Indy conceded. "But so what? That doesn't mean there's no interior world. And it could have a similar-looking region. In fact, Salandra said that the interior world is a reflection of the outer world. They're counterparts."
Brody shuffled through the photos, then held one of them out to Indy. "This mountain is the highest one in the Gran Sabana. It's over nine thousand feet. The name of it is Roraima."
Indy shrugged, but now he wasn't so certain. "Another counterpart, I guess."
"And the Indian name for those mesas is tepui. You see? Think about it. Did you actually see any cities inside them?"
"No, but—"
"Ideas were placed in your head, and the drug did the rest, or most of it. You battled a giant and a dinosaur because that's what they wanted you to see. It was probably something else altogether. And your castle. That was a dream, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. Go on." Indy's confidence was waning.
"You probably spent some time in the border region of Venezuela and Colombia." Brody tapped the map again. "It's called the Guajira peninsula." He walked back to his desk, and opened an oversized book to a marked page. "Take a look." It was a photograph of a woman wearing a long, billowy gown. One side of her face was painted black.
"That's one of the Wayua women," Indy said, excitedly.
"No, a Guajira Indian. And Maleiwa is the name of a figure from Guajira mythology." Brody laid the book down, picked up another, and opened it. "Can you read this?"
Indy stared at a page of Rongo-rongo script. He shook his head. "Not anymore, Marcus."
"As I thought. It's too bad. I wrote Davina about your disappearance, and I just received a letter from her." He picked up an envelope from the desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and handed it to Indy. Davina expressed her regrets at Indy's disappearance, then added: "Regarding any unknown sacred tablets, they don't exist, and even if they did, it would be best for them to remain hidden forever."
Indy walked over to the window and stared out toward Central Park. The park is real, he thought. New York is real. I am real.
Brody cleared his throat. "Don't get me wrong, Indy. I think more than a drug was involved. I would classify your experiences as shamanistic encounters. There are people, as you know, who believe strongly that they can manipulate what we consider normal reality. I think when a number of them focus on someone with a strong intent, they may actually be able to alter that person's awareness, too."
"That would be hard to prove, Marcus."
Brody held up his hand. "I didn't say it was scientific fact, and to tell you the truth, I'm not interested in proving it. But I do think this hypothesis is better than believing that you were in an interior world."
"I still find it hard to believe, Marcus. If there's no interior world, what was the point?"
"It obviously had something to do with your involvement with that ivory staff. This Maleiwa had probably followed you to the Anasazi ruins where you hid it. After you left, he dug it up. Then the two factions started fighting over it, and both of them believed that you had some sort of power because you had possessed it for a while."
Indy laughed. "You've got an explanation for everything, Marcus. But how did I get on top of the Statue of Liberty? Tell me that?"
"How did you get down?"
"I climbed down to the observation deck," Indy said.
"Then that's how you got up there. You climbed up. You just don't remember that part."
"Yeah, I only remember the unicorns."
Indy stopped by the window again, and glimpsed a young woman walking along the sidewalk across the street from the museum. He leaned closer. She was tall, with copper-colored hair, and walked with a graceful, easy step. Salandra!
Brody continued talking, unaware of Indy's sudden interest in the woman. "The only thing that bothers me is that I swear I saw that ship, the Caleuche, sink into the sea. They'd taken you, and I thought you were dead. That's hard to explain."
No, it couldn't be her, Indy thought. But maybe... She turned into the park, and he had an urge to dash out of Brody's office, down the stairs, out the door, and across the street. Then he saw a bearded man approach her, and take her arm. He couldn't see his face very well, but it looked like Vicard.
"I guess I fell captive to the Caleuche myth myself, as did Hans Beitelheimer. It haunts that island. And this matter with doubles is fascinating, too," Brody continued. "I don't know what to think of that."
He moved over the window and peered out over Indy's shoulder. "What are you looking at so intently?"
Indy took his eyes off the pair for a moment, and when he looked again, they were go
ne. Maybe it had been them, maybe not. "Our doubles, Marcus."
"Our doubles?"
"That's right. Now I know who Vicard reminded me of. You!"
Brody tapped his chin in a gesture that was exactly as Vicard had done it. "Well, it would be nice to be a king, I suppose."
They both laughed. Indy wasn't sure what to believe about what had happened to him. Calling it all a drug-induced illusion seemed like a convenient way of explaining away everything. But he still had a lot of unanswered questions. For instance, what had happened to Maleiwa?
But then Indy recalled Salandra's final words, and now they made sense to him. "When you go back, things will seem confused," she'd said. "You will question what is, and what is not. But just remember our saying here: 'The unity of all is all that is.'"
About The Author
Rob MacGregor wrote Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, a novel based on the movie script. He is also the author of The Crystal Skull, a novel of adventure and intrigue, and The Rainbow Oracle (with Tony Grosso), a book of color divination. His travel articles have appeared in the Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Newsday and elsewhere. He is also a contributor to OMNI Magazine's "Anti-Matter" section. Besides his work as a writer, he has organized adventure tours to South America for travel writers, and led the first group of U.S. journalists to the Lost City in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta Mountains in Colombia in 1987. He lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, where he is at work on his next novel.
THE HIDDEN LAND BELOW
A strange mystery connects the whispering moai statues of Easter Island to the eerie ghost ship of Chiloe Island, leading Indiana Jones on a dangerous quest into a hidden interior world. Earlier Indy accidentally caused an imbalance between the two worlds when he disposed of a fabled but dangerous relic. Now, the leader of an unstoppable army uses this artifact to enter our world and form a deadly alliance with an even darker force....
Indiana Jones and the Interior World Page 20