by Ben Mezrich
• • •
Thirty seconds that felt like a lifetime later, Jack was still tearing upward through the tight, claustrophobia-inducing marble drainpipe, his lungs beginning to burn, his shoulders, arms, and chest aching from the half crawl, half swim up the too-gentle incline. The water was still just as thick and murky as it had been in the river, and even with the flashlight, he could only see a few feet ahead: more drainpipe, more water. He could feel Sloane pushing herself forward just behind his flippers. When he glanced back, he could see that she was having a slightly easier time than he was, because of her narrower form. But the look in her eyes through her mask mirrored his own growing sense of panic. Another few seconds, and they were going to have to try and turn back—hopefully, they’d make it to the tanks before either of them blacked out and drowned.
Jack cursed to himself, his fingers clawing at the marble. He couldn’t be sure, but they had to have gone fifteen yards by now. Either the blueprints were wrong, or there had been some construction since they were drafted; if those photographs that Unger had shown them had really come via this route, then the men who had taken them were small enough to get through a drainpipe wearing scuba gear, or they had lungs like goddamn dolphins.
Jack nearly choked as the top of his head suddenly touched metal. He whirled upward, his mask inches from a circular metal grate. In front of him, the drainage tube ended in a chipped marble wall.
Jack reached up and gripped the metal with his fingers. No time to pray, he thought to himself. And then he pulled with all of his strength.
Nothing happened. He was about to give it another shot when Sloane reached past him and pointed to a latch at the top of the circle. Jack was thankful it was too dark for her to see him blush as he flicked the latch with his finger, then used his entire weight against the metal.
There was an audible creak, and then the grate swung downward on rusted hinges. Jack crouched low, then lunged upward through the opening, exhaling the last of his air as he went.
• • •
“Not exactly pine fresh,” Jack gasped as he pulled Sloane up out of the water, “but it beats drowning.”
She collapsed next to him on the marble floor, her chest heaving beneath her wetsuit. He could see her blinking hard behind her mask, and he understood her disorientation. If anything, it should have been even darker in the underground chamber than in the drainage tunnel, considering they were at least six stories underground. But somehow, the small chamber was lit by a soft, greenish glow that seemed to be coming right through the walls. Not that there was much to see; other than the grated hatch they had just come through, the chamber was a perfect cube, seemingly made of sheer marble—the same type of marble that had been used to build the onion dome, now many stories above their heads.
Jack took off his flippers and mask and stretched his cramping shoulders, trying to breathe shallow breaths as he reoxygenated his lungs. The smell in the small chamber was unlike anything he had ever experienced before; musty and acrid at the same time, with a hint of something noxiously floral. As he rose to his feet and took a couple steps away from the hatch, he noticed that the smell got even stronger, making his eyes start to water.
“We’re not going to want to breathe this in for very long,” Sloane said as she rose next to him, kicking off her own flippers. “I suggest we get out of this room as soon as possible.”
Jack looked around them at the four glowing green walls.
“I’m open to suggestions. It’s like some sort of twisted children’s riddle in here. An anthropologist and a botanist have to get out of a room with no windows and doors. Maybe if we could figure out where the light is coming from—some sort of hidden skylight, maybe? Reflecting moonlight down from the higher floors?”
He scanned the ceiling, but nothing jumped out at him. Then he noticed that Sloane had taken a step to their left and was focused on the nearest glowing wall.
“It’s not coming from the ceiling,” she said. “And it isn’t moonlight.”
“How do you know?”
“The smell. It’s coming from the walls. And I think it’s going to help us find our way out of this place.”
She ran a tongue along her bottom lip, tasting the air.
“Omphalotus olearius. A species of bioluminescent fungi that grows in rotting wood.”
“Glowing fungus?”
“Fungi. The cells of the olearius genus emit luciferase, an enzyme that reacts with a second chemical called luciferin; even the slightest stimulation—a change in temperature, a light breeze—causes it to emit light. It’s a pretty fascinating adaptation, actually.”
Jack peered toward the nearest wall; when he looked more closely, he noticed that what had previously appeared to be an evenly distributed glow was actually stronger in some areas, weaker in others.
“So there’s fungus running inside these walls? How does that help us?”
“Fungi. As I said, Omphalotus olearius grows in rotting wood—not marble. So although there are spores cultivating all around us, the source has to be something made out of wood.”
“Like a door,” Jack said. “How do we find the source?”
“We follow the smell,” she said, starting forward. Jack followed a step behind, watching her with no small sense of awe as she walked them toward the far corner of the chamber, pausing only once to whiff the rapidly thickening air. When they’d reached the corner, she pointed to a spot halfway up the sheer marble. Now that they were up close, it was clear that one section of the wall was glowing a much deeper green than the rest.
Jack moved next to her and placed his hand against the marble. He ran his fingers up and down, but didn’t feel a seam. He shrugged, then moved Sloane out of the way and lowered his right shoulder.
“Is this really the best way—” Sloane started, but Jack was already moving forward.
He hit the wall shoulder first. Almost the moment he came in contact with the marble, a thin, perfectly straight horizontal crack appeared a foot above his head, lining up with two vertical cracks rising up from the floor. Jack stepped back, then placed his hands on the marble and carefully removed what he now realized was a three-inch thin sheet of the polished stone, placing it on the floor next to them. As Sloane had predicted, behind the marble was a rotted-through wooden door, covered in glowing green fungi. The stench was overwhelming, but Jack was too excited to give in to a sudden bout of nausea.
There wasn’t a knob, but a simple push of his foot against the damp wood caused the door to swing inward. A blast of slightly fresher air swept into the chamber, and Jack moved quickly through the doorway and found himself in another chamber—this one much larger than the first, and rectangular in shape. Again, the walls glowed green, but the expanded space made the smell much less overpowering.
“This looks like the right place,” Sloane said, stepping into the room next to him. She pointed at the first line of statues standing just a few feet ahead of them on black marble pedestals. “From the photos, I couldn’t tell that there would be so many.”
Jack didn’t respond; even though he’d already seen the photographs, seeing the statues up close, in person, was instantly humbling. Six floors beneath the most iconic, famous mausoleum in the world, he was now standing in a hidden chamber filled with stone representations of many of the most important idols of an ancient religion—a chamber that had been literally hidden from history for centuries. Right in front of them, not three feet away, Jack recognized Ganesh, the elephant god; and behind him, Hanuman, a Vanara—a human with a monkey-like face. Beyond these were a dozen more statues, many of which Jack didn’t recognize; but then again, there were so many deities in the Hindu religion, it could take a lifetime to learn them all.
“The Vedas mention thirty-three gods, but the common conception is that the Hindu religion contains as many as three hundred and thirty million lesser deities.”
“I count about fifty in here,” Sloane said, looking over the rows of statues. “Maybe the ot
her three hundred odd million are behind the red door.”
She was nodding toward the far side of the room—and then Jack saw it too, the same red brick door from Unger’s photographs. And right in front of the door, there it was: the half-man, half-woman deity resting on a pedestal that seemed twice as high as the pedestals holding the other stone gods. Jack started forward, winding his way through the other statues, careful not to touch anything as he went.
He didn’t stop until he was just a foot away from the pedestal, so close he could see every detail etched into Ardhanarishvara’s face: the symmetry of his-her cheeks, the thickness of his-her eyebrows, the third eye, in the direct center, below a partial crown. And of course, in one of the god’s four hands, the tall trident, pointing right up toward the ceiling of the chamber.
Sloane had passed to the other side of the statue and was running her hands over the red brick door.
“I don’t think you’re getting through this one with your shoulder,” she said. “There doesn’t appear to be any way inside.”
“There’s always a way inside,” Jack said. “You just have to know where to look.”
Without another word, he unzipped the top of his wetsuit and retrieved Unger’s moondial. Carefully, he rose to his tiptoes and hung the chain around Ardhanarishvara’s neck. Then he carefully positioned the dial at the exact center of the god’s chest, right where it was hanging in the pictogram. He leaned close, focusing on the small jut of stone in the middle of the dial.
The shadow was almost imperceptible, the ambient light so low that Jack had to get within inches to barely make it out, but there it was, a thin line of gray pointing down across the moondial at a slight angle. Jack followed the shadow down the legs of the statue, all the way to the pedestal—and right where it would have hit the black marble, he saw what appeared to be the head of a small, black stone nail—almost flush with the pedestal. Without knowing where to look, it would have been impossible to find.
Jack knelt down and held his hand over the nail, breathing hard. He glanced up at Sloane, then slammed his hand down, palm first.
The nail sunk into the pedestal, and for a moment, nothing happened.
Then there was a deep rumble beneath the floor of the chamber, followed by the grating sound of stone against stone, growing louder by the second. Both Jack and Sloane whirled away from the statue just in time to watch the red brick door collapse inward.
• • •
Jack’s heart was on full throttle as he picked his way over the pile of bricks and through the billowing cloud of reddish dust and glowing green fungi spores, one hand on Sloane’s arm to keep her steady as she followed close behind. She was covering her mouth as she went, probably to avoid breathing too much of the bioluminescent material, but at the moment, Jack didn’t care about a little bit of fungi.
As the cloud settled down around their feet, Jack saw that they’d moved into a much larger chamber—a cubic space at least fifty feet across, with walls rising more than twenty feet on all four sides. Unlike the last two chambers they had gone through, these walls weren’t sheer, and they weren’t covered with fungi; the glistening white marble was covered in meticulous carvings. Stepping closer to the nearest wall, Jack followed the carvings with his eyes and saw incredibly detailed pictures of plant life—vines, flowers, bushes, even trees. A chiseled garden that seemed to repeat itself every few feet, mimicking the symmetrical precision that he knew characterized the magnificent complex six stories above their heads.
Around the plants, Jack saw geometric patterns inlaid with precious and semiprecious stones, in shapes such as hexagons, ellipticals, and swirling nautiluses that ran down the walls between the faux plant life and across the floor, even beneath their feet. He was about to ask Sloane if she could identify any of the flora on the walls, when he noticed the lack of color in her cheeks.
“My god, is that what I think it is?” she gasped, her words suddenly echoing around them.
She wasn’t pointing at the walls or the floor. She was pointing above them, toward the ceiling of the center of the enormous room.
Ten feet above Jack’s head, the plant-covered marble walls bowed outward, traveling another ten yards into a generous curve; then back again, folding slowly together, narrowing toward a perfect, cylindrical point.
Jack knew exactly what they were looking at. The roof of the underground chamber was a smaller replica of the interior of the great onion dome that topped the architectural Wonder more than six stories above. The room they were in, with its detailed walls—and, Jack noted, as he shifted his attention ahead and saw the raised platform in the exact center of the room, containing a single sarcophagus—was at least the second such replica of the infamous tomb. The main floor, containing Shah Jahan and Mumtaz’s empty coffins—their cenotaphs—was all that most tourists knew about. Beneath that stood a second tomb, with the real bodies of the emperor and his beloved bride. And here, six floors down, yet another tomb, this one with a single coffin. But if Jack was right, this coffin might very well contain something much more precious than the remains of a star-crossed lover.
Jack started forward. As he crossed the room, he again noticed the echo he had heard when Sloane had pointed out the domed ceiling. The sound of each of his steps reverberated off the curved dome and the detailed walls, and as he went, he counted down the seconds—then smiled, realizing it was exactly right.
“Twenty-eight,” he said as Sloane caught up with him, five yards from the base of the coffin.
“Sorry?”
“Something my dad told me when I visited the real dome upstairs when I was a kid. The interior of the onion is one of the most unique acoustic settings found in architecture. The shape of the marble creates an unbroken echo that lasts for twenty-eight seconds. Every noise we make, every step—it echoes for exactly twenty-eight seconds before the sound waves dissipate past being audible.”
“I guess the phenomenon carries just as well down here in the basement,” Sloane said, the last syllable bouncing around them as they reached the marble base. “Hopefully, we won’t wake any sleeping mummies with our racket.”
Jack didn’t expect to see any mummies, though out of reflex he found himself touching the hilt of his iták, which was still strapped to his back beneath the partially unzipped wetsuit. The coffin was almost at eye level on top of the five-foot-tall base and appeared to be made out of solid gold. The sarcophagus was decorated with jewels; Jack counted dozens of diamonds, rubies and emeralds, some as big as his fist. He could only imagine how Unger would have reacted, seeing such treasure. Even Sloane’s breath had gone rapid.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, and Jack wasn’t sure if she meant one of the gems, or the coffin itself.
Apart from the stones, the cenotaph was also covered in elaborate calligraphy; Jack recognized Sanskrit, but also a few words of Ancient Greek, as well as multiple lines of Sumerian cuneiform and an entire section in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Given time, he knew he could have translated some of the passages, but at the moment, he was much more interested in what was inside.
He put his hands on the marble base and carefully pulled himself up until he was kneeling next to the coffin. The lid was adorned with what appeared to be flower petals, so he guessed it was supposed to mimic the cenotaph of Mumtaz, the emperor’s beloved bride. He knew that if he were in the real tomb—not the one the tourists saw—but the real burial place of the emperor and his bride, when he opened that lid, he would see the decayed remains of Mumtaz Mahal, wrapped in silk, facing to the right toward Mecca. But deep in the depths of the Taj Mahal, he guessed that this sarcophagus contained something completely different.
He ran his fingers along the edge of the lid and then glanced back at Sloane.
“One thing I neglected to mention,” he said, letting his words echo for the full twenty-eight seconds. “You might want to be ready, okay?”
“For what?”
“The thing is, guys like Unger have been around for a
long, long time. As long as people have been building tombs and treasuries, other people have been robbing them. And they didn’t have cell phones, or alarm systems, or police call boxes back then. You wanted to protect something from grave robbers, you came up with your own methods. Some of the things I’ve seen—well, just do me a favor, and be ready.”
“You’re talking about booby traps.”
He shrugged as her last syllable echoed through the chamber. Finally, she nodded. Jack turned his attention back to the sarcophagus and gripped the lid tightly in both hands.
With a burst of strength, he yanked the lid upward. There was a loud hiss, and a cloud of greenish dust floated upward. Jack jerked his head back, holding his breath. When the cloud cleared, he peered down into the coffin.
It took less than a second for him to find the object, dead center, right where Mumtaz’s heart would have been. Just as in the eye of Christ the Redeemer, it was wrapped in parchment.
Jack’s fingers trembled as he lifted the object free and carefully unwrapped the parchment. The snake segment shined in the green glow of the bioluminescent fungi. It was about the same size as the other two they had recovered—the head from Christ the Redeemer, and the section Sloane had found in the Colosseum—this time curving slightly to the right. Jack could see the same strange bronze gears inside, clearly visible from both openings. Then he turned his attention to the parchment, spreading it out against the open sarcophagus lid.
Once again, he was looking at an image of the segmented snake. But this time, there was a pictograph next to the third segment:
Three trapezoidal shapes that could have been windows or stones above another geometrical shape—a stepped cross, symmetrical rectangular arms around a circular center. Jack instantly recognized the Incan Chakana, one of the most holy symbols of the lost Peruvian civilization. He knew from his time spent in the nearby jungles with the Yanomami what the Chakana was supposed to represent: the Tree of Life, similar in form and context to the Tree from the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden. But he’d never seen a version of the Chakana that had looked quite like this. The edges of the stepped cross seemed to be on fire—metallic wisps of flame leaped from every corner. Even without understanding the details, he knew what the pictograph was trying to tell him—and where they needed to go next.