Raiders Of the Lost Ark

by Campbell Black

  He paused. Between a couple of tents lay several hampers, their lids open.

  No rope, he thought; so in such circumstances you improvise.

  When he'd made sure he wasn't being watched, he moved toward the hampers.

  Indy snapped the wooden staff in two and stuck the headpiece back into his robes. He placed the pieces of wood in a far corner of the Map Room, then he went to a spot directly under the hole and stared up­ward at the bright sky. The brilliant blue blinded him momentarily.

  "Sallah," he called out, caught between a shout and a whisper.

  Nothing.

  "Sallah."

  Nothing.

  He glanced around the room for an alternative way out, but there wasn't one as far as he could see. Where was Sallah?

  "Sallah!"

  Silence.

  He watched the opening; he blinked against the harsh light, waited.

  There was a sudden movement above. Then some­thing began to fall from the hole and for a second he thought it was the rope, but it wasn't: instead, what he saw descending was a bunch of clothing tied to­gether, clumsily knotted to create a makeshift rope- shirts, tunics, pants, robes and-of all things-a swas­tika flag.

  He caught hold of the line, tugged on it, and then began to climb. He surfaced, dropping flat on his stomach as Sallah started to haul the line of clothing out. Indy smiled and the Egyptian stuffed the make­shift rope inside the oil drum. Then Indy rose and followed Sallah quickly between some tents.

  They didn't see the German who was walking up and down with an expression of dark impatience on his face.

  "You! I'm still waiting for that water!"

  Sallahspread his hands apologetically.

  The German turned to Indy. "You're another lazy bastard. Why aren't you digging?"

  Sallah moved toward the German while Indy, bow­ing in wonderful subservience, hurried off in the other direction.

  He moved quickly now, his robes flapping as he rushed between tents. And from behind, as if some suspicion had just been aroused, some crime sus­pected, he could hear the German calling after him. Wait. Come back here, Indy thought, The last thing I intend to do is come back, dummkopf. He hurried along the tents, caught between his unwillingness to look suspicious and his urge to start digging for the Well of the Souls, when two German officers appeared ahead of him. Damn, he thought, pausing, watching them stop to talk, light cigarettes. His way was blocked.

  He slipped along the sides of the tents, hugging such shadow as he could find, and then he moved through an opening, a doorway, and stepped inside one of the tents. He could wait here at least for a few minutes until the way was clear. Those two Krauts could hardly stand out there smoking and talking all day.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead, rubbed the damp palms of his hands against his robes. For the first time since he'd entered the place, he considered the Map Room: he thought of that weird sense of timelessness he'd felt, an experience of being some­how suspended, afloat-as if he himself had become a trapped object in the jar of history, preserved, per­fect, intact. The Map Room at Tanis. In a way it was like discovering that a fairy tale had some basis in reality-the legend at the heart of which there is truth. The thought touched him in a fashion he found a little humbling: you live in the year 1936, with its airplanes and its radios and its great machines of war-and then you stumble across something so simply intricate, so primitively elaborate, as a miniature map with one specific building designed to glow when struck by light in a certain way. Call it alchemy, artistry or even magic-however you cut it, the passage of centuries hadn't improved anything very much. The movement of time had merely slashed at the roots of some pro­found sense of the cosmic, the magical.

  And now he was within reach of the Well of the Souls. The Ark.

  He wiped his forehead again with the edge of his robes. He peered through the slit in the tent. They were still there, smoking, talking. When the hell would they find a reason to move on?

  He was pondering a way out, trying to think up a means of making an exit, when he heard a noise from the other corner of the tent. A strange grunting, a stifled noise. He turned around and peered across the tent, which he had convinced himself was empty.

  For a moment, a moment of disbelief, wild incredu­lity, he felt all his pulses stammer and stop.

  She was sitting in a chair, tied to it by crisscross­ing ropes, a handkerchief bound tightly around her mouth. She was sitting there, her eyes imploring him, flashing messages at him, and she was trying to speak to him through the folds of the handkerchief pressed against her lips. He crossed the floor quickly, untied the gag and let it fall from her mouth. He kissed her and the kiss was anxious, long, deep. When he pulled his face away, he laid the palm of his hand flat against her cheek.

  When she spoke her voice faltered. "They had two baskets . . . two baskets to confuse you. When you thought I was in the truck I was in a car ..."

  "I thought you were dead," he said. What was that sensation he felt now-unfathomable relief? the lifting of guilt? Or was it pure pleasure, gratitude, that she was still alive?

  "I'm still kicking," she said.

  "Have they hurt you?"

  She seemed to struggle with some inner anxiety. "No-they haven't hurt me. They just asked about you, they wanted to find out what you knew."

  Indy rubbed his jaw and wondered why he de­tected an odd hesitation in Marion. But he was still too excited to pause and consider it.

  "Indy, please get me away from here. He's evil-"

  "Who?"

  "The Frenchman."

  He was about to untie the rope when he stopped.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Look, you'll never understand how I feel right now. I'll never be able to find words for that. But I want you to trust me. I'm going to do something I don't like doing."

  "Untie me, Indy. Please untie me."

  "That's the point. If I let you loose, then they're going to turn over every particle of sand around here to find you and I can't afford that right now. And since I know where the Ark is, it's important I get to it before they do, then I can come back for you-"

  "Indy, no!"

  "You only need to sit tight for a little longer-"

  "You bastard. Turn me loose!"

  He slipped the gag back over her mouth and tight­ened it. Then, kissing her once more on the forehead, ignoring her protests, her grunts, he stood upright. "Sit tight," he said. "I'll be back."

  I'll be back, he thought. There was a very old echo there, an echo that went back ten years. And he could see doubt in her eyes. He kissed her again, then moved toward the opening in the tent.

  She thumped her chair on the floor.

  He went outside; the German officers had gone.

  Overhead, the sun was stronger now. It beat down insanely.

  Alive, he thought: she's alive. And the thought was something that soared inside his head. He began to rush, moving away from the tents, from the excava­tions, out into the burning dunes, out into that place where he had a rendezvous with Omar and his dig­gers.

  He took the surveyor's instrument from the back of Omar's truck and erected it on the dunes. He aligned it with the Map Room in the distance, and consulting the calculations he had made, he got a fix on a posi­tion some miles out in the desert, out in untouched sand considerably closer than the spot where Belloq was mistakenly digging for the Well of the Souls. There, he thought. The exact place!

  "Got it!" he said, and he folded the instrument and stuck it back in the truck. The place was well hidden from Belloq's dig, concealed by the rise of the dunes. They could dig unobserved.

  As he was climbing into the truck, Indy noticed a figure appear over the dunes. It was Sallah, robes flapping, hurrying toward the truck.

  "I thought you were never coming," Indy said.

  "I almost didn't," Sallah said, climbing in back. "Let's go," Indy told the driver.

  When they had gone out into the dunes they parked the truck. It
was a barren spot in which to be looking for something so exciting as the Ark. Overhead the sun was incandescent, the color of an exploding yel­low rose; and that was what it suggested in its inten­sity, a thing about to burst loose from the sky.

  They went to the spot which Indy had calculated. For a short time he stood and stared at it-dry sand. You could never dream of anything growing here. You could never imagine this ground yielding up any­thing. Certainly not the Ark.

  Indy went to the truck and took out a shovel. The diggers were already moving toward the spot. They had leathery faces, burned faces. Indy wondered if they managed to live beyond forty in a place like this.

  Sallah, carrying a spade, walked alongside him. "I believe they might come here only if Belloq realizes he's working in the wrong place. Otherwise, there would be no good reason."

  "Who ever heard of a Nazi needing a good rea­son?"

  Sallah smiled. He turned and gazed across the dunes; miles of nothing stretched away. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Even a Nazi would need a good reason to wander in this place."

  Indy struck the ground with the point of his spade. "He'd still need a requisition and have it signed in triplicate in Berlin." He looked at the diggers. "Let's go," he said. "Let's get on with this."

  They began their dig, heaping sand, laboring hard, furiously, pausing only to drink water that had al­ready turned warm in the camel-skin bags. They dug until the light had gone from the sky; but the same heat remained, tethered to the sand.

  Belloq sat in his tent, drumming his fingertips on the table that held maps, drawings of the Ark, sheets of paper covered with the hieroglyphics of his calculations. There was a dark mood of frustration inside him; he was edgy, nervous-and the presence of Die­trich, as well as Dietrich's lackey Gobler, didn't help his frame of mind much. Belloq rose, went to a wash­basin, splashed water across his face.

  "A wasted day," Dietrich said. "A wasted day . . ."

  Belloq toweled his face, then poured himself a small shot of cognac. He stared at the German, then at the underling Gobler, who seemed to exist only as a shadow of Dietrich.

  Dietrich, undeterred, went on: "My men have been digging all day-and for what? Tell me, for what?"

  Belloq sipped his drink, then said, "Based on the information in my possession, my calculations were correct. But archaeology is not the most exact of sci­ences, Dietrich. I don't think you entirely understand this fact. Perhaps the Ark will be found in an adjoin­ing chamber. Perhaps some vital piece of evidence still eludes us." He shrugged and finished his drink. Usually he loathed the way the Germans nit-picked, the way they always seemed to hover around him as if they expected him to be a seer, a prophet. Now, however, he understood their change in mood.

  "The Fuhrer demands constant reports of progress," Dietrich said. "He is not a patient man."

  "You may cast your mind back to my conversation with your Fuhrer, Dietrich. You may well recall I made no promises. I simply said that things looked favorable, nothing more."

  There was a silence. Gobler moved in front of the kerosene lamp, throwing a huge shadow that Belloq found curiously menacing. Gobler said, "The girl could help us. After all, she was in possession of the original piece for years."

  "Indeed," Dietrich said.

  "I doubt if she knows anything," Belloq said.

  "It is worth a try," Gobler said.

  He wondered why he found their treatment of the girl so unsettling to him. They had used her barbarically-they had threatened her with a variety of tor­tures, but it seemed apparent to him that she had nothing to tell. Was this some soft spot, some awful weakness, he had toward her? The thought appalled him. He stared at Dietrich for a moment. How very badly they live in fear of their sorry little Fuhrer, he thought. He must strut through their dreams at night -if they dreamed at all, a prospect he couldn't quite believe. They were men stripped of imagination.

  "If you don't want to be concerned with the girl, Belloq, I have someone who can undertake the task of discovering what she knows."

  It was no time to parade a weakness, a concern for the woman. Dietrich went to the opening of the tent and called out. After a moment the man named Arnold Toht appeared, extending his arm in a Nazi salute. In the center of his palm was the scar, burned-out tissue, in the perfect shape of the headpiece.

  "The woman," Dietrich said. "I believe you know her, Toht."

  Toht said, "There are old scores to settle."

  "And old scars," Belloq said.

  Tohtself-consciously lowered his hand.

  When it was dark and a pale desert moon had come up over the horizon, a moon of muted blue, Indy and his Arabs stopped digging. They had lit torches, watching the moon begin slowly to darken as clouds passed in front of it; after that there was lightning in the sky, strange lightning that came in brief forks and flashes, an electric storm summoned, it seemed, out of nowhere.

  The men had dug a hole that revealed a heavy stone door flush with the bottom of the pit. For a long time nobody said anything. Tools were produced from the truck and the diggers forced the stone door open, grunting as they labored with the weight of the thing.

  The stone door was pulled back. Beneath the door was an underground chamber. The Well of the Souls. It was about thirty feet deep, a large chamber whose walls were covered with hieroglyphics and carvings. The roof of the place was supported by huge statues, guardians of the vault. It was an awesome construc­tion, and it created, in the light of the torches, a sense of bottomlessness, an abyss in which history itself was trapped. The men moved their torches as they peered down.

  The far end of the chamber came into view, barely lit. There was a stone altar that held a stone chest; a floor covered with some form of strange dark carpeting.

  "The chest must contain the Ark," Indy said. "I don't understand what that gray stuff is all over the floor."

  But then, in another flash of lightning, he saw; he shook, dropping his torch down into the Well, hearing the hiss of hundreds of snakes.

  As the torch burned, the snakes moved away from the heart of the flame. More than hundreds, thou­sands of snakes, Egyptian asps, shivering and un­dulating and coiling across the floor as they answered the flame with their savage hissing. The floor seemed to move in the flicker of the torch-but it wasn't the floor, it was the snakes, striking backward from the flame. Only the altar was untouched by snakes. Only the stone altar seemed immune to the asps.

  "Why did it have to be snakes?" Indy asked. "Anything but snakes, anything else. I could have taken almost anything else."

  "Asps," Sallah said. "Very poisonous."

  "Thanks for that piece of news, Sallah."

  "They stay clear of the flame, you notice."

  Pull yourself together, Indy thought. You're so close to the Ark you can feel it, so you face your phobia head on and do something about it. A thou­sand snakes-so what? So what? The living floor was the embodiment of an old nightmare. Snakes pur­sued him in the darkest of his dreams, rooting around his innermost fears. He turned to the diggers and said, "Okay. Okay. A few snakes. Big deal. I want lots of torches. And oil. I want a landing strip down there."

  After a time, lit torches were dropped into the Well.

  Several canisters of oil were dropped into the spaces where the snakes had slithered away from the flames. The diggers then began to lower a large wooden crate, rope handles attached to each corner, into the hole. Indy watched, wondering if a phobia were something you could swallow, digest, something you could ig­nore as though it were the intense pain of a passing indigestion. Despite his resolve to go down there, he shuddered-and the asps, coiling and uncoiling, filled the darkness with their sibilant sound, a sound more menacing than any he'd ever heard. A rope was lowered now: he stood upright, swallowed hard, then swung out on the rope and down into the Well. A moment later Sallah followed him. Beyond the edges of the flames the snakes wriggled, slid, snakes piled on snakes, mountains of the reptiles, snake eggs hatching, shells breaking to rev
eal tiny asps, snakes devouring other snakes.

  For a time he hung suspended, the rope swaying back and forth, Sallah hanging just above him.

  "I guess this is it," he said.

  Marion watched as Belloq entered the tent. He came across the floor slowly and studied her for a while, but he made no move to untie her gag. What was it about this man? What was it that caused a sensation, something almost like panic, inside her? She could hear the sound of her heart beat. She stared at him, wishing she could just close her eyes and turn her face away. When she had first met him after being captured, he had said very little to her-he had sim­ply scrutinized her in the way he was doing now. The eyes were cold and yet they seemed capable, although she wasn't sure how she knew this, of yielding to occasional warmth. They were also knowing, as if he had gone far into some profound secret, as if he had tested reality and found it lacking. The face was handsome in the way she might have associated with pictures in romantic magazines of Europeans wearing white suits and sipping exotic drinks on the terraces of villas. But these weren't the qualities that touched her.

  Something else.

  Something she didn't want to think about.

  Now she closed her eyes. Marion couldn't bear to be so closely stared at, she couldn't bear to think of herself as an object of scrutiny-perhaps like some archaeological fragment, a sliver of clay broken loose from the jigsaw of an ancient piece of pottery. Inani­mate, a thing to be classified.

  When she heard him move she opened her eyes.

  He still didn't speak. And her uneasiness grew. He moved across the floor until he was standing directly over her, then he put his hand forward very slowly and slipped the gag from her lips, sliding it softly and teasingly from her mouth. She had a sudden picture, one she didn't want to entertain, of his hand caressing the fold of her hip. No, she thought. It isn't like that at all. But the image remained in her head. And Belloq's hand, with the certainty of the successful lover, gently drew the gag from her mouth to her chin and then he was untying the knot-everything per­formed slowly, with the kind of casual elegance of a seducer who senses, in some predatory way, the yielding of his prey.